PEOPLE : Bioengineer Is Named As First CEO, President Of Houston-Based Biotechnology Start-Up Firm; Obituaries

Bioengineer Is Named As First CEO, President Of Houston-Based Biotechnology Start-Up Firm Mitchell D. Eggers, a bioengineer who headed the bioelectronics division of The Woodlands, Texas-based Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC), is the first president and CEO of a new biotechnology company in the Houston area called Genometrix Inc. The new firm opened its doors on August 1. Temporarily housed at HARC, a nonprofit research organization that conducts biomedical studies, Genometrix will be targeting its efforts toward developing and manufacturing novel instrumentation for health care and biotechnology that combines microelectronics and molecular biology. Such devices would result in quicker, cheaper diagnostic methods, according to Eggers. "We want to miniaturize the laboratory--from test tubes to microchips, and from days to minutes," he says. Currently, Genometrix's researchers are working on developing two instruments: a bioscanner, a high-speed, sensitive instrument to provide images of samples tagged with fluorescent, radioactive, or chemiluminescent labels; and a "genosensor," a square-centimeter-sized chip to perform mutation analyses on DNA samples. Eggers anticipates the bioscanner, which he describes as a molecular "copy machine," to be available within two or three years. The genosensor will take a little longer--three to five years, he says--because as a diagnostic tool it has to undergo more rigorous testing and will be subject to government regulations. Eggers, 36, received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Texas A&M University, College Station, in 1984. In addition to his position at Genometrix, he holds adjunct associate professorships in bioengineering and electrical engineering at Baylor University College of Medicine and Rice University, both in Houston. Harry Kloor has become the first individual in the United States to receive two doctoral degrees simultaneously, according to the Washington, D.C.-based National Research Council and the United States Department of Education's National Center for Education Studies. On August 7, Kloor, 31, graduated from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Ind., with doctorates in theoretical physics and in chemistry. Kloor, who defended his theses for both subjects within a few hours of each other on July 29, says that the two research projects were entirely distinct--"about as far apart as things can get in science." His physics research involved a search for new forces beyond the four known varieties: gravity, electromagnetism, and the two types of nuclear forcesQstrong forces that hold particles such as protons together, and weak forces responsible for phenomena such as radioactive decay. "It is sort of like a Sherlock Holmes hunt," says Kloor. "We look for possible interactions or forces at every level, from subatomic to astronomical scales, and then try to constrain the possibilities of these new interactions." For his chemistry dissertation, Kloor worked on developing a model to explain a phase transition that occurs in the mineral magnetite, also called lodestone, at 120o Kelvin. "It is a marvelous puzzle," he says, "to figure out how the material changes all of its electron-transporting and thermodynamic properties just by reorganizing the electrons around the iron groups." He explains: "I used a paradigm shift to develop my model-- taking a quantum-mechanical point of view rather than using classical concepts." Prior to beginning his graduate work at Purdue in 1988, Kloor had obtained two bachelor's degrees, in physics and chemistry, from Southern Oregon State College in Ashland. "As a child, it always seemed to me that the great scientists--both real and fictional--knew everything," he offers as a reason for pursuing two subjects at once. "Also, nowadays the great events in science are happening in interdisciplinary areas." Kloor maintains an active interest in communicating science to the public, having served as a corporate liaison for the department of physics and as codirector of a physics outreach program at Purdue. He is not yet clear about his postgraduation plans but hopes to eventually "settle down and do research in promoting science education." Julian S. Schwinger, a theoretical physicist whose fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics earned him the Nobel Prize in physics in 1965, died July 16 in Los Angeles of pancreatic cancer at age 76. Schwinger shared the 1965 Nobel with physicists Richard P. Feynman and Shin'ichiro Tomonaga of Japan for their independent work in quantum electrodynamics. Schwinger and FeynmanUs research in the 1940s and 1950s in quantum field theory is credited with laying the groundwork for the progress in physics made since then, particularly in ultra-high-energy physics and the search for the ultimate structure of matter. Schwinger's mathematical formulas led to a better understanding of the interaction between charged particles and an electromagnetic field. Schwinger published his first paper at 17. His published work comprises nearly 200 papers and numerous books. He had been a member of the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles, for 22 years, beginning in 1972 as a professor of physics and then as a University Professor. Schwinger received a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1939, at the age of 21, although he had completed the research for his doctorate at 19. He subsequently went to the University of California, Berkeley, to work with renowned physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. From 1943 to 1946, he was a member of the wartime staff of the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, contributing to the development of radar. After the war, Schwinger went to Harvard University as an associate professor, becoming a full professor in 1947 at the age of 29. Between 1948 and 1950, he published the papers on quantum electrodynamics for which he won the Nobel. Schwinger was lauded by his colleagues and students as a superb educator. He directed more than 70 doctoral theses, and three of his students went on to win Nobel Prizes--Ben R. Mottelson (1975, physics), Sheldon L. Glashow (1979, physics), and Walter Gilbert (1980, chemistry). William Wilson Morgan, a professor of astronomy at the University of Chicago and the discoverer of the spiral structure of the Milky Way, died June 21 in Williams Bay, Wis., at the age of 88. The cause of death was a heart attack, according to officials at the university. Morgan was Bernard E. and Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor, emeritus, at Chicago, from which he received his Ph.D. in 1931. He conducted research at the university's Yerkes Observatory--where he was director from 1960 to 1963--for more than 60 years. Morgan's studies centered on astronomical morphology, the structures of stellar populations. He was best known for four major contributions to the field: the development, with astronomer Philip Keenan, of a two-dimensional classification system--known as the MK, for Morgan Keenan, system--for stellar spectra and luminosity; the discovery of the Milky Way's spiral structure; the development of a precisely defined system to determine the brightness of stars; and the development of the Yerkes system of classification of the optical forms of galaxies. Morgan used the MK system to determine the distances of bright stars within the Milky Way, and thus discovered the galaxyUs spiral structure (Sky and Telescope, 11:138, 1952). When he announced his finding at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in 1951, he was given a rare standing ovation.

PEOPLE : Bioengineer Is Named As First CEO, President Of Houston-Based Biotechnology Start-Up Firm; Obituaries

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