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Volume 5, #6The Scientist March 18, 1991 NIH GUIDELINES COULD FACE A VETO FROM WHITE HOUSE Author: Jeffrey Mervis Date: March 18, 1991 WASHINGTON--The Bush administration is unlikely to endorse any conflict of interest regulations that require clinical scientists to do anything more than disclose financial holdings in the companies whose products they are evaluating, according to White House officials. National Institutes of Health administrators have recently completed work o

Volume 5, #6The Scientist March 18, 1991 A SHRINKING ROLE FOR SCIENCE IN SHAPING ANTARCTIC POLICY Author: ELIZABETH PENNISI Date: March 18, 1991 History shows that science once was the driving force behind Antarctic policies. But the present state of affairs suggests that the role of science is diminishing. In 1959, one year after the International Geophysical Year opened this icy frontier to science, the Antarctic Treaty was written by the dozen nations involved in that resea

NIH takes aim at the links between industry and those doing clinical trials while ignoring firms that get funds for technology innovations WASHINGTON--Current government efforts to prevent financial conflicts of interest among clinical investigators appear to ignore an obscure but well-funded federal program that operates with few safeguards against such potential abuse by researchers. And some scientists think that omission could be a costly mistake. Officials at the National Institutes of

New ASTM regulations promise to set clear definitions, enabling scientists to develop truly degradable plastics WASHINGTON--The growing public demand for truly biodegradable plastics has gone unfulfilled, in part because of a lack of agreement on what "biodegradability" means. But a new and comprehensive set of standards to define and measure such natural polymers, due out this spring, promises to help clear up the confusion within the scientific community as well as society at large. "The n

Polar scientists worry that new international interests might threaten their ability to do good science in the future The ability of polar scientists to do research may be jeopardized by the political winds swirling around the world's last frontier, say Antarctic science veterans. For most of the past three decades, scientists dominated the setting of policy in Antarctica. But researchers are worried that the current discussions about Antarctica's future could threaten the basic tenets of the

Grants For AIDS Research From AmFAR The American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR) offers one-year research grants, as well as short-term travel grants, for biomedical research on AIDS. The research grants provide up to $50,000 for direct costs, plus up to an additional 20 percent of the grant amount for institutional indirect costs. Smaller travel grants of up to $5,000 finance short periods of study or specialized training. Postdoctoral investigators who are affiliated with nonprofit ins

Boston Museum Honors GTE Chemist with 1991 New England Inventor Award Los Alamos' Meson Physics Lab Director Elected President Of Santa Fe Institute Martha J.B. Thomas, former director of technical services at GTE Electrical Products Group in Danvers, Mass., has been named the 1991 New England Inventor by the Museum of Science in Boston. The award is given annually to an individual whose application of science and technology, creativity, and independent thought has positively impacted

Stuart Taylor Erhard W. Rothe Stuart Taylor, a biologist whose research focuses on cardiac muscle function, has been named a distinguished professor of biological sciences at Hunter College, City University of New York. Taylor, 53, comes to Hunter from the Mayo Medical School and Graduate School of Medicine at the University of Minnesota, where he was a professor of physiology, specializing in biophysics and pharmacology. Taylor earned his doctorate in biology from New York University

WASHINGTON--The National Science Foundation can't see what's on the horizon in science. The federal government doesn't know what the supercollider will ultimately cost. And nobody has a clue how to balance competing demands for scarce science dollars. On February 20, Congress learned those things and more as it took a five-hour stab at setting science policy. The occasion was back-to-back hearings on the president's proposed science budget for 1992, involving first a portion, and then the whol

WASHINGTON--The crowds were bigger than expected at last month's 157th national meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. And while very little of the substance of this annual scientific smorgasbord made it into the national press, the association managed to bask in the reflected glory of having the president of the United States address its leaders on the biggest news story of the year, the war in the Persian Gulf. Security concerns related to the war had little imp

The president's financial plan looks good on paper, but Congress now faces the tough job of reconciling promises with harsh reality. WASHINGTON--Benjamin Franklin, the story goes, was asked what he and his fellow statesmen had produced during their deliberations in that steamy Philadelphia summer of 1776. "A republic," he answered, "if you can keep it." Every federal budget raises anew the question of whether a large increase sought for any one program will come at the expense of other pro

The commericial race to put therapeutic peptides and proteins into pill form worries those who fear reckless research. Against a backdrop of secrecy and suspicion, researchers are working on a pill that would deliver protein and polypeptide drugs into the body, and could generate billions of dollars in annual sales for biotechnology and pharmaceutical firms. But some scientists, looking at the radically different scientific and business approaches being pursued in the pill's development, have