ASTROPHYSICS

Günther Hasinger

Günther Hasinger, who helped to build up the Astrophysical Institute Potsdam (AIP) after German unification, will direct high-energy astrophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching starting in October. Hasinger now serves as managing scientific director of the AIP, which he joined in 1994. He enjoyed the management challenge of bringing the AIP, which was fairly isolated before unification, into contact with more researchers in the West, including the United States. But he looks forward to returning to his research interests in high-energy astrophysics, particularly with X-ray telescopes. At Garching, Hasinger will lead groups in building and using instrumentation for space-based observations. “I could not have done this at the same level in Potsdam,” he says, noting that Garching focuses more on technology development and instrumentation.

BIOINFORMATICS

Gunaretnam Rajagopal, a theoretical physicist formerly affiliated with the University of Cambridge, took the helm of the Singapore Bioinformatics Institute this month. Gunaretnam, who has a strong foundation in supercomputing and a keen interest in biology, will focus the institute on training about 100 postgraduate students a year to help to meet the demand for computing experts who can make sense of the information from the genomics revolution. As well as providing training, the institute will support projects including the fugu fish genome-sequencing project, now being carried out by the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, the US Department of Energy and the Singapore Genomics Programme. Gunaretnam, who is Malaysian, says he will be happy to be closer to his mother, who lives in Kuala Lumpur.

CHEMISTRY

Ian Kent

LGC, the United Kingdom's leading independent analytical laboratory (formerly known as the Laboratory of the Government Chemist), has appointed Ian Kent as chairman. The former chairman of Roslin Bio-Med will take over at LGC when Brian Richards retires from the board. Kent has spent his entire career managing agrochemical companies and is non-executive chair of several firms besides LGC. He also has a background in biotechnology as a founder of Imutran, one of the first xenotransplantation companies, which was sold to Novartis in 1996. Kent aims to help to continue the expansion of the once-public LGC as a private company. The company provides chemical- and DNA-based analysis, including verification of analytical methods used by chemical and pharmaceutical companies. It also processes samples for the United Kingdom's criminal forensic DNA database. LGC is expanding its activities, including the growth of its reference materials business with the June acquisition of Promoshem. “The big issue is managing growth, which is a nice problem to have,” says Kent.

PHARMACEUTICALS

Peter Kim

Peter Kim's path from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Whitehead Institute to executive vice-president, research and development, with Merck marks a logical pursuit of a scientific quest as well as a natural career progression. Kim joined the Whitehead as a postdoc in 1985, became an associate member in 1988, and was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in 1992. At the Whitehead he concentrated on protein folding, and in 1993 discovered, with Chave Carr, how a spring-loaded protein mechanism helps the influenza virus to invade targeted cells. They also learned that HIV, among other viruses, uses a similar mechanism. Kim soon began experimenting with peptides that might be able to inhibit viruses and he helped to form the biotech company Scriptgen in 1993. “I became very aware of how hard it is to make a drug,” he says. That realization informed his decision to join Merck full time this February. “If my research could contribute to a drug or vaccine, that would be something I would consider one of the major accomplishments of my career,” Kim says.

BIOTECHNOLOGY

Last month, HealthSpan Sciences named Bryant Villeponteau as its chief scientific officer. Villeponteau started his career in academia, first as an assistant research chemist in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles, then as assistant professor of biological chemistry at the University of Michigan Institute of Gerontology. During this period, Villeponteau was one of the first scientists to clone a human ageing-related gene. In 1993, Villeponteau joined Geron Corporation based in Menlo Park, California, then a start-up biotech company focused on age-related diseases, where he developed a patented technique for identifying gene-expression changes brought about by ageing. In 1994, Villeponteau and colleagues cloned and characterized the RNA component of human telomerase.