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From Yale To Stanford, Universities Are Thoubled Shortfalls in overhead, depreciation, and other indirect costs can tear apart faculties and bring strong provosts to their knees. Indirect costs aren’t glamorous. They won’t solve the mystery of dinosaur extinction or find the charm in quarks. But whisper those two simple words in the ear of virtually any president or provost of a major research university, and you may see a strong person blanch. The reason: Indirect costs are risin

Retin-A, the acne drug that is prescribed for wrinkles, has also smoothed the future for the University of Pennsylvania’s dermatology department. The drug’s inventor and patent holder, longtime Penn dermatologist Albert Kligman, 71, has been donating his royalties to the department. The money, $4 million so far and climbing fast, frees the department from the hypocrisy” of grant-getting, says Kligman, and has been used to recruit faculty, buy equipment, and fund research. Un

Strong measures to save Imperial College from indirect costs have ruffled scientists’ feathers LONDON--When the tall, spare frame of David Thomas glides into their laboratories, even the crustiest dons at London University’s Imperial College quake inside their tweed coats. For Thomas is the college’s ghost of Christmas future, warning of impending ruin unless scientists mend their financial ways. His message, preached with Welsh fervor, is simple. Imperial College and other

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