Subspecialty AUTHOR: SCOTT HULER, P.18-19 Wander by the Richards Medical Research Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, designed by architectural superstar Louis Kahn, and you may see aluminum foil taped to the windows. Applied to keep out the sun glare that makes working in some of the building's labs the scientific equivalent of driving through the Arizona desert, the foil is only the most visible sign of Richards' unusual reputation. The unique aesthetic design makes the Richards c

Sometimes, negotiating with a prospective employer is easy. "In fact, I wrote my own ticket," says K.C. Nicolaou, a chemist lured from the University of Pennsylvania after being courted by the Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, Calif., and the University of California, San Diego, for a dual appointment. "Essentially, [Scripps and UC-San Diego] did exactly what I asked them to do." It didn't hurt his position, he recalls, that "at the same time I was recruited by Yale." Clearly in the catbird

AUTHOR: SCOTT HULER, p.20 First-place winner ($40,000 college scholarship): Ashley Reiter, 17, of Charlotte, N.C., a senior at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in Durham. For her project, she determined the dimensions of fractals generated by Pascal's Triangle and its higher-dimensional analogs. Second-place winner ($30,000): Denis Lazarev, 17, of Fair Lawn, N.J. Lazarev, who came to the U.S. from the Soviet Union in 1989, attends Elmwood Park Memorial High School. He c

The ethics of scientific conduct, once rarely discussed publicly, lately has merited the attention of groups as diverse as national newspapers, professional associations, and Congress. Much of this attention has been negative. With such causes c‚l`bres as the 1989 and 1990 convictions of Food and Drug Administration scientists for accepting gifts from companies whose products they were investigating and the case of psychologist Stephen E. Breuning, found in 1987 by a National Institute o

Biotechnology firms cherish their scientists -- molecular biologists, immunologists, biochemists, microbiologists, synthetic organic chemists. These researchers spend their days cloning and sequencing DNA, altering genes to create engineered proteins, developing diagnostics and therapeutics, and conducting other investigations that constitute the bread and butter of the industry. To many observers, it may seem ironic that the industry's human resources professionals the people who seek out the

With so many investigators vying to have their papers appear in the scientific community's most prestigious journals, it's no wonder some scientists in pursuit of publication confuse cutting-edge research with work that simply cuts loose. According to Nature associate editor David Lindley, some recently submitted articles that have not graced his journal's pages border on the ridiculous. "There's a lot of perpetual motion machines, refutations of Einstein," he says. "And I've had people write