April 1995

Buoyed by enabling legislationand scientific advances, institutions are aggressively shopping their facultiese 'blue-sky' investigations. In the past decade, university technology transfer has moved into the spotlight. Several hundred schools are now participating in what was once a relatively obscure function at a few institutions. Government, industry, and venture capitalists, in seeking successful commercial products to develop, are keenly interested in what researchers are creating today.

Some are vocal in their atheism; others see no conflict between science and religion, as long as the two are kept separate. Historically, the relationship between science and religion has been uncomfortable at best. Scientists today run the gamut of opinion on the compatibility of the two, ranging from those who feel they occupy vastly different realms of thought and reality that will never meet to those who see little reason why they cannot easily coexist. According to philosopher Michael Rus

Buoyed by enabling legislation and scientific advances, institutions are aggressively shopping their faculties' `blue-sky' investigations. In just the past year, patents on the genes implicated in obesity, breast cancer, and other disorders have generated headlines in newspapers across the United States. In several of these cases, scientists have turned their patented discoveries into lucrative commercial deals worth several times their funding from other sources--crucial money in light of pro

Government and private labs are springing up to accommodate expanded use of genetic evidence, but retraining existing workers. In less than a decade since DNA analysis brought forensic science into a new era, the growth of the discipline--as an evidentiary tool as well as an industry--has been massive, as more and more high-profile cases hinge upon the evidence it provides. Yet the phenomenal expansion of its use in courts around the United States is not translating into new entreprene

Sixteen individuals--one woman and 15 men--from a variety of disciplines in science, engineering, and mathematics are being honored for their scientific and humanitarian achievements at the 132nd annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), scheduled for April 24 in Washington, D.C. Five of the 16 are already NAS members. Also taking place at the convocation will be the election of new academy members and the induction of new members elected last year (N. Sankaran, The Scientist, J

The Leaders of Science: The Readers of The Scientist FRANK PRESS Cecil and Ida Green Fellow at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and president emeritus of the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C. "THE SCIENTIST is entertaining, informative, enjoyable,and easy to read. It is very modern in its outlook and goesright to the heart of the important issues facing the scientific community today." Frank Press, former scientific adviser to President Carter, sees many pro

The Jan. 9, 1995, issue of The Scientist featured two intriguing articles about the relationship between science and religion. Billy Goodman's story ("Religious Scientists Sense The Divine In Their Work," page 1) made the point that these apparently unusual people see no contradiction between their theistic religion and their science. (No one needs to be told that scientists who are atheists see no contradiction between their atheism and their science.) Although the subjects interviewed were di

The history of science and technology includes a remarkable number of well-known persons who were sustained in their scientific activity through their Quaker convictions. Among them: John Dalton of atomic theory fame; Abraham Darby of Coalbrookdale, England, who produced coke from coal for use in iron production, and thus ushered in the industrial revolution; Arthur Eddington, who confirmed Einstein's prediction that light travels on a curved path around the sun; and crystallographer Kathleen

I read with interest the Hot Papers section in your Feb. 6, 1995, issue [page 17]. In particular, I was delighted to see coverage of a paper applying biophysical techniques to cell biological questions (E. Neher, R.S. Zucker, Neuron, 10:21-3, 1993). Nevertheless, I was a little surprised that in your discussion of the recovery of secretory vesicle membrane you failed to cite the first study to define, both quantitatively and kinetically, secretory vesicle membrane retrieval using these techniqu

This is with reference to the Research article on apoptosis (R. Lewis, The Scientist, Febr. 6, 1995, page 15). The term apoptosis first (I believe) appeared in 1972, in a paper by Kerr et al. (J.F.R. Kerr, A.H. Wyllie, A.R. Currie, British Journal of Cancer, 26:239, 1972). In fact, in a footnote on page 241, the authors thank "Professor James Cormack of the Department of Greek, University of Aberdeen for suggesting this term." I think all of us working on any aspect of apoptosis should be cogn

The article on apoptosis by Ricki Lewis (The Scientist, Feb. 6, 1995, page 15) contains a number of significant errors and omissions. The fact that bcl-2 specifically blocks cell death was first demonstrated in 1988 (D.L. Vaux et al., Nature, 335:440-2), and this was confirmed by others two years later (D. Hockenbery et al., Nature, 348:334-6, 1990). At that stage, the sequence of none of the C. elegans ced genes had been published, so bcl-2 was the first apoptosis regulatory gene known in any

Editor's Note: Reflecting the notoriety the field of forensics has been experiencing of late, the newsletter Science Watch--produced by the Philadelphia-based Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)--devoted its January 1995 lead article to the discipline. Forensics--the science of examining evidence from a crime scene--covers a wide array of scientific disciplines, including molecular biology and toxicology. By choosing a group of nine journals that cover basic and applied research, the pu

Despite travel-budget cuts at many institutions and companies, as well as the growing number of gatherings on the annual calendar, attendance at many scientific meetings remains strong. But researchers are becoming choosier in deciding which conferences they will attend, more carefully weighing the expense--in both money and time spent away from the lab--against the expected scientific and career-building returns. Kenneth I. Berns, president-elect of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM),

Imagine an orchestra composed of 100 musicians, all playing a different instrument. Now consider what you'd hear if all of the musicians began playing a symphony, but with each starting on a different note, or playing in a different key. If the individual members of the orchestra didn't communicate, their performance would probably sound like a cacophony of screeching tires and wailing animals--certainly not something you'd want to pay money to hear! Add a conductor with sheet music, and the ou

Self-starting science fraud investigators Walter Stewart and Ned Feder at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) appear to have received something like an apology from their supervisor, L. Earl Laurence. Laurence had written the two men a stern reprimand concerning an incident of alleged misuse of NIDDK letterhead. After a November appearance before the federal Commission on Research Integrity--previously approved by Laurence--Stewart and Feder in January s