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A brain drain, red tape, and pinched budgets could turn the $8 billion network of defense labs into a scientific backwater At the U.S. Army's Aviation Systems Command in St. Louis, helicopter designer Roger Smith was faced with an important career move. The Army was transferring its helicopter-design activities to San Francisco, a much more expensive place to live. But Smith's salary was set by federal law and couldn't be raised to reflect the higher cost of living on the West Coast. Looking

As six-year term ends, Bloch wins praise for raising NSF's profile, but questions remain on how to set priorities WASHINGTON -- You won't see this advertisement in the classified section of any newspaper or magazine. But it describes the type of person that the scientific community hopes will become the next director of the National Science Foundation. The six-year term of the current office holder, Erich Bloch, expires this coming August, and - although there has been no official announcemen

Despite gaps in their knowledge of how the mollusk produces the adhesive, scientists hope to re-create it GAITHERSBURG, MD. -- "Nature didn't make mussel glue for man's instant gratification," says Herbert Waite, the marine biochemist who first isolated adhesive protein from the foot of the common blue mussel. But man certainly intends to make use of and profit from this novel material. Last month, Genex Corp. - a Maryland biotechnology company - introduced its first glue based on the mussel

Consortium's technology for synthetic protein engineering offers access to one of the next hot fields in biotechnology WASHINGTON -- Proteins! That's what his elders would tell Dustin Hoffman to pursue instead of plastics if the 1960s movie The Graduate were set in the 1990s. That's where the next revolution in man-made materials will be. And that's why the federal government, the University of Maryland, and local politicians have invested $8 million to set up a protein engineering laboratory,

Inside Out At NIH In their quest for the authority to pay higher salaries to attract top scientific talent, NIH officials are quick to claim that, since James Wyngaarden came from Duke University to become NIH director in 1982, they have been unable to fill any top administrative positions with outsiders. That streak came to an end in January with the appointment of James Snow, chairman of the department of otorhinolaryngology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, as the first d

WASHINGTON -- The unity of a coalition that each year campaigns for a large increase in the NIH budget has been splintered by a group of bench scientists who say the agency should fund more grants to individual investigators. The disagreement reflects the growing strain on the scientific community from declining funding rates for such grants and the perception of some scientists that their work is being squeezed out by megaprojects like the war against AIDS and the effort to map and sequence t

Stone Award Honors Southern Chemists The Carolina-Piedmont Section of the American Chemical Society will be accepting nominations through May 15 for the Charles H. Stone Award. Stone, who founded the Carolina-Piedmont Section in 1943, was a native North Carolinian and a pioneer in the chemical and dyestuff industry. Income from the Stone Trust Fund, provided in his will, supports administration of this award. Since Stone's death in 1969, this regional group has presented one annual prize, desi

Bradford H. Hager, professor of geophysics in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's department of earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences, has been named the school's Cecil and Ida Green Professor in Earth Sciences. Hager is best known for his research on the physics of geologic processes. He has focused his work on applying geophysical observations and numerical modeling to the study of mantle convection, the coupling of mantle convection to crustal deformation, and precision geodesy.

Looking for compounds to kill tumors, Michael Boyd abandons leukemic mice and tries a radically new, unprecedentedly large assay In a sharp break from its past, the National Cancer Institute has abandoned a 30-year-old system for finding compounds that kill tumors and has replaced it with an elaborate but unproven factory-style operation. In the new program, unique in its scope, 20,000 compounds and extracts will be tested against a broad array of human tumor cells each year. The compounds wi

Bequest by developer turns into $118 million endowment to fund work on the molecular bases of heart disease SAN FRANCISCO -- When Southern California shopping center developer J. David Gladstone died while swimming in the pool of his Hollywood Hills home in 1971, his death got scant notice beyond local real estate circles. Yet today the memory of this obscure businessman lives on among biomedical scientists as the benefactor of the J. David Gladstone Foundation. The spectacular growth and sci

Science Teachers Want It Cheap And Real The number of projects aimed at improving science education in U.S. schools is growing so quickly that officials at Argonne National Laboratory say it wasn't easy "to offer something new and important." But Lou Harnisch thinks that he's found the answer. Harnisch, a Chicago high school teacher on a leave of absence at Argonne, has launched a program that relies on cheap-to-produce equipment and the glamour of real-life topics to excite youngsters in Chica

The endangered red squirrel gets a 120-day reprieve, while Congress reconsiders its support of Mount Graham complex TUCSON -- Two years ago, astronomers and their supporters climbed up Capitol Hill and won approval for a $200 million observatory on an Arizona mountaintop. Many people thought that was the end of a four-year struggle between astronomers and people who opposed observatory development (The Scientist, Nov. 28, 1988, page 5; and Jan. 22, 1990, page 4). But last month, a federal cour