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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)

FOR SEARCHING PURPOSES:  
AU   = author
TI   = title of article
TY   = type
PG   = page
NXT  = next article

------------------------------------------------------------
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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                          --------
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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                          --------
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.)
  
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ON THIS STORY, PLEASE WRITE TO US AT EITHER ONE OF THE  
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                          --------
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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                          --------
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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.)

                         ----------
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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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WE WELCOME YOUR OPINION.  IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO COMMENT  
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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:

------------------------------------------------------------
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.)
  
                         ----------

NXT:

------------------------------------------------------------
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.)
  
                         ----------

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   :  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  
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garfield@aurora.cis.upenn.edu
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The Scientist,
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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  
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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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U.S.A.

                          --------
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.)
  
                         ----------

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   : 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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                          --------
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                             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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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:

                            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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