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As the echoes of the tanks on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square begin to fade, scientists from the United. States whose research requires access to Chinese sites--and their Chinese counterparts working or studying in the U.S.—are wondering whether they should permanently write off their projects as casualties of the violence. Universities, private companies, national agencies, and individual scientists have spent years overcoming xenophobia, language barriers, and other obstacles to ]

Following Through For Children The Thrasher Research Fund of Salt Lake City, Utah, is preparing to launch a program to strengthen its ongoing interest in research on childhood diseases. This fail the fund will begin a program to encourage organizations to implement discoveries made in the laboratory. The fund hopes to devote about 25% of its more than $1 million annual expenditures to this effort. The fund, which was launched by California inventor E.W. Thrasher, is affiliated with the Mormon

WASHINGTON—Six months after a White House panel concluded that United States competitiveness in high-temperature superconductivity hinged on the successful creation of a half-dozen industrial consortia dedicated to superconductivity research, nearly twice that many either exist or are now proposed. But while organizers tout the vast potential of superconducting electronics and stress the need to beat the Japanese in this field, troubling scientific and economic issues still cloud the pr

Politicians Rally To Save SERI Can Colorado’s congressional delegation rescue the Solar Energy Research Institute? The Golden, Colo. based lab, whose Department of Energy funding has been sliced nearly in half over the last eight years,’ is facing an additional 32% cut for fiscal 1990, which begins in October. Although Congress has traditionally boosted low presidential requests for solar research, members of the state delegation fear that the federal deficit will make such a rescu

NIH To Tap Alumni To Lobby Money, not memories, is the idea behind an effort by NIH officials to build a national alumni association. “Our primary goal is to promote the best interests of the NIH as the leading biomedical research institute in the world” through a grass-roots lobbying effort aimed at state and national legislators, says Abner Notkins, director of the intramural research program at the National Institute of Dental Research. Since last year, at the end of the NIH c

WASHINGTON—The Department of Energy pulled the plug on millions of dollars of geologic research last year after members of Congress from New England became afraid that such work might lead to a nuclear waste repository in their region, a recently released government report has revealed. The congressional action came in the form of amendments passed late in 1987 to a bill that sets United States policy on the disposal of highlevel nuclear wastes. Investigators from the congressional Gen

California Schools Pair Up With Business The State of California has embarked on a matching funds program meant to take technology from the state’s universities and national laboratories and apply it in the marketplace. In May, the state’s Competitive Technology Program awarded $6.6 million in grants, matched by $6.8 million In industry funding. Among the big winners were a superconductivity consortium, made up by the University of California, Los Angeles ran four venture capital f

Looking At Academic Entrepreneurs What best encourages entrepreneurship in an academic environment? According to a recently published paper, life scientists at major research universities are more likely to enter the marketplace when their colleagues have done so. In crediting this entrepreneurial climate within individual schools and departments, the study, reported in Administrative Science Quarterly (34:110-31, March 1989), concludes “that institutions cannot easily engineer entrepren

Navy Scuttles U.S.-Soviet Alvin Dive The little scientific submersible Alvin marked its 25th anniversary of deep-sea exploration last month, but even as oceanographers staged a gala party on the Woods Hole, Mass., waterfront, the Alvin was becoming the center of an international brouhaha over technology transfer. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which operates the Navy-owned sub for the scientific community, had hoped to stage joint dives off Bermuda later this summer with the Soviet

Even as Congress once again wrestles with levels of funding for the superconducting supercollider (SSC), plans for another large North American high-energy physics project are moving quietly but steadily ahead. While SSC supporters scramble to entice reluctant foreign partners to help foot an estimated $6 billion bill for what has always been promoted as a United States-led effort, the other project-a proposed $450 million Canadian accelerator-has been designed from the start with international

For most of the public, the word "fusion" refers to the recent claims by University of Utah chemists of a way to produce boundless energy in a jar at room temperature. But research on "hot" fusion, the attempt to simulate within the laboratory the enormous pressures and temperatures that fuel the stars, has been under way for more than a generation. And it was only last year that the press was reporting a possible breakthrough from experiments in which scientists subjected tiny capsules of hydro

WASHINGTON-Sharing notebooks and other data with someone outside their laboratory is an idea that is anathema to many scientists. But they may need to get used to it as part of the price of performing science with public funds. The search for a better system to record, retain, and share data is emerging as a key issue in the ongoing debate over how to curb scientific misconduct. It promises to remain a significant issue long after scientists have finished arguing about whether Rep. John Dingell