The Scientist

President Reagan has proposed doubling the National Science Foundation (NSF) basic research budget by 1992. Equally important, he states in his budget message: "The Nation's future position in global markets will depend upon: the allocation of national resources to the generation of new knowledge; and the effective and timely transfer of this new knowledge to specific applications." This noble statement could as easily have been made by countless senators or representatives. Despite these noble

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"True descendants of Prometheus, science writers take the fire from the scientific Olympus, the laboratories and the universities, and bring it down to the people." That was how William Laurence, a science writer for The New York Times, described the work of science writers in the 1930s. Fifty years later, many scientists might be more likely to compare their opposite numbers in the media to the troublesome Pandora, whose impulsive opening of the box sent by Zeus unleashed a host of evils on hum

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Craig V. Svensson (The Scientist, January 26, 1987) claims to be a biblical literalist. Those of us who spend some of our spare time combating the obfuscations of creationism wish heartily that this claim were true, for the literal words of the Bible are much more compatible with Darwinism than is the pseudoscientific bilge of creationism. The fact is that fundamentalism cannot get by without hundreds of nonbiblical canons for which there is no authority but the word of scientifically illiterate

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CHICAGO—A new National Academy of Sciences report will recommend that basic science become "the principal objective of the space program." Speaking here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Thomas M. Donahue outlined some of the major recommendations of the Academy's Space Science Board report, entitled "Major Directions for Space Science: 1995-2015." Donahue is an astrophysicist at the University of Michigan and chairman of the Space Science Bo

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WASHINGTON—The Reagan administration is seeking congressional sponsors for a bill that would revive plans to create a federally funded think tank to support research on the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). A move by the Pentagon last year to establish the proposed SDI Institute was blocked on Capitol Hill after questions were raised about the need for the center, its staffing and independence. According to one Senate staff member who requested anonymity, "the SDI Institute is in better

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