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SCID Mice Go Commercial The Philadelphia-based Fox Chase Cancer Center has entered the mutant mouse business with a series of licensing agreements that will allow commercial distribution of a key strain used to study diseases of the immune system. The SCID (severe combined immune deficiency) strain, which arose naturally from a chance mating of two normal mice in the Fox Chase labs in 1981, was the first to accept human immune system cells, making national headlines for two California research

G. CHRISTOPHER ANDERSON WASHINGTON—The Department of Energy, reacting to congressional pressure and criticism of its epidemiology program, has asked a new advisory panel for help. The move is aimed at defusing an increasingly volatile dispute between environment and health activists and the energy department over the health records of 600,000 DOE nuclear weapons plant workers (The Scientist, Aug. 7, 1989, page 1). Meeting last month for the first time with his Secretarial Panel for t

A report on genetically engineered plants predicts that they will begin reaching the marketplace within five years, but when they do, high research and testing costs will allow only the largest companies to compete in the field. Gerald Campbell, a St. Louis biochemist and one of the authors of the report, says the big companies likely to benefit from the technology are Calgene, Du Pont, and Monsanto. Under a contract with Campbell Soup, Calgene is now engaged in field trials of a genetically en

WASHINGTON—Congress last month passed an $18.7 billion-dollar appropriations bill to fund all 1990 research programs sponsored by the Department of Energy. For officials at DOE’s research laboratories, the next move is to figure out how to cope with $31 million less than they had requested. The appropriations bill was intentionally vague, spelling out only $l0 million of the cut. Brookhaven’s Alternating Gradient Synchrotron will get $5 million less for operating costs than

Systematic biologists, a vital ingredient in the race to identify and protect rare species before they vanish, are themselves a declining academic breed in the United States. A recent survey conducted for the National Science Foundation found that systematics attracts less than half as many students as a decade ago. And an aging population of faculty, many nearing retirement, has left fewer and fewer systematics professors available to train these students. Systematics, the science of collect

WASHINGTON—The focus of the troubled 15-year U.S. Agency for International Development program to develop a malaria vaccine (The Scientist, July 10, 1989, page 1) has moved from the laboratory to the courtroom as government investigators charge that an attempt to halt a Third World plague may have been used by some scientists as a source of personal gain. One of the leading scientists in the research program has been indicted on felony charges, and at least two other technical invest

BOULDER, COLO.—During the course of the devastating heat wave that struck Texas in the summer of 1980, climatologist Stephen Schneider estimates he fielded 25 calls from reporters trying to fathom the situation. When corn belt yields fell some 40% in 1983, Schneider, who is Senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) here, got that many phone calls in a month. And when severe drought struck the southeastern United States n 1986, queries came in a rate of 25

DE SOTO, TEXAS-How do you attract scientists to a project that won’t yield its first results for 10 years? How do you build a research facility on a physical scale that has never before been attempted? How do you spend billions of federal dollars without incuning suffocating oversight and bureaucratic red tape? The task of answering those and hundreds of other questions over the next decade will fall on the scientists who have signed on to build the Su perconducting Supercollider (SSC).

Roy Schwitters, Director The National Science Foundation demonstrated its knack for spotting talent 10 years ago when it selected this experimental physicist for its prestigious Alan T. Waterman Award as the nation’s outstanding young scientist. Schwitters, then a recently named professor of physics at Harvard, was chosen for his important contributions in the design and construction of a particle detector for the Stanford Positron-Electron Accelerating Ring at the Stanford Linear Acceler

WASHINGTON-A new program at the National Science Foundation will give institutions a larger voice in training researchers in the life sciences. The initiative, which NSF plans to launch with a $4 million investment next year, is also aimed at stimulating interdisciplinary research in the nation’s universities. Called the Research Training Group Awards, the program is sponsored by the NSF’s Biological, Behavioral and Social Sciences (BBS) directorate. The foundation hopes to award

Marvin L. Speck was a professor of food science and microbiology at North Carolina State University when he developed a new process to help people digest milk. Speck recognized that his discovery, which he called SweetAcidophilus in honor of the fact that it improved on the unpleasant taste of the existing process, had commercial possibilities. So in 1972 he convinced the university to assign the trademark to a state dairy foundation, which then signed agreements with two companies, one to manuf

Pity the Nobel committee now trying to make its selection for the next prize in physiology or medicine, soon to be announced. The committee has a very difficult task. The five-member group at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm is sifting through dossiers on more than 100 candidates. The committee members are no doubt asking themselves, as they must ask themselves every year, “How are we to select from among this collection of outstanding, world-class researchers just one (or at mos