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Chances are excellent that if you ask laboratory workers to describe the ventilation system for their laboratories, they will not include themselves as part of the system. Yet they are as much a part of the successful operation of the system as the fume hood itself. All the engineering in the world is not going to do any good if the systems designed and installed are not properly used. Yet how many lab workers have ever received on-the-job training in the proper use of a fume hood and its ass

In 1887 the U.S. federal government established a little one-room laboratory on Staten Island, N.Y., and called it the Laboratory of Hygiene. Today, that lab is called the National Institutes of Health. All year long NIH has been bombarding the media with press releases on its centennial events, including a July 1 Capitol Hill “photo opportunity” with some of the nation’s 25,000 centenarians. But they’ve failed to mention many of the more interesting stories. For ex

Turning points in my intellectual life have never been welcome; I always seem to resist them until forced to do otherwise. One such passage occurred some 10 years ago, as I was walking one spring morning in the Downs of southern England with the evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith and his biologist wife Sheila. John, remarking on our proximity to Charles Darwin’s home, chided me gently: “You really must think about natural selection, Stuart.” How his comment shocked me

You’ve promised yourself you’ll begin looking for a job just as soon as summer’s over. Fortify yourself with the tribulations of young Albert Einstein; things got so bad that his father even wrote on his behalf. It took Einstein almost two years to land his entry-level appointment at the Swiss Patent Office But the rest, of course, is history We hope you fare as well. From The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Vol. 1: The Early Years, 1879-1902 (Princeton University Press,

PARIS—Europeans this summer have gained intimate experience in an exercise they had viewed in the past as a strictly American sport: genetic engineers versus ecologists. The contest arose after a spate of reports revealed that field tests of modified bacteria and plants were under way in France, West Germany, Belgium and Britain. Ecologists quickly denounced the “arrogance” of the European Economic Community, which financed some of the experiments. Of particular concern is

WASHINGTON—States competing for the Superconducting Supercollider have been given 30 more days to submit their proposals to the Department of Energy. The department’s original deadline of August 3 for proposals, announced last winter, produced howls of outrage from states that had waited to mount their campaigns until President Reagan threw his support behind the multibillion-dollar project. They complained they could never catch up to the handful of states that had already spent

LONDON—In an effort to build circulation in the Pacific Rim, Nature last month started printing in Japan. The press run of 3,500 copies— l0 percent of the weekly journal’s total circulation—is expected to reduce costs and speed delivery for subscribers. “Our first objective is to get more readers in Japan,” said Nature editor John Maddox. “We hope that will lead to our attracting more Japanese scientists as contributors. “What we are really up

BRAZZAVILLE, CONGO—The continent’s leading scientists and technology experts have agreed to form a Pan-African Union of Science and Technology to apply their knowledge to the enormous economic problems facing their developing countries. The decision was made at the end of an unprecedented week-long meeting here coordinated by the Organization of African Unity (OAU). The First Congress of African Scientists was funded in part by UNESCO, the United Nations Development Program and th

OTTAWA—The National Research Council of Canada, seeking ways to buffer government pressure to support more applied work, has taken several small steps to bolster basic research. Its latest effort is a $1 million fund from which to finance petitive grants for “curiosity-driven projects” in a variety .of disciplines. In a recent letter to NRC staff, President Larkin Kerwin noted that grants for basic research comprised only 15 percent of the council’s awards but that he

DUBLIN—Approval of the EEC’s Framework program is important news for Irish scientists, whose country relies heavily on the joint projects to augment the low level of support from their own government. “Basically, it means that people like me are working here rather than abroad,” said Edel Stephens, technical manager for software development at a small firm doing EEC-backed work. With support at levels far below the rest of the EEC (Ireland spends 0.8 percent of its

WASHINGTON—The government’s management of scientific and technical information came under heavy fire last month at a congressional hearing. Witnesses charged that the Reagan administration has failed to develop a coherent national policy, and attacked its plans to broaden security restrictions on such information and sell off the National Technical Information Services (NTIS), the nation’s largest repository of technical material. The hearing before the Science, Research a

BRUSSELS—The European Economic Community’s R&D program of collaborative work on telecommunications and other advanced technologies is now poised to go ahead following a budgetary compromise between the British government and the rest of the EEC. Variously heralded in the British press as a retreat by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher or a vindication of her demands for restraint, a 5.2 billion ECU ($6 billion), the Framework program for the next five years has been set by the EC