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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

This issue of The Scientist is clearly different from those of the past. The newspaper is growing, both expanding its range of features and sharpening its focus. The new look, new coverage, and new features are a direct response to your suggestions. From its inception, The Scientist has kept you informed about important developments on the science policy scene. A glance at this issue will show that we are continuing our commitment to bring you incisive and timely reporting on policy decisi

When Roland W. Schmitt retired from his job as a senior vice president of General Electric Co. and director of GE’S Research and Development Center on January 31, he had little time to spend in leisure activities. On March 1, the 64-year-old physicist became the 16th president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY He takes over an academic institution that is unique in its links with industry RPI has centers dedicated to interactive computer graphics, manufacturing productivit

When scientists realized that the immune system could discriminate self from non-self, they began to study whether the body could recognize tumor cells as foreign and then eliminate them. An immune response against foreign antigens (for example, viruses or bacteria) typically requires immunization and also that the foreign antigen binds to the body's own major-histocompatibiity [MHC] antigens (for example, HLA or H-2). Using in vitro assays to measure the killing of tumor cells, researchers

The Scientist has asked a group of experts to periodically comment upon recent articles that they have found noteworthy. Their selections, to be presented here in every issue, are neither endorsements of content nor the result of systematic searching. Rather, they are personal choices of articles they believe the scientific community as a whole mayalso find interesting. Reprints of any articles cited here may be ordered through: The Genuine Article, 3501 Market St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19104./

A new form of computation is emerging. Propelled by advances in software design and increasing connectivity, networks of enormous complexity known as distributed computational systems are spreading throughout offices and laboratories, across countries and continents. Unlike standalone computers, these growing networks seldom offer centralized scheduling and resource allocation. Instead, computational processes (the active execution of programs) migrate from workstations to printers, servers,

When it comes to peer recognition, papers published by Rockefeller University scientists get more than their share of attention. A lot more. In fact, the average journal article by a Rockefeller scientist was cited nearly three times more often than the average scientific paper tracked over a 12-year period (1973 to 1984) by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). Also cited far more than the average were papers published by faculty at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Columbia, and the Univ