Kevin Davies spoke with Jonathan Rothberg, the founder of 454 Life Sciences, on the eve of the publication of his company's landmark paper in Nature.

Australian Biotechnology News editor-in-chief Iain Scott spoke with renowned industry analyst Cynthia Robbins-Roth about what it will take to keep biotech alive.

Producing products from human blood plasma is a lucrative business and the Chinese market provides a significant long-term opportunity, AVT Plasma's CEO tells Ruth Beran.

Ruth Beran discovers how one of Australia's great bioentrepreneurs has moved from inspiring shareholders to inspiring a nation.

Brian McNamee has been at the helm of Australia's oldest - and now biggest - life-sciences company, CSL, for 15 years. He guided the company through its public listing in 1994 and has overseen its growth to a market capitalisation of $6.8 billion. He spoke with Melissa Trudinger about CSL's research and development programs, and his vision for the company's future.

One of the leading lights of international stem cell research will be in Australia next week, as a de facto ambassador for Wales as well as to discuss his research.

Dr John Raff tells Graeme O'Neill why Australia's agbiotech industry is struggling.

Even after its R&D budget was cut this week by parent company Fonterra, ViaLactia still has one of the biggest research budgets in New Zealand's biotechnology industry. CEO Colin South discussed his company's research programs with Australian Biotechnology News during a tour sponsored by New Zealand Trade and Enterprise in March.

Engineer Greg Winter spends his days building, folding chains and working with scaffolds. He's also a librarian. But rather than cataloguing hefty manuscripts, he has viruses create each new inventory for him -- an elegant manufacturing process if ever there was one.

The thing about bioinformatics, according to Prof Terry Speed, is that it tends to attract people from a variety of disciplines, such as physicists with programming skills not interested in a career in defence, or mathematicians with a practical bent.

On a wall at CSIRO Plant Industry's Merbein laboratories, is an old photo-micrograph of a grapevine floral bud. Dr Nigel Steele Scott, head of Plant Industry's horticultural research laboratories in Glen Osmond, South Australia, says it's his favourite image -- a portent of a revolution in viticulture that is still having an enormous impact on the Australian wine industry today.

When Eric Jakobsson took a new job with the National Institutes of Health, part of the agreement was that he would split his weeks between Bethesda, Maryland, and his job at the University of Illinois, jetting back and forth between the two.

There's at least one respected member of the investment community who believes the biotech boom is around the corner. Despite the complications that have surrounded the birth of the international biotechnology industry, Leslie Platt, a biotech investment expert with the international accountancy firm Ernst and Young, is irrepressibly bullish about its future.

History students and trivia buffs in the distant future time will be grateful for one of history's little coincidences -- the Human Genome Project will be completed this year, 2003, a neat half-century after the elucidation of the structure of DNA.

Nobel Laureate Prof Peter Doherty is lending his name to a new prize to be awarded at Australia's first Commercialisation Forum and Fair of Ideas, which started in Sydney today and runs to March 28.