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PARIS—Only a few weeks before UNESCO’s 50-nation Executive Board meets here for its semiannual session, a scientific front-runner has emerged in the race to succeed Senegal’s Amadou Mahtar M’Bow as director-general. He is Federico Mayor Zaragoza, a 53-year-old Spanish biochemist and pharmacologist who was deputy director-general for UNESCO, the chief U.N. agency for scientific research from 1978 to 1981. He has since served as minister of education and research in Ma

WASHINGTON—The Presidential Young Investigators award program is supposed to lure newly minted scientists and engineers away from industry and into academia by offering them up to $100,000 a year for their research. The 200 young scientists chosen each year by the National Science Foundation are also asked, somewhat paradoxically, to build ties with industry by obtaining matching funds for the federal dollars they receive. But four years after it was begun, the PYI program has failed

Jorge Rocca is not your average Presidential Young Investigator. Unlike the majority of his colleagues, he says the award was ‘‘a big factor’’ in his decision to remain in academia. ‘‘We like what we do,’’ he said about young researchers who have begun to build a record of achievement. ‘‘But the award strongly biases you to stay and make good use of the money." Rocca, who is using part of his PYI money to build short-wavelength laser

WEST BERLIN—West and East Germany have agreed to pursue more than two dozen scientific and technological projects as part of a joint agreement signed last week. The announcement was made on the occasion of the first visit to Bonn by East German General Secretary Erich Honecker The agreement comes after 34 rounds of negotiations in the 15 years since the two countries first established formal relationships. A panel of government officials and scientists from each country will be create

BOZEMAN, MONT.—The deliberate violation by a Montana State University scientist of EPA regulations on the release of genetically engineered organisms has evoked sharply different reactions from scientists and top administrators on campus. While colleagues criticize him in harsh terms, university officials say they welcome the increased attention to the impact of federal regulations on science. At issue is plant pathology professor Gary Strobel’s June release into the wild of a ge

TOKYO—Stung by foreign criticism of its scant contributions to basic research, Japan has taken steps to break down its traditionally rigid system of funding university research and to launch new ventures. Budget figures released this summer show that government support is strongest, in fact, for the least traditional of the new programs, some of which involve substantial foreign participation. The Science and Technology Agency (STA) achieved a 23 percent increase in funds for its nont

WASHINGTON—Last spring’s newspaper stories that described how IBM researchers had boosted the critical current density of a superconductive thin-film crystal by a factor of 100 were also bringing news of the discovery to most scientists. Not until six weeks later were the details published in Physical Review Letters. Increasingly, scientists in fast-paced fields are announcing breakthroughs at meetings or press conferences. Long before results appear in scientific journals, they

SAN FRANCISCO—A battle is brewing over a Federal Communications Commission proposal that could double the cost of accessing many on-line computer networks. Users affected by the proposal include the thousands of research labs across the nation that regularly use on-line computer services to keep them up-to-date on specific topics or to assist otherwise in their work. The change could force such labs to severely curtail or drop their use of such services. At issue is the right of so-ca

Director of the Institute of Medicine since 1985, Samuel 0. Thier has succeeded in increasing both its budget and its public profile. In doing so, the Brooklyn native has been able to draw upon his experience as an academic physician and administrator. A Cornell University graduate, Thier received his MD degree from the State University of New York at Syracuse in 1960. He went to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston as an intern and eventually became chief of its renal unit, while also jo

Q: The AIDS report is a major example of IOM’s increased visibility. Its recommendations have been widely disseminated. Are you happy with the response it’s gotten from policymakers? THIER: The response from the research community has been pretty reasonable. The major concern is that we pointed out that education is our only major intervention until therapies and vaccines are developed, but the amount of activity relating to education has been very modest. We also were concerned th

Although many scientists must narrowly fail to make an important discovery, it is hard not to feel guilty for not having pushed oneself just that little bit harder. Early in my career as a psychologist, I began to study vision in the octopus. I chose this strange beast because it was an invertebrate; hence its visual system, though highly developed, has evolved from structures very different from that of vertebrates. I believed (perhaps rather naively) that by finding the differences betwee

Export and other controls over the dissemination of “technical data” are part of the federal government’s efforts to inhibit or prevent the transfer of advanced technology of critical military or intelligence importance from the United States to the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact nations. Some university research results might be technical data of the kind subject to these controls. The present situation of security controls—which for the most part exempts academic