The Scientist - Home

The diminishing capacity of the government to recruit top candidates for key government scientific positions has "long-term consequences ... very serious for the nation," a recent report issued by the Panel on Presidentially Appointed Scientists and Engineers states. "There is considerable evidence of increasing difficulty in recruiting ... highly qualified appointees," according to "Science and Technology Leadership in American Government," and this has "a significant and harmful effect on t

JUST HOW EFFECTIVE ARE THE SCIENCE AND MATH MAGNET SCHOOLS? Author: Susan L-J Dickinson A 1990 study conducted by the North Carolina School of Science and Math (NCSSM) on the occasion of its 10th anniversary covered some 900 alumni from the school's first eight classes (1982-1989), and revealed the following statistics: * 99 percent of NCSSM students attended or were attending four-year colleges, vs. 58 percent of all students nationally and 39 percent in the state of North Car

Pay-Per-View At HHMI Campaign Contributions More From The Land Of Opportunity Salamander Sex Proving Their Productivity The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has produced a new video on lab safety techniques and distributed it to each of its units and laboratories. The 12 1/2-minute tape, entitled What You Should Know About Laboratory Safety, features correct procedures for such functions as storing, transporting, and disposing of hazardous chemicals; removing contaminated gloves; and ha

For most of this century, United States colleges and universities adhered to a dogma that the best way to compete for students, faculty, and research dollars is to expand. But this approach has led to large, complicated bureaucracies, according to Barbara Bergmann, president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). The net result of this, Bergmann says, is a debilitating malady called "administrative bloat." Bergmann, a professor of economics at American University, contend

Scientists in industry and academia foresee trouble as NIH persists in claiming ownership over partial sequences Date: April 27, 1992 The reviews from the scientific community remain mostly negative over the National Institutes of Health's patent application for a total of 2,722 partial human gene sequences. Academic researchers, who say they are mostly unaffected by the patenting process, nevertheless are appalled; and while some in the commercial sector of the biotech community now believe

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