A small group of scientists and scholars sat around a coffee table recently, balancing lunches on laps while discussing the prospects of greatly extending human life using new genetics tools and nanotechnologies. The group included a Johns Hopkins University cancer biologist, a Yale University philosopher, the executive director of an Oakland, Calif.-based advocacy group focusing on genetics and society, a Washington lobbyist, and various others. The talk, about the societal implications of lif

Bacteria are winning, and infectious disease doctors are worried. Disease-causing microbes are increasingly able to defeat the best antimicrobial drugs available. No "superbug" has yet emerged, resistant to all antibiotics and therefore untreatable. But that day may not be too far off. "There's increasing panic among infectious disease specialists,'' admits Jonathan Blum, a clinician and researcher at Harvard Medical School. Particularly worrisome to those specialists is a strain k

Is it research misconduct if a scientist lies about her results at a departmental seminar but never publishes the results? Is it research misconduct if a scientist, in discussing research with a competitor at another institution, suggests performing an experiment he knows to be a waste of time, thus delaying and hindering his competitor? Is it research misconduct if a scientist agrees to be a coauthor of a colleague's paper to which he has made no substantive contributions? If

About ten years ago Antonia Demas, a self-described "middle-aged woman,'' returned to graduate school after raising a family, intending to develop the work she had been doing informally for many years. Volunteering in an elementary school in Trumansburg, N.Y., near Ithaca, she had used food and cooking in the classroom as teaching tools, and she proposed to explore ways of tying the school lunch program to the academic curriculum and improving education about nutrition. She has now become embro

A wave of anxiety is sweeping the nation's 125 medical schools. These schools and their affiliated teaching hospitals--the academic health centers where new doctors are minted and where cutting edge biomedical research and medicine is practiced--are being squeezed financially by cost-conscious health maintenance organizations. Managed care providers steer their members who need medical care to nonteaching hospitals where costs are lower or, when their members do see doctors at academic health c

Cases of potential scientific misconduct are rarely routine, and even those that seem to have the potential for a swift conclusion often metamorphose into highly contentious and confused proceedings. A recent case involving Philadelphia's Fox Chase Cancer Center (FCCC) illustrates some of the difficulties institutions face in responding to misconduct allegations-especially with regard to conflicts that arise when institutions must police themselves. THE FIRST TIME: Fox Chase president Robert

ALL-CONSUMING: Exonerated researcher Herbert Needleman reports having had "no original ideas" while his case was pending. Those eventually cleared of misconduct charges say the system is too eager to presume them guilty. Approximately 70 percent of cases of alleged scientific misconduct that come to the attention of the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), an arm of the Department of Health and Human Services, end up with the accused being cleared. But what happens to these re- spondents-as OR

Photo: Youngblood PLAY IT AGAIN: Replication is the key to reducing inadvertent errors or fraudulent results, maintains USC's W. French Anderson. Last fall, Francis Collins, a prolific and widely respected scientist, retracted all or parts of five papers he had coauthored in the preceding two years. Collins, the director of the National Center for Human Genome Research at the National Institutes of Health-which in January became the National Human Genome Research Institute-apparently was the v

Amid mixed reputation, the organization, known as SHER, focuses on ending discrimination and providing support. Twenty-five years ago, a group of women at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., began meeting every Wednesday at noon to work together to combat sex discrimination at NIH. Today, a group of women meets every Wednesday at noon to work together to combat sex discrimination at NIH. Little more than the faces have changed, according to members of the organization, known as

Changes In System REHIRED: Following her exoneration, Thereza Imanishi-Kari was named an associate professor at Tufts University. Participants, observers say the case highlighted a need to overhaul the mechanism for dealing with charges of scientific misconduct. The conclusion of the decade-long scientific misconduct case against Thereza Imanishi-Kari-she was exonerated in a June 21 decision of an appeals panel of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)-would appear to be a clear-cu

SIDEBARS Implementation Group on Research Integrity and Misconduct Definitions of Misconduct in Science Scientific misconduct is front-page news again. Late last month, Tufts University immunologist Thereza Imanishi-Kari was cleared of misconduct by an appeals panel of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). In October 1994, she had been found guilty by the department's Office of Research Integrity (ORI) of fabrication and falsification related to a 1986 paper entitled "Altered re

Tenure To Female Chemist Colleagues 'Dismayed' By Decision 'SOMEWHAT SURPRISED': Sharon Palmer, who will have to leave next year, says "I thought it couldn't quite happen." When C. Pauline Burt was hired by Smith College to teach chemistry, the periodic table numbered 86 elements. The neutron had yet to be discovered. Pluto, too, was unknown. United States President Woodrow Wilson presided over the first meeting of the League of Nations. Babe Ruth still played for the Boston Red Sox. Burt wa