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The Scientist has asked a group of experts to periodically comment upon recent articles that they have found noteworthy. Their selections, presented here in every issue, are neither endorsements of content nor the result of systematic searching. Rather, they are personal choices of articles they believe the scientific community as a whole may also find interesting. Reprint. of any artieles cited here may be ordered through The Genuine Article, 5501 Market St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19104, or by tel

Biotech Patent Bottleneck Harms Makers Of Better Mousetraps AUTHOR:RON COWEN Date: September 05, 1988 While the U.S. Patent Office fiddles, small firms lacking earnings records may be losing potential investors WASHINGTON—Chemist George Rathman won’t soon forget July 1, 1987, the day that the worth of his company’s stock dropped $10 million in six hours. President and CEO of Aragen Inc., an eight-year-old biotechnology firm in Thou- sand Oaks, Calif., Rathmann calls the ex

A flap over photographs has made the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins University the target of a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union. The suit charges that staff photographer Terry Corbett was illegally fired in August 1987 after he refused to take pictures of demonstrators protesting the lab’s work on nuclear weapons. ACLU lawyer Charles Becker contends that the rights of demonstrators were violated when the Defense Department-funded lab gave pictures of the demonst

The Kresge Foundation, one of the dozen largest private foundations in the U.S., is well known for its financial support of nonscience-related construction and renovation. And indeed, over the years it has been instrumental in funding some very flashy libraries and gyms. However the foundation has always been open to science-related proposals as well, and earlier this year it offered to fund equipment as well as buildings. (See The Scientist, June 13, page 23.) According to program officer G

Scientists who have joined the ranks of secretaries, journalists, data processors, and others who spend most of the day glued to a VDT screen, take note. Last month James Sheedy, chief of the University of California, Berkeley’s Video Display Terminal Eye Clinic, reported that an eye-focusing problem in people in their 20s and 30s was the number one problem in clinical studies of 153 patients. The study did not prove a causal relationship between regular VDT use and difficulty with eye

Emil Thomas Kaiser, the Patrick E. and Beatrice M. Haggerty Professor of The Rockefeller University in New York, died on July 18, at the age of 50, from immunosuppressive complications after kidney transplant surgery at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. Kaiser was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. He also served on the editorial board of The Journal of the American Chemical Society, the National Institutes of Health panel evaluatin

Heinz R. Pagels, executive director and chief executive officer of the New York Academy of Sciences, died in a mountaineering accident on July 23 while attending the summer session of the Aspen Center for Physics. A theoretical physicist, Pagels, 49, worked in the areas of relativistic quantum field theory and cosmology and was noted as being a popularizer of science. He authored three books on science: The Cosmic Code (1983); Perfect Symmetry: The Search for the Beginning of Time (1985); an

At its annual meeting in June, the Iondon-based Royal Society elected one new fellow and six new foreign members. Also at the meeting, the Council of the Society announced the recipients of its medals and honors for 1988. In honor of her contributions to the history of contemporary science, Margaret Gowing was elected a fellow of the society. Cowing, a specialist on the implications of atomic energy in Britain and the person responsible for establishing the Contemporary Scientific Archives

Yale physicist D. Allan Bromley, already a member of the low-profile White House Science Council, will soon be wearing a second, more visible Washington science policy hat. On July 25, President Reagan announced Bromley’s nomination to the National Science Board, which oversees NSF. Staffers at each body say they foresee no conflicts between the two positions, adding that Bromley’s most serious problem may be finding sufficient time to serve on each panel. Bromley is part of Vice

WASHINGTON—Starting next month, NSF will be allowed to pay up to $95,000 to scientists accepting temporary positions in Washington. The new rule represents a boost of $17,500 in the federal pay ceiling created last December by Congress. But the higher cap comes at a price—a new ceiling on salaries for thousands of NSF grantees. That annual ceiling has also been set at $95,000, although typically NSF funds only the summer salaries of university scientists. The ceiling will be appl

PARIS-- In a country where thousands of physicians practics ho- meopathy the Beneviste affair has generated widespread publicity, much of it favorable to the French scientist. Paris Match magazine, for example acclaimed the initial paper about the alleged memory of water as a stupendous breakthrough, but did not mention Nature's subsequent investigation. The newspaper Le Point reported with tongue not in cheek, rumor that several Nobel Prize-winning physicists met in Bermuda, somewhere near

Benveniste’s “high-dilution” experiments are not the first to raise concern about science journals’ proper response to unconventional results. Twice before, Nature published papers dubious enough to warrant accompanying editorials questioning the results. And in one eerily parallel precursor incident, Nature’s then editor actually swooped down on a yet another Paris lab with “The Amazing” Randi and a third party to debunk unorthodox results—and