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PHILADELPHIA--In a move that surprises many observers, the University of Pennsylvania has sued one of its own professors and a pharmaceutical firm over the ownership of a patent on Retin-A, an anti-acne drug also said to reduce wrinkles on the skin. The case is likely to be watched closely by administrators at other universities because it demonstrates a willingness on the part of a major research institution to seek legal recourse against a faculty member - a strategy usually reserved for case

WASHINGTON--One week after the Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded in April 1986, Soviet contacts called Carnegie Mellon University robot researcher William ("Red") Whittaker to ask for help in saving thousands of Soviet cleanup workers from radiation exposure. Whittaker's autonomous robots were already cleaning up the disabled Three Mile Island nuclear plant, and his technology was widely acknowledged as the world's best in replacing humans in hazardous environments. But a year later, after 5,00

Many scientists once denied emigration have now left the USSR, but others are still unable to obtain exit visas. Yuri Magarshack is doing science again. Today, he is an assistant researcher in the chemistry department at New York University. Yet for an 11-year period that ended last spring, the theoretical physicist was struggling to endure life as a refusenik - a Soviet citizen, usually Jewish, who is denied permission to emigrate. Dismissed from his job as head of a laboratory in Leningrad's

As a boy, Philip Currie dreamed of digging for dinosaur fossils in the vast deserts of Outer Mongolia. Currie was inspired by the books of Roy Chapman Andrews, who led the American Museum of Natural History's expeditions to Central Asia in the 1920s. Years later, as head of his own dinosaur program at the Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Alberta, Canada, Currie attempted to pursue his dreams. "In 1982, we approached the Mongolian government and ran into a bureaucratic brick wall," he recalls.

Researchers find visits increasingly necessary for career advancement, high-tech lab work, and hard currency earnings. As pluralism and democracy move to replace communist rule in Eastern Europe, researchers in the West can expect to see a steady increase in the number of scientists traveling to Western Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States. "It seems to me that there are three key issues: one is freedom of travel, and in all of those [Eastern Europe] countries the travel barriers

The next big project in high-energy particle physics is likely to use electrons and be cheaper to build Not an inch of tunnel for the 53-mile Superconducting Supercollider has been laid, but already the massive accelerator is casting a long shadow on the future of high-energy physics facilities. As Congress and the nation struggle with the estimated $7 billion cost of the huge machine, many scientists are coming to the conclusion that the SSC may signify the end of the line - a dinosaur as big

Deals with the Pasteur Institute and Connaught Biosciences establish Institut Merieux as a global front-runner PARIS--At 8:20 A.M. on December 13, Jacques Francois Martin, general manager of the Institut Merieux, received a transatlantic call in his Lyons office from Alan Nymark, vice president of Investment Canada, a unit of the Canadian Ministry of Industry, Science, and Technology. Nymark was calling to tell Martin that Merieux could proceed with its proposed takeover of Connaught Bioscienc

Following a storm of criticism, HHS chief Sullivan asks for another plan to stem conflicts of interest. WASHINGTON--As soon as he read them, James Wyngaarden knew that there would be problems. The former National Institutes of Health director expected the agency to propose guidelines to eliminate potential conflicts of interest by government-funded university scientists who are carrying out clinical trials. But instead of directing a surgical strike against questionable financial relationships

Scientists are realizing that substances in the environment can have devastating effects on the human nervous system For decades, neuropathologist John Olney waged a one-man crusade to have "excitotoxins," chemicals in the brain that cause nerve cells to self-destruct, removed from foods. One of the worst, he argued, was glutamate, consumed by millions as the food flavoring monosodium glutamate. But nobody really paid much mind to Olney's concerns. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) did no

A small tortoise-shell cat stars in a new General Electric television commercial, getting most of the credit for founding GE's thermoplastic business. The year is 1953. In the ad, the cat crawls through an open laboratory window, slinks across a lab table occupied by test tubes and pipettes and then, in a reckless leap, knocks a beaker onto the floor. The following morning Dan Fox, a young researcher, finds that the liquid in the beaker has turned into a hard, transparent block. The voice-over

A 12-member group of chemical companies that produces chlorofluorocarbons is stepping up efforts to investigate the environmental impact of their alternative: hydrochloro- fluorocarbons and hydrofluorocarbons. They are hoping that this research will confirm their initial findings, presented at the United Nations Environment Programme in Nairobi last year, that these alternatives have little significant environmental impact, unlike chlorofluorocarbons, which have been implicated in the destructi

The scientists who study surface water, and what's needed to keep it clean, now find themselves in positions of public authority. When Michael Principe landed his first job as a limnologist nine years ago, he considered himself lucky. The economy was mired in a recession, and the outlook for increased government spending on the environment looked dim. Few federal or state agencies were seeking scientists in Principe's research realm, the scientific study of fresh water systems - an area increa