Digitalvision Whether you're a penurious postdoc or a highly paid pharmaceutical executive, stress may be an unknown by-product of your daily lab work. Stress is our great common denominator. We are stressed, feel stressed, are stressed out, or are overstressed. Anyway you say it, grad students, professors, bench scientists, and their department supervisors live with some amount of stress everyday. "I guess it's demands, it's time lines," says Patrick Edwards, associate director in regulatory

Photos: Erica P. Johnson  Britton Chance Padding around his laboratory in gray wool socks, Britton Chance glances at the clock and notices the hour is approaching noon. On Saturday, that's quitting time for the 89-year-old University of Pennsylvania biophysics professor emeritus. But first he has E-mails to answer and a lab to close for the day. Chance moves slowly but sure-footedly. Time has bowed his lean frame ever so slightly, and he remains a spare man with big brown glasses and wisp

During his career in the pharmaceutical industry, Jim Richman often recruited scientists. Job openings always attracted a bounty of talented people. But finding applicants with the complete package of scientific excellence and social savvy could prove challenging. "I did see a lot of green folks come in with PhDs and postdocs who had no sense of what corporate life was all about," says Richman, now an executive coach and trainer. "If I gave them advice it was that you can never do enough train

Image: Erica P. Johnson They come from disparate parts of the world and study disciplines as diverse as diabetes research, protein chemistry, and mammalian development. Yet David Lynn, Martin H. Johnson, and Peter Stralfors share a common bond: For each, teachers inspired his life's work. As a child, Lynn used his chemistry set to concoct explosive potions. But when it came to choosing a career path in college, Lynn admits he was as bewildered as the next student until a chemistry professor g

Image: Erica P. Johnson Bioinformatics is growing up. Science's hottest information tool is coming into adolescence and has transformed the way research is conducted. For life scientists, this transformation means that those who lack skills to integrate informatics in their work are in danger of not staying competitive and also of not staying employed. "There is no doubt in my mind that the life sciences have already turned very informational, and once the train is on the track you can't reve

Image: Anne MacNamara Thomas Collett discovered a way to get the schooling he needed to become a biotechnology leader: He joined a company that paid for it. His postdoctoral training at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., gave him entrance into McKinsey & Co, a worldwide management consultancy. As he traversed Germany on the firm's payroll, he developed the business networks and abilities to land an executive position at a startup company. Now, at only 38, he's a chief exec

Long before he became a physicist, Rush Holt embraced politics. The son of a US senator from West Virginia, Holt so enjoyed the political scene that in the seventh grade he bought his own subscription to The Washington Post. Today Holt has combined his two passions—science and politics—into one job: US Representative (D-NJ). The former assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory works on three House committees, including the powerful budget committee. The scientist-

Last August a contingent of US AIDS researchers visited Malawi, where health officials believe 20% of the urban population is HIV-infected. The investigators wanted to know if government leaders would allow citizens to take part in an AIDS vaccination trial set to begin later this year. When meeting with the nation's top three health ministers, the visiting scientists were surprised to find that each were former Fogarty International Center (FIC) fellows trained at Johns Hopkins University. "The

Of all the job titles Simon Wessely thought he might hold in his life, researcher ranked among the least likely. He wanted to be a physician. "I certainly didn't see myself in a laboratory," Wessely says. So the Sheffield, England native collected the necessary degrees, but wasn't in practice long before he realized he found general medicine unchallenging. Wessely moved on to psychiatry and in time found his true niche. In one of life's delicious little twists, Wessely is today considered one o

Judith Britz decided to leave academic science for industry during her morning commute one day in 1986. She had exited Interstate 95 on the way to work as a postdoctorate fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. But when she pulled onto the off ramp and hit the brakes, she didn't slow down. "The brakes failed and scared the hell out of me," says Britz. "I was able to stop the car with my hand brake. I was so frightened and at the same time angry because we had replaced the brakes before a

Two months after the September 11 terrorist attacks the US government finally acknowledged that an already anemic economy had slipped into recession. It wasn't exactly a stop-the-presses moment. Everyone, from the guy with a few nickels in a 401k plan to big money investors, knew that Wall Street's run had ended. While every sector of the economy has suffered, the slowdown has refocused attention on the life sciences, which venture capitalists had shunned only a few years ago. In biotechnology

Time has turned one wall in Robert Weinberg's office at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research into a family photo gallery. Across the room, a tangle of tropical plants has grown as thick as the record of his 20 years of collaborative research. Weinberg, a world-renowned biologist and cancer researcher, was a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor in 1982 when David Baltimore, the Whitehead's first director, asked him to become a founding member of the fledgling institute in Ca