The Scientist - Home

If scientific hurdles can be leaped and political pitfalls circumvented, then developing countries may one day benefit from a unique international effort to bring genetic engineenng to the Third World. In biologist Roger Beachy’s lab at Washington University in St. Louis, scientists from France’s Institute of Scientific Research for Development Through Cooperation (ORSTOM) are working to make cassava, a crop that feeds 800 million people in Africa and Latin America, resistant to dis

Biosphere Guests Bid Bye-Bye To Earth Can planet Earth be packaged into small, self-contained habitats? Space Biospheres Ventures, a venture capital firm based in Oracle, Ariz., is betting $30 million that it can be done—and that there is someone who wants to do it. Toward this goal, the firm last month sponsored marine biologist Abigail K. Ailing’s five-day stay in a glass module that was 20 feet high and 23 feet long on each side. Cut off from outside sources of air, water, and f

The battle over the extent of Cetus Corp.’s right to claim royalties on products resulting from the use of the company’s patented DNA amplification technology hasn’t kept other entrepreneurial companies from pursuing their piece of the PCR profit pie. Indeed, the explosive demand for this technology—some analysts estimate that by the year 2000 the market for DNA amplification tools will be as high as $1.5 billion—has spawned science s newest copycat industry. Muc

Animal Rights.Group Affiliates With AAAS That elusive middle ground in the bitterly polarized debate over the use of animals in research may finally be emerging. The American Association for the Advancement of Science, after a close vote at its recent annual meeting, agreed to admit the Scientists Center for Animal Welfare (SCAW) as an affiliate and give it a voice in the affairs of the association. Although there are nearly 300 science-related organizations that have such a relationship with

Two years ago officials at NCR Corp. scanned the high-technology horizon and saw the discovery of high-temperature superconductors as a once-rn-a-lifetime opportunity for the computer giant. But the Dayton, Ohio, company had a problem: it had never researched superconductivity, and it didn’t know the best way to enter this fast-moving field. To overcome its ignorance, NCR shelled out $100,000. to become a founding member of an industrial consortium on superconductivity being formed by the

PALO ALTO—In the first week of May, Nancy Kendzierski and a team of Hewlett-Packard Co. software engineers will arrive at the Computer HUman Interaction conference in Austin, Tex., armed not with the floppy disks of their trade but with a six-minute-long videotape containing their vision of tomorrow’s computers. The tape demonstrates a portion of what H-P calls its Cooperative Computing Environment (CCE). The project is based on the concept that teams of machines and people can

Some members of the National Academy of Sciences no doubt were shocked this past February when the latest edition of their thick, pale gray journal—Proceedings of the NAS— arrived in their mailboxes. Here was the National Academy—the most respected, and surely the most cautions, scientific body in the United States—publishing in its very own “house organ” the work of Peter Duesberg, the respected but controversial University of California, Berkeley, retrov

ASHLAND, OREG.—The pharoah in the biblical story of Joseph suffered through seven lean years; biochemist Ken Goddard’s dry spell lasted even longer. For nine years, this U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service scientist was a voice crying in the wilderness, trying to convince the powers-that-be that the nation desperately needs a forensic laboratory to combat the growing illegal trade in wildlife products. And for most of those nine years, Goddard found his efforts stymied by tight budgets

More Millions For Fellowships? Changes may be afoot in the handling of the Markey Trust. Ever since 1983, a year after Lucille P. Markey, owner of thorough-bred breeding stable Calumet Farms, died in Miami, the Lucille P. Markey Charitable Trust has been spending about $40 million a year on biomedical research. Markey’s goal was for her foundation to spend both the endowment ($300 million) and its income within 15 years, and quietly go out of business. So far, the foundation has funded b

Have Gear, Will Travel A major upgrade would normally be considered a sure sign of rowth at a national lab. But when the upgrade—in this case, a million dollar spectrometer—is specially designed to be transportable to other labs, there’s reason to wonder how long its creator will be around. That’s the word among scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory’s experimental accelerator facility, known as LAMPF. Last month, officials there decided to back a proposal b

If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t FCCSET? In 1976 Congress created the Federal Coordinating Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (FCCSET) to set overall federal policy in science. Known to insiders by its acronym, pronounced “fix-it,’ the 1 4-member council brings together the heads of all of the federal agencies that fund basic research. But the council, led by science adviser William Graham, has a major image problem: Its approach to tackling problems that range fro

Patent Protection For Worcester Discovery In an effort to speed the development of anti-AIDS drugs—and, perhaps, to profit in the process—the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology has patented a class of substances known as anti-sense DNA.” These are pieces of synthetic DNA that have the ability to enter cells and “lock on” to the genes of a virus. The patent, received Feb. 21, is for work conducted by institution scientists Paul C. Zamecnik and John Goodc