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In 1980, biotech was a fledgling industry with only 20 companies and no reported revenue. It has become a $2 billion-a-year industry with 1,000 companies. Now, industry analysts conservatively project revenues to grow to $20 billion a year by the end of the decade, while a report on national biotechnology policy released in February by the President's Council on Competitiveness predicts revenues will shoot to $50 billion by 2000. "The venture capital industry is undergoing very dramatic changes

Peter House is chief analyst and director of the Division of Policy Research and Analysis at the National Science Foundation. In one corner of his 12th-floor office stands a bookcase filled with 30 years' work on public policy analysis and technical assessment. So it's somewhat surprising to the 54-year-old House that a single, 34-page unpublished paper written in 1989 and revised several times since then has attracted so much attention and made him the center of a sharp debate over whether the

p.21 In fiscal 1992, the National Institutes of Health plans to spend $13 million to help stimulate research at small colleges and universities that traditionally have not been supported by NIH funding. Since 1985, NIH has offered Academic Research Enhancement Awards (AREA grants) to support new research projects or help expand ongoing research efforts by faculty undergraduate institutions. These funds are for projects related to the health sciences. To be eligible for AREA grants, an institut

p.22 UC-Davis Professor Is Awarded Prize For Outstanding Teaching And Research $50,000 Cancer Research Prize Goes To Massachusetts Molecular Biologist People Brief Outstanding Teaching And Research Author: REBECCA ANDREWS, p.22 Barbara A. Horwitz, a physiology professor at the University of California, Davis, has been selected to receive the UC- Davis Prize for Teaching and Scholarly Achievement. The $25,000 award, which Horwitz will receive at a ceremony on May 23, was established in 198

The same decision-making process was displayed by Fisher's Council of Competitiveness,which was formed in 1986 by a group of prominent leaders from industry and academia. Instead of requesting more for research, the council asked Congress to take the billions now going into what it called "national prestige technology projects," such as the space station, the superconducting supercollider, the Hubble space telescope, the national aerospace plane, and the Human Genome Project, and put them into

Baltimore Retraction Still In The Mail NAE Slow To Get The Message Tell Your Story To The World NSF Signs Lease On New Building On March 15, Nobel laureate David Baltimore, reacting to a draft of a National Institutes of Health report that criticized his behavior in the course of a five-year investigation of a scientific paper he coauthored when he was director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT (The Scientist, April 15, 1991, page 4), announced that he would retrac

While Dingell panel moves to curb misuse of grant money, some observers worry that overall federal support will be reduced WASHINGTON--As Stanford University stands accused of misusing millions of dollars in federal funds meant to reimburse the school for the cost of supporting faculty research, the issue is not simply one of $7,000 bedsheets and $1,200 antique fruitwood commodes. The more important question for scientists is whether some of that money has been diverted from research. Many

Job opportunities expand as scientists from many disciplines join forces to preserve a multitude of plant and animal species WASHINGTON--New programs, reports, legislation, and other activities are focusing attention on the study and preservation of the world's diverse species and habitats. "There's a rising tide," says Robert Jenkins, vice president for science at the Nature Conservancy. "Biodiversity has come to be the thing that we're all concerned with." It's hard to imagine how a pie

New legislation designed to reward outstanding scientists might help to keep them in the Public Health Service ranks Attracting senior-level scientists to Public Health Service jobs in the Department of Health and Human Services and keeping them there has been tough over the past 10 years. Congressmen, policymakers, and other government officials contend that scientists have been leaving government service for better opportunities and agencies have had difficulty replacing them because thei

p.21 The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases and the National Center for Nursing Research are offering Research Planning Grants to support the development of plans for research projects on the etiology, pathogenesis, diagnosis, treatment, cure, and prevention of diabetes mellitus and its complications in minority populations, with the exception of Native Americans and Alaskan natives. (These populations are covered under a separate program.) The research may involv

Philadelphia's Franklin Institute AUTHOR: Barbara Spector, p.23 AUTHOR:Rebecca Andrews, P.23 Philadelphia's Franklin Institute Geochemist James Lawrence Powell, who has been president of Reed College in Portland, Oreg., since 1988, will be leaving higher education administration to become president and chief executive officer of the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia. His appointment at the museum, which is heavily visited by schoolchildren, becomes effective in August. Po

NIH's new director isn't shy about stating her agency's needs, while NSF's new leader likes things the way they are WASHINGTON--Bernadine Healy, the new director of the National Institutes of Health, wants to shake things up. Walter Massey, the new director of the National Science Foundation, hopes to stay the course. If both wishes are fulfilled, scientists may see NIH becoming more active on a variety of issues, such as managing research dollars and promoting women, and NSF continuing to p