Scientists in industry and academia foresee trouble as NIH persists in claiming ownership over partial sequences Date: April 27, 1992 The reviews from the scientific community remain mostly negative over the National Institutes of Health's patent application for a total of 2,722 partial human gene sequences. Academic researchers, who say they are mostly unaffected by the patenting process, nevertheless are appalled; and while some in the commercial sector of the biotech community now believe

The end of the era of behemoth projects at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration may be at hand as Congress on March 31 confirmed a non-astronaut as the new administrator of an agency facing congressional funding cutbacks. Until his appointment, Daniel Goldin was vice president of TRW Inc.'s Space & Technology Group in Redondo Beach, Calif. TRW, a longtime NASA contractor, has been involved not in space shuttle-sized projects but in the smaller science of satellites, the Compton G

A new set of biotechnology regulations for the state of Minnesota, approved by an administrative law judge in mid-March, have many researchers in the state alarmed. The scientists are disturbed not so much by the rules themselves--which require the obtaining of state permits for field tests of transgenic plants and microbes and the registration of labs working with recombinant organisms--as by the atmosphere surrounding their drafting. According to Jeff Tate, a plant physiologist at the Univer

In February, President Bush announced "major new ground rules" to streamline the regulation of the biotechnology industry. And on the same day, the president's Council on Competitiveness published--under the auspices of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)--a policy for all biotech-regulating agencies that set out a "risk-based, scientifically sound approach to the oversight of planned introductions of biotechnology products into the environment." OSTP's risk-based approach means

The Whitaker Foundation currently is in the process of selecting as many as 30 students out of the 122 who applied for the $27,000 in stipends, plus education and travel expenses for use during graduate studies at institutions offering engineering degrees (preferably those with concentrations in biomedical engineering). The grantees will be an- nounced by March 31, and when the program is in full swing four years from now, a total of up to 150 students will hold grants. Peter Katona, the fou

Engineers may be quaking over the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's announcement last month that it may cut 5,000 space shuttle-related jobs over the next five years. But space science researchers are viewing the move as nonthreatening, or even as a boon. In a January 6 speech broadcast to NASA employees, Robert Crippen, the new director of the Kennedy Space Center and a former shuttle astronaut, said that if Congress cuts the agency's budget it will be the space shuttle program