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Bush Budget Would Reduce Number Of New NIH Grants
Jeffrey Mervis | | 6 min read
Sidebar: Wrong Number, Please Try Again The president's request for 1993 specifies more science support overall but dims hopes for some individual researchers WASHINGTON--On the surface, the 1993 budget that President Bush submitted to Congress January 29 should look very familiar to researchers: A lot more for the National Science Foundation, a little more for the National Institutes of Health, and large increases to pay for the continuing construction of the superconducting supercollider an

Gay And Lesbian Scientists Seek Workplace Equality
Barbara Spector | | 10 min read
Sidebar: How AIDS Has Changed the Nature of Research Sidebar: Security Clearance Delays Hamper Gays' Careers While more institutions move to accommodate homosexual researchers, many gay activists still complain of bias Last September, the business world focused its attention on Lotus Development Corp. when it became the first large firm to offer health and other benefits to the "spousal equivalents" of its gay and lesbian employees. "The intent is to make us the employer of choice," says Rus

Turmoil Besets Wistar In Wake Of Koprowski's Ouster
Jean Wallace | | 10+ min read
The Wistar Institute in Philadelphia marks its 100th anniversary this year, but the mood at the nation's oldest independent biomedical research facility is hardly jubilant. The institute has been in turmoil for the last year, after the abrupt ouster of longtime director Hilary Koprowski, the famed virologist and immunologist who transformed Wistar from a dilapidated museum into a world-renowned research center. The commotion recently was stirred up further, when the 75-year-old Koprowski file

Funding Briefs
| 1 min read
The U.S. Army Research Office's Young Investigator Program offers three years of support to young university faculty members pursuing research projects relevant to Army interests. Eligible candidates must hold tenure-track positions at U.S. institutions and have received their doctoral degrees within five years of applying for the award. Research areas of interest include biotechnology, polymer chemistry, kinematics, atmospheric sciences, artificial intelligence, materials science, and condensed

Funding Briefs
| 1 min read
The Burroughs Wellcome Fund offers the $350,000 George Herbert Hitchings Award for Innovative Methods to a scientist or group of scientists investigating novel approaches to drug design and discovery. Hitchings, who served as president of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund from 1971 to 1990, pioneered several important concepts in drug design. The award is intended to support investigators embarking on new lines of drug research who are not yet eligible for more traditional grants. Eligible projects

Funding Briefs
| 1 min read
Navy Sponsors Postdocs The Office of Naval Technology sponsors a postdoctoral fellowship program at naval research and development centers and laboratories across the United States. The fellowship program provides approximately 40 new postdoctoral appointments each year in fields such as aerodynamics, acoustics, biotechnology, computer science, material sciences, and oceanography. To be eligible, scientists must be U.S. citizens and have received research doctoral degrees within seven years of

Koprowski: From Music To Medicine
Jean Wallace | | 2 min read
Were it not for World War II, Hilary Koprowski might be famous today as a concert pianist instead of a biomedical scientist whose achievements, including development of the first oral polio vaccine, have saved thousands of lives. Koprowski, who was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1916, at one time considered a career as a pianist, graduating from music conservatories in Warsaw and Rome. As the only child of the first female dental surgeon ever graduated from a Russian dental school, Koprowski grew

NSF Backs Push For Better Database Management
Jeffrey Mervis | | 4 min read
WASHINGTON--The National Science Foundation has created a new program that funds research on how to store, retrieve, and manipulate scientific data. Its goal is to help scientists make better use of the flood of information their work is generating, as well as to stimulate cooperation among individual disciplines in tackling common problems in processing data. In addition, participants hope to upgrade the status of the information sciences by demonstrating the importance of modern scientific da

Growth Of A Research Bastion
Jean Wallace | | 1 min read
In 1892, when Gen. Isaac J. Wistar founded the institute that a century later still bears his name, his main intent was to make a home for the anatomical collection that belonged to his great-uncle Caspar Wistar, a University of Pennsylvania anatomist and physician. Fortunately, the general thought to add a few laboratories and research rooms to the museum on the first floor, which displayed such items as a great whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling. But though it was the general who fou

Notebook
| 3 min read
Getting Leaner But Not Meaner All You Need is Drugs Thanks, But The Answer's No Spreading The News Researchers have an obligation to think about what's good for society as well as what's important for science, says Rep. George Brown (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Science, Space, and Transportation Committee. Such public-spirited thinking, he says, could lead to a smaller federal research budget but a healthier citizenry and stronger national economy. Speaking at the National Academy of Sc

Wrong Number, Please Try Again
Jeffrey Mervis | | 2 min read
Making sense of the mass of numbers in the president's budget isn't easy, even for administration officials who have played a role in developing them. For example, at his news conference held the day the budget was released, presidential science adviser Allan Bromley declared that military spending in the 1993 proposed budget represents only 53 percent of the total R&D budget request. Several articles in the national media cited that number as proof that the Bush administration has shifted it

How AIDS Has Changed The Nature Of Research
Barbara Spector | | 2 min read
In his best-selling expose, And the Band Played On (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1987), San Francisco Chronicle reporter Randy Shilts documented how AIDS was largely ignored by the research and funding communities until the disease reached crisis proportions. Today, however, AIDS has become a glamorous field of investigation. Because the United States research establishment has become convinced that proceeding at an accelerated pace might help save lives, the processes of proposal review and d

















