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Industry Scientists: Yale Wants You Now corporate scientists can tap into the brainpower and technical expertise of Yale University cell biologists, thanks to a project just established at the university by its Office of Cooperative Research. For $20,000 (small businesses pay $10,000), members of the Cell Biology Liaison Program are able to visit the school of medicine’s cell biology department laboratories, attend an annual symposium held exclusively for subscribers, participate in tech

When Walter Plosila was asked in 1982 by Pennsylvania’s Gov. Richard Thomburgh to set up one of the nation’s first state programs to promote high technology, he knew he’d have to show results—and fast. After all, the governor and legislature were putting both personal prestige and taxpayer dollars behind an effort whose linchpin was state-sponsored collaboration between university researchers and industrial entrepreneurs. By February 1987, Plosila was ready to prove

Jezzy Leszczynski was living the good life: He was a visiting scientist in quantum chemistry at the University of Florida, his two children were happy, his wife was working at the university as a postdoctoral fellow in environmental science. So why did Leszczynski suddenly leave his family behind to become a research associate at the University of Alabama? No, this isn’t some sad tale about a “science marriage” on the skids. The fact is, Leszczynski hops on a bus or piles

SAN DIEGO—When Ivor Royston founded his first biotech company in 1978, the 33-year-old assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego had no idea it would make him so rich and...infamous. Royston did know he was taking a risk. But his idea, to start the first company in the nation to sell monoclonal antibodies to other labs, was so compelling that he decided to gamble his career at UCSD. “I had only been there a year. I wasn’t even tenured,” recalls

Columbia University oceanographer Arnold Gordon had planned to spend much of this year plumbing the Straits of Indonesia to understand how warm water from the Pacific Ocean mixes with the cooler waters of the Indian Ocean. His field work, financed by a $4.4 million grant, from the National Science Foundadon, would have been part of a five-year study to understand how differences in water temperature affect global weather patterns. But three years after Gordon first traveled to Jakarta to s

WASHINGTON—The phone call on that January 1988 morning stunned staffers at the American Association for the Advancement of Science: Forensic pathologist Robert Kirschner, a member of the AAAS Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility, had just been thrown into a Kenyan prison. Before heading for Kenya, Kirschner had received official government approval to attend an inquest into the death of a prisoner whose case had become a cause célèbre following allegations of gov

The National Stroke Association is launching a new program called Career Development Fellowships for Young Investigators in hopes of increasing the number of clinical and basic scientists committed to stroke research for the long term. Investigators who are funded for projects concerning either the causes of stroke or the rehabilitation of stroke victims, are to pursue their research under the auspices of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Institute for Stroke Research, an NSA affiliate headquartered in

Hitting The Hot Spots Scientists attending a recent American Geophysical Union meeting reported on a new lightning detection network that helps predict storms and pinpoint “hot spots” of lightning activity. Comparing two years of human observations of thunderstorms to data collected from a network of magnetic lightning detectors, Ronald Reap of the National Weather Service’s Techniques Development Laboratory, Silver Spring, Md., found that the magnetic detectors identify thre

With the self-declared goal, of addressing “the drought of scientific and engineering talent that is drying up America’s leadership and international competitiveness,” Robert E. Mercer has accepted the position of chairman of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME). Mercer, chairman of Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., has long been active in the cause of science and engineering education. Stressing that by the year 2000 one in three Americans will be a m

Fusion Controversy To Get Review Dissident physicist R Leonardo Mascheroni, who made headlines last year when he attacked the fusion research program at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, may finally get the technical review, he has demanded. The National Academy of Sciences has agreed to conduct a study for the Department of Energy on inertial confinement fusion programs, with a report due by September 1990. NAS officials say that the as-yet-unnamed panel will likely ask Mascheroni, who has

After seeing countless sentimental ads of big-eyed puppies and kittens distributed by animal rights activists, the Washington, D.C.-based Foundation for Biomedical Research has responded with a few emotional ads of its own. ‘Thanks to animal research, they’ll be able to protest 20.8 years longer,” reads one ad that depicts an angry crowd demonstrating against the use of laboratory animals. Another ad shows slides of cancer cells, diseased heart tissue, and the AIDS virus benea

Francis Crick Critiques Gerald M. Edelman Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick has taken to attacking a fellow laureate in public of late. Crick recently told a University of California, San Diego audience that a two-year-old book, Neural Darwinism, The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (Basic Books, 1987) by Nobelist Gerald M. Edelman makes misleading claims for itself. Crick quoted Edelman’s description of the book as “a radically new view of the function of the brain and the nervo