Notebook

POWER EXCHANGE: Molecular biologist James Battey has become the second person to head NIDCD.

SECOND GENERATION AT NIDCD Molecular biologist James F. Battey, 45, has been named the new director of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) of the National Institutes of Health. Battey, who had been serving as acting director of NIDCD, succeeds the recently retired James B. Snow, Jr. Snow, a former University of Pennsylvania professor of otorhinolaryngology and human communications, became the first director of the institute in 1990. As scientific director of NIDCD, a position he has held since March 1995, Battey has overseen the development of research programs in molecular genetics and its connection to human communication disorders; he expects to see those efforts intensify in the years to come. "Recent advances in our fundamental understanding of the human genome gives us unprecedented opportunity to better understand and identify the genes...