 HHMI’s Joan Massagué on TGF-B and Metastasis
Of all the molecules that control the growth and proliferation of
cells, the family known as transforming growth factor-beta (TGF-b
) is surely the most versatile. In the "social behavior of
cells," to borrow a phrase from Memorial Sloan-Kettering and Howard
Hughes Medical Institute cancer biologist Joan Massagué, there is
little that TGF-b
will not regulate: everything from the movement of cells and their
proliferation to their differentiation and their death. This family of
growth factors maintains homeostasis, in effect, and assures that cells
will behave in an orderly and cooperative fashion in tissues and organs.
Not surprisingly, the disregulation of TGF-b is one of the fundamental
steps in the misbehavior of tumorigenesis, and, subsequently, TGF-b also
plays a critical role in the metastasis that all too often follows.
All of this has made the study of TGF-b among
the hottest areas in
science, and no one in this field has been more influential than
Massagué himself. At this writing, he sits in the #8 spot in the latest
Thomson Scientific Essential
Science Indicators
(ESI)
ranking of the most-cited researchers in molecular biology and
genetics. The current ESI
file lists 68 of his...
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 Doctors
of the Decade, 1995-2005
Seven
years ago this publication surveyed highly cited researchers in clinical
medicine, based on papers published and cited between 1981 and 1998 (Science
Watch, 10[3]: 1-2, May/June
1999). For a more-recent snapshot of medical research, we now turn to
Thomson Scientific Essential
Science Indicators
(ESI) and a listing of high-impact authors in the field of clinical
medicine over the last decade. In the first table...
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