Stories by Louise Fickel

Customer Focus: Window Seat

Five years ago, American Airlines Inc. entered new territory by launching the industry's first website. In those early days of the Web, allowing customers to check logistical details such as baggage requirements, in-flight movie schedules and airport maps was big news. But the airline had even bigger plans: American hoped that opening up the online channel would not only streamline communication with customers but also cut costs of handling customer transactions and eventually generate additional revenue by allowing customers to book flights online. "At the time, paying commissions and booking fees to computerized systems [such as America Online and CompuServe] made it expensive to do business," says John Samuel, vice president of interactive marketing. "So saving distribution costs was a major driver."

Biotechnology: Writing the Book of Life

It was early spring in Cambridge, England, in 1953. James Watson and Francis Crick were frantically racing against one of the world's most renowned researchers--Linus Pauling--to determine the chemical structure of DNA. As with many scientific discoveries, everything seemed to fall into place suddenly. "The brightly shining metal plates were then immediately used to make a model in which for the first time all the DNA components were present," Watson wrote in The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA. "In about an hour I had arranged the atoms in positions which satisfied both the X-ray data and the laws of stereochemistry."

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