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ZURICH—With two Nobel prizes in as many years, something good has to be going on at IBM’s research laboratory in Rüschlikon on the outskirts of this city. But apart from an environment that offers fine wines, Swiss cheeses and, on a clear day, a postcard view of the Alps, is there a lesson for other industrial research labs? The IBM lab’s achievements are by now familiar. Last year’s Nobel Prize in physics went to IBM researchers Gerd Binning and Heinrich Rohrer

WASHINGTON—NIH may lose a program to train researchers in primary medical care because of congressional concern that the money is going to researchers in other fields. The General Accounting Office has concluded that all 16 of the National Research Service Awards that NIH earmarked for work in primary health care in 1986, totaling $2.1 million, are instead supporting “biomedical research on specific diseases and in specialty areas of medicine rather than primary care.” Awar

AUSTIN, TEXAS—The Wild West has a new hero. Abraham Charnes, the founder of the Center of Cybernetic Studies at the University of Texas, has unhoistered mathematical equations to help Texas farmers win a long court battle over water rights from the Pecos River. The headwaters of the Pecos lie in central New Mexico. Flowing southward into West Texas to join the Rio Grande, the river runs through some of the most arid country in the United States. Texas and New Mexico have argued over

LONDON—Higher salaries at private companies have left Britain’s Ministry of Defense with hundreds of vacancies in its $12 billion procurement office. Ten percent of the 9,200 specialist posts are now unfilled. The problem is particularly acute among electrical and electronics engineers who assess, order and monitor the performance of sophisticated weapons systems. “We face a diabolical situation in defense procurement,” said Jenny Thurston, assistant general secretar

WASHINGTON—The U.S. fusion program must accept “an unprecedented degree of collaboration” with Western Europe, Japan and the Soviet Union if it is to achieve its current goals, according to government officials and the authors of a new report to Congress. Going it alone is too expensive and, besides, the money isn’t available. That was the clear message from the Department of Energy and the congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) at a hearing last month b

LONDON—A team of 40 scientists from the United States, Western Europe, Japan and the Soviet Union plans to begin work next spring on a three-year, $180 million effort to design the next large thermonuclear fusion experiment. If the participants accept the design, construction of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) could begin as early as 1993. Meeting last month in Vienna, officials from each of the participants also agreed on a European site for the project. It

WASHINGTON—On November 6 the American Chemical Society will celebrate National Chemistry Day. The posters proclaiming that "chemistry is everywhere” are part of the society's campaign to blunt the impact of such environmental disasters as Bhopal and Love Canal and, at the same time, gain crdit for some of the recent advances in medicine and biotechnology. Even as ACS is looking outward, however, it is also trying to harmonize its dual roles as a professional society and as an advi

WASHINGTON—Ohio State University physicist William Palmer says he felt like “eollapsing in the corner” after working long hours to help his state complete its proposal for the Superconducting Supercollider. But the september 2 filing deadline was just the beginning of the race for the multi-billion-dollar high-energy physics project. Officials from Ohio and 24 other states barely had time to catch their breath before plunging ahead into the next phase of the campaign, which

BEIJING—Impressed by China’s example, more than 100 scientists from Asia, Africa and Latin America have resolved to improve scientific and technical cooperation within and between their countries. But the September meeting here adjourned with no consensus on specific proposals. “The secret of success is self-reliance plus a collective spirit, which I define as cooperation and coordination,” Lu Jiaxi, executive president of the Chinese Academy of Science, told delegate

WASHINGTON—The National Institutes of Health is tightening monitoring and information programs for researchers and other staff who handle the AIDS virus. The new effort follows the announcement October 8 that a second worker has become infected, apparently in an accident at an contract facility. Some scien tists have also questioned whether current safety guidelines are adequate to deal with the dangers posed by working with the virus. The new procedures will require workers in the inst

Thomas R. Odhiambo, founder and director of ICIPE (the International Centre for Insect Physiology and Ecology) in Nairobi. has won international recognition for his efforts as a scientist, educator and administrator to mobilize support for science in Africa. As a child in Kenya he developed a curiosity about wasps that helped inspire his later studies at Makerere University in Uganda and at Cambridge University in England, where he received a Ph.D. in insect physiology in 1965. After stints as

Q:Must traditional folk practices in Africa be abandoned for the scientific culture to flourish? ODHIAMBO: I don’t think so. In fact, if you analyze folklore, particularly storytelling, there’s a tremendous amount of natural history in it. All one has to do is translate what is being stated into more modern language—simply make those stories current. I don’t see a conflict at all between the traditional knowledge base and the modem technology base. I think we can use th