diene is of interest as "the most strained organosilicon molecule to date."

But strain is relative: Calculations performed by Kira's group suggest that the main reason they were able to iso­late the silicon bow-tie molecule is that its ring-strain energy may be much low­er than that of the carbon analog.

Ron Dagani

Tough Path For New Top Weapons Scientist Creating an environment that allows Department of Energy nuclear weapons scientists to shift their sights from secu­rity back to science is the main job of Maureen I. McCarthy, new chief scien­tist for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).

McCarthy began work in early July at the same time that NNSA head John A. Gordon was sworn in. She immedi­ately joined Gordon on a fact-finding tour of DOE's three weapons labs (Los Alamos, Sandia, and Lawrence Liver-more National Laboratories) and five weapons production facilities. Together these sites make up the empire Con­gress created for the semiautonomous NNSA (C&EN, Oct. 11, 1999, page 51).

McCarthy and Gordon found that new restrictions imposed in response to sloppy security, misplaced classified computer hard drives, and possible for­eign espionage had made scientific re­search at the labs nearly impossible.

"There is no avoiding the fact that morale was abysmal," she tells C&EN. "Some security procedures brought sci­ence to a screeching halt.

"When we implement policies back here in headquarters, it is hard to know exactly what the effect will be," she says. "Some procedures literally shut down Los Alamos' secret X Division."

Listening to lab scientists, McCarthy says, led Gordon to drop the most oner­ous restrictions, such as a requirement that classified computers and offices in already secure areas be locked up and shut down whenever scientists left, no matter how briefly. And the visits made clear the need to quickly end a ban on lab visits by foreign scientists (C&EN, Sept. 4, page 13).

McCarthy and Gordon are still listen­ing, she says, and are trying to ferret out other security-driven procedures that should be tailored to a science-focused enterprise.

Meanwhile, McCarthy says each lab will hold a thematic daylong seminar over the next year to put a bright light on sci­ence. The "science day" will bring top re­searchers in and out of DOE together to discuss a topic of key im­portance to the host lab. The first will be at Sandia on Dec. 14 with the theme of nanotechnology.

"We want to elevate sci­ence and get top research­ers to tell us what we need in order to get lab pro­grams where they should be headed for the next five to 10 years," she says.

NNSA will also create a blue ribbon commis­sion to prepare a report within 18 months on the McCarthy intermix of security and classified and nonclassified research throughout the complex.

Weapons-related research, Mc­Carthy notes, is in part dependent on the 25% of weapons science done in non-weapons labs as well as on general DOE-funded research. Her role, she

Signaling its serious intention to stay in the top ranks of the agrochemical indus­try, Bayer has agreed to acquire Novartis' Flint fungicide business for $760 million.

The planned purchase, which has been cleared by the European Commis­sion (EC) but is still subject to U.S. Fed­eral Trade Commission (FTC) approval, marks Bayer's second recent stab at a major acquisition in the crop protection arena. Bayer executives acknowledge being in the running to purchase American Home Prod­ucts ' Cyanamid agro-chemical unit earlier this year, but they were out­bid by BASF, which paid $3.8 billion.

Although it's not Cyan­amid, Flint—known ge­netically as trifloxystrobin—will provide Bayer entry into the new and fast-grow­ing strobilurin class of fungicide chemis­try. Launched last November, Flint will see sales of about $40 million this year, but Bayer expects it to turn into a "block­buster" agrochemical by 2003, with sales of about $300 million annually.

Trifloxystrobin is a potent inhibitor

says, is to enhance weapons research in classified as well as nonclassified environments.

But on the horizon, she predicts, will be greater security measures in the half-

dozen nonweapons labs. § McCarthy is a physical | chemist, who for six years S was a researcher at Pacific Ζ Northwest National Labo-.Ω

% ratoiy. She also served as £ an American Association

for the Advancement of Science fellow at the Penta­gon, and most recently she was a DOE adviser on non-proliferation and security.

Despite the measures NNSA has taken, security pressure on the labs is not likely to ease. Last week, the Senate passed provi­

sions requiring 5,000 new polygraph tests for lab scientists, and the House Armed Services Committee issued a re­port urging Gordon to more quickly orga­nize NNSA and promising close commit­tee monitoring and oversight.

Jeff'Johnson

of fungal spore germination and myceli­al growth. It controls such pests as fruit scales and mildews on gourds, apples, and grapes.

Rob Bryant, principal of the U.K.-based consulting firm Agranova, notes that retail sales of strobilurin fungicides as a whole have grown from nothing in the mid-1990s to almost $800 million last year. Bayer is an active player in older genera­

tion fungicides but didn't catch the strobilurin wave, Bryant says. 'They figured either they miss this, or they buy their way in."

They're buying and Novartis is selling in prep­aration for merging its ag­ricultural business with that of AstraZeneca to form the agribusiness

company Syngenta. The EC cleared the merger in July under the condition that Novartis and AstraZeneca sell businesses in several overlapping areas. Strobi-lurins—an area in which Novartis, Astra­Zeneca, and BASF are the main play­ers—is one such field.

Several other product divestments are still to be made, and FTC approval of

Bayer Keeps Pace In Agrochemicals

OCTOBER 23, 2000 C&EN 13

n e w s of t h e w e e k ^^I^Miâ^Jfl^t^

Syngenta is still pending, but the two companies have said they hope to complete the merger by the end of the year.

Syngenta will be the world's largest company in an agrochemical industry that has reorganized radical­ly in the past year as companies like Novartis and AstraZeneca that are active in pharmaceuticals and crop protection decided to fo­cus on pharmaceuticals alone.

Aventis, the second largest agro-chemical maker, has also signaled that it is rethinking its drugs-plus-pesticides strategy. Monsanto's agrochemical unit, the third largest player, went pub­lic on the New York Stock Exchange

last week as part of an agro­chemical exit by its new owner, Pharmacia (see page 17). And

BASF jumped into the num­ber four spot after Ameri­can Home decided to focus only on drugs. Although Bayer's pur­

chase of the Flint line isn't as big as these landscape-shifting deals, the company may not be done ac­quiring. Chief Executive Officer

Manfred Schneider said earlier this year that he feels the company is strong in fungicides and insecticides, but not herbicides. "We have a strategic gap for which we would like to find solutions," he said.

Michael McCoy

Biotech Firms Keep On Consolidating Strategic needs are driving the latest mergers and acquisitions among bio-pharmaceutical producers. For Seattle-based Corixa, a merger with Coulter Pharmaceutical, South San Francisco, is expected to give it a major product. In another, smaller deal, Amgen, Thou­sand Oaks, Calif., wants to expand its small-molecule drug development and so is acquiring Kinetix Pharmaceuti­cals, Medford, Mass.

Corixa has agreed to pay about $900 million in stock, a 43% premium over Coulter's stock price on Friday, Oct. 13. Corixa can terminate the agreement if Coulter does not receive Food & Drug Administration marketing approval for its first product, Bexxar, a treatment for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. FDA rejected the initial application for Bexxar in August 1999. After reanalyzing some existing data as requested, Coulter resubmitted its application in September.

The drug, currently under priority re­view and to be marketed by SmithKline Beecham, is expected to have annual sales near $100 million. Corixa is prepar­ing a filing for its own first major U.S. product as well, a melanoma vaccine called Melacine. Together, Corixa and Coulter's complementary R&D efforts will focus on immunotherapeutics, including vaccine and antibody-based products.

"Bexxar represents an exciting prod­uct opportunity with the potential for sig­nificant near-term revenue," says Steven Gillis, Corixa's chairman and chief execu­tive officer. "Coulter's ability to enhance the power of monoclonal antibodies with either cytotoxic drugs or radionuclides

broadens the therapeutic potential of multiple antibody-based products in the combined company's pipeline. And a ded­icated sales force at Coulter provides a strategic asset that can be readily lever­aged to bring additional products to the marketplace," he says.

However, analysts and investors were doubtful about the price Corixa seems willing to pay. The company's stock fell nearly 15% to $37.69 per share on Oct. 16,

when the deal was announced. And some were surprised to see Coulter agree to a sale so close to having a product to the market. Still, Coulter's stock rose nearly 13% to $34.88 per share. For the first six months of 2000, Coulter had revenues of just $7.8 million and a net loss of $23.7 million, whereas Corixa's revenues were $16.2 million and its net loss was $18.2 million.

In contrast, Amgen—which leads the biopharmaceutical industry, with more than $3.3 billion in annual revenues and about $1.1 billion in profits—will pay just $170 million in stock to acquire Kinetix. The privately held, three-year-old compa­ny is expected to be a building block in Amgen's small-molecule drug discovery program. Kinetix focuses on the inhibi­tion of protein kinases, enzymes that are key regulators of internal and external cellular communications.

Both deals are subject to sharehold­er approvals but are expected to close before the end of the year. Amgen fore­sees minimal financial impact from its deal. Corixa does not anticipate break­ing even until 2003 and becoming profit­able in 2004. If the deal with Coulter falls through, Corixa, depending on the conditions, might have to pay a termina­tion fee in the form of a $15 million loan to Coulter.

Ann Thayer

Institute of Medicine Elects New Members

Six scientists who work in chemically related areas and two highly placed civil servants are among the 60 newly elect­ed active members of the Institute of Medicine (IOM), one of the four sister institutions that make up the National Academies, Washington, D.C. IOM now has 613 active members; 711 senior members, five elected this year; and 56 foreign members, five elected this year.

Active members are chosen for their major contributions to health and medi­cine or to related areas such as social and behavioral sciences, law, adminis­tration, and economics. IOM's charter requires that at least one-fourth of the members be drawn from outside the health professions.

Following are the newly elected chemistry-related IOM members:

Elizabeth Blackburn, professor, de­partments of biochemistry and bio­physics and of microbiology and im­munology, University of California, San Francisco.

Gunter Blobel, Howard Hughes Med­ical Institute investigator and professor of cell biology, Rockefeller University.

Thomas R. Cech, president, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Chevy Chase, Md., and Distinguished Professor and Investigator, department of chemistry, University of Colorado, Boulder.

Peter S. Kim, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator; member, White­head Institute for Biomedical Research; and professor, department of biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

David J. l ipman, director, National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md.

Wylie W. Vale, head and professor, Clayton Foundation Laboratories for Peptide Biology, Salk Institute for Bi­ological Studies, La Jolla, Calif.

Robert A. Weinberg, member, White­head Institute for Biomedical Research, and professor, department of biology, MIT.

The civil servants newly elected to IOM's ranks are the following:

Jane E. Henney, commissioner, Food & Drug Administration, Rockville, Md.

Donna E. Shalala, secretary, Depart­ment of Health & Human Services, Washington, D.C.

14 OCTOBER 23, 2000 C&EN