A new law allows Pentagon to become venture capitalist to support domestic firms deemed vital to national security SANTA CLARA, CALIF. -- When Jerry E. Crowley threw a lunch last fall for potential investors, he was looking for a few risk-taking venture capitalists to help out his company, Gazelle Microcircuits Inc., a small startup electronics firm here in Silicon Valley. But instead of someone from the private sector, Crowley managed to tap a totally unexpected source of funds: the Departme

Bequest by developer turns into $118 million endowment to fund work on the molecular bases of heart disease SAN FRANCISCO -- When Southern California shopping center developer J. David Gladstone died while swimming in the pool of his Hollywood Hills home in 1971, his death got scant notice beyond local real estate circles. Yet today the memory of this obscure businessman lives on among biomedical scientists as the benefactor of the J. David Gladstone Foundation. The spectacular growth and sci

New chief sees future of less nuclear physics, more biomedical work, and more commercial projects. BERKELEY, CALIF.--Its main thoroughfare is still called Cyclotron Road, a relic of its days as the world's premier center for high-energy physics. But the name is rapidly becoming an anachronism. In just a few years, the last of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's big particle accelerators - the billion-electron-volt Bevalac - will be shut down. That will leave only a vintage 88-inch cyclotro

Nationalism is major issue in much of developing world as U.S. scientists seek to learn more about this endangered ecosystem When Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson thinks about the 1950s, his recollections are tinged with more than a little nostalgia. Not because life was necessarily better then, he explains. But his kind of science was certainly easier to do. Wilson, a noted authority on tropical ants and widely recognized as the "father" of sociobiology, the study of how biological traits in