Judging a scientific journal by its cover

This doesn't happen every day....  

The pile of journals that I wanted to read was already too high and the 6 October 2011 issue of Nature had just arrived.  So I placed Nature beside the pile, turned to grab my sandwich, and then reached to open this new issue.  I realized, however, I had opened The Biochemist.  So I closed The Biochemist and there it was, the same cover on Nature and on The Biochemist. 

Well not quite the same cover, if one has an eye for gels or electropherograms, one will see that lanes 6-11 on the Nature cover are the same as lanes 1-6 on The Biochemist cover.  Back to the important part.... reading the contents. 

Mitosis or apoptosis (life or death)

Our laboratory has invested much time and effort in developing an experimental model of how human cells can divide even when they have damaged DNA.  The efforts are beginning to pay off.  Recently we found that when cells enter mitosis with damaged chromosomes, they can inactivate apoptosis.  Perhaps this should not be too surprising because mitosis should cause all the alarms to sound (loss of contact, changes in organelles, DNA everywhere).  The rub is to know if cancer cells use this as another mechanism to survive.  We are now examining the pathways that might provide survival.  A new area for us, which was illuminated by our model and a pharmacological approach.