The Scientist - Home

Geneticist Kunkel shows how breakthroughs can be made without big budgets, big staffs, or big bullies When it comes to tackling scientific problems of enormous difficulty, Louis M. Kunkel’s seven-member team at Boston’s Children’s Hospital proves that it isn’t always necessary to have a big staff or to have a big budget. And it’s not necessary to play rough, either. For five years, Kunkel and his crew have been doggedly pursuing the genetic basis of muscular d

Laying Waste To Hazardous Waste A ton of toxic waste is far worse than a pound—except when it comes to devising treatments for the stuff. “Bitter experience has shown that you cannot learn enough from a beakerful to determine what treatment to use,” explains Glenn Paulson. Paulson directs the Chicago-based Center for Hazardous Waste Management. The EPA has just granted the center a unique permit to accept and store up to 16.5 tons of contaminated substances. The hope is that

As federal money flows toward ‘glamour facilities,’ enterprising scientists are raising private funds for smaller scopes For 30 years the big white dome in the Southern California hills was the most important observatory in the world, the home of what one astronomer calls “the grandfather of all modern reflecting telescopes.” But in 1984 light pollution from nearby Los Angeles caught up with Mt. Wilson Observatory and its famous 100-inch Hooker telescope, causing its

I’d Like You To Know Me Better H. T. Kung, professor of computer science at Carnegie-Mellon, had a good thing going. Instead of asking industry for money to fund his research, he would brashly invite companies to bid for the privilege. In the past, this tactic snared top dollars from General Electric, Honeywell, and Intel. But when Kung recently invited 12 major high-tech firms to join him on his latest project, a computer network, he only received sub-par offers. “We were too opti

The promise of profit in neurobiology is exciting the neurons of venture capitalists all over the country (see accompanying story). It’s also stimulating gray matter at the stoic nerve centers of the pharmaceutical giants. Although they may be loathe to admit it, beneath the traditionally calm exterior at these companies, synapses—and scientists—are jumping. Some of the large companies, of course, have been searching for drugs that affect the central nervous system for years

Perestroika Comes None Too Soon Mikhail Gorbachev’s push to improve health care in the Soviet Union has led the Soviets to the doorstep of a small firm in Falmouth, Mass. Called Associates on Cape Cod, the venture was founded in 1974 by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution microbiologist Stanley Watson and pioneered the commercial use of a substance derived from the blood of horseshoe crabs—limulus amebocyte lysate (LAL)—to test for pyrogens in drugs. The new procedure was c

Pairing Youth And Experience By combining the long experience of SmithKline Beckman with the scientific expertise of Nova Pharmaceutical, the two drug companies hope to develop new therapies with which to treat central nervous system diseases. Under a partnership announced last month and awaiting stockholder approval, SmithKline Beckman would specifically target $49 million over the next seven years for central nervous system research performed by the Baltimore company (The Scientist, May 16,

Public Interest In Science Surges The public’s interest in science has boomed in the last decade and science museums are proliferating in response. According to preliminary findings of an international study conducted by the Association of Science-Technology Centers, attendance at U.S. science centers grew 38% from 1979 to 1986. In addition, 16% of the 131 institutions responding said they had been founded within the past seven years. Even more indicative of the growth trend: four out o

Caviling, carping, and quarreling, is this any way to advance science? New HAVEN, CONN. "For a science that deals with the apparently simple question of who is related to whom, phylogeny has been positively littered with bones of contention. The root problem, explains former Yale University taxonomist Charles Sibley, is that a creatures appearance may not always bean accurate guide to its place in the pantheon of beasts. So until recently, phylogenists were left to cavil over the appropriate

Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department revolutionizes psychology CAMBRIDGE, MASS--Daniel Osherson works with equations on paper. He is interested in the abstract and arcane topic of "inductive inference”" in particular, the theory of how evidence can support a hypothesis. William Quinn toils over collections of fruit flies in a biology lab, trying to discern how small genetic differences can cause subtle changes in memory and learning among populations of Drosophila. As unlikely as it m

Competition with fancy machines and wads of cash, state schools steal national center scientists Christmas came early in 1985 for serious number crunchers. In the spring of that year, the National Science Foundation christened five national supercomputing centers and sent them forth into the world to meet the grand challenges of science and engineering. The NSF's idea was to fund these silicon meccas so that they could maintain state-of-the-art technical facilities and provide supercomputing

The foundation battles to get the best and the brightest WASHINGTON--William WuIf is the kind of person who believes that when you’ve been supported by a system, you have an obligation to give something back someday. So the University of Virginia computer scientist was sorely tempted when the National Science Foundation asked him to come to Washington for two or three years to run its computer and information science and engineering directorate. As a young professor, Wulf had benefited f