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OTTAWA—The National Research Council of Canada, seeking ways to buffer government pressure to support more applied work, has taken several small steps to bolster basic research. Its latest effort is a $1 million fund from which to finance petitive grants for “curiosity-driven projects” in a variety .of disciplines. In a recent letter to NRC staff, President Larkin Kerwin noted that grants for basic research comprised only 15 percent of the council’s awards but that he

DUBLIN—Approval of the EEC’s Framework program is important news for Irish scientists, whose country relies heavily on the joint projects to augment the low level of support from their own government. “Basically, it means that people like me are working here rather than abroad,” said Edel Stephens, technical manager for software development at a small firm doing EEC-backed work. With support at levels far below the rest of the EEC (Ireland spends 0.8 percent of its

WASHINGTON—The government’s management of scientific and technical information came under heavy fire last month at a congressional hearing. Witnesses charged that the Reagan administration has failed to develop a coherent national policy, and attacked its plans to broaden security restrictions on such information and sell off the National Technical Information Services (NTIS), the nation’s largest repository of technical material. The hearing before the Science, Research a

BRUSSELS—The European Economic Community’s R&D program of collaborative work on telecommunications and other advanced technologies is now poised to go ahead following a budgetary compromise between the British government and the rest of the EEC. Variously heralded in the British press as a retreat by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher or a vindication of her demands for restraint, a 5.2 billion ECU ($6 billion), the Framework program for the next five years has been set by the EC

WASHINGTON—More than four months after researchers in the United States and France agreed to share credit for the discovery of the AIDS virus, the international foundation, they proposed to help fight the disease has yet to emerge from the necessary paperwork. The Department of Health and Human Services recently received the signatures of 15 scientists from HHS and the Pasteur Institute that are needed to set up the foundation, said Robert Charrow, HHS deputy general counsel. A request

WASHINGTON—A government report has failed to substantiate claims by the National Science Foundation that it has a problem hiring and retaining top-level science administrators. But the report has been denounced as “irrelevant” by the congressional committee that requested the information. In a four-page fact sheet, the Government Accounting Office found that the attrition rate (retirements, resignations and layoffs) of senior executives at NSF during the past three years was

BRISTOL—Three British universities have agreed to form a science research center, with an R&D staff of 150, that will be the centerpiece for the largest science park in the country. The 500-acre project at Emerson’s Green, Kingswood, will be linked closely to the nearby universities of Bristol and Bath and Bristol Polytechnic. The project, to be built at a cost of $375 million over 10 years, was initiated by the Emerson’s Green Development Company. “We will provide the

WASHINGTON—Scientists and staff at the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) do not understand the proper role of peer review and do notagree on its purpose, its use and the effect it has on scientific research projects, a new National Academy of Sciences report has found. The ARS, the principal in-house research agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, employs more than 8,500 scientists, engineers and technicians at 127 locations. It distributes its $500 million annual budget̵

WASHINGTON—The recent censure of Charles J. Glueck for misreporting his studies of children on low-cholesterol diets illustrates the biomedical community’s increasing concern about scientific misconduct, according to NIH Deputy Director William Raub. Glueck, who has received several NIH grants, was formally censured by the agency last month. It has recommended that Glueck be barred from receiving any federal funds for two years, and banned from serving on any government advisory g

ZURICH—The twin problems of transcending national boundaries and crossing over from academic to industrial labs appear to have doomed a NATO program meant to encourage international scientific exchanges. Begun in 1982, the $1 million program was designed to forge links between universities and industrial laboratories in different countries by using the same exchange mechanisms as those for basic science and inter-university cooperation. These include fellowships, collaborative research

Editor's note: The U.S. armed services operate a network of in-house laboratories to pursue basic research that fits the mission of each service. In the months to come The Scientist will offer a glimpse of these little-known but well-respected facilities and the challenges they face. The first two articles in the series deal with the Army's labs. ADELPHI, MD.—"As Bell Labs is to AT&T, the laboratory command is to the Army Materiel Command," says Ira Marcus, associate director for engineer

WASHINGTON—Nearly two years after it was convened, a National Academy of Sciences panel is searching desperately for the middle ground in a bitter debate about the use and treatment of laboratory animals. A minority report, rare in an NAS study, seems likely to emerge from the 15-member panel, which has heard scientific discussion give way to personal attacks in the course of its nine meetings. The latest spark stems from a Wall Street Journal editorial relating an account of an alleged co