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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

From Limelight to Hotspot George, Eat Your Broccoli! These Jobs are the Pits No Loose Lips Here Merging Cultures Lifting Off Early Stanford University president Donald Kennedy, who last fall took a lot of heat from Congress for the school's management of indirect costs associated with federally sponsored research grants, is headed for the very venue from whence the heat arose. After stepping down as president this coming August, Kennedy--in January 1993--will become the first faculty

While hallway conversations may turn to federal biotech streamlining, this year's Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology meeting programs will be heavy on basic research, with the theme of "growth factors, receptors, and signal transduction." FASEB is expecting 13,000 researchers, students, and exhibitors to converge on Anaheim, Calif., from April 5 to April 9. More than 7,000 scientific reports will be delivered and companies will be displaying about 700 exhibits in the Anahe

The 12,000 or so attendees at the 203rd national American Chemical Society meeting, running April 5-10 in San Francisco, will spend a lot more time discussing purely chemical issues than safety or job concerns; most of the 656 technical meetings, the 6,200 paper presentations, and the 425 expo- sition booths highlight such topics as anticancer drug taxol, plastics recycling, and AIDS prevention. Still, many safety and career topics will be covered. The following are examples: * Aspects of chem

When Christine Benally was a high school student in Shiprock, N.Mex., on the easternmost edge of the Navajo Reservation, her educational goals went no further than getting a vocational degree--as her father, a mechanic, did before her and as many of her friends would do, as well. "I figured something like that would do me," recalls Benally. "Get a technical degree, get out fast, start earning money." Yet some 15 years later, Benally has a doctoral degree in environmental toxicology under her b

Date: March 16, 1992 Revamping of the biology directorate and creation of a social sciences unit aims to accommodate new trends in life sciences When Cora Bagley Marrett assumes full duties in May as the first assistant director of the new social, behavioral, and economic sciences division (SBE) of the National Science Foundation, she will give social scientists something for which they have long lobbied: their own voice in high-level NSF decisions. NSF announced the new directorate last Oc

Strong academic-industry links are deemed essential to the resuscitation of math's ability to attract and retain top-notch students Mathematicians are looking at the numbers, and some don't like what they see. Despite a spate of recent reports and studies urging greater support for the mathematical sciences and math education, academic funding levels and student retention rates are still far below what math practitioners believe is warranted. A follow-up study to a 1984 National Research Cou

Immunoassay technology, a quick and cost-effective method of detecting and measuring minute quantities of substances in the human body, has now transitioned from the clinical and biological research arenas to environmental investigations. The technique, which exploits the capacity of a mammalian antibody to latch onto a particular chemical with great specificity, is used in at-home pregnancy tests, workplace drug-screening programs, and AIDS testing. Within the last year, however, several immun

Lennart Carleson Lennart Carleson, a professor of mathematics at Sweden's Uppsala University and at the University of California, and John G. Thompson, the Rouse Ball Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, England, have been chosen to receive the 1992 Wolf Prize in mathematics. They will share the $100,000 prize, one of several awarded annually in various fields by the Israel-based Wolf Foundation. The president of Israel will present the awards on May 17 i

The newly appointed chief executive officer of the New York Academy of Sciences says he hopes to guide the academy to a leadership role in the national and international arenas as well as locally. "One of the academy's central functions must continue to be serving the science and engineering community itself," says Rodney W. Nichols, named to the CEO post late last month. "But the function of serving society, which has always been tacit, really has to rise to equal priority." Nichols, a forme

Table of Contents Science Publishing Is Not Perishing Computers Say The Darnedest Things But Only If They Travel First Class Turning Dan Quayle Into A Genius? They Just Might Make It, After All Global Warning Two bimonthly science journals debuted last month. Current Directions in Psychological Science, a publication of the Washington, D.C.-based American Psychological Society, brought out its first issue in February. Also bowing was Surgical Oncology, an international journal coedited b

As American Indians continue to join the ranks of U.S. scientists, many seek to remind their peers that native cultures have been contributing to Western science for half a millennium. "Indians were first-rate geneticists and agronomists," says Hopi tribal member Frank Dukepoo, an associate professor of genetics at Northern Arizona University. "If we'd been able to evolve [without European contact], we'd have had Indian scientists," he argues. "But as they evolved into being scientists, they