March 16 was not the best of days for Sotheby's, the venerable New York auction house. Albert Einstein failed to sell, and Ross Perot failed to buy. HIGH-FLYING FIDO: This 1959 prototype canine high-altitude, partial-pressure suit for use in Soviet suborbital biological research flights sold for $25,300. A 72-page Einstein manuscript on special relativity, which first sold for $1.2 million in 1987, did not attract any bidders above the confidential minimum price. Earlier the same day, Sotheb

And Books Don't throw away that rough draft of your latest paper just yet, archivists advise. It may never have the multimillion-dollar value of Albert Einstein's draft chapter on special relativity (see story on page 3), but it may still be sought after by historians and collectors. Scientific memorabilia-including books, manuscripts, letters, instruments, and signatures-are actively collected. Einstein, who was a prolific letter writer, commands great attention and prices. So do Galileo, Kep

A Last Resort Those alleging misconduct agree with administrators that the optimal way to settle cases is through institutions, not the press. (The Scientist, Vol:10, #6, p. 1 & 4, March 18, 1996) Scientists do not agree on what misconduct is. They do not agree on how much of it occurs. Nor do they agree on what should be done about it. Yet scientists and research administrators largely do concur that it would be better for all concerned-and for science itself-if the press never got involved i

Integrity Commission Author: Billy Goodman Early reaction to a long-awaited report on scientific misconduct finds members of the research community no closer to consensus on the controversial issue than they have been after previous efforts to elucidate the problem. In fact, the portion of the report eliciting the most contentious response has been the panel's definition of research misconduct itself. Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, the medical journal based in London, calls the new rep

Members Disperse Author: Billy Goodman Sidebar:Where Are Roche Institute Members Going? The Roche Institute of Molecular Biology (RIMB)-once one of the premier basic research labs in the United States-is about to go dark. Hoffmann-La Roche Inc., the Swiss-owned pharmaceutical giant that chartered RIMB and gave it a great deal of independence, decided a year ago to close the Nutley, N.J.-based institute and move it to Palo Alto, Calif., where the company had just bought Syntex Corp., a small bio

The Albert Lasker Medical Research Awards officially turn 50 this year and, by almost any measure, have a luster unsurpassed among American awards for biomedical research and second internationally only to the near-twice-as-old Nobel Prizes. The reason is obvious to many members of the jury and previous award winners. NEW ROLE: Lasker laureate Joseph L. Goldstein takes over as jury chair. "No award is better than its recipients," says Joseph L. Goldstein, winner of a Lasker in 1985 and a Nobe

Sidebar: The AIDS Research Evaluators The 100-plus members of a newly constituted National Institutes of Health task force have begun their daunting task: a comprehensive reevaluation of NIH's entire $1.4 billion AIDS portfolio, including both intramural and extramural research. Compounding the challenge for the scientists and AIDS activists who make up the task force is a withering schedule. They will have to produce a report due in January 1996, to aid in planning the 1998 Office of AIDS Rese

Point Grants:NIGMS' Marvin Cassman agrees that risky proposals don't get funded. The traditional, romantic notion of scientific research is of a glorious, serendipitous journey into the unknown. But this ideal is belied, in the perception of many scientists, by the apparent reality that much of what gets funded these days is less exploratory and more predictable_cloning and sequencing a gene, for example. While not denying the importance of such predictable studies, the scientific community s

Theory (The Scientist, Vol:9, #10, pg 3, May 15, 1995) In Norman, Okla., this month, about two dozen speakers will gather to challenge dominant paradigms of modern theoretical physics and to discuss alternatives. At the annual meeting of the Southwestern and Rocky Mountain Division (SWARM) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) on May 22-24, these self-styled dissidents are planning to renew their attack on the special theory of relativity and big-bang cosmology. This

In Norman, Okla., this month, about two dozen speakers will gather to challenge dominant paradigms of modern theoretical physics and to discuss alternatives. At the annual meeting of the Southwestern and Rocky Mountain Division (SWARM) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) on May 22-24, these self-styled dissidents are planning to renew their attack on the special theory of relativity and big-bang cosmology. This is not the first time the group has met in a AAAS foru

While the most quoted dissenter says the virus plays no part, there is a broad diversity of opinion in the scientific community on its function. When the journal Science ran an eight-page special report in December, it got a lot of attention which, after all, is what special reports are intended for. But this one, devoted to a single researcher, was highly unusual. Called "The Duesberg Phenomenon," it presented University of California, Berkeley, retrovirologist Peter Duesberg's unorthodox vie

Many detect a new openness to finding a synergy between the realms of laboratory research and theology From the days of Galileo, the public perception that scientific tenets are antithetical to religious doctrine has been a strong one. Yet many researchers who hold strong religious beliefs maintain that science and religion are not incompatible. The view that most scientists are atheists, while perhaps closer to urban legend than demonstrable fact, remains a popular one. A Wall Street Journ