Greenhouse

Most of the people who belong to the Hobby Greenhouse Association's Delaware Valley Chapter don't own a greenhouse. "About a third of our 80 members have greenhouses," says Bernie Wiener of Havertown, who founded the local chapter. "The rest garden under lights or on windowsills, but they dream that someday they will have a greenhouse. "We are all indoor gardeners," he says, and that has become the focus of the chapter: to promote the growing of healthy plants indoors, whether in a terrarium or an estate-size greenhouse.

Every medium has special-occasion pieces that aren't necessarily great but have a particular aura due to their impracticality. In chamber music, it's Mendelssohn's congenial but uneven Octet, which has the buoyant appeal of his Midsummer Night's Dream music but requires two string quartets. That's hard to justify in the real world, unless you're Astral Artistic Services, whose greenhouselike roster of young artists not only has the needed string players but the excellent Chiara String Quartet as a basis for the enterprise.

Tom Ryan is a patient man. And as any mother will tell you, good things happen to those who wait. For Ryan, a special-education teacher at Bunker Hill Middle School in Washington Township, the wait stretched to six years. That's how long it took him to raise more than $20,000 and build a greenhouse at the school. Ryan admits that his wife, Roxanne, is the gardener in the family, but nevertheless, he felt it was imperative for his school to have a greenhouse. "Greenhouses can be used across the curriculum," he explained.

Maurice Marietti wants it understood from the beginning. He is a man who enjoys growing orchids. That's it. Don't make him up to be a world-champion grower - though he has won several awards, among them a national one from the American Orchid Society. ("A lot of people win those," he said). He is a past president of the Pinelands Orchid Society and is involved with setting up the orchid section for the Philadelphia Flower Show. And he knows the plants well enough to give talks on diseases that affect them.

A fire that started in a wholesale florist's warehouse yesterday destroyed 10 mostly empty greenhouses and sent a large plume of black smoke into the air. There were no injuries. Fire officials said yesterday afternoon that they were investigating the cause of the blaze. Ken Ruch, a fourth-generation owner of George Didden Greenhouses at Vine Street and Butler Avenue, said he heard employees yelling just before 10:30 a.m. When he ran outside, he saw flames "lapping out from under the roof" of his warehouse and jumping to nearby greenhouses.

A Philadelphia lawyer with expertise in the biopharmaceutical industry and a physician who worked at four start-up companies have been selected to jointly manage a $33.8 million economic-development initiative to commercialize promising life-science research and to create jobs. In April, Gov. Schweiker announced that the state would give the money to the biotechnology "greenhouse" in Southeastern Pennsylvania to help speed promising medical research from university laboratories to the marketplace.

Microbiologist Yvonne Paterson and a team of University of Pennsylvania scientists have toiled in labs for 12 years on a genetically engineered vaccine they believe has commercial promise to treat human cancers. In 1995, after documenting that the live bacteria vaccine prevented and reduced cancer tumors in animals, Paterson tried to interest pharmaceutical companies in developing a new drug based on the technology. But industry officials declined, saying they wanted to see more tests that prove the vaccine works in people.

Gov. Schweiker announced yesterday that Philadelphia would receive $33.8 million to create a biotechnology "greenhouse" in Southeastern Pennsylvania. The amount is less than the $45 million that local backers of the economic development initiative had wanted. But several hundred people gathered in West Philadelphia to hear the governor's announcement, and many were enthusiastic about the potential for the greenhouse program. "People ask me all the time, 'What is this greenhouse all about?

America is undergoing an economic revolution as dramatic as the shift from the agricultural to the industrial age. But Philadelphia is far from the front lines. Cities around the country are rushing to grab a piece of the diverse "new economy" emerging out of information technology, biotechnology and new communications networks. The Philadelphia region - hamstrung by its curious mix of arrogance and self-doubt, stymied by turf wars - has been slow to use its many assets to court this knowledge industry.

The latest round of negotiations over international climate change policies has concluded, and once again, the United States is taking heat for holding back its support .. . .Though advocates of greenhouse gas reduction treaties will continue to flagellate the United States for its refusal to participate, and portray us as an arrogant and irresponsible force of global destruction, the Bush administration's decision is the right one.. . . The United States [has] only a certain amount of resources to invest in protecting us from all the risks we face.