Dr. Reddy’s Is Developing Eight More Biotech Drugs
- India continues its foray into biotech/pharma

Stem Cell Policy Hampering Research
- NIH official speaks out against Bush’s plan

Guy Kawasaki outlines 10 steps to innovation in this terrific presentation. I’ve never had the opportunity to attend one of Guy’s talks, but judging by the video it would certainly be worth the time. Guy does a great job of telling a coherent story in an entertaining and engaging fashion.

There is an interesting article by economist Tyler Cowen in today’s NY Times that addresses the propensity for American teenagers to start companies. He suggests that academic and family leniency is responsible for allowing young entrepreneurs to flourish.

In line with yesterday’s theme, two articles in the Scientist discuss online opportunities for scientists:
Shouldn’t you be online?
-Editorial addresses restrained adoption of online services by scientists (an issue I raised in my post yesterday.)

Better work through the network
-Using LinkedIn to expand your network.

Take aim…
- This month’s Economist includes a brief overview of the intrinsic difficulties developing cancer therapies.

Nature Publishing Group has created a science aggregator called Scintilla. The goal of Scintilla is to bring personalization to science.

Here’s a description from Nature’s blog Nascent-

Scintilla is an aggregator—of science weblogs, news stories and publication databases—but it works in a slightly different way from the existing online RSS readers that cover the whole internet. For a start, the sources are manually selected, and only related to science, so there shouldn’t be any trouble with spam when searching for stories. Also there’s no ‘unread items’ count, so you don’t have to feel like you have lots of reading to catch up on. Browse the site, add sources to your collection, and visit your ‘Read’ page on Scintilla whenever you’re looking for some juicy science stories to read.

The other important feature of Scintilla is ratings and recommendations. As you’re browsing through stories or papers, give them a quick rating: high if you think it’s interesting and you’d like to read more like this, low if it’s not your cup of tea. These ratings will be analysed alongside everyone else’s and used to recommend stories that you might like (if other people liked the same stories as you, you’ll hopefully like the other things they found interesting as well).

You can also manually recommend stories to other people: either to individual members of your social network, or to groups that you’ve joined. There are already groups for bioinformatics, pop science, images, visualisation and open science, but if your speciality isn’t covered then feel free to start up a group and invite your colleagues to join. The more interesting people in your network, the better your recommendations will be

I haven’t had an opportunity to take a close look at the service, but I like the concept. The true utility of the aggregator will ultimately determine whether or not scientists choose to use the service. The scientific community isn’t nearly as web-addicted as IT folks (for obvious reasons) so I don’t think it’s a given that the scientifically-inclined will adopt the numerous web services Nature is rolling out lately. However, I do think it’s high time that someone gave it a shot.

Additional reading:
Scintilla brings personalization to science

Scintilla, a science aggregator and recommendation engine freshly from the Natureplex

A recent Science article highlights the impact increasing the number of H1-B visas could have on US scientists. Companies such as Google, Microsoft, and more recently Genentech have advocated for increasing the H1-B visa cap. Bill Gates has proposed that the cap be abolished. Increasing the cap is, of course, in the corporation’s best interests as such action will increase the prospective employment pool, and likely depress wages.

I don’t have a problem with companies lobbying for increases in the H1-B visa cap (that currently stands at 65,000.) Incredibly, the cap was reached on the very first day that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) began accepting visa applications for 2007. I do take issue with corporations justifying a cap increase by claiming there is a “scientist shortage”. I can’t comment on engineering and IT fields, but there is certainly not a labor shortage in biomedicine as institutions around the country are saturated with scientists (mostly in the form of postdoctoral fellows) searching for gainful employment. Perhaps these corporations are really saying that there is a talented scientist shortage, and if that is the case action must be taken to amend the situation.

Avoiding competition by limiting the number of H1-B visas is not the answer. Talented scientists and engineers will take their skills somewhere and the US loses a competitive advantage by turning them away. The visa cap should not be abolished as Gates suggests. but a sustainable number should be identified. It is obvious to me as a graduate student that major systemic changes must be made to the current structure to make scientific training more desirable. I will abstain from pontificating on the numerous problems with graduate training at this time (perhaps I’ll address these issues in future posts!) Obtaining a PhD is far too lengthy and arduous to be greeted by a saturated job market and low wages. However, severely limiting foreign competition (in the form of foreign talent) is not the solution…systemic changes to increase US competitiveness is.

Compassionate Capitalism by Marc Benioff and Karen Southwick demonstrates that giving back is always a good idea and benefits the community, employees, and even the company. The authors clearly outline steps to integrate philanthropy into corporate culture while providing numerous case studies of small and large companies that practice successful corporate philanthropy.

To practice “compassionate capitalism” the authors suggest companies adopt the 1-percent solution– 1 percent each of equity, employee time, and profits devoted to philanthropy.

I recommend all entrepreneurs, or aspiring entrepreneurs, pick up this book as Benioff and Southwick point out that creating a culture of philanthropy is much easier if initiated in the early stages of a company.

USC English professor Ron Gottesman’s retirement speech included the following message (from Creating the Good Life by James O’Toole.)

“Invest in friends. There is no other instrument that pays such high returns…forget bonds, forget stocks, forget gold–invest in friendships.”

Auren Hoffman incorporates this philosopy into his concept of soft assets- your connections, knowledge, and reputation. Auren encourages people to focus on growing soft assets while young and suggests you build your connections and friendships by simply helping people.

“Invest in friendships” is terrific advice for everyone, especially entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship is a highly social endeavor and soft assets will likely play an integral role in an entrepreneur’s success. Additionally, I’m a firm believer that the quality of your relationships is directly correlated to happiness in life.

How much time do you spend building and nurturing friendships?

Betting on biofuels
- McKinsey Quarterly article outlines strategies for competitiveness in the biofuel industry.

Scientists apply for first patent on synthetic life form
- Controversial issue that will certainly generate much discourse over the next several years.

If you haven’t heard of Microsoft Surface, I highly recommend you check it out. It’s amazing technology that could change the way we interact with digital media. It’s not difficult to imagine future applications for this technology beyond it’s current platform and into areas such as medicine and biotechnology.