Daily News Briefs

Harvard University Professor George McClelland Whitesides is a recipient of the 19th annual Kyoto Prize in advanced technology, for pioneering a technique of organic molecular self-assembly and its applications in the field of nanomaterials science. The Kyoto prizes, sponsored by The Inamori Foundation, are international awards for individual contributions to advanced technology, basic science and arts and philosophy. McClelland will be named a materials science and engineering laureate and will be presented with a gold medal and $400,000 at a ceremony today in Japan. Other award winners are Bunraku puppeteer Tamao Yoshida and University of Chicago physicist Eugene Newman Parker. The winners will also meet at the third annual Kyoto Laureate Symposium March 3 at the University of California, San Diego. . . . Micralyne Inc., a manufacturer of BioMEMS and other MEMS components, announced it will increase its work with Microchips Inc. on drug delivery product development activities. Microchips' technology is based on microfabricated devices containing hundreds of microreservoirs, each of which can be filled with any combination of drugs, reagents or other chemicals; the reservoirs can also serve as tiny protective chambers for microfabricated biosensors.