If you’re into the history of science, head over to the Harvard Museum of Natural History tomorrow. In celebration of the 300th birthday year of Carl Linnaeus 18th century Swedish naturalist who came up with the world’s first scientific classification system for plants and animals—the museum will have on display, for one day only, Linnaeus’s personal, annotated copy of Systema Naturae, the 1735 book that ultimately revolutionized the study of natural history.

At MIT over the weekend, 59 teams of students from around the world competed in the 6th annual “International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition”:https://parts.mit.edu/igem07/index.php/Main_Page. This competition, created and organized by MIT synthetic biology researchers, has been getting bigger and more international. “Last year’s competition”:https://network.nature.com/boston/news/blog/U66E7CD1A/2006/11/05/synthetic-biology-olympics-at-mit-and-the-winner-is had 37 teams entered and the winning team was from Slovenia.

This year’s winner: a team from “Peking University”:https://parts.mit.edu/igem07/index.php/Peking_The_Projects. Their overall aim was to design a population of bacteria that can differentiate into specialized cells, each with their own roles, but working together cooperatively to do a series of tasks sequentially, like an assembly line. “The Scientist”:https://www.the-scientist.com/ was at the event and blogged more about the winner “here.”:https://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/53832/

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And a team led by researchers from the Broad and Dana-Farber had a “paper”:https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nature06358.html published online in _Nature_ today describing the results of their mapping of genetic changes happening in lung cancer. They genotyped 371 lung tumors and found 57 genetic changes, including stretches of chromosomes that have been deleted or duplicated. Only a third of these regions contain genes known to be involved in lung cancer, suggesting that there are many yet undiscovered lung cancer genes. In fact, they found one potential new oncogene.

The Globe ran a good “story”:https://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/11/05/researchers_detail_cancer_dna_damage/ that quotes scientists who have been critical of this kind of open-ended approach to cancer genetics studies, saying that they’re costly and an inefficient way of homing in on the important cancer genes.