Hans Kristian Kotlar began his career as a cancer researcher and says he was "the last idealist who left to turn industrialist." His professed "love of a pretty woman" lured him to another part of Norway, where ended up using his early training in polymer chemistry to work for StatoilHydro, the Norwegian state oil company which chiefly operates in the North Sea. Now the head of StatoilHydro's R&D, he looks for interesting microorganisms in oil deposits under the North Sea, which he describes in "Can Bacteria Rescue the Oil Industry?".
As a graduate student, James Lyons-Weiler was asked if bioinformatics was a fad or was something real. Intrigued, he investigated and became hooked. In this month's opinion ("Time for an IP Share Market?"), Lyons-Weiler argues that investors should put their money towards specific intellectual property, not just the companies that own it. The idea came because of "my interaction with ...
