Genzyme shares during the 20 trading days ending on the fifth trading day pri­or to completion of the merger.

In Millennium's case, the company specializes in identifying targets believed to play a role in human diseases, but has none of its own drugs in clinical trials. LeukoSite, on the other hand, has five products in clinical development, includ­ing a leukemia drug that, if approved by regulators, could achieve annual sales of $150 million within five years. LeukoSite also offers 150 employees.

"LeukoSite is an ideal complement," says Mark J. Levin, CEO of Millennium. This acquisition is "a major step forward in building the biopharmaceutical com­pany of the future."

Under its deal, Millennium says, Leuko­Site shareholders would receive 0.43 Mil­lennium share ($35.86) for each Leuko­Site share, representing a 49% premium to LeukoSite's closing price on Oct 14.

Ronald Rogers

House moving on Superfund reform The House is likely to vote on Super-fund reform legislation in early Novem­ber once differences between two com­peting bills are worked out, according to congressional aides. Whether the com­promise bill would reinstate the Super-fund tax, however, remains uncertain.

Speaker of the House J. Dennis Has-tert (R-Ill.) last week instructed the chair­men of two committees with jurisdiction over Superfund to reconcile the two mea­sures so a unified bill could move to the House floor. Both pending bills are de­signed to speed the cleanup and reuse of abandoned industrial properties. A major difference between these brownfields measures is that legislation (H.R. 1300) sponsored by Rep. Sherwood L. Boehlert (R-N.Y.) and approved in August by the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee would reinstate an excise tax on chemical feedstocks and crude oil (C&EN, June 28, page 20). This tax, which expired at the end of 1995, generat­ed revenue for the federal trust fund that finances cleanup of abandoned hazard­ous waste sites.

On Oct. 13, the House Commerce Committee marked up and approved a competing bill (H.R. 2580) sponsored by Rep. James C. Greenwood (R-Pa.) that has no mention of the Superfund tax (C&EN, Oct. 4, page 19). The Commerce

Committee added a provision to Green­wood's bill that would require the federal government to study the "cancer potency values" of a dozen contaminants fre­quently found at Superfund sites. Anoth­er addition would require federal risk as­sessments of Superfund sites to identify groups of people who are highly exposed or greatly susceptible to contamination from Superfund sites—or who would be if the area were cleaned up and reused.

The amended version of Greenwood's bill also would require the Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry (ATSDR) to establish an external peer re­view committee. The panel would give advice on new research, assess the quali­ty of studies funded by the agency, and provide guidance to ATSDR on risk char­acterization and risk communication.

Aides to the commerce and transpor­tation committees say they anticipate no problems in combining the bulk of the

Greenwood and Boehlert bills. House leaders and Ways & Means Committee Chairman Bill Archer (R-Texas) will de­cide whether the legislation will rein­state the Superfund tax.

EPA Administrator Carol M. Browner has panned both Republican-sponsored bills, saying they would slow the pace of brownfields cleanup. And if the House passes a Superfund reform bill, a key Sen­ate panel may take up the legislation, ac­cording to a spokesman for the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee.

In August, that committee's chair­man, Sen. John H. Chafee (R-R.L), gave up on Superfund reform legislation be­cause he could not muster the 10 votes needed to move the bill through the committee to the Senate floor. Chafee may make another attempt to move a Superfund reform measure if the House passes a bill.

Cheryl Hogue

New exhibit on chemistry of life opens in New York

lion, interactive exhibition was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Pfizer Foundation, the Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and an anonymous friend of the museum. Above, children work at one of the exhibit's hands-on and sophisticated computer sta­tions; here, in a "low-tech" mode, they are creating "new" molecules or build­ing models of actual molecules such as adenine, ethanol, and testosterone. New York Hall of Science Director Alan J. Friedman (center in photo at left), exhibi­tion curator Martin Weiss (left), and Harvard University chemistry professor Dudley R. Herschbach, who spoke at one of the exhibit's opening events, dis­cuss a 3-foot-high DNA model, the centerpiece of an area titled "Molecules for Reproduction." In January, the $996,000 hands-on Pfizer Foundation Bio­chemistry Discovery Lab funded by Pfizer and NSF will open. "Chemistry has always been a challenge for science centers—how practically and safely to present this vitally important part of both the living and nonliving world," Friedman says. The new exhibition solves this challenge and fills a "crucial gap" between exhibits on biology and physics, he says. More information about the museum, which first opened as part of the 1964 World's Fair, is available at http://www.nyhallsci.org or by calling (718) 699-0005.

Madeleine Jacobs

OCTOBER 25,1999 C&EN 13