Ask most companies how they bring value to the market and they’ll point to their products. Cycorp is a bit different. The 10-year-old company cares about the services it sells—but mainly because they bankroll its true quest: creating a “knowledge base” called Cyc that can endow computers with something approaching common sense. This quest has been so time-consuming that most venture capitalists would long ago have written off their investments—or demanded the CEO’s head on a platter. That Doug Lenat and his 54 employees have avoided this fate is a lesson in managing long-term, visionary R&D projects.

Until recently, researchers and their assistants spent countless hours poring over seemingly endless volumes of journals and scientific literature for information pertinent to their studies in fields such as cancer, AIDS, pediatrics and cardiology.

But thanks to new software developed by bioinformatics researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, scientists can now easily identify obscure commonalities in research data and directly relate them to their studies, saving money and speeding the process of discovery.

The computer application is unique because it "emulates the scientific thought process" in researching data, said Dr. Harold "Skip" Garner, professor of biochemistry and internal medicine, who with former graduate student Dr. Jonathan Wren developed the system.

Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft Corp. with Bill Gates, claimed preliminary success in a hitherto secret project to enable computers to answer questions they've never seen before, and to state their reasoning.

The project seeks to develop a so-called Digital Aristotle, named after the Greek philosopher who, in a far simpler day, is said to have known the answer to any question about science.