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Nominations are now being accepted for the Chevron Conservation Awards, the oldest privately sponsored program of its kind in the United States. The $1,000 awards will recognize 10 professionals, 10 citizen volunteers, and five nonprofit organizations working to enhance U.S. air, water, land, and wildlife resources. The awards, to be presented in May, include a bronze plaque and a trip to Washington, D.C., for the presentation. The awards are important because "they attempt to recognize people

NEW CAUCUS IS NOT QUITE ONE FOR ALL Author: Jeffrey Mervis WASHINGTON--The latest battlefield in the ongoing war over priorities within the biomedical research community is the congressional Biomedical Research Caucus. The caucus, which has signed up 18 members of Congress as of the first of October, made its debut earlier this month at an afternoon symposium and reception on Capitol Hill that featured Harold Varmus, a microbiologist at the University of California, San Francisco

WASHINGTON--A new report from the Institute of Medicine on how to fund health sciences research doesn't take the easy way out by asking the United States government for more money. But what it does recommend--that the government redistribute existing funds by shifting some money from research grants into training the next generation of scientists and improving research facilities--seems likely to aggravate rather than end the heated debate about how to allocate scarce federal resources. The me

Lending Nature A hand Car Wash Helps NCAR NASA Creates Astrophysics Network UC Regents Press Ahead on DOE Ties The Boston-based family of mutual funds, Fidelity Investments, has teamed up with the Smithsonian Institution to offer its investors the chance to make charitable contributions to support conservation efforts in Latin American rain forests. The project is based on the "debt-for-nature" swaps pioneered by biologist Thomas Lovejoy, assistant secretary for external affairs at the

TUCSON, Ariz.--Seven years ago, Charles Sterling came to the University of Arizona determined to find a new line of research. At the time Sterling, who was an expert in malaria from Wayne State University in Detroit, had grown tired of what he called the "nasty" world of big-time malaria research funding, a world rife with political infighting and fierce competition among scientists. So, at Arizona, he turned his attention to an obscure, little-studied relative of the malaria parasite, a protoz

WHAT THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT SPENDS ON NEUROSCIENCE (The Scientist, Vol:4, #21, pg. 8, October 29, 1990) (Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.) -------- (ANNUAL SUPPORT IN MILLIONS OF DOLLARS) NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke 490.0 National Institute on Aging 92.0 National Eye Institute 80.0* National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders 59.0 National Institute of Child Health and Human Development 58.5 National I

U.S. AGENCIES TO PLAN BRAIN RESEARCH AGENDA Author: Elizabeth Pennisi (The Scientist, Vol:4, #21, pg. 8, October 29, 1990) (Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.) -------- While the neuroscience community mobilizes and plans its Decade of the Brain campaign, those involved in brain research within the federal government are doing a bit of housekeeping themselves. The executive branch's Office of Science and Technology Policy has set up a Subcommittee on Brain and Behavioral Sciences u

Increased awareness and larger donations are drops in the bucket compared with the amount of federal dollars needed When President Bush signed a congressional resolution officially proclaiming the 1990s as the Decade of the Brain, a cry of triumph rose from patient advocacy groups across the country. Many of the roughly 70 voluntary organizations that represent victims of neurological and mental disorders--a number of whom raise money for research in basic neuroscience as well as for the study

A move is on in academia and government to shatter barriers that traditionally have stymied U.S. females' pursuit of science careers The warning cry sounds loud and clear throughout the science community and well beyond--in the halls of Congress and in the financial community: The United States is suffering from severe and worsening shortage of scientists, one that threatens the nation's ability to compete internationally Everyone, from the president to academicians to industry leaders, is wor

The Hauglands cultivated their booming enterprise by anticipating the demand for new fluorescent probes It was 1975, and husband-and-wife chemists Dick and Rosaria Haugland were short on cash. Rosaria had taken time out from academic research in biochemistry to raise the couple's two children, and Dick regretted having no time for research in his first teaching job at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn. As a way to make extra money and as an excuse to spend more time in the laboratory Dick

EUGENE, Oreg.--Janis Weeks looks up and smiles as the sounds of young voices drift through an open window on the University of Oregon campus. The neurobiologist points out her young son, one of a half-dozen youngsters walking hand-in-hand across the quad to the day care center. Her belly bulging, Weeks is expecting her second child sometime this month. Weeks is a proud mother and she is also the proud recipient of a 1989 Presidential Young Investigator (PYI) award, a prestigious honor bestowed

Before Margaret Rossiter wrote her book Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1982), science historians had not paid much attention to women scientists. There was the occasional bibliography, but no survey of what Rossiter found were large numbers of underrecognized and underemployed women who had managed to work in the lab. Rossiter transformed dusty records archived letters, manuscripts and obituaries of women's past scientif