In an unprecedented deal, RiboGene Inc. is putting a Soviet team's advanced research into production with American money MENLO PARK, Calif.A year and a half ago, venture capitalist Petri Vainio was considering buying into a proposal from protein chemist and would-be entrepreneur Kin-Ping Wong. So Vainio began an investigation commonly performed by patent attorneys to see whether any other inventor, anywhere in the world, had come up with a similar idea. Vainio discovered that a group of Sovie

As sources of money dry up, potential backers demand that science startups have prototypes to show off, if not products ready to roll PALO ALTO, CALIF.--For much of the eighties, software engineer Eric Hannah rode the roller coaster of venture capital funding for new high-tech startups in northern California. But after one rocketing success and one crashing failure, he's promised himself never to risk another ride. In fact, one of the things he likes most about the Silicon Valley company he's

A brain drain, red tape, and pinched budgets could turn the $8 billion network of defense labs into a scientific backwater At the U.S. Army's Aviation Systems Command in St. Louis, helicopter designer Roger Smith was faced with an important career move. The Army was transferring its helicopter-design activities to San Francisco, a much more expensive place to live. But Smith's salary was set by federal law and couldn't be raised to reflect the higher cost of living on the West Coast. Looking

LIVERMORE, CALIF.-Last summer Edward Teller, founder of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, took his protégé, Livermore theoretical physicist Lowell Wood, to the White House. There they met with President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George Bush to discuss Wood's latest idea for a weapon to defend the country against incoming Soviet missiles. Joining them was John Nuckolls, a nuclear physicist who a few months earlier had become the director of Livermore, the Department of

After years of hype, the national aerospace plane may finally be lumbering off the ground. Gone are the visionaries who spent years promoting proposals that have turned out to be little more than pipe dreams. Replacing them is a group of practical scientists and engineers. They admit that they are working on an experimental prototype that may never fly, much less carry passengers. Ironically, though, it’s just this kind of pragmatic talk that could bring the project the credibility it will

PASADENA, CALIF—NASA's current plans for a space station are being challenged by advocates of a smaller station, more useful to scientists, that could be built more quickly and with fewer shuttle flights. This opposition has crystallized in recent weeks around two embattled figures: Peter Banks, the former chairman of NASA's task force on scientific uses of the space station, and Oliver P. Harwood, a senior engineer at Rockwell International. Banks, director of Stanford University's Space