The Scientist - Home

Countering the widespread predictions of a future scientist shortage, several analysts predict a crisis in quality, not quantity WASHINGTON--The idea of an upcoming massive shortage of scientists and engineers is now being assailed and discredited on many fronts. But that doesn't mean that labor economists and statisticians are anticipating only bright skies ahead for scientists entering the job market. What is emerging is a more limited assessment of employment prospects and the economy that

While the agency's halt to `downward negotiations' may promote fairness, it fails to brighten overall research support vistas WASHINGTON--The National Institutes of Health has officially ended its highly unpopular practice of applying unilateral, across-the-board cuts to the grants of those researchers it funds. But most scientists will find that the varying approaches adopted by individual institutes to replace what were euphemistically called "downward negotiations" do not yield any more mon

Fulbrights Back Teaching And Research The Fulbright Scholar Program for 1992-93 will award 1,000 grants for research and teaching in more than 100 countries to academic faculty at all levels, professionals, and independent scholars. Grant periods range from two months to an academic year and may include research, university lecturing, or a combination of the two. Basic requirements for Fulbright awards are U.S. citizenship and a Ph.D. or equivalent professional qualifications. Most lecturing

Healy unveils $30 million plan to provide interim funding for researchers struggling to secure NIH grants for their research WASHINGTON--In her first official appearance before Congress as National Institutes of Health director last month, Bernadine Healy delivered a gift to the scientific research community: a new $30 million awards program. Healy told the House appropriations subcommittee headed by Rep. William Natcher (D-Ky.) that by the end of September, NIH hopes to have thrown a lifelin

Healy's Family Ties Soften Pay Cut Penn Researcher Fights Sanctions Astronomers To Get SDI Technology Soon They'll Want A Sports Car Try Dial-A-Prayer New NIH director Bernadine Healy received copious condolences last month from members of a House appropriations subcommittee for the "substantial pay cut" that she was taking to come to Washington. Indeed, her financial disclosure statement reveals that she earned $251,000 last year in salary as director of the research institute at the

In 1980, biotech was a fledgling industry with only 20 companies and no reported revenue. It has become a $2 billion-a-year industry with 1,000 companies. Now, industry analysts conservatively project revenues to grow to $20 billion a year by the end of the decade, while a report on national biotechnology policy released in February by the President's Council on Competitiveness predicts revenues will shoot to $50 billion by 2000. "The venture capital industry is undergoing very dramatic changes

Peter House is chief analyst and director of the Division of Policy Research and Analysis at the National Science Foundation. In one corner of his 12th-floor office stands a bookcase filled with 30 years' work on public policy analysis and technical assessment. So it's somewhat surprising to the 54-year-old House that a single, 34-page unpublished paper written in 1989 and revised several times since then has attracted so much attention and made him the center of a sharp debate over whether the

p.21 In fiscal 1992, the National Institutes of Health plans to spend $13 million to help stimulate research at small colleges and universities that traditionally have not been supported by NIH funding. Since 1985, NIH has offered Academic Research Enhancement Awards (AREA grants) to support new research projects or help expand ongoing research efforts by faculty undergraduate institutions. These funds are for projects related to the health sciences. To be eligible for AREA grants, an institut

p.22 UC-Davis Professor Is Awarded Prize For Outstanding Teaching And Research $50,000 Cancer Research Prize Goes To Massachusetts Molecular Biologist People Brief Outstanding Teaching And Research Author: REBECCA ANDREWS, p.22 Barbara A. Horwitz, a physiology professor at the University of California, Davis, has been selected to receive the UC- Davis Prize for Teaching and Scholarly Achievement. The $25,000 award, which Horwitz will receive at a ceremony on May 23, was established in 198

The same decision-making process was displayed by Fisher's Council of Competitiveness,which was formed in 1986 by a group of prominent leaders from industry and academia. Instead of requesting more for research, the council asked Congress to take the billions now going into what it called "national prestige technology projects," such as the space station, the superconducting supercollider, the Hubble space telescope, the national aerospace plane, and the Human Genome Project, and put them into

Baltimore Retraction Still In The Mail NAE Slow To Get The Message Tell Your Story To The World NSF Signs Lease On New Building On March 15, Nobel laureate David Baltimore, reacting to a draft of a National Institutes of Health report that criticized his behavior in the course of a five-year investigation of a scientific paper he coauthored when he was director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT (The Scientist, April 15, 1991, page 4), announced that he would retrac

While Dingell panel moves to curb misuse of grant money, some observers worry that overall federal support will be reduced WASHINGTON--As Stanford University stands accused of misusing millions of dollars in federal funds meant to reimburse the school for the cost of supporting faculty research, the issue is not simply one of $7,000 bedsheets and $1,200 antique fruitwood commodes. The more important question for scientists is whether some of that money has been diverted from research. Many