April 1992

Date: April 13, 1992 The orphan drug firm, Wall Street's darling in 1991, now faces fraud charges brought by some of its investors As 1991 came to a close, suburban Philadelphia-based U.S. Bioscience was riding high. In just 12 months the four-year- old biotechnology company had delivered its first anticancer product, Hexalen, to market. Corporate staff had doubled to 100 employees. The firm's much-publicized second product, Ethyol, was in accelerated review at the Food and Drug Administratio

A new set of biotechnology regulations for the state of Minnesota, approved by an administrative law judge in mid-March, have many researchers in the state alarmed. The scientists are disturbed not so much by the rules themselves--which require the obtaining of state permits for field tests of transgenic plants and microbes and the registration of labs working with recombinant organisms--as by the atmosphere surrounding their drafting. According to Jeff Tate, a plant physiologist at the Univer

Curriculum quality must change in order for the depleted math profession to attract young scholars, workshop attendees agree The teaching of mathematics requires drastic change, according to a group of academic mathematicians who met in Oakland last month. The approach and the content of university mathematics are dangerously out of synch with the needs of both students and industry, and the result, the mathematicians contend, is causing the number and quality of mathematics students to dwindl

Growing enterprises are rethinking staff needs and realigning priorities as they move to parlay early gains As more biotechnology companies bring products beyond the discovery stage, small, research-driven organizations find themselves acquiring large staffs. Company officials say this new era of growth demands that they change recruiting strategies to hire employees with different skills, cope with increased competition among companies for workers, and create management structures that will p

Gallo Investigation: A `Messy Business' Raises Many Issues Author: SCOTT HULER As the probe into alleged misconduct by the National Cancer Institute lab of Robert Gallo in its search for the AIDS virus deepens, the scope of the investigation broadens as well. Recently joining the National Institutes of Health's Office of Scientific Integrity (OSI) in its long-running investigation of Gallo are the General Accounting Office, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Ho

Block That Kick! Study That Gene! Fiction, Fact - As Long As It's Science Patently Outstanding Take A Meeting Dubious Distinction Camden, N.J.-based Coriell Institute for Medical Research is putting a lot of muscle into its effort to survive the budget crunch facing research institutions. On April 15, a fund-raising event dubbed "Coriell Sports Day: Sports & Science United" is being held at the Eagles' Nest Country Club in Sewell, N.J., owned by former Philadelphia Eagles quarterback

Biomedical research has enjoyed unequaled success in recent decades, and its spectacular growth is expected to continue in future years. There is, however, increasing concern that, owing to an anticipated shortage of adequately trained physician-scientists, the momentum may not be sustained. In a paper discussing the training of biomedical scientists, Joseph B. Martin refers to this phenomenon as the "opportunity-resource paradox" (Academic Medicine, 66[3]:123-29, 1991). Despite the great excit

The fledgling field of computer drug design, viewed skeptically by some scientists, gained dramatic validation when scientists from Agouron Pharmaceuticals Inc. reported at a March 18 cancer symposium in Amsterdam that they have created a new compound. Agouron claims the compound, dubbed AG-331, demonstrates "significant anti-tumor activity" in animal tests. "This is a completely novel chemical entity that was not found in nature," says Mike Varney, a computational chemist at San Diego-based

In order to stay abreast of important developments in his field, University of Pittsburgh biologist Craig Peebles used to scan the table of contents of some half-dozen different journals each week. Every time he spotted something of interest, he would make a copy of the article and then add it to one of the stacks of papers he kept in his office for ready reference. While online services with easy-to-use, menu-driven interfaces offer researchers one avenue of access into the world of database