Word: microbiologist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Jennifer Lobo. By all rights, Lobo should be a microbiologist. "I fell in love with the field in high school," she says, after reading The Double Helix by Nobel Laureate James Watson. Lobo majored in microbiology at the University of California, Berkeley, and took advanced courses in bacteriology and immunology. Says she: "I was really quite a good laboratory scientist." The experience stands her in good stead as she crisscrosses the continent, working 14-to-18-hour days. Lobo, 31, keeps tabs on a handful of health-care firms for Domain Associates, the Princeton, N.J., venture capital firm that...
Perhaps the most innovative technology involves the use of bacteria. A small Texas company called Detox Industries has developed microbes that eat PCBs, creosote and pentachlorophenol. Microbiologist Ananda Chakrabarty of the University of Illinois in Chicago has used a patented "molecular breeding" process to achieve the evolution of a bug that can convert the chief ingredient of the herbicide Agent Orange, 2,4,5-T, into carbon dioxide and chloride. In laboratory tests, his bacteria are so dependent upon the chemical that once they have consumed whatever is available they...
Perhaps no one, however, seems to have employed bacterial conversion better than Microbiologist James Whitlock of the Homestake Mining Co. He found a solution to the problems caused when the company dumped water laced with cyanide, which is used to leach gold out of ore, into South Dakota's Whitewood Creek. Whitlock examined waste-water samples until he found bacteria, grew them in the lab, then exposed them to higher and higher levels of cyanide and saved the survivors. He then installed these superbugs in a brand new $10 million water-treatment plant, putting billions of them on each...
DIED. Cornelis Bernardus van Niel, 87, pioneering Dutch-born microbiologist who in the 1930s formulated the first correct chemical theory of photosynthesis, the all important process by which green plants convert water, carbon dioxide and light energy into carbohydrates and oxygen; in Carmel, Calif. At Stanford University, Van Niel worked with bacteria, some of which also perform a kind of photosynthesis, to derive his own general equation; in the 1940s experiments using isotopes of oxygen with different atomic weights traced the course of the chemical reactions and proved he was correct about green plants as well...
...People around the country who are microbiologist probably don't know that he carries an administrative burden that in other places would be a full time job," says Bullard professor of Neurobiology Richard L. Sidman, a Medical School colleague of Dowling's. This, Sidman explains, is because even with all his administrative responsibilities, Dowling remains one of the world's experts on the physiology of vision...