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SLAC Management? Willenbrock Bids NSF Adieu? Then Try, Try Again NRC Report Criticized Massey Fills Two Posts? Nobelist Burton Richter, director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, is angry over allegations by a former employee who claimed he was ordered to inflate estimates of damages caused by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake so that Richter's lab could receive more money from the Department of Energy. The charges were raised earlier this year, as part of a personnel grievance, by

Gilbert Levin has had sweet dreams for a long time. Levin is the president and founder of Biospherics Inc., a Beltsville, Md.-based environmental and health technology company. For nearly two decades, he has sought a noncaloric sweetener boasting both the bulk of table sugar and the ability to withstand cooking heat--in short, the ultimate food additive. Now he thinks he's found it, in a sugar called tagatose. He and the other Biospherics scientists who have studied the tagatose molecule hope

Attending some scientific conferences can be as frustrating for the career-driven researcher as a stroll through a bookstore is for the book-starved browser. With offerings so vast, one simply may not have the time or the energy to satisfy the intellectual appetite. In the spring of 1990, the advisory committee to the NSF chemistry division decided to conduct its annual meeting a little differently. Instead of devoting one hour to one topic before moving on to another, committee members deci

Clearly established research goals, awards of shorter duration, and vigilance over costs will do the trick, says the agency,s director BETHESDA, Md.--National Institutes of Health director Bernadine Healy hopes to increase by almost 50 percent the total number of grants the agency awards over the next several years. To do it, she says, NIH must trim budget requests by principal investigators and tighten up on indirect costs paid to institutions, manipulate the length of its grants awarded to av

Young biomedical scientists will lose a major source of postdoctoral training funds as a result of the decision by the Lucille P. Markey Charitable Trust to terminate its Markey Scholars in Biomedical Science program. The trust, created by the heir to the Calumet Farm horseracing fortune, was established in 1982 with the stipulation that all its funds be distributed by 1997. The trustees decided that its seventh round of scholars, announced in February, would be its last. Since the Scholar Aw

Roger Revelle, a California oceanographer who predicted global warming as early as the 1950s, died July 15 at the age of 82. He was a professor emeritus at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, at the time of his death. Revelle helped found UC-San Diego in 1960. One of the university's five undergraduate colleges is named Revelle College in his honor. Revelle's career, which spanned nearly 60 years, encompassed a wide range of interests. From 1951 until

Harvard Biochemist Jeremy Knowles Named To Top Arts And Sciences Post Veteran Computer Systems Designer Mayo Takes Helm as Bell Labs seventh President John L. Zabriskie Robert Gall Thomas Waldman Jeremy R. Knowles, a British-born chemist who has been at Harvard University since 1974, has been appointed dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In his new job, second in importance only to the presidency, Knowles oversees the finances, organization, and educational policies of Harvard Co

Although the timing was a coincidence, the simultaneity of the activities symbolized Kennedy's inability to quell, through personal response, the indirect costs controversy that has plagued the U.S. academic world for the past several months--a controversy that Kennedy and his institution principally precipitated. His peers in academe note that failure even as they give expression to their sympathy. "The events of the past year are a sorry climax to a brilliant career," says Richard Atkinson,

WASHINGTON: On July 29, as Donald Kennedy announced his resignation as president of Stanford University, research institutions throughout the United States were rushing to meet a 5 P.M. deadline to comment on changes in the rules governing how much they can charge for the indirect costs of doing federally funded research. Although the timing was a coincidence, the simultaneity of the activities symbolized Kennedy's inability to quell, through personal response, the indirect costs controversy t

UC VS DOE Far East to West FASEB Attracts Two Societies The Infinite Voyage Part, V The Rat Next Door A few months ago, some University of California officials hinted that the UC system's 45-year stint as caretaker of the Energy Department's national labs could come to an end if DOE officials carried out a plan to open the negotiations to other bidders on soon-to-expire contracts for running the labs. The potential crisis passed, however, as DOE announced it would be negotiating exclus

Volume 5, #16The ScientistAugust 19, 1991 LEFT-HANDED SUGAR GETS A FREE RIDE OUT OF YOUR SYSTEM Chemical compounds can exist in forms that are mirror images of each other. Like gloves, they can be either left-handed or right-handed. Sugars are such "handed" molecules. Human digestive enzymes have evolved to act upon right-handed sugar molecules, while often allowing left-handed forms to pass directly through. Both l-tagatose, the left-handed form, and d-tagatose, the right-hand

Volume 5, #16The ScientistAugust 19, 1991 PUT THEM ALL TOGETHER, THEY SPELL CHEMISTRY In the spring of 1990, the advisory committee to the NSF chemistry division decided to conduct its annual meeting a little differently. Instead of devoting one hour to one topic before moving on to another, committee members decided to hold the meeting like a retreat. Says NSF chemistry division director Kenneth Hancock: "We decided to sit back and literally ask where the intellectual frontier