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LONDON-A major new trade union has emerged in Britain with the goal of organizing skilled workers in the new technologies. With trade union membership falling, the new organization, known as Manufacturing, Science and Finance (MSF), hopes to extend the frontiers of organized labor into areas where recruitment has been difficult. Its co-leaders, Clive Jenkins and Ken Gill, are confident that the new union can establish its identity quickly. MSF is the product of the merger of two medium-sized

Recent events have resulted in a great deal of publicity about competitiveness. Among the so-called races in high technology, the biotechnology race has attracted much attention and comment. In the United States, there is much concern about the perceived possibility that history may repeat itself, and that a technology that was invented in the United States may find its most impressive commercial applications developed in Japan. It is all very well to talk about competitiveness, not withstandi

STOCKHOLM--The Nobel Foundation plans to sell stock in a new firm being formed to preserve the value of the annual prizes it awards.. . . This year's prizes.. . will each be worth $340,000... . Shrewd investments in the past decade. . . have reversed years of declining value for the prizes, and have raised the foundation's assets to near the real value of the original estate in 1900. --From THE SCIENTIST October 5, 1987, p.4. Lend an ear to hear the story of my galloping success. I was onc

When I started Syntex Pharmaceuticals in Britain nearly a quarter of a century ago, the triumvirate to whom I reported in Mexico were all youngish scientists themselves, and all paper millionaires by their own remarkable efforts. The chairman of the corporation, George Rosenkranz, not only was one of the founders of the modern steroid industry, but he also had seen himself through the Eidgenössiche Technische Hochschule in Zurich by playing soccer for the Grasshoppers, acting at the Stadt

The development of the free-flyer will give us expertise in many areas, including control over our own low-gravity materials processing studies and in the various areas of robotics which will be involved in helping maintain and service parts of the platform. In general, Europe will have more freedom than if it had only the attached module. DEPENDENCE ON PUBLIC MONEY Q: Would you explain the rationale behind putting large sums of money from governments, rather than from the private sector, int

For one thing, no computer is as natural as pencil and paper. Placing a word in a certain location, writing in big letters or changing to script or Greek can be done almost without thinking when using a pencil, but all these actions require explicit commands when using a keyboard. It's difficult to build a system with easy-to-remember commands, in large part because ease of use depends upon personal preference. For many people, typing "center," or the command "ce" to center a line is easier tha

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Today much information has recently become available, including U.S. Atomic Energy Commission files and FBI files on Fuchs' statements and on his and Gold's confessions, as well as memoirs published by Fuchs' communist associates in England. From these and other sources it is clear that many aspects of the case were kept from the public in order to conceal important political secrets, not just atomic ones. One political secret was how Fuchs' spying was discovered in the first place. We now kno

Pediatric Research Center Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh $15.0 Million Institute of Human Genomic Studies, Mt. Sinai (N.Y.) Medical Center $12.7 Million Science Facility, Oregon Health Science University $10.0 Million Cancer Research Center, Medical University of South Carolina $8.0 Million Institute of Nuclear Medicine, University of Medicine and Denistry, Newark $7.5 Million Center for advanced Microstructures, Lousiana State Universtiy $12.0 Million Center for Applied Opti

In the past few years, this type of headline has begun to appear more and more frequently Why? In times more economically secure than these-before Gramm-Rudman, the volatile stock market, dramatic takeovers, and increased shareholder awareness-a company set out to do a job, hired staff and hoped to be successful. If, along the way, the company experienced sudden growth, it hired to accommodate the new orders. When business slowed, it laid people off. What companies attempted to do on a large s

Push Up Prices Very few ";first quality" manuscripts-meaning seminal works on a subject familiar to the public, such as Newton's Principia-ever appear on the market, said Dillon, a specialist in historic scientific and medical books. They tend instead to be housed in institutions, as Principia has been for the last 250 years at a Cambridge University library. But the record price does focus interest on scientific manuscripts, Dillon said, and plenty of Einstein manuscripts of moderate importan