"From Charcot to Lou Gehrig: Mechanisms of Neuronal Growth and Death in ALS" Don Cleveland, Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, UC San Diego.

"Revolutionize the Practice of Clinical Medicine through Innovations and Cost-Effective Technologies" Ron Davis, Genome Technology Center, Stanford University.

In the biblical story in which two women bring a baby to King Solomon, both claiming to be the mother, he suggests dividing the child so that each woman can have half. Solomon's proposed solution, meant to reveal the real mother, also illustrates an issue central to economics and moral philosophy: how to distribute goods fairly. Now, researchers at the California Institute of Technology have discovered that reason struggles with emotion to find equitable solutions, and have pinpointed the region of the brain where this takes place. The concept of fairness, they found, is processed in the insular cortex, or insula, which is also the seat of emotional reactions. "The fact that the brain has such a robust response to unfairness suggests that sensing unfairness is a basic evolved capacity," notes Steven Quartz, an associate professor of philosophy at Caltech and author of the study.

Scientists at Caltech have produced the first complete description of the complex network of genes that create a particular type of cell in an organism. Using the complete sequence of the California purple sea urchin and other techniques to determine the regulatory genes expressed at each point during embryonic development and how their interrelationships influence the architecture of the sea urchin's skeletal system, Eric Davidson and his colleagues created a complete blueprint for the development of a lineage of cells whose particular function is to build a series of biomineral skeletal rods inside the embryo. The work appears in the April 22 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.