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Three Japanese behemoths led the list of companies receiving the most U.S. patents in 1987. Canon K.K., Hitachi Ltd., and Toshiba together received more patents (2,515) than General Electric Co., IBM Corp., and RCA Corp. (1,874), according to a study by Intellectual Property Owners. The Japanese also raced to a commanding lead in the auto industry, where Mitsubishi, Honda, and Toyota each chalked up more patents than the U.S. leader, General Motors. All told, 29 Japanese companies appear amon

Fun And Profit In The Skin Trade From deep biology to Epidermis Inc., another tale in the merchandising of science CAMBRIDGE, MASS--Jeff Morgan and Brad Guild moved into their new office on the opening day of baseball season this April. The space was small: a single room with built-in desks lining opposite walls and barely enough room to swivel their chairs. The pair stacked boxes and unpacked a few books. And Guild took up a blue magic marker and scrawled the business’s first official

Are the special sparks of creativity and do-it-yourself vigor that are the hallmarks of entrepreneurship something that can be learned in a classroom? Increasingly, scientists are teaching scientists the art and business of new commercial ventures. At Northwestern, for example, students with science and engineering backgrounds compose one-third of the classes taught by physicist and business professor Stuart Meyer in the Kellogg School of Management. And at Cornell, former physicist and Genera

Life In The Fast Lane At Nova Pharmaceuticals, And The Not-So-Sweet Smell Of Success To hear pharmacologist Bill Kinnier tell it, life at Nova Pharmaceutical Corp. has finally settled down. He’s back to being a full-time scientist He gets to go home at a normal hour. He even has a new secretary all to himself. The only problem is: Kinnier misses the old days. Take the summer of 1984. Nova, a hot pharmaceutical startup, had been born of a dream that renowned Johns Hopkins University neu

Pseudomedicine Is A Multibillion Dollar Business In The U.S. On weekends, medical researcher Waflace I. Sampson often leaves his suburban home and drives up the peninsula into San. Francisco. He sees himself as an investigator "his quarry, an epidemic that’s ravaging the City by the Bay." But it’s not the AIDS virus he’s after. Although a hematologist by training, Sampson is hunting tainted medicine, not tainted blood He’s a quackbuster. In recent months, Sampson un

The Race Is On To Replace Ozone-Eating CFCs. The Entrants: Corporate Giants And Upstart Startups Catalyzed by an international agreement to freeze, and eventually to reduce usage of damaging cholorflourocarbons (CFCs)—and by DuPont Co.’s recent decision to voluntarily comply with the guidelines-the once-cool CFC research arena has transformed into a very hot race. Scientist Michael Hayes, for example, works on the boundaries of matter, studying the reactions that occur between o

Particle physicists battle solid-state physicists over slice of a shrinking pie BALTIMORE--Inside the gleaming vaults of the Baltimore Convention Center last month, 1,900 researchers were giving 1,200 talks, seminars, and press conferences, all part of the usually festive spring meeting of the American Physical Society. But in the corridors, much of the talk was anything but festive. The APS is torn by a bitter internal squabble pitting the society’s largest constituency, 9,000 solid-s

When research is mobilized around combating a virulent infectious agent, risk-taking is inevitable. That has been true in the pursuit of a polio vaccine and a cure for smallpox, in the study of cancer-causing viruses, and most recently, in AIDS research. While the responsible course of action is to limit as much as possible the risks to investigators and laboratory technicians, those goals can only be accomplished within certain limits. Infectious organisms are opportunistic, always seeking n

Opinion Why I Walked Away From Star Wars--And A Good Job AUTHOR: RICHARD RUQUIST Date: May 16, 1988 Years before the term Strategic Defense Initiative had been coined, no one was more enthusiastic about a defensive missile shield than Richard Ruquist. The questions seemed purely technical back then, and Ruquist was an engineering bloodhound on a hot trail. But after scores of analyses, the scientist concluded that it was a terrible mistake—that a defensive system in space would be vulne

This issue of The Scientist is clearly different from those of the past. The newspaper is growing, both expanding its range of features and sharpening its focus. The new look, new coverage, and new features are a direct response to your suggestions. From its inception, The Scientist has kept you informed about important developments on the science policy scene. A glance at this issue will show that we are continuing our commitment to bring you incisive and timely reporting on policy decisi

When Roland W. Schmitt retired from his job as a senior vice president of General Electric Co. and director of GE’S Research and Development Center on January 31, he had little time to spend in leisure activities. On March 1, the 64-year-old physicist became the 16th president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY He takes over an academic institution that is unique in its links with industry RPI has centers dedicated to interactive computer graphics, manufacturing productivit

When scientists realized that the immune system could discriminate self from non-self, they began to study whether the body could recognize tumor cells as foreign and then eliminate them. An immune response against foreign antigens (for example, viruses or bacteria) typically requires immunization and also that the foreign antigen binds to the body's own major-histocompatibiity [MHC] antigens (for example, HLA or H-2). Using in vitro assays to measure the killing of tumor cells, researchers