Suppliers of laboratory chemicals and plastics are already beginning to feel the pinch from rising crude oil prices in the wake of the worldwide embargo of Iraqi oil. But it's not clear when-or if-scientists will have to pay more for those products. Officials at some companies, like J.T. Baker Chemical Inc. of Phillipsburg, N.J., one of the country's largest suppliers of laboratory solvents and other chemicals, say they plan to pass the cost increases onto their distributors, who could try to

Before parting with money to fund the NSF program, corporate backers demand to play a greater role in charting its development WASHINGTON--The National Science Foundation wants industry to invest more than $100 million in a new minority education program that would produce 50,000 baccalaureates and 2,000 Ph.D.'s a year in science and engineering by the year 2000. What the NSF doesn't want, say officials organizing the program, is a lot of advice from the businesses on how to set it up. That an

Allan Goldstein believes the thymosins he discovered can cure immune diseases, and he hopes his company and institute will prove it WASHINGTON--Science moves too slowly for biochemist Allan Goldstein. For most of his professional life, he has been trying to unravel the mysteries of the human immune system through a better understanding of a group of hormones known as thymosins. He discovered them 26 years ago, and their use in 1974 to save the life of a five-year-old girl, along with his encou

Director Robert Stevenson takes its mission beyond keeper of the country's microbes to attract key researchers and funding ROCKVILLE, MD. - Like a headmaster looking after a huge dormitory of slumbering schoolboys, Robert Stevenson watches over 50,000 microbes suspended in a sleep of absolute biochemical inactivity. As director of the American Type Culture Collection, the 64-year-old bacteriologist provides scientists with clean, well characterized cultures of yeasts and fungi, monoclonal anti

Innovative instruments, often jerry-built from parts of other devices, are making a wide array of new projects possible One look through something called a confocal microscope was all it took for William Sunderland to make a drastic change in his career plans. A math student with what appeared to be a bright future in computers, he peeked one day through the lens of a microscope invented in the lab where he worked. The dazzlingly detailed pictures of living cells convinced him to switch his ma

Federal office helps scientists get controlled substances, but the price is paperwork and secrecy WASHINGTON - Pharmacologist Louis Harris keeps his drugs in a massive safe bolted securely to the floor of his lab at Virginia Commonwealth University. Barbara Slifer, a behavioral pharmacologist at the University of New Orleans, refuses to tell her lab partners where she's stashed the chemicals for their next experiment. They and thousands of their colleagues around the country can wait weeks and

questions about the wisdom of rushing into clinical trials WASHINGTON -- The first company to win permission from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to test an AIDS vaccine on humans was an obscure biotech firm in West Haven, Conn. That step, taken in August 1987, was viewed as a great leap forward in the fight against AIDS and a coup by the four-year-old company, MicroGeneSys, in its race against two other firms. Yet some scientists believe that the company made a false start. Because not

Patent counsels and scientists work together to further understanding of science and increase corporate financial gain WASHINGTON - Corporate patent lawyers just don't see science the way researchers do. "Scientists spend their entire careers creating intellectual property," says Auzville Jackson, Jr., a partner in the Washington firm of Staas and Halsey, which specializes in intellectual property law. "Yet they never think about property values and how to protect their property, which is ofte

Scientists inside and outside the industry debate the commercial possibility of using antibodies as enzymes WASHINGTON - Catalytic antibodies are the stuff of Steven Benkovic's dreams. He hopes these immune system molecules, when put to work speeding up chemical reactions, will function as magic bullets to fight disease and infection. Benkovic, a physical organic chemist at Pennsylvania State University, is not alone in his reverie. More and more scientists and their corporate cohorts are env

WASHINGTON -- University of Utah administrator Jean Nash began to wonder two years ago whether her institution or the individual scientist owns research data generated in the laboratory. As the director of the Utah Resource for Genetic and Epidemiological Research, Nash was trying to develop management guidelines for the burgeoning amounts of information flowing out of her center and its affiliated medical school. But she discovered that, in her words, "there were no university guidelines. And

Despite gaps in their knowledge of how the mollusk produces the adhesive, scientists hope to re-create it GAITHERSBURG, MD. -- "Nature didn't make mussel glue for man's instant gratification," says Herbert Waite, the marine biochemist who first isolated adhesive protein from the foot of the common blue mussel. But man certainly intends to make use of and profit from this novel material. Last month, Genex Corp. - a Maryland biotechnology company - introduced its first glue based on the mussel

FASEB speakers teach scientists about drug development and urge researchers to shape the regulatory process WASHINGTON--Biochemists isolating novel chemical compounds could use a bit more street smarts if they want to raise the profile - and budgets - of their research, according to university and industry scientists attending this month's annual meeting of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. Speaking at a symposium on the "Impact of Federal Agencies on Drug Develop