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THE SCIENTIST
VOLUME 8, No:22 NOVEMBER 14, 1994
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
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THE SCIENTIST
(Page numbers correspond to printed edition of
THE SCIENTIST)
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AU = author
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TI : CONTENTS
PG : 3
============================================================
NEWS
DE FACTO REFORM: Though health-care reform was declared
legislatively dead more than a month ago, observers from
various segments of the biomedical research community report
that reform-based changes, such as managed care, are
proceeding apace, and their effects are being felt in
academic and industrial research
PG : 1
UNIQUE AIDS CONFERENCE: Among the 800 or so AIDS
investigators from around the world attending Robert Gallo's
10th annual lab meeting, some love the atmosphere, others
hate the format; but almost all agree the gathering bears
the distinctive imprint of the accomplished and
controversial AIDS researcher
PG : 1
APOXALYPSE NOW: A recommendation by a World Health
Organization committee to destroy the world's remaining
smallpox stores has scientists reacting strongly, both for
and against the proposal
PG : 1
BROAD-BASED MEETING: A far-ranging scientific program is in
store for attendees of next month's annual meeting of the
American Society for Cell Biology, including presentations
on such "hot" topics as signal transduction and emerging
fields like programmed cell death
PG : 3
OPINION
GALLO ON GALLO: In an exclusive interview with The
Scientist, NIH retrovirologist Robert Gallo discusses
reports that he will leave the health agency in the near
future and reflects on pivotal past events. From the
earliest days of AIDS research, Gallo has played a central
role in advancing scientific understanding of HIV. In the
mid-1980s, however, he was involved in a bitter dispute over
appropriate credit for its discovery
PG : 12
COMMENTARY: The scientific journals and reference works
becoming available on CD-ROM are indications that the dream
of universal, real-time access to the world's accumulated
knowledge is coming close to tangible reality; but practical
technological obstacles need to be overcome before this
"information nirvana" is achieved, saysEugene Garfield
PG : 13
RESEARCH
A FIELD DEVELOPS: Among the numerous exciting advances
taking place in the neurosciences, the field of
developmental neuroscienceis providing some of the most
active and productiveinvestigations
PG : 14
HOT PAPERS: Molecular biologist Cammie Lesser discusses
nuclear pre-mRNA splicing; biologist J. Troy Weeks reports
on a protocol for producing transgenic wheat lines;
developmental biologist Kevin Peters expands on FGF receptor
genes
PG : 15
TOOLS & TECHNOLOGY
CULTURAL SOLUTION: Although cell-culture media and reagents
often rely on long-established formulations, suppliers have
managed to keep pace with and facilitate the multitude of
new discoveries and techniques in cell biology
PG : 16
PROFESSION
SELLING SCIENCE: Scientists trying to cope in an
increasingly precarious job market are "transitioning" into
nontraditional careers; many of them are applying their
knowledge and skills in sales
PG : 24
THOMAS KIRK, former deputy director of the superconducting
supercollider laboratory, has become an associate director
of Brookhaven National Laboratory
PG : 25
SHORT TAKES
NOTEBOOK PG : 4
CARTOON PG : 4
LEADERS OF SCIENCE PG :10
LETTERS PG : 13
CELL-CULTURE MEDIA DIRECTORY PG: 20
NEW PRODUCTS PG : 23
OBITUARY PG : 25
(The Scientist, Vol:8, #22, pg.3, November 14, 1994)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
----------
WE WELCOME YOUR OPINION. IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO COMMENT
ON THIS STORY, PLEASE WRITE TO US AT EITHER ONE OF THE
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U.S.A.
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NXT:
----------------------------------------------------------
TI : Gallo's Meeting: A Scientific 'Folk Festival'
AU : FRANKLIN HOKE
TY : NEWS
PG : 1
Like Robert Gallo the scientist, Robert Gallo the scientific
impresario can be brilliant and engaging, excessive and
abrasive, according to some of the 800 AIDS investigators
from around the world attending his 10th annual lab meeting
last month. They say Gallo's eclectic touch is evident
throughout the gathering, which they consider one of the
most important of the year--almost as much for the community
feeling it brings to the far-flung scientists battling the
disease complex as for the new research presented there.
"Gallo's meeting has juice, that's what it's got," declares
Cecil H. Fox, an experimental pathologist, biochemist, and
20-year NIH veteran who is now president of Molecular
Histology Laboratories Inc., Gaithersburg, Md. "That is,
there's a lot of interpersonal contact, there are colorful
people that go to it, there are discussions, disagreements,
and, frequently, hard feelings and good feelings that come
out of it. It's what scientific meetings are supposed to be
about. It's not a group of wooden people flying in on an
airplane, getting off the plane, coming to the hotel or
whatever it is, delivering a talk that they've delivered six
times in the previous two months, getting back on the plane,
and leaving."
Fox adds that, among scientific meetings, "this is a folk
festival."
Surprising, perhaps, to outsiders is the fact that much-
publicized and long-running official investigations of
alleged scientific misconduct by Gallo and members of his
lab, which were discontinued in November 1993, appear to
have had little impact on attendance at the meeting or on
its overall value to scientists.
The meeting, sponsored by Gallo's Laboratory of Tumor Cell
Biology in the National Cancer Institute at the National
Institutes of Health, runs for seven days--from September 25
to October 1 this year--10 hours a day, with 10 minutes
scheduled for each talk. Even so, Gallo says, the large
number of worthy papers presented this year required that
the meeting be broken into concurrent sessions for the first
time. "I never wanted it to happen, but the only alternative
was to make this eight, nine, or 10 days," he explains.
Gallo exerts a high degree of personal control over the
meeting's agenda, researchers say, and some of its most
valuable and unique aspects strongly bear his imprint. For
example, Gallo selects and invites the much-praised roster
of special lecturers, top scientists not working directly on
AIDS but whose research often proves to have implications
for the field. Some of the often-criticized features of the
event, too, spring from the same source. Here, scientists at
the meeting point to what they call an overwhelming number
of papers presented with insufficient screening, resulting
in a "diluted" quality of the sessions and, this year, in
undesirable concurrent sessions that undermine the meeting's
feeling of unity. Still and all, the scientists come.
"This is the real AIDS researchers' meeting," says Candace
Pert, a psychopharmacologist and former NIH investigator now
with Peptide Research, a Rockville, Md.-based consulting
firm. According to Pert, the larger international AIDS
meeting, held in Yokohama, Japan, this year, is "too
inconvenient and too much infiltrated by nonscientific
issues."
The researchers who come to the meeting are not blind to the
misconduct charges that have dogged Gallo for much of the
past decade. The investigations revolved around accusations
that he misappropriated credit in 1984 for the discovery of
HIV from Luc Montagnier and his researchers at the Pasteur
Institute in Paris. But while a number of the meeting
participants believe some portion of the charges, they also
tend to be somewhat forgiving.
"He's a rogue, but a likable one," says one British
researcher, speaking on condition of anonymity. She says she
was disinclined to attend when invited by Gallo several
years ago, because of the controversy surrounding his lab.
Since then, she has come to every meeting. "It's a large
meeting but keeps its small-meeting feel. I don't know how
he does it."
"A few years ago, I stopped worrying about credit and how
many more papers I was going to publish," says Pert. "I've
published my 250 papers, and I'm really focused on finding
cures for human diseases. So, if [Gallo] should steal
something that I think of that enables him to make progress,
I'd feel good about it. He does have this reputation, but I
think it's undeserved on a certain level."
A French researcher, who asks not to be identified, says
angry feelings still run high, at least in her country,
concerning the just apportionment of credit between
Montagnier and Gallo for discovering HIV. Nevertheless, she
says, many French scientists have continued to attend the
meeting regularly, and she has attended Gallo's meeting
every year since 1985.
This year, there was talk in the halls that this might be
the last Gallo meeting to be held in the Washington, D.C.,
area--or, in any case, the last to be held at government
expense. Rumors circulated that Gallo has been asked to
leave NIH and to retire from government in return for a
permanent discontinuation of the misconduct investigations.
Other speculation suggested he may return to his alma mater
in Philadelphia, Thomas Jefferson University, or establish a
university-affiliated institute near NIH with at least one
other high-profile AIDS researcher. Gallo acknowledges that
he is engaged in negotiations with several universities and
that he would like to move into academia (see interview on
page 12).
Scientific Strengths
"What I like about the Gallo meeting is that it's not just
about AIDS," says Terri H. Finkel, an immunologist working
on T-cell signaling at the National Jewish Center for
Immunology and Respiratory Medicine in Denver, where she is
head of the laboratory of pediatric research. "Eclectic is
the word that comes to mind, because he brings in people
that may not be in the field [of AIDS], but touch on it in
various ways."
As examples, Finkel cites the talks given by NIH
neuroscientist and Nobelist D. Carleton Gajdusek on
infectious amyloids, by Howard Hughes Medical Institute
investigator Roger M. Perlmutter of the University of
Washington, Seattle, on T-cell development and signaling,
and by David Beach, another Hughes investigator at Cold
Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, on cell-cycle kinases.
"All of these can help us better understand HIV, although
the people aren't in that field," Finkel says. "And that's
really what HIV [research] needs." She points to recent
exhortations by Bernard Fields (Nature, 369:95-6, 1994) and
NIH Office of AIDS Research head William Paul for a return
to basic research in AIDS investigations. "Gallo's meeting
has been trying to do that, and, of the AIDS meetings, it's
unique in trying to take a broader view."
Finkel's own talk, titled "How Does HIV Kill T Cells?", was
included in a session on apoptosis--programmed cell death,
or cell suicide--and fit into one of several distinct
scientific themes evident at the meeting. In her study,
Finkel explored possible signaling mechanisms by which HIV
may be killing T cells other than the cells actually
infected with the virus.
"The dogma certainly is that HIV itself kills cells, that
it's a cytopathic infection, and so we assumed that the
infected cells would be apoptotic," Finkel says. "Probably
the most surprising result that came out of this study was
that the infected cells were not apoptotic--it was the
bystander cells that were apoptotic. That was a complete
surprise and may mean the virus has ways of protecting
itself [and the infected cell] from apoptosis."
"Back in the early days, people were so excited that they'd
found the virus," says Pert. "The concept was that the virus
directly infected lymphocytes, and that's the pathogenesis.
But the subtheme [that emerged at this meeting] is that the
viral proteins do all kinds of things by acting at
receptors, by acting at a distance, so that only a very
small percentage of the cells in the immune system actually
need to be infected, because they're putting out this
extremely toxic little protein. And it's really getting more
play."
"We needed very badly to have a summary roundtable on how
the T cells are lost," says Gallo, noting that a number of
studies presented offered conflicting views on the question
of whether HIV kills T cells directly or indirectly. "That
general area was, to me, one of the high points of the
meeting, but without clear-cut resolution."
One of the most important presentations, according to Gallo,
recapped HIV vaccine work being done with chimpanzees by
Marc P. Girard of the Pasteur Institute. In this study and
others, vaccines based on HIV envelope proteins, such as
gp120 and gp160, have been shown to stimulate significant
immune responses in chimpanzees.
"This is a chimpanzee study just using the viral protein,"
Gallo says. "It's the kind that got refused recently for
clinical trials [by National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci in June], the
kind that one finds it hard to believe would do something.
Nonetheless, [the vaccine] has protected chimps, both by
mucosal infection and intravenous infection [routes], and
it's protected against a few different strains."
Scientific Character
One of the two vaccines for which clinical trials were
refused further United States government support this summer
was a gp120 vaccine developed by Genentech Inc. of South San
Francisco, Calif. Last month, the World Health Organization
in Geneva, after consulting much of the same preliminary
data as did Fauci, agreed to fund large-scale clinical
trials that will include the Genentech vaccine.
The clinical scientist managing the trials for Genentech is
Don Francis, a researcher whose longtime criticism of Gallo
and his lab dates to the mid-1980s, when Francis was with
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
At that time, a dispute flared between Francis and Gallo,
with each accusing the other of impeding research progress
against AIDS by controlling access to crucial experimental
samples and reagents.
Francis, who did not attend the Gallo meeting, acknowledges
that the gathering "has become, traditionally, an
interesting scientific affair." And he understands that most
scientists do not make a link between the allegations
against Gallo's lab and their decision to attend his
meeting, although he finds it surprising.
"Science is the pursuit of the truth," Francis says. "How
can a meeting designed to uncover the truths of nature be
hosted by a group--not necessarily an individual, but by a
group--with a questionable history of honesty? That's the
underlying question. And this [meeting] is really hosted by
the United States government, represented by that group and
NIH. How does that continue, I wonder?"
Other researchers, whether they do or do not believe the
charges leveled against Gallo and his lab, seem ready to
move on to other discussions.
"It's really a pity that the discussion of whether [Gallo]
stole the virus from the French or not has eclipsed the fact
that he's a really original and brilliant scientist," says
Pert. "The French sent him the virus because they knew he
could grow it, and they couldn't grow it. So, I respect his
brilliance--and maybe he's growing and learning to give more
credit to other people."
"I don't think it's worth pursuing any longer," Fox
comments. "[But] this is a case of someone marked with the
sign of Cain. That's it. He wasn't exonerated, remember."
Like others, Fox, who is a veteran of the Gallo meetings,
praises many of the speakers at this year's event while
criticizing the number of low-quality papers presented, the
split sessions, and even the choice of hotel, which was
changed from previous gatherings.
"The old meetings that were held down in the basement of
this hotel in Bethesda were wonderful, because it was like
the old experiments in sensory deprivation," says Fox. "What
you did was you went down into this chamber, this darkened
chamber, and you were sensorily deprived. You sat there, and
you could see the podium and the lights on the podium and
the slides, and you didn't try to pay attention. But you
emerged, mole-like, six or seven days later with a reordered
understanding of the state of science associated with
lentiviruses. It was an osmotic learning experience."
(The Scientist, Vol:8, #22, pg.1, November 14, 1994)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
----------
WE WELCOME YOUR OPINION. IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO COMMENT
ON THIS STORY, PLEASE WRITE TO US AT EITHER ONE OF THE
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U.S.A.
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NXT:
------------------------------------------------------------
TI : U.S. Health-Care System Changes Proceed In Absence
Of Reform
Industrial and academic biomedical scientists
areincreasingly affected by `competition withoutthe
management end'
AU : BARBARA SPECTOR
TY : NEWS
PG : 1
Since September 26, when Sen. George Mitchell (D-Maine)
officially pronounced health-care reform dead for 1994, each
sector of the biomedical research community has been
reacting in its own way to the news of its demise. Officials
at academic health centers, for example, have been lamenting
this year's missed opportunity, while leaders of
biotechnology and pharmaceutical firms have been celebrating
the congressional reprieve.
But regardless of their position on the issue, research
administrators in industry and academia agree that the
United States health-care market is already driving the
system toward reform, even without legislation. And in the
two years since Bill Clinton became president, they say,
these market-influenced changes have dramatically altered
the way virtually everyone in this sector does business.
"The market forces are out there, which are pushing toward
the managed competition [and] the HMOs," observes Bruce L.R.
Smith, a science-policy analyst at the Washington, D.C.-
based Brookings Institution. "The whole Clinton health
[plan] was more a reflection of those forces than the cause
of the debate. And those forces will continue, and they'll
have some impact."
"Though we didn't make any policy headway, the market has
changed phenomenally in the past 22 months," reports Edward
O'Neil, an associate professor of family and community
medicine at the University of California, San Francisco,
School of Medicine and executive director of the Pew
Commission on Health Professions. "It's created a managed-
competition model without the management end of it."
Several policy analysts predict that some attempt will be
made to reintroduce a reform bill--and the related Harkin-
Hatfield Fund for Medical Research amendment (see
accompanying story)--in the 104th Congress in 1995. But Alan
Hillman, director of the Center for Health Policy at the
University of Pennsylvania's Leonard Davis Institute for
Health Economics, contends that, because the system has
already changed of its own accord, to a certain extent "it
doesn't matter what specific plan comes out of Washington."
Hillman, who served on a 500-person task force organized by
Clinton in early 1993 to design the president's reform plan,
maintains that such legislation would "really simply be a
catalyst or facilitator. It will not be the end-all or be-
all of reform unless it's a drastic plan, which I don't
think now has any chance of passing."
The View From Industry
The relief on the part of top executives of drug and biotech
firms at the collapse of reform efforts stems from their
strong objection to price controls, a component of Clinton's
original plan. Limits on prices, in the view of Richard De
Schutter, president of Chicago-based Searle and Co., would
have "stifled research," marking "the end of the industry as
we know it."
While the issue of price controls was on the table, many
companies, fearful of the potential detriment to their
profit margin, put ambitious research plans on hold. Now,
says De Schutter of his pharmaceutical house, "we plan to
spend more on R&D in '95 than in '94. That would not have
been possible if the Clinton plan had gone through." Had the
president's original vi-sion become a reality, he
speculates, companies would have adjusted through "massive
layoffs, which clearly is not the case now."
Likewise, Carl Feldbaum, president of the Biotechnology
Industry Organization (BIO), reports that the notion of
price controls served to "scare the heck out of our
investors." Biotech CEOs, according to Feldbaum, were
"threatened by this episode and distracted, as well."
But, notes Robert Bell, a professor of economics at Brooklyn
College, City University of New York, the nationwide move to
managed care is limiting what drug and device manufacturers
can charge even in the absence of legislation. "Insurance
companies are imposing the price controls," he observes.
He and other pharmaceutical industry analysts point out that
the most notable effect of market forces has been the
decreased desirability of "me-too" drugs--those that
duplicate the functions of existing medications. "Insurers
set up a formulary, or a list of drugs they'll pay for,"
says Bell, author of Impure Science: Fraud, Compromise, and
Political Influence in Scientific Research (New York, John
Wiley and Sons Inc., 1992). "They are not at all interested
in these 'me-too' drugs. [They] will only approve something
that's tried and true."
Manufacturers "can't expect to market drugs on the grounds
that those drugs are going to be widely prescribed unless
they [genuinely] add something or reduce costs," asserts
Kenneth Shine, president of the Institute of Medicine (IoM).
Because it is less costly to produce a "me-too" drug than a
novel product, "their profits are going to be squeezed." As
a result, Shine foresees that "jobs in industry will shrink
in the aggregate for scientists."
Searle's De Schutter agrees: "As the marketplace flexes its
muscle, the pharmaceutical industry has to change. The
consolidations are not over."
With this shift in focus, Bell predicts, "medical research
is more likely to become more bona fide research. There is
more incentive to develop an AIDS drug or a cancer drug than
a 'me-too' drug. [While] those people working on [duplicate
medications] will be looking for work, those working on
AIDS, cancer, or many, many problems that need work will do
fine."
Academic Centers' Woes
As more individuals enroll in cost-conscious managed-care
plans, academic health centers are forced to compete with
community hospitals for patients. This situation puts the
university facilities at a disadvantage, since they need
patient-care revenues to fund their research and teaching
operations. "When the hospital starts to bleed, the medical
school goes into shock," says John W. Rowe, president of
Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Mount Sinai Hospital in
New York City.
A number of reform proposals under discussion would have
included subsidies for academic centers to help offset the
decrease in internal support for these functions. Without
reform, "the bottom-line message is that managed-care
organizations competing in a price-driven environment will
not pay for research or education," laments IoM's Shine.
"If you're negotiating in a managed-care environment in
which price is the determinant, it's very hard to generate
margins," he elaborates, adding that he expects a shrinkage
in university research. "You can't raise people's tuition
[more]. The endowment has been committed umptity-ump times.
You can't ask a donor to pay your indirects. It's
potentially a very serious problem if no reform is
[passed]."
On the other hand, reform would likely have included some
provisions detrimental to academic centers, such as
reductions in Medicare and Medicaid and decreased support
for specialty medical education, according to Mount Sinai's
Rowe. While decreasing the number of specialists is
desirable in the long run, he says, in the short term the
measure "has a potentially adverse effect on the very
population that health-care reform was designed to assist."
Academic medical centers--many of which are located in urban
areas--"provide needed specialty care to indigent
neighborhoods through supervised residents and fellows,"
Rowe notes. With a reform-driven reduction in the number of
residents in medical specialties, "it costs a hospital a
substantial amount of money to replace a resident with a
health-care provider [such as a nurse practitioner or
physician assistant]. We saw no provision to assist these
institutions in coping with this effect."
UC-San Francisco's O'Neil sees changes on the horizon. While
academic health centers have traditionally viewed their
mission as "training specialized providers," now "those that
can't diversify their patient-care programs are at risk."
At his institution, he reports, administrators are pondering
the issue of "How can we bring a richer mixture to our
training programs and position the biomedical research
enterprise so that it remains strong and vibrant?" The an-
swer, he suggests, may lie in shrinking the medical school
and downsizing specialty care. But, he adds, this strategy
cannot be adopted by all institutions.
Issues each school must address for itself, according to
O'Neil, include: "Should we just become a biomedical
research institution, and cut out most of the patient-care
program? Should we expand the primary-care network to have
enough people in our programs to support the tertiary care
that we do? Should we develop partnerships with new merging
systems?" The last tactic, he points out, has been
aggressively pursued by the University of Pennsylvania and
several other institutions.
Although national health-care reform has not become a
reality, several states have proceeded with their own
legislation, which has affected the academic health centers
within their borders, according to administrators at such
institutions. Minnesota, for example, is one of the most
regulated states in terms of health-care policy, with a
sizable majority of its population enrolled in managed-care
plans.
In addition, there are local reform laws in the Minneapolis-
St. Paul area, notes Shelley Chou, interim dean of the
University of Minnesota Medical School, Minneapolis. In his
region, Chou says, "managed care has now progressed to an
integrated service network. It is not easy for patients to
go out of the system unless they co-pay."
In the absence of a contractual agreement between a
university facility and a system insurer, he explains,
"going back and forth from an academic health center to the
system is not easy" for patients. His institution is
developing "a Centers of Excellence type of package" to make
it attractive to managed-care systems, offering tertiary-
care services such as bone- marrow transplants for a flat
fee.
"It's a moving target," Chou says. "We do the best we can to
build up a primary-care practice in greater Minnesota. The
maturity of the market is a factor--how many patients are
locked [in]" to particular managed-care packages. "We may
not have enough revenue to run the kind of quality projects
that we do."
What Next?
For now, academic and industry administrators are trying to
deal with the market changes already occurring, while
bracing themselves for the plans that might be introduced in
Congress next year. "Some people will say it was good to
step back and think about [the optimal measures to be
taken]," remarks Roy Silverstein, president of the American
Federation for Clinical Research (AFCR) and chief of the
division of hematology and medical oncology at Cornell
University Medical College in New York City. "I view it as
an opportunity that was lost."
AFCR, Silverstein vows, will continue to lobby for reform:
"We will keep supporting [legislators] who support aspects
of health-care reform that we think are important, and keep
reminding them how important we think this is."
>From the biotech industry's point of view, says BIO
president Feldbaum, "the silver lining was that, instead of
biotech being buried in the noise level, we were able to be
heard above the din. We were able to explain ourselves." He
anticipates "not having to be on the defensive" when the
debate resumes.
Clinton administration officials maintain that they will
continue the reform effort. At the Albert Lasker Medical
Research Awards luncheon, held on September 30, Health and
Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala gave the attendees "a
message from the first lady that she has no intention of
giving up on health-care reform."
Penn's Hillman is skeptical, however. "We'll have to see how
receptive Congress and the United States people are," he
cautions. "We'll have to wait and see what happens in
January and February--what tactics are going to be used by
various members of health-care industry. Then we'll see if
there's a chance for serious reform. If not, we'll go back
to the tried-and-true method of incremental change."
(The Scientist, Vol:8, #22, pg.1, November 14, 1994)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
----------
WE WELCOME YOUR OPINION. IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO COMMENT
ON THIS STORY, PLEASE WRITE TO US AT EITHER ONE OF THE
FOLLOWING ADDRESSES:
garfield@aurora.cis.upenn.edu
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The Scientist,
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U.S.A.
--------
NXT:
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TI : WHITHER HARKIN-HATFIELD?
AU : BARBARA SPECTOR
TY : NEWS
PG : 8
The Harkin-Hatfield Fund for Medical Research amendment,
introduced last spring by Sens. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Mark
O. Hatfield (R-Ore.) and attached to several health-care
reform bills debated in Congress, would set aside monies for
medical research above the National Institutes of Health
appropriation. The funds would be obtained through a 1
percent assessment on all monthly health insurance premiums
and a voluntary income tax check-off.
The biomedical-research community--joined by many members of
Congress--was overwhelmingly in favor of the amendment. "The
support for that bill this year was unlike anything I've
seen," says Terry Lierman, president of Washington, D.C.-
based Capitol Associates Inc., a government-relations firm.
But with health-care reform bills taken off the table, at
least for the remainder of the year, there is no guarantee
that the proposal will pass.
Harkin and Hatfield both are considered friends of
biomedical research. As chairman of the Senate
Appropriations Committee Subcommittee on Labor, Health and
Human Services, and Education, Harkin obtained an increase
in the NIH budget from $7.89 billion in 1989 (when he took
over the subcommittee chairmanship) to $11.34 billion in
fiscal year 1995.
Hatfield, the ranking Republican on the Appropriations
Committee, was instrumental along with Harkin in setting up
nationwide centers for Alzheimer's research five years ago.
In addition, he wrote legislation setting up a national
center for sleep research as part of NIH's reauthorization
last year and has embarked on a campaign for a strategic
plan for research on rare diseases.
Both senators have pledged to continue their efforts to pass
the Harkin-Hatfield amendment, either as part of a larger
health-care reform bill or as a free-standing bill.
Lierman calls the proposal "the only vehicle available to
provide the funding necessary to avert the crisis in medical
research." Other ways of allocating the money have become
dead ends, he says: "There's a budget freeze. You can't get
it into the appropriations process. And the president isn't
going to propose any increase."
Institute of Medicine president Kenneth Shine, who has had
informal discussions with representatives of managed-care
organizations, reports that they would be receptive to the
bill if the money from the proposed fund were to go to
clinical research--which would free up more NIH money for
basic science.
"There's a logic to the approach," he maintains. "It makes
sense to them to have a small percentage of the health-care
dollar support research when it's clinical research.
"In fact, money has been coming out of patient care to
support research, by paying it to hospitals to create
overhead. What we're talking about is rationalizing what is
already happening--patient care supports research."
In the absence of a total national reform package, however,
it is likely that the public will be leery of the proposal,
some observers believe. If Harkin-Hatfield were not included
in an aggregation of modifications to the entire health-care
system, "passing that bill would be [viewed as] passing a
tax," asserts Abbey Meyers, president of the New Fairfield,
Conn.-based National Organization for Rare Disorders.
"Nobody's going to vote for anything that would raise taxes.
It has to be something that people don't see in their
paychecks."
Hatfield addressed this concern in a written response to a
question from The Scientist: "Some will continue to see it
as a tax rather than investment in cost containment. For
those, let me reiterate that this is one tax the American
people seem to support overwhelmingly, with Harris polls
showing that 77 percent of Americans will pay $1 more per
week in taxes for medical research [see below]."
But Bruce L.R. Smith, a science-policy analyst at the
Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution, says the
proposal amounts to "adding to the cost of insurance." He
contends: "It's adding to the cost of the system when the
problem is to control the cost of the system. If NIH wants
an increase in appropriations, let them go to Congress and
ask for it, and debate it on its own terms."
Roy Silverstein, president of the American Federation for
Clinical Research, acknowledges that the proposal may be
viewed as an additional tax. "There's a risk that people
will see it that way," he says.
"But anything that puts on the table the opportunity to
increase funding for medical research is a risk worth
taking."
--B.S.
(The Scientist, Vol:8, #22, pg.8, November 14, 1994)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
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TI: RESEARCH!AMERICA: CITIZENS WOULD PAY MORE
TY: NEWS
PG: 8
In 1993, Research!America, an Alexandria, Va.-based
research-advocacy organization, commissioned Louis Harris
and Associates to take a survey of United States adults,
assessing their views on various health-care issues.
According to the polling organization, the 1,254
respondents' age, sex, race, education, and region were
weighted "to bring them into line with their actual
proportions in the population." The margin of error for the
survey is approximately 3 percent.
Following are highlights of the survey:
* 91 percent of respondents said they believed the U.S.
should spend more on medical research.
* Given a choice, 61 percent said the country should spend
a lot more on medical research, compared with 35 percent
favoring a lot more spending on energy research, 10 percent
advocating a lot more spending on space research, and 9
percent recommending a lot more spending on defense
research.
* 74 percent of respondents said they were willing to
spend $1 more per week in taxes if assured that it would be
spent for additional medical research. Seventy-five percent
said they would spend $1 more per prescription drug, and
77percent said they would spend $1 more per week in
insurance premiums.
Source: Research!America
(The Scientist, Vol:8, #22, pg.8, November 14, 1994)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
----------
WE WELCOME YOUR OPINION. IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO COMMENT
ON THIS STORY, PLEASE WRITE TO US AT EITHER ONE OF THE
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--------
NXT:
------------------------------------------------------------
TI : Smallpox Extermination Proposal Stirs Scientists
AU : KAREN YOUNG KREEGER
TY : NEWS
PG : 1
Eminent virologists from around the world are reacting
strongly--both for and against--a recommendation made in
September by a World Health Organization (WHO) committee to
destroy all remaining stores of the smallpox virus.
At a September 9 meeting in Geneva, the 10-member WHO Ad Hoc
Committee on Orthopoxvirus Infections unanimously agreed
that the potential costs to humanity from biological warfare
or inadvertent outbreaks of the disease outweigh its
research benefits to science--especially when there are
alternatives to using the live virus for scientific
investigations.
Advocates of preserving the viral stores argue, however,
that given the powerful microbiological tools that have been
devised in the recent past, it is short-sighted and foolish
to get rid of the live virus just yet. They contend that
information that is likely to be discovered in the smallpox
genome could help fight other deadly viral pathogens, most
notably HIV.
"To me, on a scientific basis, we're taking an extremely
precious resource and destroying it," asserts Bernard
Fields, chairman of the microbiology and molecular genetics
department at Harvard Medical School in Boston. While he
does not advocate that researchers "immediately start doing
experiments with the virus," Fields stresses that
"destroying it ends the whole issue of possibly
understanding it in the future."
On the other hand, David Baltimore, Ivan R. Cottrell
Professor of Molecular Biology and Immunology at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge,
maintains that "we can get a lot of information from a
variety of other routes, which I think scientists will be
prepared to take because they're safe."
He adds, referring to concerns that terrorists might use the
virus in biological warfare: "Balance [these alternative
methods] against the fact that there are nuts in the world,
and I would just as soon get rid of it."
If the recommendation to exterminate the stores by June 30
is carried out, it also means that the smallpox virus--more
specifically, the variola strain, which is deadly to humans-
-would have the distinction of being the first species to be
intentionally eliminated.
Before the remaining stocks are autoclaved and incinerated,
health ministers from around the world will vote on the ad
hoc committee's recommendation at the annual meeting of the
World Health Assembly--the decision-making body of WHO--next
May in Geneva. Currently, live viral stocks are held in
freezers in high-containment laboratories at the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta and the
Institute for Viral Preparations in Moscow.
Diseases And Detente
Smallpox was once the scourge of almost every inhabited
continent on Earth, with hundreds of cases appearing in the
former Yugoslavia as late as the early 1970s. In 1967, WHO
launched an aggressive vaccination campaign to eradicate the
disease. Ten years later, a man from Somalia was the last
known person in the general populace to die of smallpox. In
1979, WHO announced that the Earth was smallpox-free, making
the virus the only contagious pathogen ever to be
eradicated.
WHO first suggested that the virus be destroyed in 1986.
According to Frank Fenner, chairman of the current WHO
committee, there were no strong objections from the
scientific community. But, he adds, in the interests of
detente, a United States-Soviet Union collaboration was
proposed in 1990 to sequence the virus, thus giving smallpox
a reprieve until December 1993.
"The U.S. Na-tional Academy of Sciences and the Russian
Academy of Sciences got together and thought a way of
softening Cold War attitudes might be to set up a
collaborative enterprise of sequencing the genome of the
variola virus," notes Fenner, who is also a professor,
emeritus, at the John Curtin School of Medical Research of
the Australian National University in Canberra.
To date, two strains have been totally sequenced along with
portions of five others. Another strain is currently being
collaboratively sequenced by CDC and the Moscow institute,
says Joseph Esposito, director of the WHO Collaborating
Center for Smallpox and Other Pox Virus Infections at CDC.
Should the virus be destroyed, the collaborating
laboratories in Moscow and Atlanta will remain open, says
Esposito. Among other responsibilities, he reports, the CDC
center will continue working with other poxviruses. The WHO
committee also recommended that CDC and the Moscow institute
become repositories for cloned smallpox DNA stored in
recombinant plasmids.
But in mid-1993, Fenner says, a "small minority" of mostly
U.S. scientists whose "words carry a lot of weight"
expressed reservations about the standing directive to
eliminate the virus after it was sequenced. These scientists
voiced their hesitation despite the endorsement of the WHO
committee's recommendation by several groups, including the
American Society for Microbiology and the Council of the
International Union of Microbiological Societies.
Although the committee listened to the pleas from the
scientific community to save the virus, Fenner says, the
committee represents 156 nations and couldn't justify
keeping the virus on hand because of a few vocal, yet
eminent, virologists. "It was a small minority, and I think
that weighed in the consideration of the committee," he
remarks.
Why Destroy It?
To the WHO committee, the most compelling argument to get
rid of the smallpox stores is the potential for the virus to
be used by terrorists for biological warfare (B.W.J. Mahy et
al., "The remaining stocks of smallpox virus should be
destroyed," Science, 262:1223-4, 1993). "Political stability
is a relative thing," Baltimore observes. "In a perfect
world we would have a perfect repository where we could keep
it just in case we were wrong [about destroying the smallpox
virus], but I don't think that makes any sense now, since
all of its information is decoded."
But Fields views this reasoning as political rhetoric, not a
scientific dilemma at all. Moreover, he says, this objection
can be addressed through concomitant political solutions:
"There are political ways to deal with that. Remove it from
CDC and Moscow and put it in a neutral country under
extremely safe conditions."
Nonetheless, Fenner maintains, the committee's
responsibility to the people it represents is justification
for destroying the virus: "There are more countries in the
world experimenting with bacterial warfare than there were a
few years ago, and many countries feel more comfortable if
there weren't these 600-odd strains of virus just [kept] in
a deep freezer."
Advocates of saving the virus, however, contend that, in any
case, eliminating lab-controlled stocks doesn't mean that
the threat of a smallpox outbreak is gone forever. Three
potential sources, they say, exist: possible stocks
unwittingly or intentionally stored in non-WHO laboratories;
possible preservation of the virus in the tissues of
smallpox victims buried in the Russian permafrost region;
and possible re-emergence through a monkeypox variant. Given
these circumstances, they ask, why not maintain the stores
for study?
Committee chairman Fenner counters that the likelihood that
a vial of smallpox virus would be found in storage somewhere
unbeknownst to WHO "gets more and more remote as time goes
on" and if someone is keeping it secretly, there's "no way
of knowing that, anyway." He also calls the chances that an
epidemic would be initiated from permafrost cadavers
"remote" and points out that easy transmission of the
monkeypox virus in humans "hasn't happened in the whole
human occupation of the rainforests of western, central
Africa."
In that unlikely event, WHO officials add, they have about
500,000 doses of vaccine readily available, with more
capable of being produced in a matter of weeks.
On the other hand, the possibility of accidental release
from the lab is significantly less remote, according to the
committee and its backers. "It can get out; it's proven its
ability to get out," says Baltimore, referring to a 1978
isolated case that stoked early debates of what to do with
the remaining stores. One year after the "last" death in
Somalia, Janet Parker, a British photographer, became
accidentally infected while taking pictures in a Birmingham
University Medical School lab in which some samples were
stored. Hers was the last recorded death by smallpox.
This incident is the "practical example [of accidental
infection] that everyone points to," he observes. "Even if
that wasn't the case, we know that containment is never
perfect. That's the problem with human beings--they're
fallible."
Supporters of retaining the virus, however, claim that the
Birmingham incident couldn't happen in today's highly secure
facilities in which the remaining smallpox stocks are
stored.
Why Save It?
Opponents of the committee's recommendation maintain that
biomedical researchers would forever lose unique scientific
knowledge if the virus is destroyed, especially at a time
when molecular biological techniques are just beginning to
reveal so much about viral pathogens (W.K. Joklik et al.,
"Why the remaining stocks should not be destroyed," Science,
262:1225-6, 1993; L.S. Sandakhchiev, "We'd Better Think
Twice Before Eradicating All Smallpox Virus Stocks," The
Scientist, Aug. 23, 1993, page 11). They say that preserving
the variola virus--at least for the next five to 10 years--
for future study will aid in understanding the way other
such other deadly viral pathogens as HIV operate and also in
developing antiviral drugs.
"Twenty years ago we didn't know anything about [smallpox]
proteins," Wolfgang Joklik, James B. Duke Professor of
Microbiology at Duke University in Durham, N.C., points out.
"Twenty years ago we thought all the information present in
a [human] viral genome was only to enable the virus to
multiply. Now we know that half the information is to defeat
the human defense mechanism." The smallpox virus infects
humans exclusively.
However, proponents of destruction say that genetic studies
can be done without the live virus because the base-pair
sequence of smallpox DNA has been mapped and that cloned
smallpox viral DNA is being kept in recombinant plasmids.
(As a precautionary measure, WHO also urged that no more
than 20 percent of the plasmid fragments be housed in any
one laboratory--with the exception of CDC and the Moscow
institute--and that no studies be performed in labs where
other poxviruses are kept.)
But, Joklik counters: "To study smallpox pathogenesis, the
complete virus is required, not just plasmid clones and a
sequence. How viruses cause disease at a biochemical and
molecular level is little understood, and in smallpox, viral
proteins mimic or interfere with host immune and regulatory
functions. Clones don't suffice for study because encoding
regions of the smallpox DNA are separated from regions that
control expression."
Fields concurs: "Anyone who says the sequence is enough
doesn't understand virology, and that includes some famous
virologists. We have to understand holistic parts of this
virus and how these work together. There are many other
poxviruses [to work on], but not this one. This one is the
key pathogenic virus in its family. It's qualitatively
different."
Even if the virus is destroyed, current pox research will
proceed apace, according to Fenner: "Pox virologists are now
working primarily with vaccinia [an avirulent strain of
smallpox] and other pox viruses as vectors for novel
vaccines" against diseases unrelated to poxviruses.
Currently, the live smallpox virus is being used only in the
sequencing project.
A Dubious Distinction
One issue that does seem to trouble both camps in the debate
is that, if the recommendation is carried out, smallpox will
be the first species to be deliberately wiped out by humans.
"I think that makes everybody a little unhappy," remarks
Baltimore. "I do think that biological diversity is one of
the great positive aspects of our planet and that we should
be maximizing it rather than destroying it, so I think that
that's a real concern.
"On the other hand, it's very hard to find a positive side
of viruses. As a virologist, that's always bothered me. If
[eradicating] any species can be justified it's a species
that has no obvious positive side to it, either aesthetic or
any other."
For the champions of sparing the virus, of course, this
aspect of the smallpox debate is also of concern.
"I don't mind containing things," Joklik says, "but I don't
think we should destroy them. With the variola virus,
obviously it's taken millions of years for nature to make
it, and why should 10 guys sitting around a table say,
'Let's destroy it'?
"It just doesn't make any sense to me because it's just such
an admission of defeat to say we can't
keep it safe."
(The Scientist, Vol:8, #22, pg.1, November 14, 1994)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
----------
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NXT:
------------------------------------------------------------
TI : Far-Ranging Scientific Program To Be Featured At Cell
Biology Meeting
AU : KAREN YOUNG KREEGER
TY : NEWS
PG : 3
A well-rounded agenda of talks, special lectures, and awards
awaits cell biologists who will be attending the 34th annual
meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB),
according to meeting organizers. Symposia covering such hot
subjects as signal transduction, as well as newly emerging
fields like programmed cell death, are all part of a far-
ranging scientific program.
The gathering will take place at the Moscone Convention
Center in San Francisco from Saturday, December 10 to
Wednesday, December 14, with an estimated 7,000 researchers
expected to participate. An unprecedented 2,836
presentations and posters and a trade exhibition at which
more than 300 organizations will be represented are
scheduled.
"We've got an exciting group of speakers that will cover
subjects of traditional interest to cell biologists and also
some emerging areas," says Bill Wood, cochairman of the
program committee and a professor of molecular, cellular,
and developmental biology at the University of Colorado,
Boulder. "We're also proud of the number of women speakers
that we have. Four out of the nine chairs of the major
symposia are women."
These nine major symposia cover the areas of cellular
disease mechanisms and therapeutic strategies, intercellular
communication, signaling in nervous-system genesis and
function, molecular machinery of the secretory pathway,
programmed cell death, building biological structure, cell
specification and patterning during embryogenesis,
biological functions of cell adhesion, and signal
transduction from the cell surface to the nucleus.
The meeting will kick off with a keynote address by Francis
Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health's
National Center for Human Genome Research. Collins will
discuss "Human Genetic Disorders and the Human Genome
Project." Elizabeth Marincola, executive director of ASCB,
notes that Collins's presentation will "combine science and
public policy."
The first of the nine symposia, which is to cover current
approaches to gene therapy, will follow the keynote speech.
Harkin Honored
This year the society will present its first ASCB Public
Service Award to Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa). After receiving
the award on Tuesday, December 13, Harkin will speak on the
topic of "Biomedical Research Funding and Health-Care
Reform."
J. Richard McIntosh, president of ASCB and a professor of
cell biology at Colorado, says Harkin has shown unusual
farsightedness in championing basic biomedical research
funding, as demonstrated by the Harkin-Hatfield Fund for
Medical Research amendment to the health-care reform bill
that he and Sen. Mark O. Hatfield (R-Ore.) jointly proposed
(see story on page 1).
"When Harkin came through with the idea of a 1 percent
surcharge [on health-insurance premiums, to be funneled to
research], that was, of course, a remarkable breakthrough in
terms of [ASCB's] perception of the way Washington was
treating basic science," McIntosh declares.
"It's really his courage in taking on something like that
that holds promise of opening up better research for
ultimately cheaper medicine in the long run. It's really
hard to take that view. And that's why we are giving him the
award."
In general, McIntosh says, ASCB "has a significant interest
in trying to make sure that Congress is fully aware of the
value of basic research. A fair amount of the research that
is presented at a meeting like this is funded by the NIH,
and much of it also by NSF and private foundations."
Traditionally among funding agencies, McIntosh points out,
"there's been a strong tendency to devote research [dollars]
to things that are going to be of practical importance."
But, he contends, what most politicians don't understand "at
a gut level" is that "science doesn't work that way very
well because it's a very exploratory undertaking.
"The discoveries that will turn out to be the most valuable
are often unanticipatable. These are issues that right-
minded fiscal advisers loathe because they are the kinds of
things that imply you can't plan and manage everything.
Science, however, has a different culture."
Special Features
In addition to scientific and policy-oriented offerings, the
meeting will feature several other professional sessions and
services for students and investigators (see story on page
3). According to Marincola, the purpose of a special panel
discussion entitled "Practice of Science: The Problem of
Ambiguity," to be held on Tuesday, December 13, is to "help
students understand the gray areas" of the practice of their
profession and some of the difficult issues researchers must
address.
For example, Marincola says, "everybody's talking about
conflict of interest, and the NIH is coming down hard on
people who are not careful about conflicts, and yet students
and young investigators--well, everybody--feels as if there
are no rules. It's the kind of thing that people have to
pick up intuitively, and they are picking it up in
inconsistent ways."
In addition to this session and a special graduate student
symposium to be held on Monday, December 12, says Mary
Beckerle, cochairwoman of the program committee and a
professor of biology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake
City, "we tried to get as much participation by graduate
students and postdocs as possible" in the other activities
at the meeting. She says that at least four out of the six
speakers in each of 24 minisymposia being conducted at the
meeting are students or postdocs.
Students and other job-seekers can take advantage of the
meeting's annual career-placement service, which will post
more than 300 positions. Participants can arrange for
interviews with representatives from more than 100 employers
in industry, government, and aca-demia. The service is free
for ASCB student members.
McIntosh emphasizes yet another "terribly im-portant"
feature of the meeting: the Exhibit Hall, a display of
equipment and supplies from scientific firms; materials from
scientific and academic publishers; and information on
government and private research institutes, as well as
professional societies.
He describes this event as "partly a service the society can
render to the private sector--a way that vendors can, with
one commitment of personnel and resources, get access to a
large number of potential customers. And partly it's a
service to the members of the society, who need to find out
what's current, what's hot, and what the best
methods and equipment are."
(The Scientist, Vol:8, #22, pg.3, November 14, 1994)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
----------
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--------
NXT:
------------------------------------------------------------
TI : AT A GLANCE
TY : NEWS
PG : 3
>From December 10 through 14, organizers expect approximately
7,000 researchers to gather in San Francisco for the 34th
annual meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology.
More than 2,800 presentations and posters, as well as a
trade show representing more than 300 organizations are
scheduled. Following are some of the special events
scheduled to take place at the convention:
* Saturday, December 10, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.: Pre-
conference workshop, "Connections for Excellence: Pre-
college Science Education for Scientists"
* Sunday, December 11, 2:00 to 3:00 p.m.: E.E. Just Lecture,
"Actin-Dependent Movement of Organelles in the Squid Giant
Axon," George M. Langford, E.E. Just Professor of Natural
Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H.
* Monday, December 12, 1:00 to 2:30 p.m.: Graduate Student
Symposium, "Can Scientists Be Educators?"
* Monday, December 12, 6:00 to 7:15 p.m.: Women in Cell
Biology presentation
* Tuesday, December 13, 7:30 to 8:30 p.m.: 13th Keith R.
Porter Lecture on Cell Biology, "Signaling Genes from the
Cell Surface: The JAK-STAT Pathway," James Darnell,
Vincent Astor Professor and head of the laboratory of
molecular cell biology, Rockefeller University, New York
For more information on the meeting, contact the American
Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) National Office:
ASCB
9650 Rockville Pike
Bethesda, Md. 20814-3992
(301) 530-7153
Fax: (301) 530-7139
E-mail: ascbinfo@ascb.faseb.org
* J. Richard McIntosh, president
* Elizabeth Marincola, executivedirector
(The Scientist, Vol:8, #22, pg.3, November 14, 1994)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
----------
WE WELCOME YOUR OPINION. IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO COMMENT
ON THIS STORY, PLEASE WRITE TO US AT EITHER ONE OF THE
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--------
NXT:
NOTEBOOK
------------------------------------------------------------
TI : Gold In That Thar Crater
TY : NEWS (NOTEBOOK)
PG : 4
In today's overpublished research environment, what kind of work
captures the world's attention? Los Alamos National Laboratory
geologist Fraser Goff has an answer. Last month, at the
Geological Society of America's annual meeting in Seattle, he
presented a paper reporting that the Galeras volcano in Colombia
releases gold into the atmosphere during eruptive episodes. While
gold, silver, and platinum are commonly present in rocks from
eruptions of extinct volcanoes, Goff explains, "here was an
example where we actually found it in a live volcano." His report
has "generated a lot more interest than I was expecting," says
Goff, who was attending a conference in Colombia in January 1993
when the eruption occurred, killing nine people, six of whom were
scientists. "Reporters from Spanish-language papers asked me
questions like: Have I staked it?" For enterprising souls who
think they can "run around with baskets, collecting nuggets,"
Goff adds a note of realism: The volcanic eruptions distribute
the gold into the atmosphere; "you'll never find it."
(The Scientist, Vol:8, #22, pg.4, November 14, 1994)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
----------
NXT:
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TI : Where Credits Are Due
TY : NEWS (NOTEBOOK)
PG : 4
The University of California, San Diego, bioengineering program
is finally getting accreditation to go along with the respect
it's acquired over the past 28 years. UC-San Diego has designated
bioengineering a separate department in the School of
Engineering, joining the existing departments of electrical
engineering, computer science and engineering, and applied
mechanics and electrical sciences. The program was ranked fifth-
best in the United States this year in a recent survey of
engineering school deans conducted by U.S. News and World Report
(March 21, 1994). The new department will be chaired by Shu
Chien, director of the school's Institute for Biomedical
Engineering. Armed with a $3 million grant from the nonprofit
Whitaker Foundation, the department intends to eventually
increase its present faculty of eight professors by seven, beef
up its core facilities, and establish graduate and postdoctoral
fellowships. The new department offers undergraduate and graduate
degrees in two major areas: bioengineering and premed biomedical
engineering. For more information, contact Chien at (619) 534-
5195.
(The Scientist, Vol:8, #22, pg.4, November 14, 1994)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
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NXT:
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TI : Garden Of E-mail
TY : NEWS (NOTEBOOK)
PG : 4
The 250,000-volume library of the New York Botanical Garden in
the Bronx has made its complete catalog available on the
Internet. CATALPA--which stands for Catalog for Library Public
Access and is also the name of a genus of American and Asiatic
trees of the trumpet-creeper family--is fully searchable by
author, title, subject, call number, keywords, corporate entry,
or contents notes. According to library officials, the garden is
the first major botanical institution to make its entire library
(The Scientist, Vol:8, #22, pg.4, November 14, 1994)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
----------
NXT:
------------------------------------------------------------
TI : WHI Expands
TY : NEWS (NOTEBOOK)
PG : 4
The National Institutes of Health has added 24 new centers to the
existing 16 participating in the $628 million, 15-year Women's
Health Initiative (WHI), conducting research on the chronic
diseases that affect women, such as various cancers, heart
disease, and osteoporosis. The study targets postmenopausal
women, aged 50 to 79, and follows them for at least three years.
Thus far, according to Ruth Kirschstein, NIH deputy director, the
centers have carried out more than 52,000 screening visits since
the original sites were announced last year.
(The Scientist, Vol:8, #22, pg.4, November 14, 1994)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
----------
NXT:
------------------------------------------------------------
TI : Survival Center
TY : NEWS (NOTEBOOK)
PG : 4
The situation for the Earth's species, scientists warn, is
precarious. Biologists predict that humans may cause as many as
500,000 to 1 million species to be lost in the next 20 years. But
from deep within the concrete environs of New York City, five
local institutions are collaborating to study and help preserve
the world's disintegrating species. Columbia University, the
American Museum of Natural History, the New York Botanical
Garden, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and Wildlife
Preservation Trust International have established the Center for
Environmental Research and Conservation (CERC) with the help of a
$6 million grant from the Netherlands-based V. Kann Rasmussen
Foundation, and $3 million more from Columbia, where the center
will be headquartered. Much of the research will be conducted in
12 remote study centers to be established in Europe, North
America, Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The center will create
interdisciplinary research groups that will propose strategies to
manage habitats and bring back endangered species, as well as
study the effects of such policies on humans. Another important
goal will be to train future generations of scientists and
policymakers. For information, contact Robert Nelson at Columbia,
(212) 854-5573.
(The Scientist, Vol:8, #22, pg.4, November 14, 1994)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
----------
NXT:
------------------------------------------------------------
TI : Power Lines
TY : NEWS (NOTEBOOK)
PG : 4
The Department of Energy recently moved to make more
comprehensive information from its national laboratories and
other facilities accessible online. Taking advantage of an
increasingly popular free Internet navigational and search
program, or "browser," called Mosaic, DOE provides a single point
of access to agency-wide resources through the program's "home
page" feature. Included are various news and program
announcements, as well as appropriate agency contacts for further
information. The electronic address for DOE's home page is
http://www.doe.gov.
(The Scientist, Vol:8, #22, pg.4, November 14, 1994)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
----------
NXT:
------------------------------------------------------------
TI : Bibliographers' Competition
TY : NEWS (NOTEBOOK)
PG : 4
Every scientist knows it pays to keep up with the literature, but
a prize awarded every two years recognizes individuals who do so
with conscientiousness and innovation. The Oberly Award for
Bibliography in Agricultural Sciences is granted in odd-numbered
years for the best English-language bibliography in the field of
agriculture or a related science compiled during the two-year
period preceding the year in which the award is made. Winners
receive a cash award (which varies) and a citation. The deadline
for nominations is December 1. Nominations should be sent to:
Oberly Jury Chair, Mike Haddock, Farrell Library, Kansas State
University, Manhattan, Kan. 66506.
(The Scientist, Vol:8, #22, pg.4, November 14, 1994)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
----------
NXT:
------------------------------------------------------------
TI : LEADERS OF SCIENCE
THE READERS OF THE SCIENTIST
PG : 20
THE SCIENTIST continues to feature the achievements of men and
women who shape the world of science. Their research
contributions and role in science policy are increasingly
significant in a world marked by rapid developments and
transitions. Here's what six influential leaders of science had
to say about the part THE SCIENTIST plays in their active
professional lives.
ELLEN C. WEAVER
1993 President of the Association for Women in Science, emeritus
professor of biological sciences and associate dean at San Jose
State University.
"What I particularly like about THE SCIENTIST is the cogent
analysis of the political and economic issues which affect
scientists. And it doesn't hurt that women are explicitly
included on almost every page -- a refreshing change from most
science publications."
----
ALFRED McLAREN
President of Science Service Inc. and publisher of
_Science News_.
"I enjoy reading THE SCIENTIST because it highlights and provides
considerable information on trends of interest. It also provides
much information of value to science professionals on options for
both research employment and the job market in general at a time
of relative impasse for young people in particular."
----
HERBERT PARDES
Chairman of the scientific council, National Alliance for Research
on Schizophrenia and Depression, and vice president for health
sciences and dean of the faculty of medicine at Columbia
University.
"THE SCIENTIST is one of the key resources for staying informed
about the breadth of science and developments in science policy.
A sophisticated perspective on the way science intersects other
disciplines and plays a role in broad social policy is attainable
through regular reading of THE SCIENTIST."
----
MARYE ANNE FOX
Member, National Science Board, M. June and J. Virgil Waggoner
Regents Chair in chemistry, University of Texas, Austin.
"What impresses me about THE SCIENTIST is its ability to provide
information that isn't available anywhere else -- with
consistency."
----
MARY WOOLLEY
CEO of Research!America, Alexandria, VA.
"I like the breadth of THE SCIENTIST. The articles from
recognized leaders in the field help me keep abreast of state-of-
the-art thinking in science and science policy. THE SCIENTIST is
an excellent way to get timely information."
-----
EDWARD O. WILSON
Baird Professor of Science and curator in entomology at Harvard
University.
"I consider THE SCIENTIST to be one of the few and among the most
readable of professional journals covering all aspects of
science."
(The Scientist, Vol:8, #22, pg.10, November 14, 1994)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
----------
WE WELCOME YOUR OPINION. IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO COMMENT
ON THIS STORY, PLEASE WRITE TO US AT EITHER ONE OF THE
FOLLOWING ADDRESSES:
garfield@aurora.cis.upenn.edu
71764.2561@compuserve.com
The Scientist,
3600 Market Street, Suite 450, Philadelphia, PA 19104
U.S.A.
--------
NXT:
OPINION
------------------------------------------------------------
TI : Robert C. Gallo Looks Beyond NIH And Defends The Past
AU : FRANKLIN HOKE
TY : OPINION
PG : 12
Q There are several rumors--some quite specific--that you may be
leaving NIH in the near future. Some have you forming an
independent institute, perhaps with a university affiliation. Are
those rumors true?
A It is true that I'm involved in about 11 different
negotiations. I'm interested in the possibility of doing
something--I don't know about independent, but university-
related, certainly. It's all premature.
Q If you were to move to an academic setting, what would you
gain and what would you lose?
A The only thing you leave behind are your memories and
assurance of constant funding. The advantages are obvious--
student contact, which I've never had, and I'd like. I have
postdocs, but I've never had students, and I teach well. [Also,]
money in your pocket. I need more money.
Q So, one reason to leave is that NIH is a constant but not
necessarily generous funder?
A One [reason] is that if I don't do it [now], I'll never do it.
I should have done it seven years ago. Of course, I think NIH
made my career and was--and is--a great place. But seven years
ago, if I'd made the move at that time, I think a lot of the
problems I went through wouldn't have happened. They certainly
wouldn't have happened with me not being able to speak. They
certainly wouldn't have happened without a lot of
counterpunching. I couldn't expect or dream that these things
would have evolved in the way [they did] without any internal
help, including [with] legal bills. This part is not something
I've been particularly happy about, obviously. But--and it's a
heavy but--if I stay or don't stay, NIH is a place I'll always
carry a great affection for and an appreciation for all the
things it did for me over a very long period of time.
Also, on the outside, I'll have a little more freedom if I do
make such a move. Not just personal freedom, [but freedom] to
build clinically. If you want to move something from the lab to
the clinic at NIH, you're relying more and more on [attracting
the interest of] a company. If you have your own biotechnology
involvement on the outside, and you're a board member, you may be
able to influence that decision. I would like to have more
influence on what goes clinical in my own center, place,
university. I think I would have that, more than you can possibly
have at NIH.
Q You've complained at times about the attention being given in
the press to critics of the HIV hypothesis for AIDS. Do you think
the press gives too much credence to these scientists?
A I guess so, yes. Nothing could be clearer on this planet--we
never are absolute about anything--but we can't get any more
absolute than that HIV is the cause of AIDS. It's about like
that. Molecular-clone virus, which means it's absolutely pure,
has infected four people by accidents in the lab--all four have
AIDS now. I mean, you can't get much better than that. My view is
that, in AIDS, the media has made anybody who speaks an instant
expert. You equalize us all. But you can see, coming to a
scientific meeting, everybody is not exactly the same. There are
differences in quality.
You guys in the media have got to remember, if you want to do
what's fair and right, that I'm working, that guy's working
[points to scientist at the next table in the restaurant, who has
been quietly listening in on the interview and now laughs
nervously]. [The anti-HIV critics] are not working. They're
talking. It's so much easier to just talk, rather than work. And
what the hell are they doing other than talking? Let them do
work.
Q Bio/Technology magazine (12:762, August 12, 1994) recently
reported that you favor funding the work of one such researcher,
Peter Duesberg at the University of California, Berkeley, who has
proposed experiments to explore the role in AIDS of nitrite
inhalers--poppers. Were they accurately reporting your views?
A They were. But listen carefully. The proposal that Duesberg
made in front of me at a Kaposi's sarcoma [KS] meeting that was
organized by the popper people I thought was a reasonable idea.
But that doesn't mean that I saw the thing written up and that it
was written up properly.
Q What was it, precisely, that you found reasonable?
A The concept to combine virus with certain chemicals like
poppers in the monkey model, because that's KS. KS, there is no
question, is multifactoral. KS, there is no question, is
enormously augmented by HIV, but clearly it's multifactoral.
We've been arguing that from the beginning. We know that. You
don't just take HIV and get Kaposi's sarcoma. There's something
else going on. [But] that's not AIDS. That's a component of AIDS,
a tumor aspect of AIDS.
Q The misconduct investigations against you and your lab appear
now to be in the past. Without revisiting the charges in detail,
if you could go back, is there any point where you would drop in
and say, "Yes, I wish I hadn't done that"?
A In all frankness, I don't think anybody did anything wrong,
other than solve the problem of etiology and develop the blood
test. I think that will stand in the record. It can't go away,
even though some people want it to. But, yes, I could have
weighed some things more carefully. I was, perhaps, too
impetuous. I talk before thinking sometimes, which is a tendency
[of mine]. I also wish--and some of my colleagues say I'm crazy
because I had no [choice but] to come--but I wish I didn't go to
the [April 23, 1984] press conference, because I had only two
weeks before visited the Pasteur Institute [in Paris], told them
our data, and said if it's the same virus type we'll make an
announcement together. That would have been the perfect thing to
do. It's exactly what I'd planned, and, so help me God, that's
the truth. And what happened was I went on to a meeting in
Cremona [in Italy] with NIH director Jim Wyngaarden, and on April
21st I was told to come home immediately. Jim and I came home,
and there was a press conference. Apparently, Heckler felt she
had no choice, because we had five papers in press: four in
Science, one in Lancet, and pieces of it were coming out in the
Manchester Guardian. The British had information on it, and it
was leaking. So, she said she had to announce that the cause [of
AIDS] was known. She had to announce that we had a blood test.
>From her perspective, maybe she was right. From my perspective, I
should have said I won't do it. I should have said, "Under no
circumstances can I go to a press conference until I
compare properly the viruses and we talk together [with the
French]."
Nonetheless, Heckler did give the French credit [at the news
conference]. The newspapers didn't report it. Why? Because she
had laryngitis and couldn't speak anymore, and she passed out her
release. It's right in there. I have the tape [of the
conference]. You know what I say [on the tape]? Somebody
[referred to the human retrovirus announced at the conference as]
HTLV, and I said, "Look, don't call it HTLV, because it's
different from [Gallo's previously discovered retroviruses] HTLV-
I or HTLV-II. I think it's going to be in the same family"--
that's the only scientific mistake we made--and I said, "Call it
the third human retrovirus, if you wish, HTLV-III, hyphen, LAV,
because my suspicion is it will be exactly the same subtype
described [as LAV] last year--but not well characterized and not
shown to cause AIDS--by the French group." And I named their
names. All that's forgotten.
[Moreover,] immediately [after the conference], I sent two
colleagues to France. One stayed there and worked. He brought our
viruses and cell lines to France and left them there. And he made
comparisons. Those comparisons showed it was very likely they
were the same subtype. On June 7, 1984, only a month after our
papers came out, I made a press conference with Montagnier in
Colorado at a meeting--front page, Washington Post--in which I
said they had isolated the virus the previous year, [and] it's
almost certainly the same virus type. So, what happened? What
happened was that it was in the interests of some people to
resurrect [the fact that] we had a contamination. We learned so
did Montagnier. So did about seven labs, with the same virus. But
we're the only ones who were investigated. We had a hell of a lot
of other isolates [supporting Gallo's 1984 findings], including
isolates in 1983. And NIH made a [press] release like that. But
it gets buried. It's all forgotten.
But 1984--how the hell can people sweep away 1984? We showed the
cause of AIDS, we developed the blood test, we mass-produced the
virus, we characterized it to a great degree, and within months
afterwards we showed it infected macrophages, went to the brain,
and was heterosexually transmitted. All of that is just swept
away.
Q Most of the people usually cast as your arch-rivals or enemies
are, in fact, here at your meeting.
A Anybody in my position has scientific enemies, and I'm far
from perfect. I don't want you thinking that I'm thinking I'm an
angel. I've never been an angel.
[National Cancer Institute director Samuel] Broder once said
to me, "You play basketball, you love to rebound." I said, "Yes."
[Broder said,] "And I bet you elbow." "Yes." "And then you go
out for beer with the guys." And I said, "Yes, we're friends,
right?" And he said, "Yes, well, the whole world's not that way.
You're going to have people who remember that one little elbow
you gave them 10 years ago."
Q One person here who described you as both brilliant and
charming also said that you are sometimes your own worst enemy.
A It's true. I get myself into trouble a lot. I used to do it
much more than now, though. Pre-AIDS, I didn't have, really,
problems, except scientific debates. AIDS is an unusual field. It
has all the passions of humanity to an extreme. You have dying
people. You have young people dying. You have the sexual issues.
You have prejudices. You have people's religions on their
shoulders. You have a lot of mis-representation of things.
(The Scientist, Vol:8, #22, pg.12, November 14, 1994)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
----------
WE WELCOME YOUR OPINION. IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO COMMENT
ON THIS STORY, PLEASE WRITE TO US AT EITHER ONE OF THE
FOLLOWING ADDRESSES:
garfield@aurora.cis.upenn.edu
71764.2561@compuserve.com
The Scientist,
3600 Market Street, Suite 450, Philadelphia, PA 19104
U.S.A.
--------
NXT:
COMMENTARY
------------------------------------------------------------
TI : Of Multimedia CD-ROMs And Real-Time Access: `Information
Nirvana' Is Still Not On Horizon
AU : EUGENE GARFIELD
TY : OPINION (COMMENTARY)
PG : 13
Franklin Hoke recently gave our readers an interesting view of
the prospects and problems of the new generation of scientific
journals on CD-ROM (The Scientist, Sept. 19, 1994, page 17). It
is indeed exciting to contemplate the convenience of having
instantaneous, fingertip access to the Journal of Biological
Chemistry, Journal of the American Chemical Society, and other
primary-research publications.
Of course, major reference works are also available on CD-ROM,
such as the Science Citation Index and the Oxford English
Dictionary. These are being joined by a growing number of
encyclopedias, including Microsoft's Encarta (based on the Funk &
Wagnalls New Encyclopedia), Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia,
and the New Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia.
"Multimedia" is the buzzword of choice for these latter
publications because they boast not only articles and
illustrations, as in the print versions, but also audio
narrations, animations, and even video clips. It is debatable
whether these multimedia applications truly "bring the book to
life," as the publishers tend to claim. You can access tens of
thousands of articles on the CD-ROM encyclopedias, but the number
of video clips ranges anywhere from 20 to 80. Nevertheless, the
multimedia bells and whistles are diverting and make browsing
more fun. It is interesting to note that the CD-ROM edition of
Encyclopaedia Britannica is text only and includes no
illustrations.
This burgeoning catalog of multimedia reference works promises to
make a reality of early visions of universal, real-time access to
our accumulated archive of knowledge--what Vannevar Bush called
"Memex" and H.G. Wells termed the "World Brain." But don't hold
your breath for the dawn of this information nirvana.
A major stumbling block is that there is no generic, standardized
software for all the different multimedia CD-ROM encyclopedias.
Each runs on its own specialized software, which you have to
store on your hard drive. Encarta, for example, requires at least
2.5 megabytes (MB) of available disk space, while Compton's
requires either 8 or 20 MB, depending on how fast you want to run
it.
Assuming an average of just 5 MB per multimedia CD-ROM
encyclopedia, loading 20 separate reference works would take up
100 MB of hard-disk space just to store the search-and-display
software!
Add to this the many other programs you typically use--word
processing, spreadsheets, graphics, relational databases,
bibliographic-management software, mathematical and statistical
packages, and so forth--as well as all the text and data files
stored on your hard drive, and you'll soon need at least a
gigabyte of hard-disk memory.
Another stumbling block to real-time accessing of multiple CD-ROM
reference works is the need for mechanical "jukebox" CD-ROM
readers or electronic "towers." The price of a mechanical six-
pack jukebox is under $500. More important, whenever you switch
from one CD to another, you have to wait while the drive reads
through all six disks. This takes only a few minutes, but it is
long enough to interrupt your thought process and raise your
frustration level. An alternative is the electronic tower
containing seven drives. The seven drives are read once, allowing
you to switch between disks with little delay. But they come at a
cost closer to $2,500. Three towers can be linked for an
additional $5,000. This would provide a library of 21 CD-ROM
reference works with essentially random access.
Reaching the information nirvana of rapid access to all the
world's knowledge in a way that allows us to work--and think--in
real time will require some major technological fixes in hardware
capabilities as well as software compatibility. I do not doubt
that the stumbling blocks can be overcome. Memory is becoming
cheaper. Data-compression techniques may increase CD-ROM storage
capacity by an order of magnitude. Optical disks may even achieve
terabyte storage capacity. Chips are becoming ever faster. And
modems may soon have the bandwidth necessary for instantaneous
search and retrieval of massive online databases via the Internet
or other networks.
But my optimism that the technological solutions are near at hand
is tempered by impatience. After waiting more than 40 years for
Memex or the World Brain, a few more years may not seem too
burdensome. Then again, I still get annoyed by the few minutes it
takes for my CD-ROM jukebox to read and open the six disks in the
cartridge.
(The Scientist, Vol:8, #22, pg.13, November 14, 1994)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
----------
WE WELCOME YOUR OPINION. IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO COMMENT
ON THIS STORY, PLEASE WRITE TO US AT EITHER ONE OF THE
FOLLOWING ADDRESSES:
garfield@aurora.cis.upenn.edu
71764.2561@compuserve.com
The Scientist,
3600 Market Street, Suite 450, Philadelphia, PA 19104
U.S.A.
--------
NXT:
LETTERS
TI : Animal Research Advances
AU : STEPHEN S. HULL, JR.
TY : OPINION (LETTERS)
PG : 13
The anti-animal research position extolled by Kenneth Stoller
(The Scientist, Sept. 5, 1994, page 12) seems rather
contradictory in light of his profession. As a pediatrician, he
must be aware of the vast amount of animal research that directly
affects a newborn's health. The first surgical closure of a
patent ductus, which normally closes at birth, was performed
using puppies. Without this closure, a "blue" baby lingered and
soon died.
Today this situation is not even in the textbooks, and most
medical students have never seen this syndrome. The use of
pulmonary surfactants--critical to the management of premature
infants--was developed using animals, particularly newborn lambs.
The list goes on and on, including vaccines, antibiotics,
diagnostic procedures, and treatments.
Stoller may not approve of research using animals, but because he
is a private practitioner, the vast amount of his income is
directly tied to animal research done so that he may deliver a
high quality of health care. Perhaps he would prefer the "good
old days" of high neonatal mortality from diseases such as polio,
and explaining the deaths to parents who lose a child. These
diseases were not "exaggerations"; perhaps he is too young to
remember them.
He is right on one point: Animal research comes at a cost and,
frankly, one I am able to support. As a parent of three children,
I do not want Stoller telling me which medical treatments are
"politically acceptable" and which ones are not.
Stephen S. Hull, Jr.
College of Medicine
University of OklahomaHealth Sciences Center
Biomedical Sciences Building
Oklahoma City, Okla. 73190
E-mail:stephen-hull@uokhsc.edu
(The Scientist, Vol:8, #22, pg.13, November 14, 1994)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
----------
NXT:
------------------------------------------------------------
TI : Animal Alternatives
AU : DONALD J. BARNES
TY : OPINION (LETTERS)
PG : 13
Science is big business, and wherever big business is found,
ancillary units will exist to siphon off any funds not already
committed to the primary mission. It would appear that Susan
Paris, as president of Americans for Medical Progress Educational
Foundation, has found such a niche (S.E. Paris, "Animal Rights
Advocates' Actions Pose Big Threat To Public Health," The
Scientist, Sept. 5, 1994,page 12).
Paris is not the genius behind this hysterical "beating of the
bush," as others--notably the National Association for Biomedical
Research--have been making a nice living with the same tactic for
years.
The simple fact is that most animal-rights activists embrace
medical research, though not at the expense of sentient
creatures. We are all concerned about our own health and the
health of our loved ones; we decry the expenditure of billions of
tax dollars for treatment of diseases that could easily be
prevented; and many of us support alternative methods of research
with our own money.
For example, the National Anti-Vivisection Society, the
charitable nonprofit organization for which I work, is the sole
supporter of the International Foundation For EthicalResearch
(IFER), which funds biomedical science directly in an attempt to
find new techniques and methodologies which do not depend on
animal suffering and death. Do we fit the mold into which Paris
would cast all animal advocates?
Finally, Paris states that the study of nonhuman animals is". . .
medical science's most valuable tool in the fight against
disease."
This is ludicrous. Billions of nonhuman animals have suffered and
died in research into cancer, diabetes, stroke, mental illness,
and so forth. Where are the cures? Why am I more likely to
contract cancer today than ever before? Should I choose to
protect my own children by supporting such improbable research?
Donald J. Barnes
Director of Education
National Anti-Vivisection Society
53 W. Jackson Blvd.
Chicago, Ill. 60604-3795
(The Scientist, Vol:8, #22, pg.13, November 14, 1994)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
----------
WE WELCOME YOUR OPINION. IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO COMMENT
ON THIS STORY, PLEASE WRITE TO US AT EITHER ONE OF THE
FOLLOWING ADDRESSES:
garfield@aurora.cis.upenn.edu
71764.2561@compuserve.com
The Scientist,
3600 Market Street, Suite 450, Philadelphia, PA 19104
U.S.A.
Fax: (215)387-7542
--------
NXT:
RESEARCH
------------------------------------------------------------
TI : Developmental Neuroscience Blossoming In The 1990s
AU : NEERAJA SANKARAN
TY : RESEARCH
PG : 14
Midway into the 1990s--the "Decade of the Brain," as declared by
the United States Congress--scientists are touting major,
exciting breakthroughs in the neurosciences. Researchers continue
to uncover new aspects of the structure, development, and
function of the brain and nervous system.
According to neurophysiologist Zach Hall, director of the
National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS)
in Bethesda, Md., a particularly active topic of research has
been developmental neuroscience. The study of the formation and
maturation of the nervous system, this subdiscipline encompasses
a broad range of investigations, from the expression of specific
genes to the formation of nerve cells and the organization of the
entire system.
As such, this expanding field draws from a number of basic areas,
including genetics and gene regulation, molecular and cell
biology, biochemistry, and physiology. The wealth of information
to arise from advances in these disciplines, coupled with
increased sophistication in such technologies as imaging,
microscopy, and tissue culture, has enabled both developmental
biologists and neuroscientists to pose hitherto unasked
questions.
For example, Eugene Major, who heads the Laboratory of Molecular
Medicine and Neuroscience at NINDS, points out that "molecular
technologies--gene amplification and expression systems--are much
further along now than they were five to 10 years ago." Such
technologies allow developmental neuroscientists to work with
molecules that are otherwise produced in very low amounts. "The
whole biology of neurotrophic factors and how they control the
genes in developing nerve cells" can be studied now that
scientists can produce and analyze these factors in their labs,
he adds.
"The whole field of developmental biology is very promising--many
basic problems are now being solved," says Carlos Lois, a
physician currently working toward his Ph.D. in neuroscience at
Rockefeller University in New York. Thus, scientists interested
in the development of specific tissues and organ systems are now
able to apply these basic findings toward answering their
particular questions. Developmental neuroscience, Lois notes, is
especially attractive in that "the nervous system is uncharted
territory--many investigators [in-cluding developmental
biologists] are attracted by its complexity."
But the same intricacies that attract and intrigue investigators
have also posed obstacles--in designing and performing
experiments--to the progress of the neurosciences, researchers
say.
"To some extent, the nervous system has been technically
difficult to work with until recently," says Major. "We now have
nervous-system-derived cell cultures with representative
populations of neuronal cells that are reproducible." For Major,
who works on viruses that have a specific predilection for
certain brain cells, for example, such cell cultures are
essential for investigating the mechanisms by which the viruses
infect and reside in the brain.
A boon to the field, he adds, has been the availability of fetal
tissue for research. "Human fetal tissue has played a significant
role in drawing attention to experiments that can be done; we
don't have to rely totally on [animal] model systems," he says.
Because of the high degree of variation in the brains of
different animals, he explains, the results of experiments on
animals cannot always be extrapolated to human disease.
One of Major's areas of research is investigating cell lineage--
namely the course of development and differentiation--of various
cells in the brain, and using this information to study the
pathogenesis of viral infections of the nervous system. For
example, his laboratory has studied the mechanisms of disease
processes of viral-induced leucoencephal-opathies--a group of
infections of non-neuronal brain cells, called glia, in the
brain's white matter often associated with AIDS. Most recently,
the group discovered that HIV-1 is capable of infecting cells
called astrocytes in the developing nervous system. The
researchers postulate that astrocytes probably act as reservoirs
for the virus in cases of AIDS-associated leucoencephalitis (C.
Tornatore et al., Neurology, 44:481-7, 1994). The virus lies
latent in the astrocytes until it reactivates in response to
certain cytokines.
The next step, Major anticipates, is "to understand the mechanism
of the [virus-nerve cell] interaction," and investigate possible
intervention strategies based on blocking either infection of the
cells or the reactivation of the virus.
Dispelling Dogmas
A long-standing belief in the scientific community about the
development of the nervous system in mammals has been that
neuronal cells could grow only prenatally, and that cells were
incapable of migrating over long distances and differentiating
into neurons after birth. Indeed, this dogma was so deeply
entrenched in the research community that an early report
documenting neurogenesis in the brains of adult rats and mice (J.
Altman, G.D. Das, Journal of Comparative Neurology, 124:319,
1965) went largely ignored, says Lois.
"The generation of new neurons was demonstrated in adult canaries
in the 1980s, by which time there were significant technical
advances in the field as well as a change in attitudes," remarks
Lois. "But there was still very little known about neurogenesis
in mammals.
"Certain cells in the lateral ventricles of the [mammalian] brain
were known to divide, but their fate was not known," he explains,
adding that these cells were commonly thought to die or become
glia. Lois investigated the fate of the dividing brain cells from
rats, both in vitro and in vivo, using a combination of labeling
techniques on transgenic animal models.
Recently, Lois and his adviser, Arturo Alvarez-Buylla, a
professor of neuroscience at Rockefeller, published evidence that
neurogenesis does occur in adult mammals. They reported that a
population of dividing cells in the lateral ventricles of the
brain migrate to the olfactory bulb region, where the cells then
differentiate into neurons (C. Lois, A. Alvarez-Buylla, Science,
264:1145-8, 1994).
These findings may have implications in therapeutic approaches to
various neurodegenerative diseases and transplantation, Alvarez-
Buylla and Lois speculate. For instance, by directing precursor
cells to specific parts of a brain, it may be possible to replace
dying cells in the targeted region. But to do this, Lois says,
"it is important to generate specific types of neurons, and as
yet we have no clue on how to do that."
These results have also opened up some interesting questions in
fundamental neurobiology--for example, "Why is the olfactory bulb
targeted for cell replacement?"--he adds. "Even more puzzling is
how memories are maintained when the structure of the cell is
changing as it undergoes differentiation. Normally, we think of
memory as being stored in the synapses between various neurons.
These are all questions to which the answers are completely
unknown."
Leading researchers see the upcoming decades yielding answers to
these and other intriguing questions about how the nervous system
is formed and how it matures. The development of the nervous
system, more than any other system in the body, is particularly
fascinating because of its potential to yield answers to
questions about behavior, memory, and intelligence, scientists
say.
Pasco Rakic, chairman of the neuroanatomy section at the Yale
University School of Medicine, New Haven, Conn., likens the
advance of this field to a house of bricks. "You build up a house
with thousands of bricks--all of them are equally important but
no one is really more important than anything else. Developmental
neuroscience is a whole discipline, not just one area of
research. There are many, many important and exciting things
going on."
(The Scientist, Vol:8, #22, pg.14, November 14, 1994)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
----------
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ON THIS STORY, PLEASE WRITE TO US AT EITHER ONE OF THE
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--------
NXT:
------------------------------------------------------------
TI : NERVE CONNECTIONS
TY : RESEARCH
PG : 14
Society for Neuroscience
11 Dupont Circle, N.W.Suite 500
Washington, D.C. 20036
Phone: (202) 462-6688
* Nancy Beang, executive director
* Carla Shatz, president
* 23,000 members
International Societyfor Developmental Neuroscience
University of TexasMedical Branch
Galveston, Texas 77550-0652
Phone: (409) 772-3667
Fax: (409) 772-8028
E-mail: regino@beach.utmb.edu
* Arne Schousboe, president
* Regino Perez-Polo, secretary-general
* 1,000 members
(The Scientist, Vol:8, #22, pg.14, November 14, 1994)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
----------
WE WELCOME YOUR OPINION. IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO COMMENT
ON THIS STORY, PLEASE WRITE TO US AT EITHER ONE OF THE
FOLLOWING ADDRESSES:
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U.S.A.
--------
NXT:
HOT PAPERS
------------------------------------------------------------
TI : MOLECULAR BIOLOGY
TY : RESEARCH (HOT PAPERS)
PG : 15
C.F. Lesser, C. Guthrie, "Mutations in U6 snRNA that alter
splice-site specificity--implications for the active site,"
Science, 262:1982-88, 1993.
Cammie Lesser (Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, School
of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco): "Nuclear
pre-mRNA splicing is the process by which the introns--the
noncoding portions of precursor mRNAs--are removed and the coding
sequences called exons are ligated together. This process is
mediated by the spliceosome, a cellular complex composed of both
RNA and proteins. A major challenge has been determining how the
components of the spliceosome identify the exact intron/exon
boundaries (splice-sites) and then juxtapose the catalytic
residues of the spliceosome with these boundaries. The
information content at the splice sites is very limited, because
there is a serious problem in maintaining the fidelity of the
reaction.
"Early studies demonstrated that one of the RNAs--the small
nuclear RNA (snRNA) U1--base-pairs with the 5_ splice site. This
RNA-RNA interaction is important for recognizing and committing
the pre-mRNA to the splicing pathway. However, it is not
sufficient to determine the site of 5_ cleavage, since certain
mutations impair fidelity, independent of maintaining this base-
pairing interaction. Thus, the question of how the site of 5_
cleavage is determined long remained unanswered.
"A recent series of in vitro biochemical cross-linking studies,
in both yeasts (H. Sawa, J. Abelson, Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences USA, 89:1269-73, 1992) and mammals (D.A.
Wassarman, J.A. Steitz, Science, 257:1918-25, 1992), indicated
that an invariant region of the highly conserved U6 snRNA is also
in close proximity to the 5_ splice site. In our study, we
performed a series of in vivo genetic studies to demonstrate a
base-pairing interaction between this invariant region of U6
snRNA and the 5_ splice site. Furthermore, by establishing that
the stabilization of the U6 snRNA-5_ splice-site pairing could
improve fidelity, we demonstrated that this interaction plays a
crucial role in determining the exact site of 5_ cleavage. In
addition, we showed that this invariant region of U6 snRNA also
influences the site of 3_ cleavage.
"These results are exciting for several reasons. First, we were
able to determine that the elusive factor responsible for
defining the 5_ cleavage site is the well-characterized and
highly conserved U6 snRNA. Second, our work demonstrates that the
5_ cleavage site is defined by an RNA-RNA interaction, as in the
case of self-splicing introns in which the RNA alone catalyzes
the splicing reaction. Lastly, our discovery provides a missing
link in a previously described network of RNA-RNA interactions
(H.D. Madhani, C. Guthrie, Cell, 71:803-17, 1992) analogous to
those in the catalytic core of self-splicing introns. These
results suggest that the RNA components of the eucaryotic
spliceosome perform the catalytic function in nuclear pre-mRNA
splicing, thus supporting the hypothesis that life evolved from
an 'RNA world.'"
(The Scientist, Vol:8, #22, pg.15, November 14, 1994)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
----------
WE WELCOME YOUR OPINION. IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO COMMENT
ON THIS STORY, PLEASE WRITE TO US AT EITHER ONE OF THE
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U.S.A.
--------
NXT:
------------------------------------------------------------
TI : DEVELOPMENTAL BIOLOGY
TY : RESEARCH (HOT PAPERS)
PG : 15
K.G. Peters, D. Ornitz, S. Werner, L. Williams, "Unique
expression pattern of the FGF receptor 3 gene during mouse
organogenesis," Developmental Biology, 155:423-30, 1993.
Kevin G. Peters (Department of Medicine, Division of Cardiology,
Duke University Medical Center, Durham, N.C.): "Members of the
fibroblast growth factor (FGF) family are powerful regulators of
cell growth and differentiation that stimulate cells by
activating specific receptor, tyrosine kinases. In this and a
previous paper (K.G. Peters et al., Development, 114:233-43,
1992), we have shown that three of the four known FGF receptor
genes are expressed in virtually all differentiating organs, but
that the individual genes have specific patterns of expression
that are, for the most part, nonoverlapping. These results
suggest that FGFs play important roles in the development of
multiple-organ systems and that individual receptor genes have
very specific functions.
"These expression studies have since been used by us and others
to guide efforts to establish specific roles for two of the FGF
receptor genes during organ development. First, knowing that one
of the FGF receptors--FGF receptor 2--was expressed in the
developing lung, we engineered a transgenic mouse that expresses
a specific inhibitor of FGF receptor 2 in its embryonic airways
(K.G. Peters et al., EMBO Journal, 13:3296-301, 1994). These
transgenic mice have a complete absence of airway branching and
of airway-epithelial differentiation, thereby establishing a
critical role for FGFs in early lung development.
"Based on our observation that FGF receptor 3 was expressed in
the cartilage of developing bones, and on data from other groups
that show that the gene for a common form of dwarfism--
achondroplasia--mapped to the same chromosomal region as FGF
receptor 3, Shiang and coworkers demonstrated that patients with
achondroplasia have very specific point mutations in FGF receptor
3, which are likely the cause of this genetic disease (R. Shiang
et al., Cell, 78:335-42, 1994). Thus, proper functioning of FGF
receptor 3 appears to be critical for early skeletal development.
"These two studies have, in turn, led to efforts to test the
ability of FGFs to protect and/or regenerate damaged lung tissue,
and to develop a simple diagnostic test for the prenatal
diagnosis of achondroplasia. Considering that the first FGF
receptor was identified in Rusty Williams's laboratory as
recently as 1989 (P.L. Lee et al., Science, 245:57-60, 1989), our
series of studies illustrates the rapid progress in going from
benchtop to bedside, made possible by modern molecular biology."
(The Scientist, Vol:8, #22, pg.15, November 14, 1994)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
----------
WE WELCOME YOUR OPINION. IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO COMMENT
ON THIS STORY, PLEASE WRITE TO US AT EITHER ONE OF THE
FOLLOWING ADDRESSES:
garfield@aurora.cis.upenn.edu
71764.2561@compuserve.com
The Scientist,
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U.S.A.
--------
NXT:
------------------------------------------------------------
TI : PLANT BIOLOGY
TY : RESEARCH (HOT PAPERS)
PG : 15
J.T. Weeks, O.D. Anderson, A.E. Blechl, "Rapid production of
multiple independent lines of fertile transgenic wheat (Triticum
aestivum)," Plant Physiology, 102:1077-84, 1993.
J. Troy Weeks (United States Department of Agriculture,
Agricultural Research Service, Western Regional Research Center,
Albany, Calif.): "Although wheat was transformed genetically in
1992 (V. Vasil et al., Bio/Technology, 10:667-74, 1992), an
improved transformation system had yet to be established to make
bioengineering of this grain crop experimentally practical. Our
goal was to develop a protocol for wheat transformation that
would allow any suitably equipped laboratory to achieve
transformation on their first try. We were successful in
establishing a transformation protocol that yielded multiple
transformed wheat lines without excessive effort, was
reproducible on a regular basis, and yielded fertile transgenic
lines that passed on the genotypes and phenotypes to successive
generations. The protocol also makes it feasible, for the first
time, to study protomer and protein functions in trans- genic
wheat.
"Our protocol describes certain key elements that appear to
influence transformation efficiency, frequency, and success. We
used the cultivar Bobwhite, which forms callus tissue very
readily and is highly embryogenic. DNA was introduced into five-
day-old calli, which are derived from immature embryos using the
particle-bombardment approach. Selection was based upon the use
of the bar gene and the herbicide bialaphos.
"Our protocol represents a general outline for achieving wheat
transformation that is both reproducible and reliable. Scientists
can use this outlined protocol to establish wheat transformation
in their laboratory and then apply it to their own research
programs.
"Recent reports describing wheat transformation (V. Vasil et al.,
Bio/Technology, 11:1553-58, 1993; N.S. Nehra et al., Plant
Journal, 5:285-97, 1994; D. Becker et al., Plant Journal, 5:299-
307, 1994) include most, if not all, the aforementioned elements.
Recent optimization of our protocol has increased the
transformation frequency to greater than 1 percent. Follow-up
work includes adapting our system to introducing agronomically
important traits into commercial wheat cultivars."
(The Scientist, Vol:8, #22, pg.15, November 14, 1994)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
----------
WE WELCOME YOUR OPINION. IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO COMMENT
ON THIS STORY, PLEASE WRITE TO US AT EITHER ONE OF THE
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--------
NXT:
TOOLS & TECHNOLOGY SECTION
------------------------------------------------------------
TI : Better Understanding Of Cell's Life Eases Culturing
AU : RICKI LEWIS
TY : TOOLS & TECHNOLOGY
PG : 16
The term "cell culture" brings to mind several cliches--"if it
ain't broke, don't fix it" and "the more things change, the more
they remain the same," to name a few. While the requirements of
cells growing in culture haven't changed over the years, better
understanding of the precise combinations of nutrients, growth
factors, attachment factors, and the like necessary for a cell's
life apart from the organism has eased cell culture, always an
integral part of the cell biology laboratory.
"Lots of companies come out with media or reagents for this or
that, and make a big splash, but they're all basically
derivatives of traditional products," says Hayden Coon, a former
National Institutes of Health re-searcher who is the founder of
Human Cell Therapies Inc. of Chebeague Island, Maine.
"Some companies call new products proprietary, but they're just
developed slightly beyond the original. They are variations on a
standard theme. But as long as it meets the goals of what we're
doing, we're satisfied," asserts Coon, whose biotech startup is
planning to develop pancreatic islets and other cell implants for
treating human disease.
Although suppliers of cell-culture media and reagents often rely
on established formulations developed in the 1950s, such as the
popular Dulbecco's modified eagle medium, they have managed to
keep pace with the many new discoveries in cell biology, offering
an assortment of individual reagents, kits, and custom services
for culturing a variety of cell types.
An Industry Merges And Matures
Cell culture has evolved along with molecular biology advances in
general, and to recombinant DNA technology in particular. Before
the late 1970s, cells were coaxed to thrive in culture so that
their secreted natural products could be collected. With the
advent of recombinant DNA technology, researchers and then
pharmaceutical manufacturers could endow cells with new synthetic
capabilities, ushering in the age of "biological" therapeutics.
"True tissue-culture people are trying to maintain cultures with
growth factors, cytokines, and such. There's no change there from
years past. But there are now more people using cell culture as a
tool to investigate what cells do," comments Shari Harrison,
product manager for a line of cell-proliferation and cell-death
kits from Indianapolis-based Boehringer Mannheim Corp. "Molecular
biology, cell biology, immunology, and biochemistry--once
separate disciplines--are now totally merged," she says,
referring to the diverse scientists who now use the kits.
The future of the field, according to many researchers, will be
in implants. Unlike the past uses of cell culture as an incubator
to churn out a needed biochemical, cell-implant technology aims
to nurture cells for the purpose of transferring them to a human
body, where their secreted products will prove therapeutic. "I
envision, perhaps 20 years from now, a series of ampules, on
shelves, with cell therapies administered by a nurse to anyone
who has a complaint," Coon predicts.
Cell-culture supply companies will not have to shift gears much,
if at all, to accommodate the fledgling field. "Cell-therapy
technology may have a different goal than traditional cell
culture, but the companies that already manufacture media can
just follow the recipes of any research group, according to what
types of cells they plan to implant," Coon adds.
What Cells Need
Most researchers use secondary cell cultures, grown from cell
lines obtained from another researcher or from a facility such as
the American Type Culture Collection of Rockville, Md. For a
researcher to start a primary culture--one directly from an
organism--cells must first be disassociated. This might involve
using a protease (such as trypsin or collagenase) and a chelating
agent to chemically break apart adherent cells, and then a
mechanical disruptor to further separate them. Cell types are
then grouped by physical differences such as weight, size, or
cell-surface topography. Cells are given enough space, in an
appropriate biochemical milieu, not only to survive, but also to
divide and specialize. Epithelial cells in culture form sheets;
muscle cells join into pulsating groups; neurons sprout
extensions; fibroblasts churn out collagen.
A culture medium typically includes nutrients (amino acids, a
carbohydrate such as glucose or galactose, and vitamins),
inorganic salts (of magnesium, sodium, potassium, calcium,
phosphate, chloride, sulfate, and bicarbonate), antibiotics, and
perhaps a fungicide such as amphotericin B. Also included are
chemicals for the culturist's benefit--phenol red to indicate pH,
and trypan blue to distinguish dead from living cells.
The Trend Away From Serum
Until recently, another basic component of cell-culture medium
was serum, usually from fetal calf or horse. Serum provides a
wealth of benefits to cells, including nutrients, hormones,
attachment factors, and carrier proteins for water-insoluble
compounds. Serum also neutralizes some toxins and buffers the
culture medium. But using serum has a drawback--it adds a whole
set of unknowns, possibly including infectious agents such as
viruses and mycoplasma. "Actually, using serum is okay, if your
goal is to grow cells. But if your goal is to grow cells and
understand their physiology, you need another kind of approach,"
according to Coon.
That approach is to use low-serum or serum-free media, which
means that what leaves with the serum must be replaced with
whatever mix of growth factors, hormones, and cytokines a
particular cell type prefers. Another reason to minimize serum
usage, or at least to track its geographic origin, is the recent
outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or "mad cow
disease," in England. Concern over contaminated serum prompted
the Food and Drug Administration to alert cell-culture reagent
manufacturers, on Dec. 17, 1993, that they shouldn't use bovine
materials from England and other European nations where BSE is
seen. "Now the industry is looking for serum sources from only a
few places--the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, and Australia," says
Richard Wilkinson, senior director of research and product
development at HyClone Laboratories Inc. of Logan, Utah.
Cost is also a factor in avoiding serum. HyClone's FetalClone
serum substitutes are about half the price of serum-based media.
"We picked the name to convince the public that it looks like
bovine serum-based media, but it's not," notes Wilkinson.
FetalClone I is suited to hybridomas, II to Chinese hamster ovary
(CHO) cells, and III to fibroblasts.
HyClone also offers a Complete Culture Media (CCM) line that is
serum-free. Says Lucy Cherbas, staff scientist at Indiana
University, Bloomington: "We grow some of our Drosophila cell
lines on HyClone's serum-free CCM 3 medium, which is cheaper than
mixing up a serum-based medium. They won't tell us what's in it,
but we have no need to know--the cells grow!" CCM 3 is
specialized for insect cells. Other CCM products target
hybridomas (CCM 1), human fibroblasts (CCM 2), keratinocytes (CCM
4), and CHO cells (CCM 5).
Another vendor of serum-free insect media is JRH Biosciences of
Lenexa, Kan., which offers kits consisting of complete, assembled
media called EX-CELL 400, 401, and 405. In addition to
Drosophila, a mainstay of genetics, another big market for insect
cell-culture media is the baculovirus expression system that uses
ovarian (Sf-9) cells of the pupa of the armyworm Spodoptera
frugiperda.
St. Louis-based Sigma Chemical Co. also offers serum-free media
kits tailored to specific cell types. "Each kit is composed of
basal medium plus necessary supplements," says Joel White,
technical services representative in cell culture. The
keratinocyte medium kit (KMK-1), for example, includes basal
medium, bovine insulin, bovine pituitary extract, human
recombinant epidermal growth factor, gentamicin, amphotericin B,
and hydrocortisone. Other kits are useful for culturing
fibroblasts or endothelial cells. "The kits save researchers not
only time, but they save economically," White adds. "If a
researcher were to buy all of the growth factors needed to
supplement a cell culture, it would be very expensive. He or she
would be trapped into buying larger quantities than needed. The
kit puts it all together quite conveniently."
Patrick Chang, product group manager at BioWhittaker Inc. of
Walkersville, Md., ticks off what he considers the top four "of
about 20" reasons to avoid serum. "The biggest reason is that
animal blood may contain viruses, some that we have no assay for.
If you are running a pharmaceutical or biotech company and are
manufacturing a drug or a biological, using cells in culture with
serum-based media is taking a large risk. Second is the cost, and
third is the consistency. When a lot of media runs out, and a
researcher gets some from a new lot, there can be large
differences in content. Finally, because of the defined nature of
serum-free medium, we know exactly what's in it. Parts of serum
may be unknown, such as growth factors we don't yet know about."
BioWhittaker offers a new serum-free product, called Ultra-MEM.
"Most serum based media require 5 to 10 percent serum to work
well. Our new formulation requires less than 10 percent," reports
Chang. The company also custom-manufactures medium. Human Cell
Therapies' Coon is one satisfied customer. "We gave BioWhittaker
a list, and they did a magnificent job. They did it well, fast,
and we got good results," he says.
For researchers choosing to buy single cell-culture components
and cook up their own defined medium, most vendors offering kits
also sell individual items, such as growth factors, antibiotics,
and amino acids. Some companies sell combinations of reagents,
such as JRH Bioscience's EX-CELL 900, which is a premixed
preparation of bovine insulin, transferrin, and selenium, the
three most commonly used media supplements for mammalian cell
culture. The trio of chemicals enhances proliferation of many
cell types, while decreasing serum needs from 10 percent to 2
percent, according to company literature.
Intergen Co., located in Purchase, N.Y., doesn't itself offer
kits, because it has so much business supplying individual cell-
culture reagents to companies that then package them in this way,
according to Michael Budnick, manager of technical/marketing
services. For example, the company is the largest supplier in the
world of bovine albumin, a plasma protein.
"It's being used more and more in biotechnology and
pharmaceutical production where customers are trying to get away
from fetal bovine serum and use a more defined medium. You can
reduce or eliminate fetal bovine serum if you use albumin,
transferrin, insulin, and growth factors," says Budnick. Albumin
has numerous roles in cell culture, including stabilizing,
providing protein, and protecting against oxygen damage.
Several new products are keeping cell-culture technology on track
with cell biology advances, ranging from individual reagents, to
kits, to entire bioreactor systems.
Attaining Attachment
Switching from serum-based medium to serum-free medium stresses
cells. The finicky cells might not attach to the new surface, or
may not proliferate. As cells that can't adapt die, the nature of
the cell population subtly shifts, altering experimental results.
San Diego-based Protein Polymer Technologies Inc. offers
ProNectin F, which can ease this tough transition for cells. The
product is a protein polymer built of repeats of a tripeptide
that is part of fibronectin, a natural attachment factor,
encapsulated in a polymer coating. The protein portion is
synthesized in recombinant bacteria. "ProNectin F allows the
rapid passage of cells from serum-based to serum-free media
without extensive weaning protocols," explains Mary Forrest,
product manager. "It's ready to use, which appeals to industry,
as opposed to culturing with lots of reagents," she adds.
Cellco Inc. of Germantown, Md., for example, uses ProNectin F in
its CELLMAX Artificial Capillary Cell Culture Systems, designed
for growing mammalian cells for research and pharmaceutical
applications. Eventually, the device will be used for ex vivo
cellular therapy, in which a patient's cells are collected,
cultured in the system, altered genetically, allowed to
proliferate with the correction, then returned to the patient,
where their bolstered capabilities should correct a disease
state. "Cellco and its collaborators have confirmed that
ProNectin F provides for im-proved cell adhesion and growth while
enhancing the biocompatibility of our products," says R. William
Lynn, president and CEO of Cellco. "These are very critical
considerations when working with therapeutically useful cells
such as endothelial and bone marrow stroma."
Cell Proliferation And Death
Boehringer Mannheim offers several kits that embrace a more
molecular approach to monitoring the life, reproduction, and
death of a cell. "It used to be that, to study cell
proliferation, you'd put yourself at a microscope and count
cells. Now there are several ways to do it," notes product
manager Harrison.
"The MTT and XTT Cell Proliferation Kits measure metabolic
activity in the cell, using tetrazolium salts in a nonradioactive
colorimetric assay," Boehringer technical services scientist
Sharon Mountain explains. The salts are oxidized by cellular and
mitochondrial enzymes, forming a dye. "But there is a danger of
not getting perfect data if cells show increased metabolism, but
are not proliferating. So the user can look at a true indication
of proliferation, which is DNA synthesis," adds product manager
Harrison. She is referring to researchers working with the
company's cell-proliferation kits, based on incorporation of
bromodeoxyuridine (BrdU), a base analog, into replicating DNA. A
fluorescently tagged antibody to BrdU highlights cells that have
incorporated the analog, indicating new cells and therefore
measuring proliferation.
Keeping pace with what Harrison calls an "exploding" interest in
programmed cell death (apoptosis), Boehringer Mannheim offers two
products, the Cell Death Detection Kit (introduced in February)
and the Cellular DNA Fragmentation Kit (introduced in May).
Programmed cell death is an active process that sends a cell
through a characteristic sequence of events. At first, blebs form
from the cell membrane, the cytoplasm condenses, and the nuclear
membrane breaks down.
The next step is where the test intervenes. The self-destructing
cell produces an endonuclease that cuts up its DNA--but only at
sites where the nucleic acid is exposed, and not protected by the
histone proteins that form part of a chromosome's structure.
After the endonuclease snips the double helix into 180-base-pair
stretches of DNA hidden in histones, the cell shatters, and
scavenging cells absorb its remains. This dance of death is
distinct from other ways that cells die. The products can help
researchers distinguish between necrosis, which is the passive
breakdown of structures as a cell dies, and apoptosis, which is
an active process. Because these routes to cell death differ,
they may underlie different disease states.
The Cell Death Detection test is an immunoassay that utilizes
anti-histone antibodies to detect the characteristically sized
histone-DNA complexes the endonuclease liberates. The Cellular
DNA Fragmentation test uses BrdU to quantitate the DNA pieces.
Back To Basics
The promising future of cell-implant technology has led some cell
culturists to reexamine the state of their art, because the need
for the technology is compelling. "About 6,000 pancreases are
donated a year, two or three are needed to cure one patient of
diabetes, and there are 1.4 million diabetics. This is an area
where amplified cells in culture could make a great impact," says
Human Therapies' Coon.
But cell-implant technology won't be feasible until cell
culturists learn much more about the individual requirements of
different cell types, says Randal A. Goffe, chief technical
officer and vice president at Unisyn Corp., headquartered in
Tustin, Calif. "The reason hepatocytes have taken so long to work
in an artificial liver, and artificial pancreases and livers have
never succeeded clinically, is because cell-culture systems
aren't efficient enough," he explains.
"At the current metabolic efficiency, you need massive numbers of
cells to treat one person," Goffe adds. "But if the cells were
performing at their peak efficiency, you would need only a small
device, and a realistic number of cells. At that point, we will
attain clinical efficiency. Cell culture is the key to moving
forward in cellular therapy. We must discover the nuances of how
to treat cells. No one has optimized cell-culture and bioreactor
technology. We must go back to basics, not just throw cells into
something and hope for the best."
Researchers at Unisyn are taking that "tear it down and build it
back up" approach to perfect a product in development called
Unigrow, which is a hollow-fiber bioreactor. Cells grow in narrow
spaces between hollow fibers bundled into glass or plastic
cylinders. The setup mimics an animal's circulatory system, with
fibers delivering oxygen and nutrients, and taking away wastes
and secreted substances.
Goffe is currently attacking what he calls "the oxygen paradox"--
the fact that cells need oxygen, but too much of it or too close
contact is lethal. "In cell culture, when you increase the
oxygen, you kill the cells," he says. "From an engineering
standpoint, how do we design a system so that doesn't happen?
That's what we're involved in."
He is evaluating several hemoglobin-based formulations as oxygen
deliverers in the Unigrow bioreactor-in-progress. "It only works
if you separate the cells from the hemoglobin, and that's where a
hollow-fiber bioreactor comes in," he points out. "Like in the
body, the hemoglobin products bind carbon dioxide where metabolic
wastes build up and drops it, picking up oxygen, in regions where
oxygen's partial pressure is higher." Goffe adds that the system
works on any cell type, even the notoriously fussy hybridomas.
Goffe is particularly interested in hematopoietic stem cells. He
founded Bothall, Wash.-based Cellpro Inc., a company specializing
in stem-cell separation. Stem-cell culture could be invaluable in
treating many disorders, because these cells give rise to mature
blood cells. Nurturing stem cells in vitro presents quite a
challenge, because they often progress through several distinct
stages before attaining their final differentiated state.
He notes: "It is important to control the microenvironment for
hematopoietic stem cells, and to supply nutrients, oxygen, and a
specialized medium for long-term expansion. To do this, you must
go back to first principles--strip the system down to simple
components and rebuild."
Ricki Lewis is a textbook author and freelance science writer
based in Scotia, N.Y.
(The Scientist, Vol:8, #22, pg.16, November 14, 1994)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
----------
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--------
NXT:
------------------------------------------------------------
TI : CELL-CULTURE MEDIA SUPPLIERS DIRECTORY
TY : TOOLS & TECHNOLOGY
PG : 20
AdvancedBiotechnologies Inc.
Columbia, MD
Circle No. 210 on Reader Service Card
American QualexAntibodies
La Mirada, CA
Circle No. 212 on Reader Service Card
American Type Culture Collection (ATCC)
Rockville, MD
Circle No. 211 on Reader Service Card
BioWhittaker Inc.
Walkersville, MD
Circle No. 214 on Reader Service Card
Boehringer Mannheim Corp.
Indianapolis, IN
Circle No. 215 on Reader Service Card
Cell Systems Corp.
Seattle, WA
Circle No. 217 on Reader Service Card
Cellco Inc.
Germantown, MD
Circle No. 218 on Reader Service Card
Cellpro Inc.
Bothall, WA
Circle No. 219 on Reader Service Card
Celox Laboratories
Hopkins, MN
Circle No. 216 on Reader Service Card
Electron Microscopy Sciences
Fort Washington, PA
Circle No. 220 on Reader Service Card
Fluka Chemical Corp.
Ronkonkoma, NY
Circle No. 221 on Reader Service Card
Gallard-Schlesinger Industries Inc.
Carle Place, NY
Circle No. 222 on Reader Service Card
Human Cell Therapies Inc.
Chebeague Island, ME
Circle No. 223 on Reader Service Card
HyClone Laboratories Inc.
Logan, UT
Circle No. 224 on Reader Service Card
ICN Biomedicals Inc.
Costa Mesa, CA
Circle No. 225 on Reader Service Card
Intergen Co.
Purchase, NY
Circle No. 226 on Reader Service Card
Irvine Scientific, Inc.
Santa Ana, CA
Circle No. 227 on Reader Service Card
JRH Biosciences
Lenexa, KS
Circle No. 228 on Reader Service Card
Life Technologies Inc.
Gaithersburg, MD
Circle No. 229 on Reader Service Card
Mallinckrodt Specialty Chemicals Co.
Chesterfield, MO
Circle No. 230 on Reader Service Card
Pharmacia Biotech Inc.
Piscataway, NJ
Circle No. 231 on Reader Service Card
Promega Corp.
Madison, WI
Circle No. 232 on Reader Service Card
Protein PolymerTechnologies Inc.
San Diego, CA
Circle No. 233 on Reader Service Card
Research Diagnostics Inc.
Flanders, NJ
Circle No. 234 on Reader Service Card
Research Organics Inc.
Cleveland, OH
Circle No. 235 on Reader Service Card
RocklandImmunochemicals
Gilbertsville, PA
Circle No. 236 on Reader Service Card
Sigma Chemical Co.
St. Louis, MO
Circle No. 237 on Reader Service Card
Thomas Scientific
Swedesboro, NJ
Circle No. 238 on Reader Service Card
Unisyn Corp.
Tustin, CA
Circle No. 239 on Reader Service Card
Wako BioProducts
Richmond, VA
Circle No. 240 on Reader Service Card
WorthingtonBiochemical Corp.
Freehold, NJ
Circle No. 241 on Reader Service Card
(The Scientist, Vol:8, #22, pg.20, November 14, 1994)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
----------
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--------
NXT:
------------------------------------------------------------
TI : NEUROSCIENCE PRODUCTS SHOWCASE
TY : TOOLS & TECHNOLOGY
PG : 21
Stoelting Launches Line Of Stereotaxic Instruments
The new line is designed for experiments involving small animals
in either the student or basic research laboratory. Based on the
standard U-frame design, the instruments offer several new
features, including: scales that face the open end of the U-
frame, the typical working position of the researcher; a secure
lock on the tilting mechanism; and a custom lead screw for a
faster drive. Both single- and dual-manipulator models are
available.
Stoelting Co., Wood Dale, IL
Circle No. 202 on Reader Service Card
Booth Numbers 218, 220, 222
----
Fluorescent Sample-Analysis System
Molecular Dynamics' Vistra FluorImager SI is a system for
quantitative analysis of fluorescent gels, blots, thin-layer
chromatography (TLC), and microplates. It holds larger samples
than can be accommodated in Molecular Dynamics' FluorImager 575
system, the product it replaces. The larger sample capacity
allows researchers to use standard, long-format, glass-sandwiched
gels, which are popular for human identification and other one-
dimensional gel applications. The new system also is controlled
through a SCSI interface from an external Windows NT workstation.
Molecular Dynamics, Sunnyvale, CA
Booth Number 227 & 229
Circle No. 203 on Reader Service Card
----
Photon Unveils Ratio Fluorescence Spectrometer
The RatioMaster Ratio Fluorescence Spectrometer is designed for
quantitative determination of ions inside living cells. Using
Fura-2 and other fluorescence probes, the instrument measures
calcium, potassium, magnesium, pH, and other ions in single cells
or cell populations. It can be configured as a cuvette system, a
microscope photometry system, or an imaging system.
Photon Technology International, South Brunswick, NJ
Circle No. 204 on Reader Service Card
Booth Number 839
----
Owl Scientific's Tapeless Sequencing Gel Caster Debuts
The Otter Sequencing Gel Caster casts gels in three minutes using
a sliding method. It relies on surface tension, so no taping is
required and gels are reportedly bubble-free without leaking
problems. The caster is adjustable to fit standard sizes of
sequencing glass plates.
Owl Scientific Inc., Woburn, MA Booth Number 1335
Circle No. 210 on Reader Service Card
----
Zeiss Introduces Automated Coverslipper From MICROM
The Cover-Tech Coverslipper, manufactured by MICROM of Walldorf,
Germany, automatically attaches glass coverslips to microscope
slides at a rate said to be up to 500 per hour. The unit is
designed for cytological smears and preparations as well as
histological sections. It features a touch keypad, integrated
halogen illumination, slide counter, and automatic error display.
Carl Zeiss Inc., Microscope Division, Thornwood, NY
Circle No. 208 on Reader Service Card
Booth Numbers 622-630
----
Immunoassay System For Protein Quantitation
The ORIGEN Immunoassay System is an automated research analyzer
and line of reagents for the development and analysis of
immunoassays based on electrochemiluminescence. The unit provides
solution-phase binding kinetics in 15 to 30 minutes. Homologous
assay formats allow for discrimination of bound vs. unbound
analyte without separation or washing steps. A range of
immunoassays has been developed using this system, including
separation, nonseparation, competitive, and sandwich immunometric
assays.
IGEN Inc., Rockville, MD Booth Numbers 810, 812
Circle No. 206 on Reader Service Card
----
Pharmacia Announces Nucleic Acid Preparation Kit
EasyPrep offers a standardized method for nucleic acid
preparation to researchers requiring nucleic acids from bacteria,
in vitro DNA synthesis, polymerase chain reaction, and other
sources. Positive air pressure from the kit's pump pushes liquid
through as many as 24 filter and column wells held in sample
plates in a sealed processing unit. Four kits containing
disposable filters, column wells, and ready-made solutions are
available separately, each containing material for 24
purifications. The specialized kits are Plasmid, M13, PCR, and
Oligo Prep.
Pharmacia Biotech, Piscataway, NJ
Circle No. 207 on Reader Service Card
Booth Numbers 636-638-640, 735-737-739
----
New Physiological Data Logger From Mini-Mitter
The Mini-Logger Series 2000, a compact and wearable unit,
provides physiological data on ambulatory subjects. The
instrument's programmability enables users to designate
combinations of heart rate, temperature, and activity channels as
well as select sampling frequency in seconds, minutes, hours, or
days. It samples four standard channels plus a heart-rate or
Inter-Beat Interval optional channel, and has a minimum of 128K
memory for data storage.
Mini-Mitter Co., Sunriver, OR
Booth Number 1336
Circle No. 205 on Reader Service Card
----
(The Scientist, Vol:8, #22, pg.21, November 14, 1994)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
----------
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ON THIS STORY, PLEASE WRITE TO US AT EITHER ONE OF THE
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--------
NXT:
PROFESSION
------------------------------------------------------------
TI : More Researchers Are 'Transitioning' Into Sales Careers
AU : RICKI LEWIS
TY : PROFESSION
PG : 24
In order to cope with a job market that over the past 10 years
has become less secure, some scientists are doing what recruiters
and career counselors term "transitioning"--identifying
combinations of skills and talents that might be parlayed into a
nontraditional career.
Dorothy Rodmann, a career-services consultant at the Washington,
D.C.-based American Chemical Society (ACS), is seeing
transitioning becoming a necessity for an increasing number of
chemists. "In light of what has been happening in the job market-
-downsizing and strategic changes in direction [among chemical
companies]--many chemists are looking at ways to move in
different directions, and use their chemical knowledge and
skills, often in nontraditional careers," she reports.
The need to identify alternative career tracks extends beyond
chemistry. And one area beginning to attract scientists is sales.
On the surface, traditional scientific training may not seem to
provide any skills necessary for a career in sales. But a
personable scientist who has conducted research, trained
students, lectured--and even, once upon a time, successfully sold
fast-food burgers or Girl Scout cookies--might just have what it
takes to sell the tools of the scientific trade, according to
recruiters, sales managers, and scientists who have made the
switch.
Linda Romagnano, product manager at National Labnet Co. Inc. of
Woodbridge, N.J., has found a sales career to be a preferable
alternative to the academic world. Upon earning her Ph.D. in
ecology at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., she did
postdoctoral research in cell and developmental biology. But
after seven years as a postdoc, she looked for a change. "I felt
the academic route was not what I wanted," she recalls. "It
wasn't satisfying, and I didn't like the grant thing. People were
having a hard time getting grants, and I didn't want to be
competitive in that way. I felt I'd rather be competitive in
business. It was, admittedly, a huge jump."
Recruiters are seeing more scientists wishing to explore
nontraditional careers such as sales. None of the scientific
societies contacted by The Scientist keeps separate statistics on
the number of researchers going into this type of work. But
Michael Neuschatz, senior research associate in the education and
employment division of the College Park, Md.-based American
Institute of Physics (AIP), says that AIP's most recent figures
indicate that 40 percent of physics Ph.D.'s end up in fields
outside of research. While this high number would include bench
scientists who go on to become vice presidents of research, it
also encompasses those in sales, publishing, and marketing,
according to Neuschatz.
"I get so many people at the bench who want to leave, it's
unbelievable," remarks Leonard Kalvert, president of New York
City-based Kalvert Personnel Service Inc., who has placed
scientists for 26 years. "Many scientists find that science was
more fun in school than it proved to be at work. They're tired of
the bench, find the work repetitious, boring. So many scientists
don't want to be in the lab, even those right out of school."
James Iannoni, president of James Iannoni and Associates Inc. in
Hampton, Conn., agrees with Kalvert: "We too have seen more
candidates for alternative careers in the last six to nine
months. What's precipitating it is that academics are tired of
the precarious grant scene, and in industry, scientists must
contend with restructuring, realigning, and downsizing. With this
lack of stability, some scientists say they are amenable to other
career options."
"I've very definitely noted an increasing interest in the whole
concept of career transitioning, and different ways to use
chemistry," adds Rodmann, author of a forthcoming ACS publication
called Transitioning for Chemistry:
Making It Happen.
For Romagnano, it was an ad in the newspaper that made her
realize how her particular experiences fit the profile of a
scientific sales specialist. "This company wanted someone with a
molecular biology background who was good with people, and was
highly visible," she says. "I felt I qualified. I had taught
genetics, lecturing to a large group. I was constantly training
people in the lab, and this position required training others.
The only thing I was lacking was business skills, but everyone
said you can learn that. It's the science you can't learn," she
says. National Labnet, where she has worked for a year, sells
thermal cyclers, shakers, centrifuges, and other scientific
equipment.
At first, Romagnano says, she had regrets about leaving research.
"But I've been surprised at how much I've enjoyed learning more
about business," she declares.
Why Firms Want Scientists
Despite the current uncertain economic climate, many companies
are well aware of the value of a person with that rare mix of
scientific and "people" skills. "In understanding intricate
applications, there's no question that a scientifically trained
individual, and not just someone with a business degree, is in a
really far better position to effectively represent the company,"
notes Iannoni.
Companies seek expertise in particular areas--such as
chromatography or peptide sequencing--as well as a broader
ability to see how all of the instrumentation in a laboratory
functions together to facilitate the customer's research. And for
that, there's no substitute for research experience. "It's much
more important to understand people's applications than to know
sales strategy. They can teach you that," says Armand Scatena, a
sales representative (a field engineer, in company parlance) for
Hewlett-Packard Co. in Wilmington, Del. "The trick is to
understand what people do. I am a problem solver. I provide
solutions, so I must understand their problems."
Scatena sells chromatography and spectrophotometer equipment to
General Electric Corp. and other clients in the Albany, N.Y.,
area. Hewlett-Packard requires its sales personnel to have a
bachelor's or master's degree in a science. Scatena has an M.S.
in chemistry, and has been in sales for nine years.
John Dresher, manager of recruiting and placement at Merck and
Co. Inc. of West Point, Pa., emphasizes that a mix of science and
business skills, as well as personality, is required to sell
well. A sales representative, he points out, "must communicate
effectively. Some people might do this by injecting humor, others
by being authoritative. Other folks can't do it at all."
Getting Into Sales
How can a scientist make a salesworthy personality apparent to
potential employers? Revamping the curriculum vita is a first
step. "A scientist interested in a sales position needs to
generate a resume that has a different flair," Iannoni advises.
"When a company looks for a sales profile, they look for key
indicators on a resume that point to an outgoing personality.
Things in a resume can [demonstrate] that. They look at hobbies,
for example." He placed one mechanical engineer at a company's
automotive division, for example, because the candidate's resume
mentioned an interest in cars.
Recruiters suggest that scientists list sales as the career
objective on their resume, and be sure to mention those fast-food
and cookie-selling jobs of the past. "Any kind of sales
experience is important," stresses Iannoni. "If you worked in a
store during college, that's important. Working in that capacity
shows you were using good people skills. Scientific training
doesn't include this."
Charles Kelleher is one scientist who educated himself in
business. He has a Ph.D. in veterinary microbiology, and
describes himself as a poultry-health specialist, or "chicken
doctor." Always fascinated by marketing and organizational
management of companies, Kelleher has worked for a commercial
poultry company, then a vaccine manufacturer, and for the past
six years has been director of marketing and sales at Kirkegaard
Perry Laboratories Inc. of Gaithersburg, Md., a provider of
diagnostic kits for the poultry industry.
Kelleher is self-taught in business. "The Ph.D. provides the
knowledge base," he says. "I acquired business skills through
some courses. There are lots of management-training programs [at
companies] that a scientist could enroll in. I also did a lot of
background reading, and learned some things by trial and error."
On The Job Scientists in sales point out that their careers
aren't necessarily better or worse than research positions in
government, industry, or academia--just different. And, like all
jobs, sales has its ups and downs.
"The advantages of travel are that you visit laboratories and
meet people, and every day is different. On the other hand, being
on the road several times a week does detract from one's personal
life," comments Scatena, who travels about 25 percent of the
time.
The travel is often what allows a scientist-turned-salesperson to
stay up-to-date, by being on the science scene. "A scientifically
trained sales rep might spend a couple of days at [the National
Institutes of Health] in a particular lab, discussing, for
example, an aspect of the Human Genome Proj-ect," Kalvert notes.
"He or she must understand the group's research to see where the
company's products fit in."
Romagnano keeps abreast of research news and trends by presenting
her company's products at major cell biology and neuroscience
meetings, where she can meet and mingle with scientists as well
as listen to talks. Kelleher advises that continuing to attend
meetings and going to seminars are good ways to stay current.
Salaries in sales jobs are at least on a par with those of
assistant professorships and entry-level Ph.D. positions in
industrial research, according to Romagnano, and may be higher at
large pharmaceutical companies than at fledgling biotech firms.
But figures fluctuate greatly. "Income varies. Some companies are
salary-oriented, some work more on commission, some allow sales
reps to buy a piece of the company," says Paul Kaufman, sales
manager at PGC Scientifics Corp. in Gaithersburg. Kaufman has a
B.S. in biology, a B.A. in chemistry, and research experience at
NIH.
Kelleher adds: "The money is better in business, but you earn
every penny. The responsibility and what's required of you are
much greater."
Beyond Sales
It's not uncommon for a Ph.D. scientist who gets a taste of the
business world through a stint in sales to rise in a company, to
such areas as technical services or regulatory affairs. "An R&D
scientist may move up by becoming more involved in production and
management," says Kelleher. Even those scientists who stay in
sales often assume greater responsibility than simply selling a
microscope here or a cell-disruption kit there. "I help our sales
force, train them," Romagnano explains. "My job is to get the
reps technically competent so that after I go out two or three
times with them, they do not need me. I also provide technical
support for our customers."
Recruiter Iannoni has seen many scientific careers at many
companies. "Whatever the technical area--pharmaceuticals, medical
devices, telecommunications--the upper echelons come less from
research and more from sales and marketing. You commonly see that
progression," he says.
The key to entering a career in sales--or any alternative to the
traditional science trajectory--is a broadened outlook and
flexibility, and the ability to envision technical expertise and
talents in a different setting. Notes Kelleher: "My advice to a
scientist contemplating a career in sales is to balance and
broaden the educational scope, as well as job experience."
Ricki Lewis is a freelance science writer based in Scotia, N.Y.
(The Scientist, Vol:8, #22, pg.24, November 14, 1994)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
----------
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--------
NXT:
PEOPLE
------------------------------------------------------------
TI : Former SSC Official Assumes Key PostAt National
Laboratory
AU : NEERAJA SANKARAN
TY : PROFESSION (PEOPLE)
PG : 25
Thomas Kirk, the former deputy director of the now-defunct
superconducting supercollider (SSC) laboratory in Waxahachie,
Texas, has assumed the position of associate director for high-
energy and nuclear physics at the United States Department of
Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y. He began
his job October 3. Kirk took over the position from Melvin
Schwartz, who left the laboratory to become the I.I. Rabi
Professor at New York City's Columbia University.
Kirk, a high-energy physicist by training, will be responsible
for the physics department, the alternate gradient synchrotron
(AGS) department, the instrumentation division, and the Center
for Accelerator Physics at Brookhaven.
Kirk says of his immediate goals for his new position, "My first
job is to make sure that the programs are sustained as planned,"
before embarking on new ventures.
Of all the programs under way at the laboratory, Kirk considers
the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) program as the most
important. Expected to be fully operational by 1999, RHIC will
enable physicists to study heavy-ion collisions for ions as large
as gold, and thus "investigate the physics of the Big Bang. We
are hoping to re-create the quark-gluon plasma that existed one
microsecond after the creation of the universe."
Such experiments, he adds, while not proving the long-contested
Big Bang theory for the origins of the universe, "would add
credibility" to the theory. Kirk also places a high priority on
the research programs associated with the AGS facility, used to
study heavy-ion collisions of lighter particles than those
examined with RHIC.
Kirk, 54, received a B.S. degree in engineering physics from the
University of Colorado, Denver, in 1962, and his master's and
doctoral degrees in physics from the University of Washington,
Seattle, in 1964 and 1967, respectively. As physics department
faculty member at Harvard University until 1972, he conducted
research at Brookhaven and in the course of his career
participated in four high-energy AGS experiments there.
He has held several scientific and management positions at many
of the top United States physics laboratories, including the
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., and the
Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. He is a consultant on
various projects to both the Department of Energy and the
National Science Foundation.
--Neeraja Sankaran
(The Scientist, Vol:8, #22, pg.25, November 14, 1994)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
----------
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--------
NXT:
OBITUARY
------------------------------------------------------------
TI : JEROME BERT WIESNER
TY : PEOPLE (OBITUARY)
PG : 25
Jerome Bert Wiesner, an electrical engineer who served as science
adviser to President John F. Kennedy and president of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was also an
internationally known advocate of arms control, died of heart
failure on October 21 in Watertown, Mass. He was 79 years old.
Wiesner, president of MIT from 1971 until 1980, began his
association with the school in 1942. In that year, he joined the
research staff of the newly created Radiation Laboratory, where
he worked on the development of microwave radar. Subsequently, he
held numerous high-level positions at the school, including
director of the Research Laboratory of Electronics (the successor
to the Radiation Laboratory), acting head of the department of
electrical engineering (now the department of electrical
engineering and computer science, MIT's largest academic
department), dean of the School of Science, and provost. During
World War II, he was a leader in the development of radar, and
within the scientific community was recognized as an authority on
microwave theory, communication science and engineering, signal
processing, and radio and radar.
Wiesner was a frequent consultant and adviser to the government.
He became a member of the President's Science Advisory Committee
in 1957, during the Eisenhower administration, and in 1961 became
science adviser to Kennedy while also heading the Science
Advisory Committee. Later he served on the Technology Advisory
Council of the Office of Technology Assessment in Congress. Among
dozens of national and international awards and honors, he
received the President's Certificate of Merit, the United States'
second highest civilian award for outstanding service.
In 1958, Wiesner became associated with Pugwash, an informal
group of scientists dedicated to improving relations between
intellectual leaders in Communist and Western countries. While a
member of the Kennedy administration, he was a key figure in
establishing the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, achieving a
nuclear test-ban treaty, and in the effort to restrict the
deployment of antiballistic missile systems. In addition to
numerous articles on arms control and nuclear disarmament in
national and international newspapers, he wrote books on arms
control as well as science and politics.
A native of Detroit, Wiesner attended the University of Michigan
in Ann Arbor and received his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral
degrees from the school in 1937, 1938, and 1950, respectively.
Prior to coming to MIT, he was chief engineer for the Acoustical
and Record Library of the Library of Congress.
(The Scientist, Vol:8, #22, pg.25, November 14, 1994)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
----------
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