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While the most quoted dissenter says the virus plays no part, there is a broad diversity of opinion in the scientific community on its function. When the journal Science ran an eight-page special report in December, it got a lot of attention which, after all, is what special reports are intended for. But this one, devoted to a single researcher, was highly unusual. Called "The Duesberg Phenomenon," it presented University of California, Berkeley, retrovirologist Peter Duesberg's unorthodox vie

Stock options and an openness to independent personalities are increasing the appeal of small firms for creative, ambitious scientists. The ability of small science-based companies to go head-to- head with much larger firms in attracting top scientific talent is growing, according to researchers and human resources analysts. The traditional recruiting advantages of big companies higher salaries and a greater degree of job security have been effectively offset in recent years by major shifts in

Daunting challenges, including implementation, assessment, and maintaining public support, lie ahead for NRC's K-12 guidelines Educators and scientists say they are encouraged by the latest version of the National Research Council's science education standards, an effort aimed at defining what United States K-12 students should know about science. The previous draft had been criticized for being at once too specific and inflexible on scientific subject matter and too vague about the practice o

For the third time in its 38-year history, the Gairdner Foundation of Willowdale, Ontario, Canada, has selected a scientist who is already a Nobel laureate to receive one of its prestigious International Awards. Traditionally, this award has been considered a "Nobel predictor," with 43 out of 238 honorees having gone on to win the coveted prize. Prior to this year's announcement, Frederick Sanger and H. Gobind Khorana, who won their Nobels in 1958 and 1968, respectively, were the only scientist

National Institutes of Health administrators are unhappy once again--with self-styled fraud investigators Walter Stewart and Ned Feder, this time for alleged misuse of NIH stationery. It appears the infraction is that, under NIH letterhead on January 23, the two men forwarded a copy of an as-yet-unreleased congressional inquiry into alleged scientific misconduct by HIV researcher Robert C. Gallo of the National Cancer Institute to Kenneth Ryan, chairman of the federal Commission on Research Int

Life scientists from a wide array of disciplines, whose paths might not normally cross, will come together in Atlanta for Experimental Biology '95 (EB '95) from Sunday, April 9 through Thursday, April 13. The 15,000 biomedical researchers expected to attend will get a chance to meet one another, share information, and plan future research activities while attending scores of technical sessions on such topics as "Protein Lipidation in Cellular Signaling" and "Degeneration and Regeneration of the

Researchers working on a large-scale plan to develop a linkage map of the genome of African Americans a project similar to the Human Genome Project (HGP)_vow to continue their efforts, despite being rejected for funding by the National Institutes of Health. As they pursue other sources of funding, they say they will carry on with the project in a loosely associated alliance of smaller research efforts at Howard University and other institutions. "It is just too important a project to be dismant

Moves to companies by a small group of HHMI investigators shows the growing appeal of commercial- sector biological research jobs. Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators are acknowledged to be among the most creative and accomplished basic researchers working in academic laboratories today. Yet even these top scientists sometimes feel the urge for a different set of challenges. Some long for the chance to develop useful new drugs and therapeutics based on their ideas or to run a larger,

Veteran Administrators Sidebar: MINORITY SCIENCE EDUCATION RESOURCES Researchers, educators, and government officials involved in the effort to increase representation of ethnic and racial minorities in science, mathematics, and engineering are encouraged by the comprehensive and business-like approaches of several projects that have been instituted in the last few years. They say this despite being critical of the majority of such programs because of a lack of effectiveness and accountability.

Policy-watchers wonder if even modest increases for science will survive Republican lawmakers' fiscal conservatism The Clinton administration is striving to put the best possible "spin" on its $72.9 billion research and development budget for the 1996 fiscal year, which would provide modest increases--about enough to keep pace with inflation--for the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. White House science adviser John H. Gibbons contends that "science and technol

Delores Parron, associate director for special populations at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Rockville, Md., refers to her office as the "mother cell," where the inclusion guidelines began. The NIMH office was put in place in 1983. Parron participated in a U.S. Public Health Service Task Force on Women's Health Issues from 1984 to 1985 that found, she states, "on those studies of diseases and disorders affecting men and women, to the greatest extent, women had been excluded."

New York University Medical Center is isolated on the edge of Manhattan's affluent Kip's Bay neighborhood, an area that includes only sparse pockets of subsidized lower- and middle-income housing. According to Kay Ryan, director of clinical trials development for the center, "Here, the patient population is not more than half minority, and here we have to do something to recruit minorities." "Something," in NYU's case, is recruiting patients for its cancer trials from Bellevue Hospital Center,