Glaeser cities Edward Pinhole associate professor of Bio-chemistry at Berkeley as an example of someone drawn away by outside industry. Penhoet recently asked for a reduction of his position at Berkeley to adjunct professor so that he could spend more time with the biotechnological company he had just founded. Penhoet will lose his tenure and have his salary cut, but he says he wants to decrease his involvement on campus to "span the two worlds." It is not possible to surround a university with a most," he says, adding that interaction between universities and industry is vital to the development of science.

Professors do not believe that cases like Gilbert and Penhoet represent a trend for professors leaving academics to join business. Most professors say they want to maintain a happy medium between both world. And graduate students and post-docs faced with the decision feel they are now presented with more attractive offers than ever before.

Since the openings in universities are limited, the students say industry offers them a secure job after graduation. Students in Ausubel's, Ptashne's, and Gilbert's labs say that there are both "pluses and minuses" in the new industry, which has just recently spread to the area of agricultural research.

But graduate students have mixed opinions of their professor's activities. Some say the professors are available at request and that they do not miss their professors' absence since they do mostly independent research. One student in Ausubel's lab says he has heard miserable tales from students who felt that they had been neglected, but he adds that he likes the arrangement since the industrial opportunities available to Ausubel siphon down to him. If Ausubel doesn't have time to write a story about his research for a popular magazine, the student says, he often asks one of his students to write it. This activity, the student says, is a good exposure to the benefits of private industry.

Although most of Harvard's graduates students plan to remain in academics, the majority concur with Gilbert's statement that biotechnology is a phase in developing an "industry out of science" Gilbert adds that in biotechnology is a phase in developing an "industry out of science" Gilbert adds that in biology today--as in other fields at other times--industry is taking "science out of what is an ivory lower and showing it has serious application in the world and a serious impact on society".

Mary S. Hunter and John D. Solomon assisted with the reporting of this article.

An informal University policy forbidding professors from serving as operating officers of companies forced Nobel laureate Walter Gilbert to announce his departure this spring. Gilbert had tried to balance his teaching responsibilities with his duties as chief executive officer of Biogen, but admitted 'you can't do both at once.'