Contributors

Phyllis Wise has spent more than 30 years trying to understand the role of estrogen in animal models, and found that the hormone protected the body from injury following stroke. So, in 2002, when the Women's Health Initiative announced that hormone therapy appeared to cause more harm than good, Wise, based at the University of Washington, and her colleagues were shocked. Wise and her colleagues returned to their animal models, and discovered that the clinical trial failed to tell the whole story (see "Clearing Estrogen's Bad Name"). Basic and clinical scientists "need to talk with each other," she says, "so that clinical work is based upon what we know from animal models and clinical studies are carried back to [basic scientist] investigators."

In this month's Opinion, on "Disease Prevention in Islamic Countries", Ali Ardalan, an epidemiologist and assistant professor in Tehran, Iran, and coauthors representing several Islamic countries, argue that noncommunicable disease prevention is playing an increasingly important role in Islamic countries. To that end, they celebrated the recent addition of lectures by prevention experts sensitive to the Muslim culture to a free web-based library of public health lectures known as the Supercourse, which joins together more than 56,000 prevention experts from 174 countries. "The focus of the [Islamic countries' Supercourse] is to put prevention in the context of [Islamic] culture and religion in order to maximize the effectiveness of prevention activities," Ardalan says in an E-mail.

Before joining The Scientist as an intern, Jennifer Evans spent her summer at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, covering the health beat. Her first weekend in New Orleans, she was on general assignment, and had to rush to report on a building fire. Unfortunately, she didn't quite know her way around, got lost, and missed the fire. Then she spent the second part of the day covering a shooting. "By the end of it, I felt really energized," she says. "It was exciting." This month, she takes on some more low-key assignments, including a Hot Paper (see "Hot Paper in Plant Biology") and several online news stories. Part of the fun of science writing is translating complicated material into a palatable form, she says. "You have a really powerful role."

Up until his senior year of high school, Philadelphia-based freelance photographer Michael Sahadi had considered a career in quantum physics before making what he calls "the dramatic shift" to the arts. Sahadi has focused mainly on photographing business people in his professional career, but recently he says he feels drawn to scientists. With scientists, "you have the opportunity [to have] something creative and visually interesting," he says. Plus, "scientists are interesting people to talk to." After snapping shots of Immune Control CEO Stephen Roth (see "Serotonin, Repurposed"), Sahadi says he stuck around to talk about science for more than an hour.