European Research Centres Longman, Harlow, 6th ed., 1986. 2 vols., 2,453 pp. £240. (Distributed in North America by Gale Research Company, Detroit, MI. $430.) Medical Research Centres Longman, Harlow, 7th ed., 1986. 2 vols., 1,080 pp. £230. (Distributed in North America by Gale Research Company, Detroit, MI. $395.) Time was when anyone trying to trace scientific organizations in countries such as Belgium, Italy or Yugoslavia had to cope with a series of national guides that were incomp

LONDON—"Agriculture has a lobby. Research and development does not." That comment last month from Karl-Heinz Narjes, vice president of the European Economic Community, summarized the problems facing the 12 nations in the Community as they struggled to agree on a new budget for collaborative research during the next five years. West Germany, France and Britain, joined in December by the Netherlands, have been calling for a major reduction in the European Commission's ambitious proposal for

BRISTOL, ENGLAND—A survey of adults in Britain has found that: Three-quarters believe astrology is scientific, but only a bare majority believe ecology is; 33 percent of the population believe that penicillin attacks viruses; 20 percent see carbon dioxide as the chief cause of acid rain; 37 percent believe proteins “provide most of the energy needs of the human body,” and 19 percent chose vitamins. Only 36 percent chose carbohydrates. Those sobering findings are pa

LONDON—Nearly 90 percent of French teenagers expect scientists to find a cure for cancer within 20 years. A little more than 40 percent believe science will eliminate hunger in that time, 61 percent think it will make daily life easier, and 15 percent expect scientists to have “blown up the world.” These forecasts come from a survey of 5,000 adolescent readers of the French general interest magazine Okapi. The results indicate considerable optimism about science coupled with a

Never make up your mind about someone's work until you've heard them under fire on a platform," an old university mentor, Alan Emslie-Smith, said to me many years ago. By stressing the importance of seeing scientists in the flesh, he was not criticizing the learned journals, their editors or their refereeing procedures. He was simply suggesting that the intuitive judgments we all make when reacting to politicians and automobile salesmen were equally appropriate in reacting to physicists and micr

Speaking at a Ciba Foundation symposium in London some years ago, Alvin Weinberg talked of the dangers that can arise when a highly technical issue such as nuclear reactor safety is subject to frenetic public debate. "There develops an escalation of contingency," the then-director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory said. "Each unlikely event connected with a reactor, once it becomes a matter of public discussion, seems to acquire a plausibility that goes much beyond what was originally intended. I