April 1990

Despite gaps in their knowledge of how the mollusk produces the adhesive, scientists hope to re-create it GAITHERSBURG, MD. -- "Nature didn't make mussel glue for man's instant gratification," says Herbert Waite, the marine biochemist who first isolated adhesive protein from the foot of the common blue mussel. But man certainly intends to make use of and profit from this novel material. Last month, Genex Corp. - a Maryland biotechnology company - introduced its first glue based on the mussel

As six-year term ends, Bloch wins praise for raising NSF's profile, but questions remain on how to set priorities WASHINGTON -- You won't see this advertisement in the classified section of any newspaper or magazine. But it describes the type of person that the scientific community hopes will become the next director of the National Science Foundation. The six-year term of the current office holder, Erich Bloch, expires this coming August, and - although there has been no official announcemen

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

Consortium's technology for synthetic protein engineering offers access to one of the next hot fields in biotechnology WASHINGTON -- Proteins! That's what his elders would tell Dustin Hoffman to pursue instead of plastics if the 1960s movie The Graduate were set in the 1990s. That's where the next revolution in man-made materials will be. And that's why the federal government, the University of Maryland, and local politicians have invested $8 million to set up a protein engineering laboratory,

WASHINGTON -- The unity of a coalition that each year campaigns for a large increase in the NIH budget has been splintered by a group of bench scientists who say the agency should fund more grants to individual investigators. The disagreement reflects the growing strain on the scientific community from declining funding rates for such grants and the perception of some scientists that their work is being squeezed out by megaprojects like the war against AIDS and the effort to map and sequence t

Looking for compounds to kill tumors, Michael Boyd abandons leukemic mice and tries a radically new, unprecedentedly large assay In a sharp break from its past, the National Cancer Institute has abandoned a 30-year-old system for finding compounds that kill tumors and has replaced it with an elaborate but unproven factory-style operation. In the new program, unique in its scope, 20,000 compounds and extracts will be tested against a broad array of human tumor cells each year. The compounds wi

Bequest by developer turns into $118 million endowment to fund work on the molecular bases of heart disease SAN FRANCISCO -- When Southern California shopping center developer J. David Gladstone died while swimming in the pool of his Hollywood Hills home in 1971, his death got scant notice beyond local real estate circles. Yet today the memory of this obscure businessman lives on among biomedical scientists as the benefactor of the J. David Gladstone Foundation. The spectacular growth and sci

The endangered red squirrel gets a 120-day reprieve, while Congress reconsiders its support of Mount Graham complex TUCSON -- Two years ago, astronomers and their supporters climbed up Capitol Hill and won approval for a $200 million observatory on an Arizona mountaintop. Many people thought that was the end of a four-year struggle between astronomers and people who opposed observatory development (The Scientist, Nov. 28, 1988, page 5; and Jan. 22, 1990, page 4). But last month, a federal cour

WASHINGTON -- Medical devices have been the most trouble-free of biotechnology's products; they have sailed smoothly through U.S. Food and Drug Administration review. But that situation is changing. These genetically engineered materials and technologies for treating and diagnosing disease are getting more complex. At the same time, Congress and the public are increasingly concerned that FDA is not being tough enough and that technology is inflating health care costs. Last month, FDA and the S

FASEB speakers teach scientists about drug development and urge researchers to shape the regulatory process WASHINGTON--Biochemists isolating novel chemical compounds could use a bit more street smarts if they want to raise the profile - and budgets - of their research, according to university and industry scientists attending this month's annual meeting of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. Speaking at a symposium on the "Impact of Federal Agencies on Drug Develop

Inside Out At NIH In their quest for the authority to pay higher salaries to attract top scientific talent, NIH officials are quick to claim that, since James Wyngaarden came from Duke University to become NIH director in 1982, they have been unable to fill any top administrative positions with outsiders. That streak came to an end in January with the appointment of James Snow, chairman of the department of otorhinolaryngology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, as the first d

Science Teachers Want It Cheap And Real The number of projects aimed at improving science education in U.S. schools is growing so quickly that officials at Argonne National Laboratory say it wasn't easy "to offer something new and important." But Lou Harnisch thinks that he's found the answer. Harnisch, a Chicago high school teacher on a leave of absence at Argonne, has launched a program that relies on cheap-to-produce equipment and the glamour of real-life topics to excite youngsters in Chica

A Platform For Animal Cell Technology West European biotechnology companies are getting together to establish a mechanism to ensure that they reap the benefits of European Community-funded research on animal cell technology. The firms plan to establish in a Dublin meeting on June 6 an Animal Cell Technology Industry Platform, which will organize technology transfer from a three-year EC initiative. Brussels has earmarked about $4 million for the initiative, a sum to be matched by private enterpr

New Psychology Journal In 1988, the American Psychological Society split from the American Psychological Association because many APA members believed that their former association's interest in psychological science was diminishing. According to James L. McGaugh, APS president and professor of psychobiology at the University of California, Irvine, he and other members had fought APA's growing trend toward an "applied clinical interest," but could not win that battle and eventually decided to f

Stone Award Honors Southern Chemists The Carolina-Piedmont Section of the American Chemical Society will be accepting nominations through May 15 for the Charles H. Stone Award. Stone, who founded the Carolina-Piedmont Section in 1943, was a native North Carolinian and a pioneer in the chemical and dyestuff industry. Income from the Stone Trust Fund, provided in his will, supports administration of this award. Since Stone's death in 1969, this regional group has presented one annual prize, desi

Bradford H. Hager, professor of geophysics in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's department of earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences, has been named the school's Cecil and Ida Green Professor in Earth Sciences. Hager is best known for his research on the physics of geologic processes. He has focused his work on applying geophysical observations and numerical modeling to the study of mantle convection, the coupling of mantle convection to crustal deformation, and precision geodesy.

Over the past two to three years, commercial publishers have been called a lot of names: greedy, rapacious, price-gouging, and so forth. Usually these remarks are made when comparing commercial journal prices with the prices of journals published by those who have the advantage of the high moral ground: learned societies. Why, it is asked (or, worse, not asked), does an American Chemical Society journal cost perhaps 10 cents per page, while an ier journal costs 25 cents per page? Let me quickly

If you don't like the pricing of certain journals, the simple answer is don't support, either intellectually or financially, any journal that you think is overpriced. Many such individual decisions would add up to a statement by the community. Purchase is a value judgment. The value in dollars of a journal subscription is determined by what rational purchasers will pay. Thus, if you buy or recommend purchase of a journal, by definition it is not priced beyond its value. We make the decision. I

Three weeks ago I sat in a small room with fellow faculty members at the University of North Carolina who serve with me on the administrative board of our library. At that meeting we voted to cancel 551 journal subscriptions. Over the previous 12 months we had canceled an additional 500 subscriptions as part of our ongoing serial review program. We had little choice. Already stagnant budgets coupled with dramatic increases in subscription prices had cut the number of books we could purchase in

[Editor's note: Between 1986 and 1988, the median price of professional science journals increased 32 percent faster than the increase in the cost of publishing them, according to the Association of Research Libraries, an organization representing 119 of the largest North American research libraries. During the same period, journal expenditures increased by 43 percent, but the number of titles that libraries bought remained the same. This, ARL says, is because skyrocketing prices have forced m

D. Kim, D.L. Lewis, L. Graziadei, E.J. Neer, D. Bar-Sagi, D.E. Clapham, "G-protein áç-subunits activate the cardiac muscarinic K+-channel via phospholipase A2," Nature, 337, 557-60, 9 February 1989. David Clapham (Mayo Foundation, Rochester, Minn.): "More than 70 (for example, à,á, muscarinic, and rhodopsin) receptor types are linked to their effectors via G proteins. These G proteins are composed of two functional subunits, known as Gà and Gáà. Although the e

L.A. Lasky, M.S. Singer, T.A. Yednock, D. Dowbenko, et al., "Cloning of a lymphocyte homing receptor reveals a lectin domain," Cell, 56, 1045-55, 24 March 1989. Lawrence A. Lasky (Genentech Inc., South San Francisco): "The trafficking of leukocytic cells to various regions of the vascular system during normal and inflammatory immune responses involves a number of cell surface adhesion molecules. One of the more interesting of these molecules is the homing receptor, so named because it allows w