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Max Essex, chairman of the department of cancer biology at Harvard University's School of Public Health and of the Harvard AIDS Institute, has been appointed the first Mary Lasker Professor of Health Sciences. The school established the Mary Woodard Lasker Professorship and Research Program in December in honor of the crusader and supporter of medical research who was a primary force in the establishment of the National Heart Institute, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Ins

The University of California, San Diego, has chosen molecular biologist Flossie Wong-Staal as the first recipient of its newly endowed Florence Seeley Riford Chair for AIDS Research. Wong-Staal will become the Florence Seeley Riford Chair Professor in the university's departments of biology and medicine. After 16 years at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., Wong-Staal officially became the Riford chair professor at UC-San Diego on January 1. She plans to set up a collaborative prog

Olle Bjorkman of Carnegie Institution's department of plant biology, Stanford, Calif., has been elected to membership in the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Born in Sweden, Bjorkman earned the equivalent of the Ph.D. at the University of Uppsala in 1960. At Carnegie Institution, with which he has been associated since 1964, he has worked with the experimental taxonomy group and collaborated with the biochemistry group in investigations of the basic mechanisms of photosynthesis. He and his c

WASHINGTON--As far as nuclear chemist Frederick Bernthal is concerned, democracy works. The man whom President Bush has picked to be the next deputy director of the National Science Foundation is a shining example of a scientist whose thoughts in midcareer turned to government and who has wound up playing a major role in federal science policy. "There are two kinds of political appointees," says physicist John Ahearne, the executive director of Sigma Xi, the scientific research society, and, l

PHILADELPHIA--In a move that surprises many observers, the University of Pennsylvania has sued one of its own professors and a pharmaceutical firm over the ownership of a patent on Retin-A, an anti-acne drug also said to reduce wrinkles on the skin. The case is likely to be watched closely by administrators at other universities because it demonstrates a willingness on the part of a major research institution to seek legal recourse against a faculty member - a strategy usually reserved for case

WASHINGTON--One week after the Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded in April 1986, Soviet contacts called Carnegie Mellon University robot researcher William ("Red") Whittaker to ask for help in saving thousands of Soviet cleanup workers from radiation exposure. Whittaker's autonomous robots were already cleaning up the disabled Three Mile Island nuclear plant, and his technology was widely acknowledged as the world's best in replacing humans in hazardous environments. But a year later, after 5,00

Many scientists once denied emigration have now left the USSR, but others are still unable to obtain exit visas. Yuri Magarshack is doing science again. Today, he is an assistant researcher in the chemistry department at New York University. Yet for an 11-year period that ended last spring, the theoretical physicist was struggling to endure life as a refusenik - a Soviet citizen, usually Jewish, who is denied permission to emigrate. Dismissed from his job as head of a laboratory in Leningrad's

As a boy, Philip Currie dreamed of digging for dinosaur fossils in the vast deserts of Outer Mongolia. Currie was inspired by the books of Roy Chapman Andrews, who led the American Museum of Natural History's expeditions to Central Asia in the 1920s. Years later, as head of his own dinosaur program at the Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Alberta, Canada, Currie attempted to pursue his dreams. "In 1982, we approached the Mongolian government and ran into a bureaucratic brick wall," he recalls.

Researchers find visits increasingly necessary for career advancement, high-tech lab work, and hard currency earnings. As pluralism and democracy move to replace communist rule in Eastern Europe, researchers in the West can expect to see a steady increase in the number of scientists traveling to Western Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States. "It seems to me that there are three key issues: one is freedom of travel, and in all of those [Eastern Europe] countries the travel barriers

The next big project in high-energy particle physics is likely to use electrons and be cheaper to build Not an inch of tunnel for the 53-mile Superconducting Supercollider has been laid, but already the massive accelerator is casting a long shadow on the future of high-energy physics facilities. As Congress and the nation struggle with the estimated $7 billion cost of the huge machine, many scientists are coming to the conclusion that the SSC may signify the end of the line - a dinosaur as big

Deals with the Pasteur Institute and Connaught Biosciences establish Institut Merieux as a global front-runner PARIS--At 8:20 A.M. on December 13, Jacques Francois Martin, general manager of the Institut Merieux, received a transatlantic call in his Lyons office from Alan Nymark, vice president of Investment Canada, a unit of the Canadian Ministry of Industry, Science, and Technology. Nymark was calling to tell Martin that Merieux could proceed with its proposed takeover of Connaught Bioscienc

Following a storm of criticism, HHS chief Sullivan asks for another plan to stem conflicts of interest. WASHINGTON--As soon as he read them, James Wyngaarden knew that there would be problems. The former National Institutes of Health director expected the agency to propose guidelines to eliminate potential conflicts of interest by government-funded university scientists who are carrying out clinical trials. But instead of directing a surgical strike against questionable financial relationships