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Many fear that the 1993 NIH allocation is likely to curtail-- if not wipe out altogether--some current and envisioned projects Date: April 27, 1992 WASHINGTON--Scientists in the United States research community are distraught over the president's 1993 budget for the National Institutes of Health, put before Congress last month. Specifically, they are troubled by funding adjustments that trim basic research grants to below what they consider adequate amounts to support their investigations. Ad

Feminist groups applaud as the beleaguered NIH employee can go back to work, vindicated, after a six-year-long battle Date: April 27, 1992 In a move that may finally resolve a suit filed three years ago, the National Institutes of Health offered to reinstate Sharon Johnson in a job earlier this month. The position of "floating scientific review administrator," Johnson says, is not exactly the same job that she fled on April 21, 1986, three years before she filed a successful lawsuit alleging

The need for chemical standards is skyrocketing, as a health-conscious public clamors to learn exactly how many parts-per-billion of pesticides are in their veggies, PCBs in their fish, dioxins in their milk, antibiotics in their burgers, cholesterol in their blood, and drugs in their employees' urine. But like a diner unable to judge the quality of a French restaurant because she's never sampled the finest French cuisine, analytical chemists charged with the mounting demand to establish trace

The end of the era of behemoth projects at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration may be at hand as Congress on March 31 confirmed a non-astronaut as the new administrator of an agency facing congressional funding cutbacks. Until his appointment, Daniel Goldin was vice president of TRW Inc.'s Space & Technology Group in Redondo Beach, Calif. TRW, a longtime NASA contractor, has been involved not in space shuttle-sized projects but in the smaller science of satellites, the Compton G

Do It Yourself Bookshelf Alert From Tires To Tumors Sythetic Chemists, Take Heart Chinese Initiative To Russia With Petri Dishes Archi and Odysseus will be getting together in San Jose July 12-16, but they won't be cruising around in that beat-up old jalopy. They'll be attending the first AI Robotics Competition and Exhibition, organized by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and chaired by Tom Dean of the Brown University department of computer sciences. Archi is a t

The National Academy of Sciences is scheduled to present 11 awards to 13 noteworthy individuals in the scientific community at its annual meeting in Washington, D.C., today. "Certain awards are annual, and some cycle differently--every two years, every five years," though all are given at the spring NAS meeting, says Mary Hofbauer Brown, NAS director of membership services. "This year we have a small crop--next year we'll have something like 16 or 17." Of the recipients, Brown says, "of cou

Growing enterprises are rethinking staff needs and realigning priorities as they move to parlay early gains As more biotechnology companies bring products beyond the discovery stage, small, research-driven organizations find themselves acquiring large staffs. Company officials say this new era of growth demands that they change recruiting strategies to hire employees with different skills, cope with increased competition among companies for workers, and create management structures that will p

Curriculum quality must change in order for the depleted math profession to attract young scholars, workshop attendees agree The teaching of mathematics requires drastic change, according to a group of academic mathematicians who met in Oakland last month. The approach and the content of university mathematics are dangerously out of synch with the needs of both students and industry, and the result, the mathematicians contend, is causing the number and quality of mathematics students to dwindl

A new set of biotechnology regulations for the state of Minnesota, approved by an administrative law judge in mid-March, have many researchers in the state alarmed. The scientists are disturbed not so much by the rules themselves--which require the obtaining of state permits for field tests of transgenic plants and microbes and the registration of labs working with recombinant organisms--as by the atmosphere surrounding their drafting. According to Jeff Tate, a plant physiologist at the Univer

Date: April 13, 1992 The orphan drug firm, Wall Street's darling in 1991, now faces fraud charges brought by some of its investors As 1991 came to a close, suburban Philadelphia-based U.S. Bioscience was riding high. In just 12 months the four-year- old biotechnology company had delivered its first anticancer product, Hexalen, to market. Corporate staff had doubled to 100 employees. The firm's much-publicized second product, Ethyol, was in accelerated review at the Food and Drug Administratio

Terril A. Nell, a professor in the department of environmental horticulture at the University of Florida's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS) in Gainesville, has been named chairman of the department. Nell had been acting chairman since June 1991. Nell joined IFAS as an assistant professor in 1977, and became an associate professor in 1982 and a full professor in 1987. He earned a bachelor's degree in ornamental horticulture from Auburn University in 1971, a master's degree in h

Stanley Prusiner, a professor of biochemistry at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, has received the New York-based Metropolitan Life Foundation's 1992 Award for Medical Research in Alzheimer's Disease. Prusiner received $200,000 to further his research plus a personal prize of $50,000 in February. Prusiner, 49, discovered the prion, a pathogen that causes several rare human brain diseases and is related to the agent that causes scrapie, a disease of cattle, sheep,