WASHINGTON—On the second Wednesday of each month, a dozen diplomatic science advisers gather behind closed doors at the French embassy here and talk about the future. The diplomats represent the 12 nations of the European Community (EC), and the focus of their discussion is 1992, the year targeted for the establishment of a unified European economy. Although the EC now controls only a small share of the funds that Europe spends on science, that share is expected to grow considerably in th

For researchers in such fast-growing fields as gene sequencing and crystallography, the end of traditional scientific publications may be in sight. Quietly, over the last year, a trial program in the electronic submission of data has laid the foundations for a revolution that may someday replace the research journal as the vehicle for scientific communication. In an agreement With GenBank, the main U.S. gene sequence database, nearly a dozen journals are refusing to accept papers with sequ

PASADENA, CALIF—Two months after its extraordinarily successful encounter with the planet Neptune, Voyager 2 is battling its failing senses and ebbing vitality in an attempt to wrestle yet more science from the cold and barren expanses of interstellar space. The spacecraft has been flung by Neptune’s gravity out of the plane containing the planets of our solar system and is moving ever farther away from planetary science. For scientists and engineers at the National Aeronautics and

G. CHRISTOPHER ANDERSON WASHINGTON—The Department of Energy, reacting to congressional pressure and criticism of its epidemiology program, has asked a new advisory panel for help. The move is aimed at defusing an increasingly volatile dispute between environment and health activists and the energy department over the health records of 600,000 DOE nuclear weapons plant workers (The Scientist, Aug. 7, 1989, page 1). Meeting last month for the first time with his Secretarial Panel for t

WASHINGTON—Congress last month passed an $18.7 billion-dollar appropriations bill to fund all 1990 research programs sponsored by the Department of Energy. For officials at DOE’s research laboratories, the next move is to figure out how to cope with $31 million less than they had requested. The appropriations bill was intentionally vague, spelling out only $l0 million of the cut. Brookhaven’s Alternating Gradient Synchrotron will get $5 million less for operating costs than

On the 20th anniversary of the first manned lunar mission in July, President Bush called for a permanent return to the moon and a manned Mars expedition. While some critics quickly labeled the proposal as political pie in the sky, life scientists had more down-to-earth concerns. They pointed out that, although a Mars mission could last as long as three years, three months is the longest any United States astronaut has been in space. And while a moon base could mean years of low gravity for

Cornell University’s Eldredge Bermingham spends hours each day, against his will, in front of a computer. Bermingham isn’t a reluctant computer scientist; he’s just a biologist who needs some good software. He uses the latest techniques in molecular genetics to understand how new species are formed. His work requires computer programs so specialized that most of them aren’t available commercially. So Bermingham has to write his own, or hire programmers to help him. Ove

BETHESDA, MD.—Behind the scenes of the Human Genome Project—the 15-year, $3 billion effort to decipher our genetic makeup—researchers are working on a different sort of code. In a high-rise tower on the campus of the National Institutes of Health, a small group of programmers and molecular biologists are designing the computer framework for the genetic catalog of human-kind—an electronic database that will someday contain the information that biologically defines a hu

WASHINGTON-In the beginning there was an idea. And the idea was good: The National Science Foundation would bring high-performance computing to the scientific masses through a national network of supercomputing centers. Although some feared the network would cater to the computational elite, the five centers created in 1985 have now emerged at the crest of an extraordinary electronic revolution that promises to open wide the doors of numerical simulation to scientists in nearly every discipline.

WASHINGTON-In an ambitious answer to the National Institutes of Health's Human Genome Project, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has sprouted plans for a parallel project to map the genetic structure of key food plants. The proposal, presented by USDA program manager Jerome Miksche at a meeting of the NIH genome project's advisory committee in June, would identify genetic traits that can increase yield and disease resistance. The price tag is estimated to be $500 million over 10 years. In recen

The dedication last month of Fermi National Laboratory as a National Environmental Research Park may mark the resurgence of an obscure, 20-year-old Department of Energy program to study the environment. In the past three months the program has gained, along with Fermilab’s unique prairie acreage, a catchy new name—ParkNet—and a mandate to use DOE computer networks to expand collaborative research on the environment. DOE officials say that the new name and the emphasis on comp

WASHINGTON—Six months after a White House panel concluded that United States competitiveness in high-temperature superconductivity hinged on the successful creation of a half-dozen industrial consortia dedicated to superconductivity research, nearly twice that many either exist or are now proposed. But while organizers tout the vast potential of superconducting electronics and stress the need to beat the Japanese in this field, troubling scientific and economic issues still cloud the pr