Articles by Stephen Greene

WASHINGTON--Don’t add biomedical companies to the short list of U.S. industries that have agreed to form national research consortia to compete in world markets. The strain of mixing scientific cooperation with financial competition ap- pears to be too great. Although drug companies have yet to form a consortium to do basic research in biotechnology, their scientists can watch how one variant of the concept is playing in Peoria. Seven companies with interests in agricultural biote

WASHINGTON—The National Science Foundation’s science and technology centers program, intended to be a beacon for collaborative U.S. research that would speed applications to the marketplace, instead has become a lightning rod for criticism from the scientific community. NSF’s decision not to fund any such centers this fiscal year provoked keen disappointment among scientists, especially those who had raced to meet the January 15 deadline. A number of applicants echoed the

Japan launched an R&D program in superconductivity this month without the international collaborators that officials there had hoped to attract. Some U.S. researchers said they didn’t know they had been invited, while others are waiting to see how the program develops. The International Superconductivity Technology Center (ISTEC) that opened January 14 is being funded by about 50 Japanese companies, including large electronics firms such as Toshiba and Hitachi, electric utility compani

WASHINGTON—The Reagan administration is asking Japan to participate in a major U.S.-led research project as part of what it hopes will be a tougher bilateral agreement on scientific cooperation. The U.S. proposal has, not been made public, but it is thought to seek Japan’s participation in a large-scale project such as the space station or the Superconducting Supercollider. According to Charles T. Owens, the National Science Foundation’s member of the negotiating team, R

Many US. scientists cloning genes in microbes could be affected by a patent awarded this month to Genentech Inc. of South San Francisco. The decision’s scope remains to be seen, but some observers believe that the impact may be slight—a sign, they say, of the growing maturity of the biotechnology industry. The question of which institutions or researchers must seek a license from Genentech, and at what stage in the process, is “a legal quagmire,” according to Iver Coo

With bears loose on the world’s major stock markets, academic, corporate and government scientists who seek cover face a forest of question marks. On Wall Street, where tremors from the recent precipitous plunge in share prices still ripple through the world economy, analysts predict an end to the easy credit and abundant capital that fueled recent growth in some science-based U.S. industries. While not everyone is predicting a recession, the prevailing mood is one of extremecaution,

Thomas R. Odhiambo, founder and director of ICIPE (the International Centre for Insect Physiology and Ecology) in Nairobi. has won international recognition for his efforts as a scientist, educator and administrator to mobilize support for science in Africa. As a child in Kenya he developed a curiosity about wasps that helped inspire his later studies at Makerere University in Uganda and at Cambridge University in England, where he received a Ph.D. in insect physiology in 1965. After stints as

Q:Must traditional folk practices in Africa be abandoned for the scientific culture to flourish? ODHIAMBO: I don’t think so. In fact, if you analyze folklore, particularly storytelling, there’s a tremendous amount of natural history in it. All one has to do is translate what is being stated into more modern language—simply make those stories current. I don’t see a conflict at all between the traditional knowledge base and the modem technology base. I think we can use th

WASHINGTON—Thanks to the new tax law, many U.S. graduate students this year will owe taxes on their fellowships and stipends for the first time. And some will see their financial aid shrink accordingly. “There’s a lot of dissatisfaction, dissension and anger” among affected students about the new tax regulations, said Patrick Melia, assistant dean of the graduate school at Georgetown University here. “It’s created a lot of unneeded frustration.” U

WASHINGTON—The Orphan Drug Act, passed in 1983, has been effective in bringing to market new drugs tsrgeted at rare diseases, but more research funds are needed to complete the task and expand it to cover medical foods and devices, federal lawmakers were told this month. In testimony before a House subcommittee on health and the environment, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Frank Young reported that nearly 160 drugs have been designated as orphans, of which 18 have been approv

WASHINGTON---The decision by Cray Research Inc. to abandon development of its most advanced supercomputer project has dealt a blow to the U.S. supercomputer industry and may set back researchers in the 1990s, say some specialists in the field. “I think the United States has lost one of its very serious efforts in supercomputing,” said Lawrence Lee, director of the Cornell National Supercomputer Facility in Ithaca, N.Y, who added that the step may have “serious repercussion

WASHINGTON—Last spring’s newspaper stories that described how IBM researchers had boosted the critical current density of a superconductive thin-film crystal by a factor of 100 were also bringing news of the discovery to most scientists. Not until six weeks later were the details published in Physical Review Letters. Increasingly, scientists in fast-paced fields are announcing breakthroughs at meetings or press conferences. Long before results appear in scientific journals, they

WASHINGTON—Whether the topic is AIDS or supernovas or high-temperature superconductivity, the blistering pace of discovery is prompting researchers in hot fields to flock to special meetings, spend hours on the phone, scan computer data bases and swap reams of journal article preprints in an effort to keep up and to record their own contributions. As scientists in those fields become increasingly dependent on such methods, however, some are concerned that the resultant short cuts have lowe

Takashi Mukaibo, deputy chairman of Japan's Atomic Energy Commission, has long been involved in international science policy. Trained as a chemical engineer, Mukaibo in 1954-58 was the first postwar science attaché at the Japanese Embassy in Washington. He served on the United Nations Advisory Commission on the Application of Science and Technology for Development from 1971 to 1980, and was vice chairman of the Japan National Commission for UNESCO in 1974-76. For the past few years he has b

WASHINGTON—A U.S. patent board ruling last month significantly boosts the odds for approval of some of the pending applications for patents on genetically engineered animals. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences, while rejecting for other reasons an application for a patent on an oyster, ruled that there is no legal reason why such patent protection should be denied. The decision may lead eventually to the marketing of new breeds of faster-growin