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TOKYO—Takashi Chikayama is a true hacker—a person who spends long hours working to crack difficult software codes, not because he’s paid overtime, but because he loves programming. Unlike most members of his scientific cadre however, he doesn’t work in a basement university lab in Cambridge, Mass., or a plush office in Silicon Valley. Chikayama’s home is Tokyo—and he is Japan’s newest and quite possibly most potent weapon in the international battle

WASHINGTON—To some scientists the title will sound impressive; to others, it will be simply obscure: associate director for natural resources, energy, and science at the Office of Management and Budget. But scientists ought to know who carries this portfolio, because the person in that office has the potential to relax or squeeze important parts of the federal research budget for science. The current occupant is R6bert Grady. a newly appointed (see story, page 1) political scientist

In a star-studded eyent next month, the National Academy of Sciences will give out more than a quarter of a million dollars in prizes, ranging from honors for an associate professor of astronomy to a medal for a computer industry chairman of the board. One award is a new one: the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology, intended for young scientists. The winner will be Kiyoshi Mizunchi, chief-of the section on genetic mechanisms at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digest

Venture Capital: Rx For Tech Transfer Blues? As many of the national labs can attest, inventing a better mouse trap is no guarantee that the world will beat a path to your door. So several government labs have been forced to adopt unusual methods to sell their wares to the private sector. The latest experiment is an $8.5 million venture capital fund set up by Argonne National Lab and the University of Chicago. The privately endowed fund, known as ARCH Venture Fund, is a nonprofit creature form

The Politics Of Filling The Pipeline If you think that an idea as all-American as national science scholars could be able to escape the taint of politics, you’ll have to think again. In last month’s address to Congress, President Bush proposed 570 such scholarships to entice the intellectual cream of U.S. youth to pursue careers in science and engineering, But his $5 million a year program to refill the U.S. science pipeline would be overseen by the Department of Education, and tha

Who needs venture capital? Not Stanford medical researchers whose work shows potential for clinical applications. Last month, Stanford University Hospital announced that it had awarded $351 ,200 to nine projects that need only to be developed a bit further to be ready for clinical testing. These are the first awards made by the hospital under its new technology transfer program, which was announced last summer. In an attempt to speed the transfer of innovative techniques from lab to bedside, th

Industry Scientists: Yale Wants You Now corporate scientists can tap into the brainpower and technical expertise of Yale University cell biologists, thanks to a project just established at the university by its Office of Cooperative Research. For $20,000 (small businesses pay $10,000), members of the Cell Biology Liaison Program are able to visit the school of medicine’s cell biology department laboratories, attend an annual symposium held exclusively for subscribers, participate in tech

When Walter Plosila was asked in 1982 by Pennsylvania’s Gov. Richard Thomburgh to set up one of the nation’s first state programs to promote high technology, he knew he’d have to show results—and fast. After all, the governor and legislature were putting both personal prestige and taxpayer dollars behind an effort whose linchpin was state-sponsored collaboration between university researchers and industrial entrepreneurs. By February 1987, Plosila was ready to prove

Jezzy Leszczynski was living the good life: He was a visiting scientist in quantum chemistry at the University of Florida, his two children were happy, his wife was working at the university as a postdoctoral fellow in environmental science. So why did Leszczynski suddenly leave his family behind to become a research associate at the University of Alabama? No, this isn’t some sad tale about a “science marriage” on the skids. The fact is, Leszczynski hops on a bus or piles

SAN DIEGO—When Ivor Royston founded his first biotech company in 1978, the 33-year-old assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego had no idea it would make him so rich and...infamous. Royston did know he was taking a risk. But his idea, to start the first company in the nation to sell monoclonal antibodies to other labs, was so compelling that he decided to gamble his career at UCSD. “I had only been there a year. I wasn’t even tenured,” recalls

Columbia University oceanographer Arnold Gordon had planned to spend much of this year plumbing the Straits of Indonesia to understand how warm water from the Pacific Ocean mixes with the cooler waters of the Indian Ocean. His field work, financed by a $4.4 million grant, from the National Science Foundadon, would have been part of a five-year study to understand how differences in water temperature affect global weather patterns. But three years after Gordon first traveled to Jakarta to s

WASHINGTON—The phone call on that January 1988 morning stunned staffers at the American Association for the Advancement of Science: Forensic pathologist Robert Kirschner, a member of the AAAS Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility, had just been thrown into a Kenyan prison. Before heading for Kenya, Kirschner had received official government approval to attend an inquest into the death of a prisoner whose case had become a cause célèbre following allegations of gov