With the squirming and posturing in Washington dominating the headlines, science faded to the background for much of 1998. Even the annual ritual of the Nobel Prizes didn't seem to get much notice; the Presidential announcement of the winners of the National Science and Technology Medals dropped with barely a ripple. Yet 1998 was far from a lackluster year for science. True, there were no astonishing breakthroughs but researchers continued to rack up a steady stream of fascinating and important gains. When science did manage to squeeze its way onto the front pages, cloning and the cosmos got top billing.

MICE CLONES

The ethical debate over creating exact copies of living organisms has done little to slow the rapid pace of genetic research. And a string of new discoveries is adding fuel to the fire. The year began with the somewhat bizarre announcement that Jonathan Slack, a developmental biologist at the University of Bath in England had created a headless frog. But soon other genetic wizards took cloning to a new level, copying some 50 mice and quickly thereafter a few calves. When Korean researchers said in December that they had cloned a human embryo, the development had a ring of inevitability. Whether their results are duplicated or not, many scientists agree it is only a matter of time.

As significant as the ability to clone organisms may be, the attention in the press obscured other key developments in genetics. Teams of scientists decoding the genes that form living organisms produced the first complete "recipe" for a higher animal--a lowly worm known as Caenorhabditis elegans. Although it contains a mere 97 million DNA base pairs, compared to more than three billion for Homo sapiens, around 40 percent of its genes are closely related to ours.

CLOCK OF AGING

Meanwhile, researchers found ways to culture stem cells, the all important embryonic cells that differentiate into tissues and organs, opening the way to repairing damaged or aging organs. Another group of investigators dispelled the long-held belief that nerves do not grow in adulthood when they discovered that humans do in fact form new neurons, even in old age. And, for those with an eye for immortality, scientists discovered how to rewind the clock on aging when they deciphered the role of the telomere, the major factor that controls whether a cell dies or thrives.

Discovering a way to make certain cells not thrive made Judah Folkman of Children's Hospital in Boston an instant sensation in May when the New York Times trumpeted results by his group. That data indicated that naturally derived angiogenesis inhibitors cured cancer in mice by preventing the growing tumors from attaining a blood supply. By year end, though, other researchers were reporting trouble duplicating those results. Even so, another cancer drug, tamoxifen, was found useful for preventing breast cancer in high risk individuals and was approved for use by the Food and Drug Administration. And clinicians battling AIDS reported results of a major test showing that the "cocktail" treatment consisting of a triple therapy, including two nucleoside analogues and a protease inhibitor, is effective.

Throughout the year, the heavens held our attention. For amateur and professional astronomers alike, 1998 got off to a grand start as a total solar eclipse swept across the Caribbean on February 26. Astronomers and physicists aimed telescopes and other high-technology instruments at the sun's corona during the eclipse, hoping to find new clues to the engine that drives our solar system.