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BALTIMORE—It was quite a show while it lasted, they all agreed, but toward the end the magic had started to wear thin. “Cold fusion,” at least to many of the 1,400 scientists who streamed out of the American Physical Society’s May 1 marathon debunking session, ended as it had begun—in a theatrical performance before a packed house. The difference was that this time, organizers claimed, the smoke and mirrors behind Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann’s unpr

Cambridge BioScience hopes to turn its first profit this year with a new kit to detect Lyme disease, a tick-borne illness that can lead to serious neurological ailmerrts. The firm, founded in 1981 by Harvard molecular biologist William Haseltine, has marketed several enzyme immunoassay tests, including two for the presence of the HIV-1 antibody. Its Human Lyme EIA kit detects the IgM and lgG antibodies that indicate the presence of Lyme disease. The firm Interpreting AIDS Research For Laypeopl

The U.S. Patent Office, Inc.? The latest scheme to speed patent processing would give the Patent and Trademark Office quasi-corporation status. The study, prepared by a panel from the National Academy of Public Administration at the behest of the Washington, D.C.-based lobbying group Intellectual Property Owners, suggests that the office should become a semiautonomous unit within the Department of Commerce. The proposal, which has yet to be endorsed by the IPO, would give the new office the po

Ocean Institute: Marriage At Sea When the Exxon Valdez foundered in Pnnce William Sound in March, clean-up efforts were stymied by gaps in the current knowledge of marine engineering. The newly established Ocean Institute, based in Washington, D.C.. intends to close these gaps. Working on projects commissioned and funded by private industry, the government, and the Navy, the institute will evaluate what research in ocean engineering needs to be done. The institute’s workers will be dra

The John von Neumann Supercomputing Center at Princeton University may be paying a devastating price for its alliance with a floundering computer giant. Last month the four-year-old center was rocked by the announcement thai its sole supercomputer supplier, ETA Systems Inc., had been shut down abruptly by its parent company, Control Data Corp. (CDC). That decision, made after the six year-old supercomputer subsidiary lost more than $100 million last year, means the center will get no furthe

WOODS HOLE, MASS.—For the past two weeks, a quarter-million students, at viewing posts in the United States and Canada, have participated in an unprecedented scientific adventure—a live telecast from the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. experiment called the Jason Project (after Greek mythology’s heroic leader of the Argonauts), is an $8 million extravaganza that is part science, part education, and part showbiz. It is the brainchild of Robert Ballard, the famed deep-sea re

WASHINGTON—If NIH is the crown jewel of federal biomedical research, then scientific misconduct is a scratch on its surface. And Brian Kimes is the man that NIH officials hope will begin to restore the luster their organization has lost in the eyes of Congress and the public. On April 10 Kimes became acting director of the newly formed Office of Scientific Integrity (OSI). The office was created by officials within the Public Health Service, NIH’s parent agency, as part of a two-

WASHINGTON—In some places, April showers may indeed bring May flowers. But in this town the vegetation must compete with the lobbyists, who appear in droves each spring to plead for their favorite projects as part of.the annual federal budget process. This year, advocates of the superconducting supercollider (SSC) are hoping to avoid last year’s bitter harvest, when Congress refused to spend anything to begin preparing for construction and instead retained level funding—$

Although the term “designer drugs” has already become trendy, the actual work of modifying chemical compounds to attack certain proteins and enzymes associated with various diseases has only just gotten off the ground. Fueling the progress in research during the past five years have been significant advances in such areas as X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance technology. And leading the support for this field of scientific investigadon has been the National Insti

GAO Defends Livermore Investigation Three months after a congressman called for the General Accounting Office to retract its Inaccurate, misleading, and biased” investigation of Lawrence Livermore founder Edward Teller (see The Scientist, March 20,1989, page 1), the GAO has declined the offer. In a letter last month to Rep. Fortney (Pete) Stark (D-Calif.), who had led the quest for a retraction, the agency said that it stands by the conclusion of its June 1988 report that the letters Tel

WASHINGTON—The view with respect to Yale nuclear physicist D. Allan Bromley seems to be unanimous: The new assistant to the pres- ident for science and technology, in the words of one colleague, “cuts through the crap to get things done.” On April 20, the White House issued an announcement that the science community had been anxiously awaiting for months: President Bush had selected his new science adviser. Long rumored for the position, Bromley comes to the job with true

A Lab To Call Your Own Rockefeller University, one of the nation’s foremost centers of biomedical research and graduate education, is looking for a few good minds to participate in its new Fellows Program in Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology. Last March the Lucille R Markey Charitable Trust of Miami contributed a whopping $5 million to support this expansion of the New York City-based institution’s 18-year-old University Fellows program. The fellowships provide an opport