Brakes and gas pedals

In September 2000, FEBS and EMBO organized the meeting ‘Molecular mechanisms of development and disease’ on the Island of Spetses in Greece. The symposium drew 23 speakers from the fields of transcription, developmental biology, cancer biology and signalling. As became readily apparent during the meeting, the study of improper recapitulation or modification of developmental and regulatory processes has led to an understanding of how their alteration or misregulation can cause disease. Importantly, a few of these processes can now be controlled, with beneficial consequences for the treatment of previously chronic or terminal diseases such as cancer. We selected a small fraction of the many superb talks for inclusion in this review, which gives an overview of the presented research.### Developments in developmentThe completion of the Drosophila and Homo sapiens genome projects has enabled the rapid discovery of novel genes. Characterization of these genes in Drosophila has permitted rapid establishment of their relevance to human disease. Herbert Jackle (MPI, Gottingen, Germany) discussed one new gene, which encodes a novel Gβγ‐like protein that has homologues in mice and humans. Polymorphisms in this gene encourage the growth of adipose tissue at the expense of rapid movement. Variants of a sequence‐related gene have been found in the Inuit, Aborigine and other racial groups prone to obesity, but may have originally helped these people make the most efficient use of limited food supplies. The rapid discovery of this gene, and its unintended possible responsibility for a serious public health problem, highlighted the ability of basic developmental biology, in combination with functional genomics, to identify causes for human disease.The discovery that a gene induces a particular phenotype, however, does not always shed light on the mechanism of action of the gene product. A good example of this is eyeless , a member of the Pax6 family of …