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WASHINGTON -- The unity of a coalition that each year campaigns for a large increase in the NIH budget has been splintered by a group of bench scientists who say the agency should fund more grants to individual investigators. The disagreement reflects the growing strain on the scientific community from declining funding rates for such grants and the perception of some scientists that their work is being squeezed out by megaprojects like the war against AIDS and the effort to map and sequence t

Stone Award Honors Southern Chemists The Carolina-Piedmont Section of the American Chemical Society will be accepting nominations through May 15 for the Charles H. Stone Award. Stone, who founded the Carolina-Piedmont Section in 1943, was a native North Carolinian and a pioneer in the chemical and dyestuff industry. Income from the Stone Trust Fund, provided in his will, supports administration of this award. Since Stone's death in 1969, this regional group has presented one annual prize, desi

Bradford H. Hager, professor of geophysics in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's department of earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences, has been named the school's Cecil and Ida Green Professor in Earth Sciences. Hager is best known for his research on the physics of geologic processes. He has focused his work on applying geophysical observations and numerical modeling to the study of mantle convection, the coupling of mantle convection to crustal deformation, and precision geodesy.

Looking for compounds to kill tumors, Michael Boyd abandons leukemic mice and tries a radically new, unprecedentedly large assay In a sharp break from its past, the National Cancer Institute has abandoned a 30-year-old system for finding compounds that kill tumors and has replaced it with an elaborate but unproven factory-style operation. In the new program, unique in its scope, 20,000 compounds and extracts will be tested against a broad array of human tumor cells each year. The compounds wi

Bequest by developer turns into $118 million endowment to fund work on the molecular bases of heart disease SAN FRANCISCO -- When Southern California shopping center developer J. David Gladstone died while swimming in the pool of his Hollywood Hills home in 1971, his death got scant notice beyond local real estate circles. Yet today the memory of this obscure businessman lives on among biomedical scientists as the benefactor of the J. David Gladstone Foundation. The spectacular growth and sci

Science Teachers Want It Cheap And Real The number of projects aimed at improving science education in U.S. schools is growing so quickly that officials at Argonne National Laboratory say it wasn't easy "to offer something new and important." But Lou Harnisch thinks that he's found the answer. Harnisch, a Chicago high school teacher on a leave of absence at Argonne, has launched a program that relies on cheap-to-produce equipment and the glamour of real-life topics to excite youngsters in Chica

The endangered red squirrel gets a 120-day reprieve, while Congress reconsiders its support of Mount Graham complex TUCSON -- Two years ago, astronomers and their supporters climbed up Capitol Hill and won approval for a $200 million observatory on an Arizona mountaintop. Many people thought that was the end of a four-year struggle between astronomers and people who opposed observatory development (The Scientist, Nov. 28, 1988, page 5; and Jan. 22, 1990, page 4). But last month, a federal cour

A Platform For Animal Cell Technology West European biotechnology companies are getting together to establish a mechanism to ensure that they reap the benefits of European Community-funded research on animal cell technology. The firms plan to establish in a Dublin meeting on June 6 an Animal Cell Technology Industry Platform, which will organize technology transfer from a three-year EC initiative. Brussels has earmarked about $4 million for the initiative, a sum to be matched by private enterpr

WASHINGTON -- Medical devices have been the most trouble-free of biotechnology's products; they have sailed smoothly through U.S. Food and Drug Administration review. But that situation is changing. These genetically engineered materials and technologies for treating and diagnosing disease are getting more complex. At the same time, Congress and the public are increasingly concerned that FDA is not being tough enough and that technology is inflating health care costs. Last month, FDA and the S

FASEB speakers teach scientists about drug development and urge researchers to shape the regulatory process WASHINGTON--Biochemists isolating novel chemical compounds could use a bit more street smarts if they want to raise the profile - and budgets - of their research, according to university and industry scientists attending this month's annual meeting of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. Speaking at a symposium on the "Impact of Federal Agencies on Drug Develop

New Psychology Journal In 1988, the American Psychological Society split from the American Psychological Association because many APA members believed that their former association's interest in psychological science was diminishing. According to James L. McGaugh, APS president and professor of psychobiology at the University of California, Irvine, he and other members had fought APA's growing trend toward an "applied clinical interest," but could not win that battle and eventually decided to f

Analysts say the Roche deal blunts the impact of a report in which the firm's top product fares poorly against its competition Genentech took it on the chin last month when a massive study by Italian scientists found that tPA, tissue plasminogen activator, was no more effective in treating heart attacks than streptokinase, a bacterial enzyme that costs one tenth as much. But the stock price of the South San Francisco, Calif., company, which manufactures the drug, hardly budged. Although tPA i