January 1991

Analysts warn that good marketing and sound financing are as key to survival for new ventures as top-notch science ST. LOUIS--After 20 years of vigorous scientific growth, neuroscience has vacated the biotechnology umbrella to emerge as a promising industry of its own. With an annual United States market of $4.4 billion in sales, neuropharmaceuticals is one area of biotechnology in which investors are always looking for a great deal. About two dozen startups are pursuing new technologies for d

Total of new awards for individual investigators, long seen as a barometer of the agency's welfare, is object of controversy ASHINGTON--Numbers are the lifeblood of science, a way to quantify the search for truth. But a number can also make a political statement. In fact, the current bitter debate within the biomedical community over the National Institutes of Health's commitment to research proposed by individual investigators can be summed up in a single number: 6,000. As a rallying cry, th

They acknowledge a laxness in following and monitoring research safety guidelines, which could pose a serious risk to some investigators Last spring, when eight students at the University of Pennsylvania's veterinary school went to the school's rural New Bolton Center to castrate some lambs, they considered it to be business as usual. Likewise for the parents and teachers of a nearby preschool class that visited and petted the sheep. What neither group knew was that just a month before, Jorge

As Congress sends mixed signals on funding, USDA, NOAA, and EPA promise to go beyond their in-house staffs Efforts by three federal agencies to increase their use of extramural scientists could mean more funding for academic research, but only if Congress cooperates. The United States Department of Agriculture, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency plan to expand programs that give out money for extramural, peer-reviewed research. T

Starting salaries for new geology graduates, especially those entering environmental fields or the domestic oil and gas industries, are rising, according to a recently compiled survey by the Alexandria, Va.-based American Geological Institute. AGI's latest annual survey of starting salaries for inexperienced graduates, released this month, projected that geologists with master's and doctoral degrees beginning work in 1990 would reap the highest increases over the starting salaries paid to their

In its 173rd annual business meeting last month, the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) honored four scientists for their contributions to science and society. Vitali Goldanski, director of the Semonyov Institute of Chemical Physics of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow, received the $2,000 NYAS Award for his work in chemical physics, nuclear physics, and chemistry and biophysics. The award also recognized Goldanski, the chairman of the Soviet Pugwash Group, for "his contributions to disa

Since the earliest days of the biotechnology endeavor, scientists have sought a practical way of co-opting the complex biological machinery that regulates DNA. From the moment they identified the intriguing enzymes that choreograph the dance of DNA replication, biotechnologists began developing ways to commander them; the swivelases and gyrases, forms of unwinding proteins that untwist the molecule; the nucleases, which snip it; the strands; the ligases, which tie these strands together; and ev

Laying It On With A Shovel Walking Away From Trouble Feeling Insecure About National Security GAO: NASA Flunks Physical Molecular biologist David Baltimore, president of Rockefeller University and former director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, returned to MIT last month for a "rededication" of the institute. Baltimore, who has taken heat from Congress for his role in defending a former colleague, immunologist Thereza Ima

CLOSE-UP -- J. Leslie Glick (The Scientist, Vol:5, #2, pg. 8, January 21, 1991) (Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.) ---------- J. Leslie Glick, president and chief executive officer of Bionix Inc. of Potomac, Md., insists that he never really intended to start a neurospecialty company. "I essentially had decided to retire," recalls the 68-year-old biologist and biotech executive. "But there are only so many museums in Washington, and I wanted to do something that would benefit the

In the year or so since medical geneticist Francis Collins of the University of Michigan Medical Center, molecular biologist Lap-Chee Tsui of Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, and their colleagues identified the cystic fibrosis (CF) gene, medical researchers, bioethicists, genetic counselors, and others have debated the pros and cons of testing for the recessive genetic disease. One of the chief arguments advanced by those against such screening is that currently available tests can identi

When genetic researchers successfully cloned the gene in which mutations cause cystic fibrosis, they also triggered a growing debate about under what circumstances and in what setting CF testing should be offered. To understand this debate, one needs some background on the history of carrier testing in the United States, a history with two strikingly different testing experiences, both of which are influencing plans for CF testing. The first experience dates to the early 1970s, when about a d

Discovery of the cystic fibrosis gene in late 1989 set off a flurry of excitement in the scientific community over the possibility of mass screening for the most common lethal recessive gene among persons of European descent. About one in 26 American whites carries the gene, and about one in 2,500 newborns has CF. Carrier testing would identify couples in which both partners carry the gene and would enable them to decide whether to take the one-in-four risk of having a child with CF or whether

In enduring myth, Prometheus was severely punished for giving humankind "every art and science"--the power to defy the forces of Nature. This concern about forbidden knowledge survives today. It is aggravated by inquiry that is both arcane and intensive, as research into DNA, genetic engineering, and the human genome is purported to be. This public anxiety persists despite general satisfaction over the economic and life-extending benefits of scientific progress. Scientific expertise offers a u

Someday soon, much of the produce available in grocery stores will be the result of genetic engineering-a synthesis of molecular biology and plant genetics to produce crops that yield greater harvests and are better able to resist insects, diseases, and environmental conditions such as drought and frost. Research efforts in engineering genes in major crop plants are not restricted to one segment of the scientific community. These investigations are being actively pursued by governments worldwi

At the University of Wisconsin's McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research in Madison, oncology professor Waclaw Szybalski and his team are helping to define the leading edge of genetic engineering. The methods they have developed could have a tremendous impact on the much-discussed Human Genome Project, and it is therefore not surprising that Szybalski and his team of three senior researchers and three graduate students spend long hours in the lab. Indeed, even when they are not working, the rese

PETER D. MOORE Department of Biosphere Sciences King's College London, U.K. Fungal epidemics in natural plant communities are influenced by a wide range of climatic and other factors, but not, apparently, by high density of the host species or by human disturbance. The outcome of periodic fungal attacks is diversification of the plant community, but diversity itself does not offer in return any protection against further epidemics. Attacks on juvenile plants can cause considerable modifica

PETER J. SMITH Department of Earth Sciences Open University Milton Keynes, U.K. The most seismically active zone in the central/eastern United States is the New Madrid, Mo., area, where in 1811-12 the three largest known intraplate earthquakes occurred. Because a recurrence of such events would be a disaster, an understanding of the New Madrid zone is urgently needed. A new analysis shows that most earthquakes in the region correlate with the Blytheville and Pascola arches within the Reelfoo

Department of Chemistry University of Texas Austin Single-junction photoelectrochemical devices suffer four unavoidable losses: lack of absorption of incident light, thermalization of ultra-band gap photons, differences between available and internal energy of thermalized excited states, and radiative decay. A recent article shows how a consideration of the absorption and transport properties of molecular chromophores and semiconductors can usefully predict optimal conditions for efficient so

SIMON SILVER Department of Microbiology & Immunology University of Illinois Chicago It is not the absence of two X chromosomes that makes for a man rather than a woman. The Y chromosome contains a sex-determining gene (or genes), which functions during testis differentiation. Missense and frame-shift mutations result in XY females. P. Berta, J.R. Hawkins, A.H. Sinclair, A. Taylor, et al., "Genetic evidence equating SRY and the testis-determining factor," Nature, 348, 448-50, 29 November 199

SOKRATES T. PANTELIDES IBM Research Division Thomas J. Watson Research Center Yorktown Heights, N.Y. Now you see it, now you don't! New experiments show that the fractional quantum Hall correlated electron states collapse into normal, uncorrelated states when the "thickness" of the two-dimensional electron gas exceeds a certain critical value. M. Shayegan, J. Jo, W. Suen, M. Santos, V.J. Goldman, "Collapse of the fractional quantum Hall effect in an electron system with large layer thicknes

F.C. Bryce, J.K. Clayton, R.J. Rand, I. Beck, et al., "General practitioner obstetrics in Bradford," British Medical Journal, 300, 725-7, 17 March 1990. F.C. Bryce (Friarage Hospital, North Yorkshire, U.K.): "This paper audits the outcome for patients booked under the care of their general practitioner for their antenatal and intrapartum care. It was initiated because of steadily rising perinatal mortality in Bradford, despite a fall in the rest of England or Wales. Several factors were consid

C.K. Glass, S.M. Lipkin, O.V. Devary, M.G. Rosenfeld, "Positive and negative regulation of gene transcription by a retinoic acid-thyroid hormone receptor heterodimer," Cell, 59, 697-708, 17 November 1989. Christopher K. Glass (School of Medicine, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla): "Retinoic acid receptors appear to exert profound effects on vertebrate development by binding to target genes and altering the rates at which they are transcribed in response to retinoic acid. Because t

J. Bruix, J.M. Barrera, X. Calvet, G. Ercilla, et al., "Prevalence of antibodies to hepatitis C virus in Spanish patients with hepatocellular carcinoma and hepatic cirrhosis," Lancet, 2, 1004-6, 28 October 1989. Jordi Bruix (Liver Unit, Hospital Clinic i Provincial, Barcelona, Spain): "Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a neoplasm that usually arises on a cirrhotic liver. In areas with high incidence of hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection, HCC seems to be strongly related to this virus. In low HBV

E.R. Fearon, K.R. Cho, J.M. Nigro, S.E. Kern, et al., "Identification of a chromosome 18q gene that is altered in colorectal cancers," Science, 247, 49-56, 5 January 1990. Eric R. Fearon (Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore): "Tumor suppressor genes appear crucial for the development of many forms of human cancer. In the cited study, we attempted to identify a tumor suppressor gene on chromosome 18q. Starting from a region of chromosome 18 that we suspected to contain this

E.A. Wayner, A. Garcia-Pardo, M.J. Humphries, J.A. McDonald, W.G. Carter, "Identification and characterization of the T lymphocyte adhesion receptor for an alternative cell attachment domain (CS-1) in plasma fibronectin," The Journal of Cell Biology, 109, 1321-30, September 1989. Elizabeth A. Wayner (Cytel Corp., La Jolla, Calif.): "It was originally thought that the adhesion of mesenchymal cells to fibronectin was solely determined by the interaction of the integrin receptor, a5b1, with the ce