Byline: By danny hakim section: Section B; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 1 Length

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: ENTREPRENEURSHIP (90%); EARLY RETIREMENT (90%); RETIREMENT & RETIREES (90%); SMALL BUSINESS (90%); PHOTOGRAPHY (88%); PERSONAL FINANCE (76%); RESIGNATIONS (76%); PHARMACEUTICALS INDUSTRY (73%); WAGES & SALARIES (72%); BABY BOOMERS (71%); BOATING & RAFTING (70%); MOUNTAINS (65%); SONG WRITING (50%)
COMPANY: PEACEABLE KINGDOM PRESS (56%); WYETH PHARMACEUTICALS INC (50%); WYETH (82%)
TICKER: WYE (NYSE) (82%)
INDUSTRY: NAICS325414 BIOLOGICAL PRODUCT (EXCEPT DIAGNOSTIC) MANUFACTURING (82%); NAICS325412 PHARMACEUTICAL PREPARATION MANUFACTURING (82%); SIC2836 BIOLOGICAL PRODUCTS, EXCEPT DIAGNOSTIC SUBSTANCES (82%); SIC2834 PHARMACEUTICAL PREPARATIONS (82%)
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW JERSEY, USA (79%); VIRGINIA, USA (70%) UNITED STATES (79%)
LOAD-DATE: July 3, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: When Carl Boast's wife asked what he planned to do in retirement, he blurted out, ''nature photography,'' in an aha! moment. (PHOTOGRAPH BY DON PETERSEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)

Mr. Boast sold his first nature photo at a craft show. ''Somebody paid me $12 for an 8-by-10 photo of a squirrel,'' he said. (PHOTOGRAPH BY CARL BOAST)

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Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

623 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
July 1, 2008 Tuesday

Late Edition - Final

The Worms Crawl In
BYLINE: By ELIZABETH SVOBODA
SECTION: Section F; Column 0; Science Desk; SCIENTIST AT WORK DAVID PRITCHARD; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1671 words
In 2004, David Pritchard applied a dressing to his arm that was crawling with pin-size hookworm larvae, like maggots on the surface of meat. He left the wrap on for several days to make sure that the squirming freeloaders would infiltrate his system.

''The itch when they cross through your skin is indescribable,'' he said. ''My wife was a bit nervous about the whole thing.''

Dr. Pritchard, an immunologist-biologist at the University of Nottingham, is no masochist. His self-infection was in the interest of science.

While carrying out field work in Papua New Guinea in the late 1980s, he noticed that Papuans infected with the Necator americanus hookworm, a parasite that lives in the human gut, did not suffer much from an assortment of autoimmune-related illnesses, including hay fever and asthma. Over the years, Dr. Pritchard has developed a theory to explain the phenomenon.

''The allergic response evolved to help expel parasites, and we think the worms have found a way of switching off the immune system in order to survive,'' he said. ''That's why infected people have fewer allergic symptoms.''

To test his theory, and to see whether he can translate it into therapeutic pay dirt, Dr. Pritchard is recruiting clinical trial participants willing to be infected with 10 hookworms each in hopes of banishing their allergies and asthma.

Never one to sidestep his own experimental cures, Dr. Pritchard initially used himself as a subject to secure approval from the National Health Services ethics committee in Britain.

In the tropics, where it is common, hookworm kills 65,000 people a year and afflicts hundreds of thousands with anemia. In low numbers in adults in a controlled experiment, Dr. Pritchard said, the worms have not caused problems.

His interest in the immunology of parasite infection stretches back to 1977. Intrigued by anecdotal reports from third world countries that parasites warded off allergy symptoms, he completed his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Birmingham on that topic.

Afterward, he was an allergist at a pharmaceutical company, but the work bored him, and he returned to academia at Nottingham in 1981, investigating the ways parasitic worms suppressed rodents' immune systems.

''At that time,'' he said, ''I realized the definitive work had to be carried out in humans. So I began to make inquiries about possible tropical venues for this research.''

In the late 1980s, the Wellcome Trust issued a grant, and Dr. Pritchard and his Nottingham team set up camp on Karkar Island, Papua New Guinea.

''We didn't speak the language, and we were sparsely equipped,'' he recalled. ''But we established a rapport with the people. We gave them worm tablets and would ask them politely, in pidgin English, to collect their fecal matter in buckets for us.''

Hookworm infiltrates a victim's system when the larvae, hatched from eggs in infected people's excrement, penetrate the skin, often through the soles of the feet. From there, they enter the bloodstream, travel to the heart and lungs, and are swallowed when they reach the pharynx. They mature into adults once they reach the small intestine, where they can subsist for years by latching onto the intestinal wall and siphoning off blood. After sieving the fecal samples to extract hookworms eliminated when the worm treatment pill was given, the team reached an intriguing conclusion: Villagers with the highest levels of allergy-related antibodies in their blood had the smallest and least fertile parasites, indicating that these antibodies conferred a degree of protection against parasite infection.

And the hookworms seemed equipped to retaliate. After colonizing a digestive tract, the host often showed signs of a blunted immune response, leading Dr. Pritchard to suspect that the worms were reducing the potency of the body's defenses to make their environment more hospitable.

''Sitting in the jungle for long periods gives you time to think,'' he noted. ''And this led to the idea that worm burdens of tolerable intensity could be beneficial under some circumstances.''

He began considering a left-field possibility. What if he could round up allergy sufferers, give them worms and see whether their wheezing and watery eyes disappeared?

Nearly 20 years later, his musing began to come to fruition. After Dr. Pritchard's self-infection experiment, the National Health Services ethics committee let him conduct a study in 2006 with 30 participants, 15 of whom received 10 hookworms each. Tests showed that after six weeks, the T-cells of the 15 worm recipients began to produce lower levels of chemicals associated with inflammatory response, indicating that their immune systems were more suppressed than those of the 15 placebo recipients. Despite playing host to small numbers of parasites, worm recipients reported little discomfort.

Trial participants raved about their allergy symptoms disappearing. Word about the study soon appeared online among chronic allergy sufferers, and a Yahoo group on ''helminthic therapy'' sprung up.

''Many of the people who were given a placebo have requested worms, and many of the people with worms have elected to keep them,'' Dr. Pritchard said.

Now he is recruiting patients for a larger-scale trial of the therapy, and he said he hoped to publish his results within the next year.

Some allergy sufferers cannot wait. The moderator of the Yahoo group, Jasper Lawrence, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, has started a clinic in Mexico, to offer the unproven therapy (a basic worm ''inoculation'' costs $3,900).

Dr. Pritchard said he understood the motivations of such unregulated efforts. ''It's all become a bit scary,'' he said. ''There's obviously a desperate cohort of patients out there, and they see this as a cure-all.''

Dr. Pritchard is the first scientist to infect patients with hookworms in a laboratory setting, but he is not the first to conclude that parasite infection might ease allergy symptoms. Previous studies have lent support to the idea.

In 2000, Maria Yazdanbakhsh, an immunologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, studied 520 Gabonese children and found that those with Schistosoma haematobium, one of a family of parasites that cause schistosomiasis, had lower levels of allergic responses to dust mites, one of the most common environmental allergens.

When Dr. Pritchard and Carsten Flohr, another Nottingham scientist, returned to Southeast Asia in 2006 to follow up on Dr. Yazdanbakhsh's work with a survey of 1,600 children in rural Vietnam, they obtained results that tallied with the Papua New Guinea and Gabon studies.

Subjects with high worm infestation were less likely to have allergic response to dust mites than noninfected children. Though reports of parasite-conferred allergic resistance have been issued over the years, it was not until 2005 that Rick Maizels, a biologist at Edinburgh University, uncovered a possible biological explanation.

When Dr. Maizels and his colleagues infected a group of mice with the Heligmosomoides polygyrus parasite, a nematode similar to the hookworm that infects humans, they found that the mice started churning out more regulatory T cells for reasons that remain unclear.

The T cells, Dr. Maizels said, modulate the immune response by secreting interleukin-10, a compound that counteracts inflammatory effects that other immune system cells generate at the site of an allergic reaction.

''There's a lot of evidence that allergy is just the immune system going a little over the top,'' he said. ''The worms are just turning down the volume.''

Based on his results, Drs. Maizels said Pritchard's work looked promising. ''I think it's quite likely the hookworms will have a similar effect on the human immune system,'' he said.

Some scientists say Dr. Pritchard is walking a fine ethical line by infecting patients with a parasite known to risk hosts' health. Peter Hotez, a microbiologist at George Washington University who is developing a hookworm vaccine, said the parasite was among the primary causes of stunted growth and malnutrition in developing countries.

''If a kid is infected with 25 hookworms, he's being robbed of his daily iron requirement, and because the worms suppress the immune system, they can increase the host's susceptibility to diseases like AIDS and malaria,'' Dr. Hotez said. ''So in its current form, I think this therapy is too risky.''

Still, he supports Dr. Pritchard's work from the perspective of proof of concept, saying, ''The real question is could you isolate the molecules the worms are using to suppress the immune system and use them for therapeutic purposes?''

Because of the potential side effects, Dr. Pritchard does not envision thousands of patients lined up at clinics to receive parasites along with flu shots.

''The worst-case scenario would be to cause damage,'' he said. ''I'm nervous about deliberate infection, but I feel that my hypothesis should be tested rigorously.''

His long-term goal, he added, is to figure out exactly how the worms turn down the immune-system radar, so he can borrow the tactics to develop alternatives to immune-suppressant and allergy-fighting drugs.

''We're looking at the molecular mechanisms the worms are using, and we're hoping to find molecules that veer the immune response away from allergy,'' he said.

A new class of drugs that mimics worms' effects on the immune system could also potentially treat Crohn's disease, arthritis and other autoimmune conditions.

Though he eventually hopes to eliminate hookworms entirely from his allergy treatment, Dr. Pritchard has few qualms about venturing where no parasite researcher has gone before.

''I gave myself 50 worms, and I felt it,'' he recounted. ''I had stomach pains and diarrhea. But with 10 worms, we've ascertained a dose that does not cause symptoms. The patients are happy. They've kept their worms, and I get an e-mail a day from people all over the world who want to be infected.''
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: ALLERGIES (90%); IMMUNOLOGY (89%); INVESTIGATIONS (86%); IMMUNE SYSTEM DISORDERS (76%); DISEASES & DISORDERS (75%); ASTHMA (73%); PHYSICIANS & SURGEONS (71%); PHARMACEUTICALS PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT (70%); RESEARCH (70%); ETHICS (69%); PHARMACEUTICALS INDUSTRY (66%); PHARMACEUTICAL PREPARATION MFG (65%); APPROVALS (64%); RODENTS (60%); LANGUAGE & LANGUAGES (60%)
GEOGRAPHIC: BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND (54%) PAPUA NEW GUINEA (91%); UNITED KINGDOM (57%); ENGLAND (54%)
LOAD-DATE: July 1, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: HIS OWN MEDICINE: David Pritchard, an immunologist-biologist at the University of Nottingham, infected himself with hookworms. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY HAZEL THOMPSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg.F1)

PARASITE PROMOTER: David Pritchard, right, with hookworm cultures in his laboratory at the University of Nottingham, and above, shown writing in 1990 with his research team on Karkar Island, Papua New Guinea. An infective hookworm larva is at left. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY HAZEL THOMPSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg.F4)

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

624 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
July 1, 2008 Tuesday

Late Edition - Final

Newark's Mayor Cory Booker at Midpoint
BYLINE: By RICHARD E. BENFIELD
SECTION: Section A; Column 0; Editorial Desk; EDITORIAL OBSERVER; Pg. 20
LENGTH: 681 words
Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, says he does not think about it that way, but there must be easier ways to make a mark in the world than by trying to turn around a troubled city.

Mr. Booker is faced -- right now, today -- with rampant crime, punishing property taxes and a burdensome legacy of municipal corruption.

Expectations were high when he came to office, not only because he was an attractive personality but also because his predecessor seemed incurably corrupt. His success depends partly on meeting these expectations. Judging by a recent interview in his spacious City Hall office, in which he exuded a sense of confident serenity, he thinks he can do so. But he says the job has turned out to be every bit as hard as he expected.

Mr. Booker reached the midpoint of his first four-year term today -- too soon to achieve the ambitious goals he set for himself, but not too soon for his constituents to grumble about his mistakes.

And there have been mistakes. In one particularly embarrassing episode, he failed to back up the highly regarded official he brought in to reform the police department at a critical moment when the official's prestige was on the line. And too often Mr. Booker leaves political details to his underlings, who botch them.

On balance, though, his achievements have outweighed his lapses. According to the city's police department, crime is down. There were 25 murders in Newark the first five and a half months of this year compared with 46 for the same period in 2006. Over all, shootings are also down. Much of this can be attributed to the transfer of hundreds of police officers to nighttime duty (often against their wishes) since Mr. Booker took office.

The mayor has also begun an intensive campaign, patterned after New York's, for private investment for parks; some 20 new or refurbished parks are scheduled to be completed by the end of his first term, giving youngsters and adults an alternative to Newark's gray, gritty streets. There have been no major scandals involving his people, a significant relief for a city where politicians and their cronies assumed that election to office entitled them to cash in. Property taxes have been stabilized.

Mr. Booker has eased city rules to allow for more housing downtown. He has attracted money from the Gates and other foundations for new charter schools, and he is working hard to bring in new business, despite the bad economy. The results of these efforts will not be seen for some time, but they are worthwhile nonetheless.

As to Mr. Booker's personal standing, the results are mixed. He is popular among liberals outside the city and has support from the city's growing Hispanic population, the emerging white and black entrepreneurs who have opened restaurants and small businesses and the Ironbound section of town, which has Portuguese roots.

But he has yet to change the perception of longtime black residents, those who turn out in high numbers for local elections, that he is an outsider. He tried recently to get his people elected to several ward and district-leader positions and failed miserably.

Some of his supporters fear this may augur poorly for his re-election chances in 2010; and while Mr. Booker insisted in the interview that he would seek re-election and, if successful, serve out a second term, some fear that he will become discouraged and perhaps even leave for a position in a Barack Obama administration.

His troubles with the old-timers lie at least partly with their fear that the city is changing and that Mr. Booker is speeding the process along. And that he is. Some cranes are already on the city's horizon, and Mr. Booker promises many more. The Prudential Center, which Mr. Booker initially opposed, has been highly successful. New residents, especially Hispanics, are continuing to move in.

Newark will become a different city whether or not Mr. Booker stays on. But Mr. Booker is the energizer and catalyst who can direct the change in a positive way. Newark has needed someone to do exactly that for a very long time.
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: MAYORS (90%); CITY GOVERNMENT (90%); EDITORIALS & OPINIONS (90%); POLICE FORCES (89%); MINORITY BUSINESSES (89%); CITIES (78%); CRIME RATES (77%); MURDER (77%); PROPERTY TAX (77%); LAW ENFORCEMENT (77%); INTERVIEWS (76%); POLITICS (72%); POPULATION GROWTH (66%); CHILDREN (66%); PUBLIC SCHOOLS (66%); SMALL BUSINESS (63%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (60%); CHARTER SCHOOLS (50%)
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, USA (79%) UNITED STATES (79%)
LOAD-DATE: July 1, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
DOCUMENT-TYPE: Editorial
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

625 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
June 29, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

The Road to Ikea
BYLINE: By PERNILLE LOPEZ; as told to ABBY ELLIN.

As told to Abby Ellin.

SECTION: Section BU; Column 0; Money and Business/Financial Desk; THE BOSS; Pg. 14
LENGTH: 592 words
EVER since I was a kid, I've been very adventurous and curious. I went to college in Denmark, and when I was writing my dissertation I decided to go to the United States and stay with a family on Long Island. The subject of my dissertation was a comparison of the American health care system and socialized medicine.

I stayed on Long Island for six months, returned home, got my degree and worked as a freelance journalist for a year. Then I realized that this was not my calling. But maybe I could start my own business.

My brother was in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., working for a furniture company; I decided to move there and start a firm that would import Danish designs.

It made a lot of sense: Denmark has always had quite a big furniture industry: you take how your home looks very seriously there.

I could see that maybe there would be a great market for Danish design in the United States; I decided to bring in a line of traditional outdoor furniture. I did that for two years. But it takes a lot of time, knowledge and money to run your own business and I didn't have enough of any of them.

My dream had always been to drive across the country and live in California. I got a job in Arizona at a company called Stor. Working for a start-up, learning how an American company was thinking, was very helpful to me.

I learned about merchandising, customer and co-worker relations and human resources, among other things. I also learned how to manage people. I was about 26. Ikea ultimately bought Stor in 1992.

The first Ikea store in the United States opened in Philadelphia in 1985. We have 35 stores in this country now. I spent four years as a store manager in Pittsburgh, where my husband and I lived for nine years.

Then I was offered the job to be the North American human resource manager. That was a big event in my life, because I was very passionate about placing women in leadership positions, and I finally got a chance to do so.

In my time as H.R. manager I met Anders Dahlvig, our current C.E.O., and when the previous president went back to Sweden, I was offered his position. So my family and I moved to Philadelphia.

The goal is to grow the Ikea name in the United States and really become a brand that everybody recognizes and understands. Soon we'll have 39 stores.

We spent the first five or six years trying to understand what we were all about. Our range was so small. All those years we tried to take one step at a time and really learn about the market.

People ask me who my mentor is and expect to hear that it's some famous person. The truth is that there is never just one mentor in your life; there are different ones at different times.

As my two kids have become older they have taken on a bigger mentor role for me. I can ask my teenagers their opinions on things that I am doing -- read them a speech or discuss whether I should attend an event that means I'll be away from home. They will ask me the kinds of questions that I ask the people that I mentor and coach.

Sometimes teenagers are tough, but they always give good feedback and are honest. They are smart, have good insights and have no fear of telling you things that you need to hear, that others might not tell you.

On a personal level, I think it's important to stay true to yourself and not let things come at you and overwhelm you.

In any kind of leadership job, a lot of things come from a lot of different places, and learning to manage that has been a learning experience. You've got to be humble and take it one step at a time.
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: SELF EMPLOYMENT (90%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (90%); FURNITURE & HOME FURNISHINGS STORES (89%); WRITERS & WRITING (78%); FURNITURE STORES (74%); HUMAN RESOURCES (70%); RETAIL MERCHANDISE MANAGEMENT (69%); FREELANCE EMPLOYMENT (76%)
COMPANY: INGKA HOLDINGS BV (95%)
INDUSTRY: NAICS551112 OFFICES OF OTHER HOLDING COMPANIES (95%); SIC6719 OFFICES OF HOLDING COMPANIES, NEC (95%)
GEOGRAPHIC: PENNSYLVANIA, USA (92%); ARIZONA, USA (79%); FLORIDA, USA (79%); CALIFORNIA, USA (79%) UNITED STATES (96%); NORTH AMERICA (79%)
LOAD-DATE: June 29, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL AHEARN)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

626 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
June 29, 2008 Sunday

Correction Appended

Late Edition - Final
Eureka! Where Do I Cash the Check?
BYLINE: By GEORGE JOHNSON
SECTION: Section WK; Column 0; Week in Review Desk; IDEAS & TRENDS; Pg. 5
LENGTH: 1051 words
When a documentary called ''Who Killed the Electric Car?'' came out in 2006, laying blame on the usual suspects -- oil companies, automakers and the Bush administration -- it was hailed by some viewers as a brave expose and dismissed by others as a conspiracy theory. But the film's broader thesis was hard to dispute. You don't have to be paranoid to believe that the inertia of the status quo acts as a drag on innovation.

Declaring last week that he wanted to break the country's oil jam by encouraging ''heroic efforts in engineering,'' John McCain called for the government to offer a prize -- $300 million (a dollar an American) to the inventor of a battery so compact, powerful and inexpensive that it would supplement or even supplant the need for fossil fuels.

Barack Obama quickly derided the proposal -- involving a sum equivalent to nearly 200 Nobel Prizes -- as a gimmick and a distraction. But prizes are hard to resist. Mr. Obama's own energy plan, posted on his Web site, suggests awarding them (in addition to tax incentives and government contracts) for ethanol research. But ultimately, he insisted, achieving energy independence will require a Kennedyesque effort like the one that put a man on the moon.

On one level the rhetoric was a replay of the old standoff between Big Government and the virtues of entrepreneurship. But it also raised deeper questions, like how best can the government finance and direct basic research without stifling something as mercurial as the spirit of invention.

Considering the bureaucratic bog the space program has waded into -- the exhilaration of Neil Armstrong's giant leap for mankind giving way to plumbing problems on the International Space Station -- Mr. Obama might not have picked the best example. The latest pictures from Mars are stunning, but the most exciting thing to happen recently in manned space flight came in 2004 when Burt Rutan won the $10 million Ansari X Prize for the first privately backed suborbital excursion.

Winning the contest, which was named for its benefactors, the Ansari family, and administered by the nonprofit X Prize Foundation, cost more than the award was worth. (Mr. Rutan was backed by a Microsoft billionaire, Paul Allen.) But greater spoils may await, with Virgin Galactic licensing the technology for a space tourism industry.

This kind of leveraging is one of the selling points of sweepstakes science. The X Prize Foundation took as its model the 1919 Orteig Prize -- $25,000 for the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris offered by a hotelier who figured it would be good for business. The purse was claimed eight years later by Charles Lindbergh, and the publicity jump-started American aviation.

Lindbergh's grandson is a member of the foundation's board, which is offering other prizes including the Google Lunar X Prize for the winner of an unmanned race to the moon; the Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize, endowed by the family of the science fiction writer, ''for practical accomplishments in the field of commercial space activities''; and the Archon X Prize for Genomics for the developer of a faster, cheaper way to sequence DNA.

None of these goals is beyond the reach of the government research establishment -- which includes, along with NASA, the Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. But with formal proposals, peer review and Congressional oversight, it's hard for administrators to jump quickly on a new idea -- and there is always the danger of getting stuck in a rut. The system was designed to pick out the best people with the best ideas and to avoid political meddling. But you can never know until the end whether you have been backing the wrong team.

Hence the allure of prizes. They come unburdened by preconceptions and require little overhead, and development costs are often picked up by people like Mr. Allen. Best of all, the prize has to be paid only if there is a winner.

That in itself can raise questions about the seriousness of the commitment. Basic research consists of the gradual, meandering, sometimes tedious accretion of small details. That requires money up front. Practical applications, if there are any, may only be clear in retrospect.

Still, where there is a well-defined goal, prizes might lure talented mavericks who would otherwise get caught in the filters. An oft-cited case is the cash prize offered by Britain in 1714 for determining a ship's longitude at sea. Had there been an 18th-century version of the National Science Foundation, grants would probably have gone to astronomers looking to the sky for a solution. (Latitude was measured that way, so why not longitude?) The winner, after half a century, was a clockmaker, John Harrison, who took an entirely different approach: devising an extremely accurate chronometer.

Determined to recapture its adventurous image, NASA has created its own prizes -- through its Centennial Challenges program (established in 2003 to mark the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers' flight at Kitty Hawk). And the defense research agency's Grand Challenge has pitted robotic cars against each other in a race to develop a vehicle that can navigate without a human driver or remote control.

There may be more to come. A recent report by the National Academy of Sciences suggested that the N.S.F. dip into the waters by experimenting with small prizes. But a discussion paper published in 2006 by the Brookings Institution called for a much bigger commitment, with government prizes ranging from $15 million for an Earth-Moon solar sailcraft race to as much as $100 million a year for improvements in African agriculture. Mr. McCain's own proposal for spurring development of alternative energy sources was foreshadowed by a bill introduced last year in Congress that would establish a prize for breakthroughs in the development of hydrogen power.

If the trend takes off there may be so many contests that they lose their appeal. But science will be in no danger. No prize will ever match the thrill of discovery -- Marie Curie isolating a shimmering gram of radium from tons of uranium ore. And for the less inspired, there will always be the rewards of the marketplace.