November 1996

Last month in Redwood Shores, Calif., participants in the National Conference of Biotechnology Ventures decided to have some fun. Venture capitalists and biotech CEOs lined up to play a corporate version of "Family Feud," an old television game show in which competing families guessed at trivia. HIGH HOPES: Venture capitalists want functional genomics firms to partner with drug companies, says Karl Thiel. One game question: What's going to be the next hot biotech area for investment? Feud pl

The holiday shopping deluge is under way, and researchers are not immune to the rush. There are sons and daughters, nieces and nephews, grandchildren, and the kids of friends and colleagues to consider. How can one please young people with fun gifts that won't turn their brains to mush? Science can help. Toy stores and other retailers sell a variety of items, both classic and new, that can pique youngsters' curiosity and hold their attention. While science educators warn gift-givers to beware

SIDEBAR : Examples of Women's Health Research Goals Advocates and scientists are optimistic as they update and expand their agenda to include varied research priorities. Today's newspapers are replete with reports detailing advances in women's health: New breast cancer-causing genes are reported with increasing regularity, as are discoveries of connections between hormones or genetics and disease. In the midst of this progress, advocates for research on women's health-scientists, clinicians, p

Sidebar: IOM Members With the election last month of 55 new members, the Institute of Medicine (IoM) has increased the number of minorities in its ranks, bringing the percentage of minority members to its highest point since the honor society was organized 26 years ago. The new slate will be formally inducted at the institute's annual dinner, which will take place next October. The addition of four minority members will bring the institute's total minority representation to 47. That amounts to

CuraGen Corp. http://www.curagen.com Genetics Institute, Inc. http://www.genetics.com/ Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Bio Online Member Website http://www.bio.com/companies/millennium.html PharmaGenics Inc. Page on BioSpace Online: http://www.biospace.com/g/synd/__d3816744/exhib_script/exhibitors/PharmaGenicsInc.html Sequana Terapeutics Inc. http://www.sequana.com/

Participants in working groups at the September planning meeting sponsored by the National Institutes of Health Office of Research on Women's Health brainstormed about the state of their fields, describing gaps in knowledge and making recommendations for future research directions. The groups concluded that more data are needed in several key areas in order to enable researchers and health care providers to accomplish the following goals. Cardiovascular Disease/Vascular Biology evaluate chest

Clay M. Armstrong professor of physiology, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Philadelphia John P. Atkinson head, John Milliken Department of Internal Medicine, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis Marion J. Ball chief information officer, Information Services, University of Maryland, Baltimore Alfred O. Berg professor and associate chairman, department of family medicine, University of Washington, Seattle Merton Bernfield Clement A. Smith Professor of Pediatri

By Eric Albert Email: ealbert@world.std.com ACROSS 1 Pharynx and upper larynx, trachea, and esophagus 4 Protein synthesis site 9 Its atomic weight is 114.82 10 Kind of retinal cell 12 Act of separating, elaborating, and releasing a substance 13 Plane surface of a crystal 15 Lymph's liquid part 17 Water is a good one 18 Of the esophageal portion of the stomach 20 Sugar, before hydrolyzation 23 Organ a salmon uses to find its way home 24 ATP component 27 Having the same osmotic pressure 28 Pheno

By Eric Albert Email: ealbert@world.std.com ACROSS 1 Pharynx and upper larynx, trachea, and esophagus 4 Protein synthesis site 9 Its atomic weight is 114.82 10 Kind of retinal cell 12 Act of separating, elaborating, and releasing a substance 13 Plane surface of a crystal 15 Lymph's liquid part 17 Water is a good one 18 Of the esophageal portion of the stomach 20 Sugar, before hydrolyzation 23 Organ a salmon uses to find its way home 24 ATP component 27 Having the same osmotic pressure 28 Pheno

Being both a scientist by training and a journalist by practice gives one a unique perspective on the challenges of conveying science news to the public. Scientists can help writers and editors do their jobs without reducing every discovery to a potential cure for birth defects or cancer by learning to explain what they do, and how and why they do it, with both eloquence and excitement. A love of basic research drove me to both science and journalism. However, I left science shortly after earn

Women seeking success in science face many problems. They often are poorly represented on study sections and editorial boards, as well as among officers of some professional societies. Women scientists also contend with difficulty finding employment and stressful struggles for tenure. Few go beyond the "glass ceiling" in academia, industry, or government. According to 1995-96 statistics from the American Association of University Professors, salaries of women on average are 18 percent less tha

The Scientist Date: November 25, 1996 THE SCIENTIST® The Newspaper for the Life Sciences Professional "Because of the way THE SCIENTIST is formatted, I can glean a lot from it quickly. There are a lot of interesting topics and ideas presented in brief. And that's something I appreciate because of my hectic schedule." Philippa Marrack Howard Hughes Medical Institute, National Jewish Center, Denver Throughout their scientific careers, Philippa Marrack and John Kappler, husband and wife

The recent attention given to bioethics in numerous articles and letters to the editor has presented a compelling discussion of decision-making in the next century. Two contributors of letters, Arthur W. Galston [The Scientist, May 13, 1996, page 12] and Brian Everill [The Scientist, Sept. 2, 1996, page 12], have probed the heart of the issue; however, at times they seem caught up in disrespecting each other's credibility. Claims of psuedoquotations and skepticism about each other's definition

Adrian Morrison's Opinion (The Scientist, Aug. 19, 1996, page 11) that focuses on possible distortions in Peter Singer's book Animal Liberation [New York, New York Review/Random House, reissued 1990] fails to address Singer's and many others' (including scientists') concerns about some research that is conducted on nonhuman animals. What Morrison does not discuss, and it is the major issue with which many people are concerned, is that some research on nonhuman animals is questionable, not only

Editor's Note: Following is Adrian Morrison's response to Marc Bekoff's letter. Marc Bekoff would have liked me to focus on something other than the very real distortions in Animal Liberation, which are amply (but not exhaustively) treated by Sharon M. Russell and Charles S. Nicoll's paper (Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine, 211-2:109-38, 1996, with a rebuttal by Singer on pp. 139-46 and their reply to his rebuttal on pp. 147-54). Singer's attack is really on all

Sidebars Most-Cited Papers By Subject In Ecology/Environmental Sciences From 1981-94 Highly Cited Papers on Global Climate Change Published Since 1993 Ranked by total citations through 1995) Editor's Note: Ever since the 1992 Earth Summit conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the scientific community has sharpened its focus on biodiversity and global climate change and how it relates to all manner of disciplines, including biomedicine and public health. In this article from the September/Octo

From 1981-94 (expressed in percentages) Subject 1981 1986 1990 19931994 Pollution 23 34 31 26 19 Acid Rain 7 5 8 0 0 Ozone/UV 1 0 1 7 10 Nutrient Cycling/Hydrology 8 11 5 0 2 Production Ecology 10 6 6 0 1 Grazing/Herbivory 11 9 9 0 2 Population Ecology 18 12 10 9 12 Community Ecology 14 8 8 2 2 Evolutionary Ecology 8 7 6 4 2 Carbon Cycle/Greenhouse 1 2 9 26 9 Ocean-Atmosphere/Circulation 0 1 1 11 6 Conservation/Biodiversity 1 2 6 15 12 Agricultural Ecol

(Ranked by total citations through 1995) Rank PaperCitations Through 1995 Citations Through Sept. 1996 1 J.M. Melillo et al., "Global climate change and terrestrial net primary production," Nature, 363:234-40, 1993 [Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Mass.; University of New Hampshire, Durham] 61 99 2 D. Skole, C. Tucker, "Tropical deforestation and habitat fragmentation in the Amazon: Satellite data from 1978 to 1988," Science, 260:1905-10, 1993 [University of New Hampshire, Durham;

Selected Suppliers of Math, Stat, And Graphing Software Date: November 25, 1996 Abacus Concepts Inc. GraphPad Software Inc. Jandel Scientific Software Math Soft The Math Works Inc. Microcal Software Inc. SPSS Inc. Stat-Ease Inc. Statistical Graphics Corp. StatSoft Inc. Wolfram Research Inc.

Edited by: Steven Benowitz A. Strasser, A.W. Harris, T. Jacks, S. Cory, "DNA damage can induce apoptosis in proliferating lymphoid cells via p53-independent mechanisms inhibitable by Bcl-2," Cell, 79:329-39, 1994. (Cited in more than 110 publications through October 1996) Comments by Tyler Jacks, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Cancer Research; and Andreas Strasser, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Melbourne, Australia CE

Edited by: Steven Benowitz KEY PLAYER: Lloyd Paul Aiello of the Joslin Diabetes Cener found that VEGF plays a crucial role in causing retinal disease. L.P. Aiello, R.L. Avery, P.G. Arrigg, B.A. Keyt, H.D. Jampel, S.T. Shah, L.R. Pasquale, H. Thieme, M.A. Iwamoto, J.E. Park, H.V. Nguyen, L.M. Aiello, N. Ferrara, G.L. King, "Vascular endothelial growth factor in ocular fluid of patients with diabetic retinopathy and other retinal disorders," New England Journal of Medicine, 331:1480-87, 1994.

In the wee hours of a morning 11 years ago-around 1:00 a.m.-Richard E. Smalley slouched on a sofa. The lights were turned off. Sipping a beer, he mulled over his situation. A MORNING REVELATION: The model for buckyballs came to Richard Smalley as he cut and pasted paper pentagons. For a week, the Rice University chemist had been trying to make sense of an experiment. Using a laser, his lab team had zapped carbon to see how its atoms would split and then cluster. The supersonic laser kept pr

SIDEBAR: Selected Suppliers of Math, Stat, And Graphing Software No scientific task is more universal than the job of analyzing data. Programs for this purpose were among the first applications written for mainframe computers, and the programs made the jump to microcomputers soon after the beginning of the personal-computer revolution in the early 1980s. Despite recent mergers among statistical software companies, scientists still have an embarrassment of riches when it comes time to choose so

Jule Unveils Dual-Piston Gradient Former The J5 Model gradient former is designed for pouring polyacrylamide gradient minigels or for pouring sucrose gradients into small centrifuge tubes up to 5 ml in total volume. The dual-piston design is intended to keep the fluid level in each chamber equal during gradient formation, regardless of the differences in density or viscosity of the two fluids being mixed. A trapped air bubble will not stop the flow, unlike gravity flow types, the company asse

STICKING POINT: Zebra mussels, here attached to a crayfish, can be real pests. Late last month President Bill Clinton signed the National Invasive Species Act, which will provide additional funds to combat a growing ecological and economic problem. Non-native freshwater and marine plants and animals from as far away as Asia are carried to North American estuaries like San Francisco Bay-where they sometimes gain a troublesome toehold-in ship ballast water. The act authorizes an average of $22