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San Diego firm's future hinges on the success of a serendipitously wrought treatment for a variety of genetic diseases Until March of this year, no one paid much mind to Wick Goodspeed, president and CEO of Vical Inc. With a staff of 22 scientists, his three-year-old biotechnology company in San Diego was just another startup hoping to cash in on the $2 billion-plus markets for innovative drug design and drug delivery methodologies. Then serendipity stepped in. While looking for a new way to

The Scientist has asked a group of experts to comment periodically upon recent articles that they have found noteworthy. Their selections, presented here in every issue, are neither endorsements of content nor the result of systematic searching. Rather, the list represents personal choices of articles the columnists believe the scientific community as a whole may also find interesting. Reprints of any articles cited here may be ordered through The Genuine Article, 3501 Market St., Philadelphia,

Culpeper Funds Medical Scholars The Charles E. Culpeper Foundation Scholarships in Medical Science provide financial support for the career development of young academic physicians. Any accredited U.S. medical school can apply for up to three years of funding, in the name of a desired candidate, for awards of up to $100,000 per year. Three awards are scheduled for funding this year. Parameters for research topics are wide; anything that has relevance to human health is acceptable. However, the

Hilary Koprowski, director of the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, recently was presented with the Philadelphia Award, also referred to as "Philadelphia's Nobel Prize." The annual $25,000 award, originated in 1921 by publisher Edward W. Bok, who died in 1930, is given by a board of trustees established in Bok's will. The honor recognizes outstanding achievement in the Philadelphia area. Previous winners include the Rev. Leon Sullivan and orchestral conductors Eugene Ormandy and Leopold Stokow

Sununu's Clout Endows Research Fellow Last year, wealthy Lebanese- and Syrian-Americans opened their wallets at a dinner held by St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., to honor White House Chief of Staff John Sununu. The result was a research fellowship. And this month the recipient of their largess, Srinivas Chunduru, a newly minted chemistry Ph.D. from the University of Akron, has begun working in the hospital's pharmacology department. The $22,000 John Sununu Endowed Fellow

WASHINGTON--NIH has balked at what would have been unprecedented funding of the Soviet component of collaborative research with a Soviet émigré now in the United States (The Scientist, April 2, 1990, page 1). But the scientist, geneticist Valery Soyfer, says that he'll be able to carry out most of the work by having his collaborator, molecular biologist Maxim Frank-Kamenet-skii, spend time in Soyfer's new laboratory at George Mason University. Persecuted and penniless in the Sovi

Is conservation enough? This new breed of scientists seeks to do more, repairing the harm done by man CHICAGO--As a boy in his native England, ecologist Stuart L. Pimm spent almost every weekend watching birds. As an adult, he abandoned the outdoors to take up such theoretical pursuits as modeling change in biological communities. But now the University of Tennessee ecologist is back on a birdwatch of a different sort, this time in the tropical underbrush of a small Pacific island near Guam.

ARGONNE, ILL.--Amy Moore, a junior at a suburban Chicago high school, wears a combination madras-and-faded-denim skirt and has zipper pulls hanging from her multipierced ears. She does well in science, is computer literate, and wants to be an astronautical engineer. She's not sure what first piqued her interest in space, but she knows what influenced her career choice. "The "Challenger accident aggravated me to no end," says Moore. "I never want to see anything like that again. I don't want to

Does university management foster free inquiry at national weapons labs, or does it inhibit the university's own academic freedom? That's the question University of California Regents will face in September when they vote on a proposed renewal of the university's current contract to manage Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories for the Department of Energy. Although opponents of the nuclear arms race have long fought the university's 40-year oversight of the labs, faculty oppo

The successful growth of human brain cells in a dish already has some researchers pondering commercial applications WASHINGTON - When a team of neuroscientists at Johns Hopkins Medical School made headlines this past May for establishing a colony of human neurons that divide and grow in a petri dish, they may have launched a new era on the business side - as well as the science side - of neurobiology. The Johns Hopkins team, headed by Solomon Snyder, reported its achievement in the journal Sc

Despite praise from Congress, others charge that his single-minded drive for bigger budgets alienated many scientists WASHINGTON - Muted by the uproar following the removal of Bassam Shakhashiri as head of the directorate for science and engineering education at the National Science Foundation is the applause of many scientists who are glad to see him gone. "There aren't any tears being shed around here, I can promise you that," says one NSF program officer. "Most of us see it as a chance to

Genetic engineers at Crop Genetics and Mycogen place hopes on two different strategies for pest control Like Babe Ruth, John Henry sees himself as a slugger. The president and CEO of Crop Genetics International of Hanover, Md., Henry is going for a grand slam in his field of pest control: a genetically designed biopesticide against the European corn borer, a pest that munches $500 million worth of corn annually in the United States. In contrast to his heavy-hitting strategy are the efforts of