David Botstein, a former vice president for science at Genentech Inc., a South San Francisco, Calif., biotechnology company, is the new chairman of the genetics department at Stanford University. He began in the post August 1. A native of Switzerland, Botstein is internationally recognized for his contributions to the search for the human gene blueprint. He is credited with helping to develop the technique of using restriction fragment length polymorphisms (RLFPs) as genetic markers, thus allo

The Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation in La Jolla, Calif. has announced the appointment of K. Barry Sharpless to the new W.M. Keck Foundation Chair in Chemistry. The position was created earlier this year with a $2.9 million award from the Los Angeles-based Keck Foundation. Sharpless, a chemist and expert in asymmetric synthesis and metal-based catalysis, is currently the Arthur C. Cope Professor of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He will begin in his new post at S

Edward C. Stone, a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology, has been named the new director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Stone succeeds current director Lew Allen, Jr., who is retiring from the post in December. JPL, a 127-acre laboratory with an annual budget of $1 billion, is operated by Caltech for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Stone's affiliation with the lab dates to 1972, when he became the chief scientist for the Voyager project. P

The American Chemical Society, whose members will gather in Washington, D.C., next week for the organization's 200th national meeting, is facing several legal attacks against its profitable Chemical Abstract Service. In June, Dialog Information Services, a California-based online information vendor, filed a $50 million suit against the society for "anticompetitive, illegal and predatory" management of CAS databases. The society is also fighting several law suits brought against it by the Columb

Darleane Christian Hoffman, a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, and faculty senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, is the winner of the American Chemical Society's Garvan Medal. Established in 1936 to recognize distinguished contributions by women chemists, the award carries with it a $4,500 cash prize, a gold medal, and a bronze replica of the medal. It was at Los Alamos, where Hoffman worked between 1953 and 1984 with the radiochemistry group and the nucle

Charles M. Vest, the provost of the University of Michigan, has been named the new president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He will assume the post October 15, succeeding Paul E. Gray, who has been president since July 1980. Gray will become chairman of the MIT Corp. when Vest takes office. During his career at Michigan, Vest, 48, has served in a wide variety of academic and administrative roles. From 1986 to 1989, he was dean of engineering and helped develop a new $100 million

Reviewers will have to think twice, now that tenure evaluation letters can be used as evidence in bias cases Academic scientists who are denied tenure and then sue universities on the basis of discrimination will find little, if any, information to support their case in written evaluations submitted by their peers. In fact, tenure candidates and the universities considering them will now have difficulty even recruiting researchers to honestly evaluate colleagues' work. These, scientists and s

[Editor's note: The following interview with Robert Teitelman took place on March 5, 1990, one month after Genentech Inc., a pioneer in the biotechnology industry, sold a controlling stake in the company to Roche Holding, Ltd., the Swiss parent of drug giant Hoffmann-La-Roche & Co. Teitelman, a senior editor at Institutional Investor, talked with Julia King, a contributing editor of The Scientist.] Q Who's managing today's biotechnology industry? Scientists or big business? A Early on it

Rare is the scientist who embarks on a career in academia purely for the money. On the other hand, money can surely be a key factor in deciding when to leave that career, especially in light of revised pension policies and retirement laws. Consider the following: By working one year beyond the traditional retirement age of 65, a university researcher with 30 years of service conceivably can add as much as $50,000 to his or her pension fund, in addition to collecting a regular annual salary.

In 1971, 65-year-old computer scientist Grace Hopper was retired by the Univac Division of the Sperry-Rand Corp., now known as Unisys Corp., after 22 years with the company. With her guidance and expertise, the Philadelphia-based com- puter manufacturer had built the first large-scale electronic computer. Fifteen years later, in August 1986, Hopper was retired again, this time by the United States Navy's Naval Data Automation Command, in which she had held the rank of admiral as well as the di

Last year, when biomedical researcher Henry Hsiao wanted to share data or test results with another scientist or engineer in his lab, he used to store the information on multiple floppy disks, then hand-deliver the disks to colleagues at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Similarly, when Hsiao, an associate professor of biomedical engineering, needed to have raw data processed by a large, number-crunching computer, he was required to physically take his data to one of the university

In 1984, biologist Maurice Hilleman - a Lasker award winner, a recipient of the National Medal of Science, and a man who had pioneered more than a dozen vaccines - found himself out of a job. Hilleman, who had worked for 27 years at the West Point, Pa.-based Merck Sharp and Dohme Laboratories, was a senior vice president and director of vaccine research at the pharmaceutical company. The fact that he was one of the firm's most productive scientists and that he didn't want to leave his post didn