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Curriculum quality must change in order for the depleted math profession to attract young scholars, workshop attendees agree The teaching of mathematics requires drastic change, according to a group of academic mathematicians who met in Oakland last month. The approach and the content of university mathematics are dangerously out of synch with the needs of both students and industry, and the result, the mathematicians contend, is causing the number and quality of mathematics students to dwindl

A new set of biotechnology regulations for the state of Minnesota, approved by an administrative law judge in mid-March, have many researchers in the state alarmed. The scientists are disturbed not so much by the rules themselves--which require the obtaining of state permits for field tests of transgenic plants and microbes and the registration of labs working with recombinant organisms--as by the atmosphere surrounding their drafting. According to Jeff Tate, a plant physiologist at the Univer

Date: April 13, 1992 The orphan drug firm, Wall Street's darling in 1991, now faces fraud charges brought by some of its investors As 1991 came to a close, suburban Philadelphia-based U.S. Bioscience was riding high. In just 12 months the four-year- old biotechnology company had delivered its first anticancer product, Hexalen, to market. Corporate staff had doubled to 100 employees. The firm's much-publicized second product, Ethyol, was in accelerated review at the Food and Drug Administratio

Terril A. Nell, a professor in the department of environmental horticulture at the University of Florida's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS) in Gainesville, has been named chairman of the department. Nell had been acting chairman since June 1991. Nell joined IFAS as an assistant professor in 1977, and became an associate professor in 1982 and a full professor in 1987. He earned a bachelor's degree in ornamental horticulture from Auburn University in 1971, a master's degree in h

Stanley Prusiner, a professor of biochemistry at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, has received the New York-based Metropolitan Life Foundation's 1992 Award for Medical Research in Alzheimer's Disease. Prusiner received $200,000 to further his research plus a personal prize of $50,000 in February. Prusiner, 49, discovered the prion, a pathogen that causes several rare human brain diseases and is related to the agent that causes scrapie, a disease of cattle, sheep,

Gallo Investigation: A `Messy Business' Raises Many Issues Author: SCOTT HULER As the probe into alleged misconduct by the National Cancer Institute lab of Robert Gallo in its search for the AIDS virus deepens, the scope of the investigation broadens as well. Recently joining the National Institutes of Health's Office of Scientific Integrity (OSI) in its long-running investigation of Gallo are the General Accounting Office, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Ho

Block That Kick! Study That Gene! Fiction, Fact - As Long As It's Science Patently Outstanding Take A Meeting Dubious Distinction Camden, N.J.-based Coriell Institute for Medical Research is putting a lot of muscle into its effort to survive the budget crunch facing research institutions. On April 15, a fund-raising event dubbed "Coriell Sports Day: Sports & Science United" is being held at the Eagles' Nest Country Club in Sewell, N.J., owned by former Philadelphia Eagles quarterback

In an era marked by the growing interdisciplinary nature of science, this new program will call on specialists from disparate fields such as physics, computer science, chemical engineering, and applied mathematics to tackle current problems in molecular biology. Their goal, in Hood's words, will be no less than to "develop the tools that are going to push us into the 21st century." Funded by a $12 million gift from William Gates III, founder and chairman of the Microsoft Corp. of nearby Redm

In February, President Bush announced "major new ground rules" to streamline the regulation of the biotechnology industry. And on the same day, the president's Council on Competitiveness published--under the auspices of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)--a policy for all biotech-regulating agencies that set out a "risk-based, scientifically sound approach to the oversight of planned introductions of biotechnology products into the environment." OSTP's risk-based approach means

In recent months, the problems that the former Soviet scientists are encountering in their newly divided homeland have been well-publicized: the scarcity of funding, the lack of scientific information, and the threat of total scientific isolation. Meanwhile, many U.S. scientists, eager to help, have run up against what they consider a frustratingly lethargic show of support by scientific colleagues and administrators. One of these U.S. researchers is Eugene Skolnikoff, a professor of politic

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To chemists arriving in San Francisco for next week's American Chemical Society meeting, Arnold Thackray, director of Philadelphia's Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry, suggests something to keep in mind. If you check into a hotel room today, he says, and you're wearing a polyester suit, "odds are everything in the room is composed of chemically processed polymers except for your body--and we're on the verge of decoding [even] that." During a time of remarkable advances, one might