SOLVING REAL-WORLD PROBLEMS: MacArthur fellow Vonnie McLoyd's research combines concepts in socioeconomics, psychology, and anthropology. This year's John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowships will help six scientists advance their cutting-edge, multidisciplinary projects that extend from the ocean depths to distant stars and planets. With grants of about $250,000 or more, the newly named fellows will be able to finance innovative-even maverick-research ideas that might otherwis

Three of the 13 awards this year are going to astronomers, including the academy's highest honor--the Public Welfare Medal--which is being given to Carl E. Sagan, 59, David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. Every year, NAS presents this medal (the only award without an accompanying cash prize) to an individual who has made extraordinary use of science for the public good. Perhaps

Three of the 13 awards this year are going to astronomers, including the academy's highest honor--the Public Welfare Medal--which is being given to Carl E. Sagan, 59, David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. Every year, NAS presents this medal (the only award without an accompanying cash prize) to an individual who has made extraordinary use of science for the public good. Perhaps

The Wistar Institute in Philadelphia marks its 100th anniversary this year, but the mood at the nation's oldest independent biomedical research facility is hardly jubilant. The institute has been in turmoil for the last year, after the abrupt ouster of longtime director Hilary Koprowski, the famed virologist and immunologist who transformed Wistar from a dilapidated museum into a world-renowned research center. The commotion recently was stirred up further, when the 75-year-old Koprowski file