KUDOS AT ACS: Spicing up a presentation on polymer architecture earned rave reviews for Cornell grad student Portia Yarborough. A few hours before her scheduled talk at the American Chemical Society's meeting this fall in Las Vegas, Portia Yarborough rehearsed her presentation for a friend. A chemistry graduate student at Cornell University, Yarborough wanted her talk to be perfect. Practicing, she laid out the slides, spoke slowly, and shared her research results. Her friend's comment: "Borin

In Bonnie Hallam's class at Huey Elementary School in Philadelphia, first-graders don't just read about ecology-they make an ecosystem. Every year, a corner of Hallam's classroom becomes a pond. Filling a huge wooden barrel with water, students carefully arrange topsoil, mulch, logs-even goldfish and butterflies. "The kids get so involved," Hallam says. "Everyone has a good time." It's a different scene from a few years ago, when science was scarce in Hallam's class. "I've always liked science

The recent success of Imitrex-the antimigraine drug made by Glaxo Wellcome Inc. of Research Triangle Park, N.C.-has ignited a fury of pharmaceutical research. Imitrex (generic: sumatriptan) is the first serotonin (5-HT) agonist, or mimic, made to fight migraines. In 1996, Imitrex tablets reaped $840 million in worldwide sales. Now, a half-dozen companies are creating new brands of migraine relief-and opening the door to neuroscientists and molecular biologists in the process. A TRAILBLAZER: Th

MULTIDISCIPLINARY APPROACH: Researchers who understand "'nouveau technologies' of biology" are needed to develop allergy treatments, notes Hoechst Marion Roussel’s Martin Wasserman. It happens like clockwork: allergy season. Every spring, more than 20 million Americans sneeze, wheeze, and curse the flowers. But if scientists have their way, things might be different in the years to come. Across the United States, biotech and university labs are unraveling the basic biochemistry behind al

Sidebar: The Dos and Don'ts of Winning Dollars Sidebar: Grant Writing - For More Information A NEW STRATEGY: UC-Irvine’s Keith Woerpel, who revised his rejected grant applications to focus on impact, now has several grants. To Keith Woerpel, 1994 will forever be the year he learned to write grants-the hard way. An assistant professor of chemistry at the University of California, Irvine, Woerpel wrote five grant applications that year. All were rejected. "I was getting burned really badly

Here are a few grant-writing rules to remember, according to National Institutes of Health reviewers and staff: check NIH's Web site for information on grant policy; call program staff ahead of time to learn what's hot-and what's not; ask colleagues to critique your grant application before submission; keep research goals simple and clear; carefully follow reviewers' suggestions for revisions when your grant application is returned. promise the world in one lab project; stack a grant ap

Sidebar : Asthma Products - Delivering the Dosage Asthma Products - More Information CHEMICAL BLOCKER: Accolate was the first new asthma drug approved by FDA since the 1970s. New research is breathing life into the asthma drug market. Inspired by improving knowledge of asthma's biochemistry, more than 40 companies worldwide are investigating drugs to control the disease. This effort translates into new opportunities for creative chemists and biologists. For 25 years, a handful of drug firms,

For more than 30 years, asthmatics have walked around with portable inhalers in their pockets. Taking a puff of medication from an inhaler, patients can stifle an asthma attack. If they inhale medicine daily, they may even prevent asthma attacks entirely. But there's a problem. Studies suggest that many asthma patients use inhalers incorrectly and end up with less medicine than they need. They might inhale their medication too quickly, for example. In many cases, asthma patients end up swallow

Sidebar: Information for researchers who want to work with the African American community to promote health HIGH PAYOFF: Rev. Frank Tucker advises researchers who want to work with churches to "invest in the infrastructure of the church." CENTRAL LOCATION: Medical researcher Keith Norris notes that outreach to churches enables scientists to "reach a fairly broad audience." Today, many clinical researchers are in a bind. On one hand, the National Institutes of Health and other granting agencie

Sidebar: Researchers Explore Thalidomide's Therapeutic Potential Firms are focusing on getting the teratogen to market to treat serious diseases; if successful, it may inspire fresh looks at other compounds. Thirty-five years after the effects of thalidomide horrified the world, the drug is teaching researchers a whole new set of lessons. This time, though, the message is positive: Working together, companies and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) can indeed pursue important new compounds

Sidebar: Selected Suppliers Of Tools For Cell Culture BIOREACTOR: Bellco Glass offers the E/Z Access Reactor for culturing mammalian, plant, and insect cells. Early in this century, 1912 Nobel Prize winner Alexis Carrel of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research was a leader in cell and tissue culture. Among his accomplishments, Carrel showed how to transfer and study colonies of animal cells. At the time, some cell culture researchers were exceedingly formal. In Carrel's lab, assistan

Last month in Redwood Shores, Calif., participants in the National Conference of Biotechnology Ventures decided to have some fun. Venture capitalists and biotech CEOs lined up to play a corporate version of "Family Feud," an old television game show in which competing families guessed at trivia. HIGH HOPES: Venture capitalists want functional genomics firms to partner with drug companies, says Karl Thiel. One game question: What's going to be the next hot biotech area for investment? Feud pl

In the wee hours of a morning 11 years ago-around 1:00 a.m.-Richard E. Smalley slouched on a sofa. The lights were turned off. Sipping a beer, he mulled over his situation. A MORNING REVELATION: The model for buckyballs came to Richard Smalley as he cut and pasted paper pentagons. For a week, the Rice University chemist had been trying to make sense of an experiment. Using a laser, his lab team had zapped carbon to see how its atoms would split and then cluster. The supersonic laser kept pr

INDIVIDUALITY: James Perley has found that a small department enables a researcher to be "your own person." When biologist James Perley first began teaching at Ohio's Wooster College in 1967, he wasn't sure he'd like it. Wooster is a small place. Perley, however, had studied and worked in big schools, including the University of Michigan and Wayne State University. In a small department, would he feel content-or claustrophobic? Content, as it turns out. Nearly 20 years later, Perley is still

SIDEBAR: Online Career Information For Scientists Describing his career, Chris Fields invokes the cry of Civil War Admiral David Farragut: Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead! Over the past 20 years, he has worked in physics, meteorology, and, now, genetics. Each career change presented new opportunities for Fields, who has a talent for data analysis. "I find it fascinating when people say they're bored with what they're doing," says Fields, chief scientific officer of newly formed Molecular