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Navy First To Fund Utah Fusion With a $400,000 grant issued earlier this month, the Office of Naval Research has become the first government agency to fund the University of Utah’s groundbreaking fusion research (See The Scientist, May 1, page 1). The grant will support additional basic research by electrochemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann “to confirm their claims [of room-temperature sustained fusion] or, if that’s not what’s going on, to get to the truth,

WASHINGTON—The resignation of James Wyngaarden last month after more than seven years as director of the National Institutes of Health may have caught scientists by surprise. But it was a long time coming for the 64-year-old Wyngaarden. In fact, his last day on the job, July 31, will be nine months past the date when the soft-spoken former Duke University medical schcol administrator had hoped to leave the post. It’s clear that Wyngaarden has had his fill of the political battles

Wildlife Cashes In On Ecuador IOU Two U.S. conservation groups have turned Ecuador’s foreign debt into a boon for that country’s wildlife areas and endangered species. The World Wildlife Fund and the Nature Conservancy have agreed to pay off $9 million of Ecuador’s debt at a rate of 11 7/8 cents on the dollar—an expenditure of little more than $1 million. In exchange for having the debt retired, the Ecuadoran government will give a private conservation group in the Sout

Using Neutron Analysis To Find Bombs In addition to the usual indignities of being tossed into the cargo hold and then hurled onto the baggage carousel, your luggage may also soon be bombarded by neutrons, thanks to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) of LaJolla, Calif. But this is one form of harassment that none of us is likely to mind. When an Air-India Boeing 747 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on June 23, 1985, a disaster widely believed to be the work of a bomb, SAIC re

Using Science To Solve Murders Forget Scotland Yard. Forget the FBI. Forget bloodhounds and fingerprint experts. Richard Merritt, an aquatic entomologist at Michigan State University, is the specialist that police call upon when they need help in determining the time of death of a decomposed corpse. Merritt’s research into the insects that live in streams and lakes has earned him a spot in the small cadre of forensic entomologists. “I’ve worked with all those insects that liv

No Conclusion Yet On Value Of Imreg-1 It was lmreg Inc., of New Orleans, La., playing David opposite the well-established, well-heeled, well-staffed, pharmaceutical Goliaths last summer. At that time, lmreg was one of the five companies in the race to develop anti-AIDS drugs that had completed FDA clinical trials for its AIDS products—and with nine scientists on board it was by far the smallest firm. (See “A Tiny Biotech Startup Wages War Against AIDS,” The Scientist, August

It wasn’t a run-of-the-mill midlife-crisis that made Jeff Wine abruptly abandon his life’s work. It was the salty taste he noticed whenever he kissed his baby daughter Nina. In the fall of 1981, Wine was a 41-year-old associate professor in Stanford University’s prestigious psychology department. A physiological psychologist, he had already won wide recognition for his use of crayfish to study how nerve cells control behavior. He was also a firsttime parent, but not an anxio

“[Here we are on] the Halloween preceding 1984,” Carl Sagan solemnly told a gathering of scientists and reporters in Washington, D.C., “and I deeply wish that what I am about to tell you were only a ghost story, something invented to frighten children for a day. But unfortunately, it is not just a story.” Thus began a spellbinding tale of doom, delivered in inimitable Sagan fashion. Should nuclear war erupt between the world’s two superpow ers, warned the Corn

Despite the trouble being encountered by some fledgling U.S. optics firms, when the University of Arizona’s Optical Sciences Center celebrated its 25th anniversary in March with the opening of a new $3 million building, optics specialists Used the occasion to herald a bright future for the discipline overall and for the young scientists who are enentering it. “I’m so bullish on the field that we’ve already selected an architect for the next addition to the center,R

Man Versus Man William Wordsworth waxed poetic about “man’s inhumanity to man,” but the more broadminded Harry Frank Guggenheim was interested in studying, as he put it, “man’s relation to man.” In keeping with that idea, the New York foundation that Guggenheim endowed in 1929 has traditionally sponsored a seven-part international program of scientific research aimed at better understanding the causes of dominance, violence, and aggression. Now an eighth a

Steven H. Safe, professor of veterinary physiology and pharmacology at the College of Veterinary Medicine at Texas A&M University, is recipient of the 1989 Burroughs Wellcome Toxicology Scholar Award. The $300,000 prize recognizes 15 years of Safe’s “strong commitment to toxicological research, training, and education," particularly in his studies of toxic dioxins and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and the relationships of these substances to cancer and birth defects. The Univers

To Catch A Spy. Debt, stress, and greed may be a routine part of life for most scientists. But they are a constant source of worry for Sandia National Lab security chief Jerry Brown. Brown recently analyzed more than 100 cases, of Communist Bloc-sponsored espionage since 1950 (of which more than half occurred in the last decade) in which he found that money was the most common motive. “That fits right in with the Soviet premise that every American has a price,” says Brown, who found