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"In terms of being a constituency group, the scientific community may not even exist as an organized body." That comment from neuroscientist Donald Stein of Clark University could also serve as the epitaph for the Washington. D.C based National Coalition for Science and Technology. Its demise last month marked the end of a six year effort to build a grassroots organization to lobby for more federal support for all of science. NCST never enrolled more than a few hunderd individual members and

Our titanic national debt will eventually force hard decisions. Science funding will not be exempted. When that time comes, a public that has heard from the scientific community about why its work is valuable will more likely support science than one that hasn't. We cannot expect the public to respond positively if we have not told them our story. We can only do so through the media. Molecular biologist Bryan Sykes of Oxford University recently spent seven weeks working for a British televis

A three alarm fire gutted half of a $5 million animal care facility under construction at the University of California Davis. At UC-Riverside, intruders ripped doors from their hinges, smashed equipment and poured red paint mixed with glue on computers before making off with 467 research animals. At the U.S .Departmen t of Agriculture research institute in Beltsville, Md., raiders sprinted away three dozen cats and seven pigs, leaving vegetarian recipes as calling cards. More than 25 raids on U

BRUSSELS—In 1972 Victor Brailovsky, then a 37-year-old cyberneticist, and his 32-year-old wife Irma, a computer scientist, applied for a visa to leave the Soviet Union. Four years later Victor was granted permission to emigrate to Israel but Irma was not. The reason, according to Soviet authorities, was that “she had been able during her work to listen and hear something secret.” Fifteen years later the Brailovskys finally arrived in Israel. Last month, at a meeting here orga

WASHINGTON—Recent increases in the number and type of longterm grants from the National Institutes of Health may intensify competition between new awards and grants continued from previous years. But officials say the self-limiting nature of the new longterm grants and new institute controls should prevent problems that forced elimination of seven-year awards in the 1970s. “In any given year, about 85 percent of the NIH budget is a commitment [to grants] from previous years,”

LOS ALAMOS, N.M.—A British journal has taken a carrot-and-stick approach to encourage scientists to make their data on nucleotide sequences available quickly to the international research community. The controversial approach is being watched closely by officials of GenBank, the U.S.-funded project here that is expanding its data collection efforts. Beginning January 1, the journal Nucleic Acids Research will require authors to prove that their data have already been submitted to the E

WASHINGTON—The start of a report to Congress on fetal research, due next May, is being delayed by differences on abortion among the 12 congressional members of the Biomedical Ethics Board. Last August the board was able to appoint only the dozen “expert” members to its advisory committee. Their disagreements have prevented their filing the two slots reserved for citizens “who possess no specific expertise” in research, medicine or ethical issues. The advisory com

‘You crack an atom, what’s left? Particles, bits. It’s like Meccano: proton, neutron, quark. Don’t you see.. The things you knew. The rest of us set our horizons at the girls’ school down the road. Whatever you dreamed of, you left us in the dark. (‘I couldn’t follow him’, one friend confessed after the fact, then ‘Why? The waste, the waste! then again, ‘Did he know something we don’t?’) '... . there’s nothing to it

LONDON—Britan’s in vitro fertilization teams are preparing for a major battle to defend their research against hostile lawmakers. The U.K. government last month published the framework for comprehensive legislation to regulate IVF treatment and embryo research. But in a neat sidestep, ministers gave members of Parliament the option of either authorizing experiments under strict limitations or in effect banning research entirely. Debate on the legislative proposal is expected to

WASHINGTON—It’s hard to escape the dominance of Japan in worldwide technology, even if the subject is France. Gallic pride took a beating when its government asked American research administrators for their views on French technology. The U.S. executives said that France provides the United States with its stiffest competition in only two. categories—nuclear energy and aeronautics. The Japanese came out on top in a majority of the 11 categories, covering automobiles, comput

SYDNEY—The Australian government’s increasingly pragmatic attitude toward academic research has dismayed many scientists here and reinforced their feeling that the universities’ central activities are under assault. Their concerns recently have focused on the Australian Research Grants Scheme (ARGS), the annual round of competitive grants for scientists and others at the country’s 20 universities. Total funding under ARGS for 1988 is $32.3 million Australian ($22 milli

SANTA ROSA NATIONAL PARK, COSTA RICA—Biologists must join the fight to save tropical species or face the loss within a generation of the edifice upon which bioscience is built, says an eminent tropical ecologist. “Many, many scientists don’t understand that if they’re not out there proselytizing for the maintenance, development and actual preservation of the systems they work on, some competitive force is going to take it away from them,” said Daniel Janzen, a