It wasn’t a run-of-the-mill midlife-crisis that made Jeff Wine abruptly abandon his life’s work. It was the salty taste he noticed whenever he kissed his baby daughter Nina. In the fall of 1981, Wine was a 41-year-old associate professor in Stanford University’s prestigious psychology department. A physiological psychologist, he had already won wide recognition for his use of crayfish to study how nerve cells control behavior. He was also a firsttime parent, but not an anxio

For Stanford president Donald Kennedy, the last year has brought trying times. In the last 12 months, Stanford has investigated one of its professors for scientific misconduct, battled community groups opposed to the construction of two new research buildings (The Scientist, November 28, 1988, page 1), and suffered a mutiny by scientists in the Center for International Security and Arms Control over the control of academic appointments. Kennedy believes that some of these incidents are symptom

In the fall of 1986, Will Talbot was just another college senior nervously applying to graduate school. He knew his credentials were good. As an ambitious high school junior in Gainesville, Fla. he had talked his way into an immunology research laboratory to begin hands-on training at the lab bench. And as a student at the University of Florida, he had compiled an outstanding academic record. But he figured that the competition for top programs in molecular biology would be stiff. “I appli

STANFORD-- CALIF—Irving Weissman is a risk taker. He doesn’t mind losing bets: A bottle of wine here, a beer there. It’s a small price to pay for the progress of science. The last bet the Stanford University immunologist lost was with postdoc Mike McCune over whether a complete human immune system could be transplanted into a mouse. “I said, ‘Great idea, fantastic, but I’ll bet it doesn’t work,’ “ Weissman recalls. “Well, I was wrong

Case One: The Molecular biologist who refuses to believe that AIDS is caused by a virus BERKELEY, CALIF.—On a Saturday early in April, as Washington’s famous cherry trees began to blossom, eight of the nation’s top AIDS researchers gathered at George Washington University for a special meeting. But they weren’t there to discuss their latest findings, or to devise new strategies for fighting the deadly disease, or even to enjoy the Washington spring. Instead, says Berke