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President Bush made a surprise visit December 22 to NIH to talk with AIDS patients and to applaud NIH employees "for helping to improve the lives of millions of people and around the world." His audience - which included the heads and deputies of each of the 13 NIH institutes as well as 500 selected intramural scientists - undoubtedly was happy to receive a pat on the back from the First Hand. But they were less than pleased with the 2 1/2-hour wait that they endured within Masur auditorium to

In November, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced its 1990 competitive research grants, an extramural program with $40 million to spend and high hopes for $500 million in 1991. Grants for up to five years are awarded according to peer review to investigators at colleges, universities, research institutions, or state agricultural experiment stations. The biggest slice of the 1990 program is a biotechnology research initiative. Begun in 1985, the program has grown to $19 million. Also, th

Joan A. Steitz, professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at the School of Medicine at Yale University, New Haven, Conn., is the first woman ever to win the 118-year-old Warren Prize, presented every three years by Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Steitz, 48, will share the 1989 prize with the 1989 Nobel laureate in chemistry, Thomas R. Cech, professor of chemistry at the University of Colorado. Prize winners receive a plaque and $2,500. Steitz, an investigator with the Howar

Paul Jennings, professor of civil engineering and applied mechanics at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, has been named vice president and provost of Caltech. An internationally known authority on earthquake engineering, Jennings has been chairman of Caltech's division of engineering and applied science since 1985. As vice president and provost, he will be responsible for all day-to-day academic affairs that relate to Caltech's teaching and research programs. Jennings, who has d

WASHINGTON--The Bush administration's continued opposition to rejoining the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization is based on complaints that are no longer valid, say those who advocate renewed United States ties with the international agency. The latest evidence, they say, is the admini-stration's hard-line response to actions taken at UNESCO's recent meeting in Paris that were meant to improve its management practices and defuse some controversial issues that contr

Too late, scientists agree too little is known about an Arizona mountaintop set to become a haven for astrophysical research University of Washington anthropologist Don Grayson went to Tucson in October to take part in discussions concerning the history of mammals in the desert Southwest. He left believing that he had taken part in an autopsy. The victim was Mount Graham, a mountain slated to become the home of up to seven telescopes. Like many of the 50 participants in the "Workshop on the Bi

Nationalism is major issue in much of developing world as U.S. scientists seek to learn more about this endangered ecosystem When Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson thinks about the 1950s, his recollections are tinged with more than a little nostalgia. Not because life was necessarily better then, he explains. But his kind of science was certainly easier to do. Wilson, a noted authority on tropical ants and widely recognized as the "father" of sociobiology, the study of how biological traits in

When Charles S. Johnson and his colleagues designed an experiment that standard nuclear magnetic resonance equipment couldn't handle, they decided to build a unit that could. The result: an electrophoretic NMR, a device that combines electrophoresis (a method of separating and identifying large molecules) and high-resolution NMR (a means of performing chemical analyses). "We're doing NMR in the presence of a large electric field," explains Johnson, Smith Professor of Chemistry at the University

Yet another voice in the scientific community's debate over animal research has made itself heard. The New York-based Medical Research Modernization Committee, a group of health care professionals who say that "most animal `models' are irrelevant or outdated," has published its first issue of Perspectives on Animal Research. Stephen Kaufman, an ophthalmologist and coeditor of the new journal, says its main purpose is to evaluate the clinical significance of different research methods, such as c

Researchers, discouraged by mapping's drudgery, doubt that a 5-year plan to finish high-resolution image is now feasible. WASHINGTON--After three years of escalating expectations, rising financial support, and congressional accolades, the Human Genome Initiative has encountered its first major hurdle. A key element of the project has fallen several years behind schedule, in part because peer review panels at the National Institutes of Health decided that some incoming grant proposals on the to

With a neuroscience institute in Washington and an emphasis on basic research, FIDIA aims to bolster respect worldwide WASHINGTON - Long after the vinyl and paper folders from a typical scientific conference have been tossed in the trash, a genuine imported leather portfolio with bright red decorative stitching and the inscription: "FIDIA-Georgetown Institute for the Neurosciences, November 3, 1985" is likely to remain on the shelves of many scientists. It's just too nice to throw away. That

Under attack by animal rights campaigners, federal health agencies counter with a vigorous drive yo gain public support WASHINGTON - Top health officials in the Bush administration have begun an offensive on behalf of the use of animals in research. Their campaign is meant to counter the continuing efforts by animal rights activists to disrupt and condemn animal research as part of the movement's broader attack on the treatment of animals. This new, more aggressive attempt to preserve a scien