April 1991

Peter House is chief analyst and director of the Division of Policy Research and Analysis at the National Science Foundation. In one corner of his 12th-floor office stands a bookcase filled with 30 years' work on public policy analysis and technical assessment. So it's somewhat surprising to the 54-year-old House that a single, 34-page unpublished paper written in 1989 and revised several times since then has attracted so much attention and made him the center of a sharp debate over whether the

In 1980, biotech was a fledgling industry with only 20 companies and no reported revenue. It has become a $2 billion-a-year industry with 1,000 companies. Now, industry analysts conservatively project revenues to grow to $20 billion a year by the end of the decade, while a report on national biotechnology policy released in February by the President's Council on Competitiveness predicts revenues will shoot to $50 billion by 2000. "The venture capital industry is undergoing very dramatic changes

The same decision-making process was displayed by Fisher's Council of Competitiveness,which was formed in 1986 by a group of prominent leaders from industry and academia. Instead of requesting more for research, the council asked Congress to take the billions now going into what it called "national prestige technology projects," such as the space station, the superconducting supercollider, the Hubble space telescope, the national aerospace plane, and the Human Genome Project, and put them into

p.22 UC-Davis Professor Is Awarded Prize For Outstanding Teaching And Research $50,000 Cancer Research Prize Goes To Massachusetts Molecular Biologist People Brief Outstanding Teaching And Research Author: REBECCA ANDREWS, p.22 Barbara A. Horwitz, a physiology professor at the University of California, Davis, has been selected to receive the UC- Davis Prize for Teaching and Scholarly Achievement. The $25,000 award, which Horwitz will receive at a ceremony on May 23, was established in 198

p.18 P. Vallance, J. Collier, S. Moncada, "Effects of endothelium-derived nitric oxide on peripheral arteriolar tone in man," Lancet, 2:997-1000, 1989. Joe Collier (St. George's Hospital Medical School, London): "The Clinical Pharmacology Unit at St. George's Hospital Medical School has a tradition of seeking to understand the local pharmacology of human peripheral vasculature both in health and in disease. Much of the early work on the peripheral actions (venous and arterial) of, for examp

p.18 J.-M. Triscone, . Fischer, O. Brunner, L. Antognazza, A.D. Kent, "YBa2Cu3O7/PrBa2Cu3O7 superlattices: Properties of ultrathin superconducting layers separated by insulating layers," Physical Review Letters, 64:804-7, 1990. J.-M. Triscone (currently at Stanford University, Calif.): "I think the realization of YBa2Cu3O7/PrBa2Cu3O7 (and YBa2Cu3O7/DyBa2Cu3O7) superlattices had a strong impact because it demonstrated that high-quality epitaxial heterostructures can be made with sharp (one un

p.18 A.J. Courey, D.A. Holtzman, S.P. Jackson, R. Tjian, "Synergistic activation by the glutamine-rich domains of human transcription factor Sp1," Cell, 59:827-36, 1989. Albert J. Courey20(Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, Los Angeles): "The biochemical mechanism by which distal promoter elements can stimulate transcriptional initiation at a site located many thousands of base pairs away has been a mystery since the discovery of this phenomenon in the early

p.18 E.S. Ward, D. Güssow, A.D. Griffiths, P.T. Jones, G. Winter, "Binding activities of a repertoire of single immunoglobulin variable domains secreted from Escherichia coli," Nature, 341:544-46, 1989. Sally Ward (University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas): "This paper describes the isolation and characterization of immunoglobulin heavy chain variable domains (VHs) that have antigen-binding activities. "The initial observation that the VH domain derived from an antilysoz

Author: JEFF SEIKEN, p.19 This summer, when approximately 11,000 scientists from around the world gather in New England for the prestigious Gordon Research Conferences, they will be marking a special occasion: the conferences' 60th anniversary. In reaching this milestone, the conferences have managed to reverse the aging process, for, if anything, their vitality has increased with time. Over the decades, the Gordon conferences have evolved into the United States' premier scientific forum. T

Author: EDWARD R. SILVERMAN, p.21 Editor's Note: The following discussion of the salaries of mid-level managers and scientific staffers at biotechnology companies is the first in a two-part series. The second part, which will appear in the May 27, 1991, issue of The Scientist, will deal with the salaries of executives at biotech firms. While base pay for scientific managers is rising significantly at United States biotechnology companies, there appears to be no dramatic movement upward in sal