Schmooze it or lose it, right? Well, not quite. To be sure, there are a lot of negative stereotypes surrounding networking, but it's not necessary to make a hard sell to widen your sphere of professional contacts, or even start one. "People think that networking's a matter of sucking up to the powerful, that it takes away from getting real work done, that it's manipulation," says Philip Agre, associate professor of information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. The first purpo

Search the Biotechnology Industry Organization's Web site using the keyword "cancer" and you'll come up with pages of companies with at least one product, department, or research program aimed at oncological therapeutics. The late-1998 approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of Genentech's Herceptin, a monoclonal antibody used to treat metastatic breast cancer, is one attestation to the upswing for biotech cancer products. Typically investment in biotech--and hence hiring--is cyclica

Some in academia liken it to the world's oldest profession. Others to selling your soul. But when you ask former academics who now work in the business world, switching was the best decision of their professional lives, despite some of the disparaging comparisons their university colleagues may have made. For these researchers--at various stages of their careers, from postdoc to full professor--the lure of the private sector had more to do with finding a suitable career fit than anything

Julie Vick (left) and Mary Heiberger Now that humankind has survived the Y2K bug threat, it's time for many budding scientists to get back to a more pressing task--finding a job. The prospect can be daunting. But career counselors and experienced job seekers say there are many strategies to make the search easier. Personal contacts, Internet and print ads, job fairs, and search firms (for job seekers with a few years under their belts) are the main places to concentrate your efforts, say the e

Some scientists would call writing the most excruciating part of their jobs. Others would say it's an act of joy, or at least it doesn't cause great pain. For a small cadre, writing for audiences outside of their peers--the communications that generally don't count toward promotion and tenure--is also a second career. To be sure, writing for the popular press is nothing new in science. Veteran scientist-authors such as Carl Sagan were profiled in The Visible Scientists,1 a book that was p

1998 Salaries Interested in what your colleagues are making at the private liberal arts college across town, at biotech and pharmaceutical firms in your region, or at agencies inside the Beltway? Or are you getting ready to hire a new employee or apply for a position in the life sciences? If so, openly discussing salaries with colleagues or at the beginning stages of a job search can be prickly. So how do you get a handle on how much you're worth? The information is out there in many forms. Pr

If the resumes of the Science Talent Search (STS) finalists over the past 60 years are any indicator, winning a scientific prize early in one's career certainly can have a positive effect. Over a six-decade time span, STS--formerly called the Westinghouse Awards and now called the Intel Science Talent Search--has given out scholarships to more than 2,200 young researchers. Two have gone on to win Lasker Awards; nine have received MacArthur Fellowships; three the National Medal of Science; two th

Only in academia does it take a committee and several months to a year or more to hire someone. In industry, most often a supervisor can hire an employee. But searches for new faculty are complicated. Graphic: Cathleen Heard The mechanics of a search are fairly simple; it's the nuances at each step that challenge participants. First a position opens up, then the department chairperson or dean decides on the disciplinary background of the position and the level: assistant, associate, or full pro

Teaching. Service. Research. These have been the three-pronged foundation of an academic career, though not necessarily in that order. But according to graduate students, faculty members, and advocates for doctoral education reform, what defines these responsibilities and what role the professorate plays in them--especially teaching--have been changing over the last few years. Teaching is moving beyond ensuring students can master the subject matter of a course. Now professors are also being as

Transgenic mice have become the stock-in-trade of basic biomedical research since their creation in the early 1980s. The techniques used to insert human genes into non-human species that were refined in rodents are now being applied to a menagerie of other mammals. These chimeric goats, pigs, sheep, cows, and rabbits are essentially living bioreactors: When a gene inserted into their DNA is specifically activated in mammary gland cells, the desired human protein is secreted into the animal's mi

Photo: Roger Riley NEW UNDERSTANDING: Kelvin Cooper predicts an upswing in interest because of new developments like comprehending the cytokine signaling pathway. Biochemical message-routing molecules are being discovered regularly, giving researchers new targets for developing more efficacious therapeutics to treat inflammatory disease. According to industry observers, these therapies constitute a multibillion-dollar market for treating disorders such as asthma, lupus, multiple sclerosis, ost

An editorial accompanying a JAMA thyroid drug study criticized private-sector funding of professional associations. A recent editorial in JAMA-Journal of the American Medical Association that detailed the events surrounding the suppression of a pharmaceutical study has drawn attention to the relationship between scientific professional societies and sponsorship by private companies (D. Rennie, JAMA, 277:1238-43, 1997). In its April 16 issue, the journal published a long-subdued study that show