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The residents of California's San Diego County have voted by a 2-to-1 margin to continue to allow unclaimed pound animals to be used in medical research. More than 600,000 voters cast ballots November 6 in the largest-ever electoral rebuff of the animal rights movement's efforts to curb the use of pound animals in research. Supporters spent $130,000 to campaign for the referendum, which was drafted by county legislators and endorsed by such well-known scientific figures as former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and Nobel laureate George Palade. There have been six such referenda--four in California--on the issue since 1986, says Barbara Rich of the Washington, D.C.-based National Association for Biomedical Research, and all have passed by similarly large margins. here on Election Day, an active supporter in Congress of more federal funding for science was upset by a political novice and a second strong voice for science won a narrow victory. Rep. Doug Walgren (D-Pa.), former chairman of the House science research subcommittee, was beaten by Rick Santorum, a 32-year-old lawyer, in his bid for an eighth term. And the man rumored to be the next chairman of the House science committee, Rep. George Brown (D-Calif.), survived a close race to win a 10th consecutive term. The current science chairman, Rep. Robert Roe (D-N.J.), who won reelection easily, is said to be weighing a bid for chairman of the Public Works Committee. Academic exchanges work best when each side has something the other side wants. That's the idea behind the Russian American University Consortium, a new group formed by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., and the National Science Teachers Association in Washington, D.C. "The key is complementary skills," says NSTA's executive director Bill Aldridge about the program, which would send U.S. faculty in economics, computer science, and business to teach Russian students, while Soviet professors of Slavic languages and certain branches of theoretical science come to various U.S. institutions. This fall, Ed Dolan, an economist, arrived at Moscow State University to teach 80 Russian engineers and computer scientists about the free enterprise system in the first wave of a program that Aldridge hopes some day will involve two dozen U.S. campuses and a proposed building at Moscow State.
