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Small Businesses: Advice And Money Dollars are available and deadlines are imminent for proposals to the Small Business Innovation Research program—plus, if you have already tried and failed, a couple of conferences might set you straight. SBIR, run by 11 participating federal agencies, funds research “of a high risk nature that may have excellent commercial potential.” Phase I SBIR awards—which range from $20,000 to $50,000 for a six-month effort—can be crucial so

The Astronomy News Hotline, sponsored by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, has a new number: (415) 337-1244. The Hotline’s recorded message—which is available to callers around the clock and has been in continuous operation since 1976, relays new discoveries in astronomy, special celestial events, and other items of interest to stargazers and armchair astronomers. It is written and produced by astronomer Sherwood Harrington, staff member of the Astronomical Society of the Pa

The ex-chairman of the nation’s Science Council forms a startup to spark government scientists OTTAWA—Stuart L Smith was fed up with his government’s inability to help Canadian scientists turn their knowledge into commercial products. So he formed his own company to do something about it. A psychiatrist turned liberal politician, Smith served from 1982 to 1987 as chairman of the Science Council of Canada. The council, Canada’s equivalent to the National Academy of S

In 1978, physicist Richard A. Muller of Berkeley was awarded two distinguished prizes—the Waterman Award and the Texas Instruments Foundation Founders’ Prize—for his research on cosmic rays and adaptive optics. The event was particularly notable because Muller had been refused support for this work after peer review by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Department of Defense. Many innovative

The past few months have been difficult ones for the National Institutes of Health and its director, James B. Wyngaarden. A series of public controversies has rocked the institution, tarnishing what many regard as the crown jewel of the federal scientific establishment. The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIH, removed Edwin Becker as head of NIH’S Office of Research Services for “inefficiency and mismanagement,” despite strong opposition from Wyngaard

The history of science is replete with successes achieved through repudiation of the common wisdom. In the following, I offer some unconventional and speculative challenges to how we think about some large problems in contemporary biology. Most are not new thoughts, but to my knowledge they have not been refuted. I know they are mostly wrong; but I am not sure all are. They will surely be addressed, and most solved, during the next century. If I could foretell exactly how, I would be wasting

Which multidisciplinary journal of science has the greatest impact in terms of citations? It’s Nature by a nose. From 1979 to 1987, Nature nearly tripled its impact, a measure of quality and utility calculated annually by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). Science also dramatically improved its impact rating over the period, while Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS) remained mostly unchanged. To determine a journal’s impact, ISI coun

Tumor necrosis factor (TNF) has been over the past few years one of the more actively investigated proteins among those involved in inflammation, immunity, and the growth and inhibition of cells. TNF is destructive to cancer— hence, its name. Loyd J. Old and colleagues at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York discovered TNF some 15 years ago. But it was only in 1984 that research into TNF really began to take off. “The decade-long effort to purify tumor necrosis

At a groundbreaking celebration last fall in Kyoto, Japan, officials of the Kyoto Research Park Corp. and Philadelphia’s University City Science Center (UCSC) watched as a Shinto priest blessed the construction site. Several months later, in March of this year, the Japanese officials visited Philadelphia and planted a symbolic cherry tree on the Science Center’s grounds. Both ceremonies were held in honor of an unprecedented agreement, formally announced at the Philadelphia tree-p

Before engaging in joint research projects with foreign companies, directors of national labs must find out if the companies have barred U.S. scientists from their facilities. The problem with that bit of congressional xenophobia, buried within the 1986 Technology Transfer Act that encourages commercial spinoffs from federal labs, is that no one has yet discovered any such shut-outs. In an effort to uncover culprits, the executive branch has told the Commerce Department to collect case histor

BIOLOGY: Stable isotope research lab. $350,000 over three years from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to Marine Biological Laboratory Ecosystem Center, J. Hobbie BIOMEDICINE: The Lalor Foundation made the following research grants: Inhibition and reinitiation of spermatogenesis in rats: development of a male contraceptive. $20,000 to Johns Hopkins University; B. Zirkin In vivo analysis of oviducal and uterine muscle during early pregnancy and its modification by drugs. $20,000 to University of Que

Organic chemists and biochemists are likely to find ChemText, a scientific word processor from Molecular Design Ltd.; a powerful tool for smoothly integrating graphics and text in scientific documents. This versatile software package is equally suitable for both academic and industrial scientists. My experience with ChemText Version 1.1 stems from teaching a traditional two-semester organic chemistry course. However, I recently received the new Version 1.2 and have fiddled with it enough to