Articles by Diana Morgan

Critics encourage scientific societies to address the needs of women members by accommodating children at professional gatherings Last fall, Miriam Forman, director of professional programs for the American Physical Society, decided to break with tradition. At a major meeting of the society, held last month in Cincinnati, the children of the 2,000 members expected to attend would be as welcome as their parents. Forman contracted a company to run a five-day program for infants and childre

New ASTM regulations promise to set clear definitions, enabling scientists to develop truly degradable plastics WASHINGTON--The growing public demand for truly biodegradable plastics has gone unfulfilled, in part because of a lack of agreement on what "biodegradability" means. But a new and comprehensive set of standards to define and measure such natural polymers, due out this spring, promises to help clear up the confusion within the scientific community as well as society at large. "The n

The commericial race to put therapeutic peptides and proteins into pill form worries those who fear reckless research. Against a backdrop of secrecy and suspicion, researchers are working on a pill that would deliver protein and polypeptide drugs into the body, and could generate billions of dollars in annual sales for biotechnology and pharmaceutical firms. But some scientists, looking at the radically different scientific and business approaches being pursued in the pill's development, have

Those just starting out are being trained to think like scientists to keep more of them interested and unlikely to switch majors Standing before the 2,000 students enrolled in his introductory chemistry course at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., chemist George Bodner mixes two flasks of chemicals. Through the exhaustive exchange of questions and answers that follows, Bodner forces this throng of young scientists to "invent" the concept of molarity long before any of them has read in

CLOSE-UP Author: Diana Morgan (The Scientist, Vol:5, #4, pg.8, February 18, 1991) (Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.) ---------- When George Bodner was an undergraduate majoring in chemistry, the thing he resented most was the lab requirement. "Nothing I did in my lab courses seemed valuable, because people told me how to do it," remembers Bodner, now a professor of education and chemistry at Purdue University. "It was the same as watching Julia Child: all cookbook." Bodner had

CLOSE-UP Author: Diana Morgan (The Scientist, Vol:5, #3, pg. 8, February 4, 1991) (Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.) -------- Sarah Cohn and Paul Christensen might have gotten married, anyway. But it helped that the musician and the electrical engineer first went into business together. They met five years ago at a social occasion. Today they are bound together in business as well as marriage, she as marketing manager and he as president of Potomac Photonics Inc. in Lanham, Md.,

These organizations help startups get assembled and launched by easing the pressures that can cause early failures Jason Lieu, an applied mathematician, had big plans for a computer system he had designed to model telecommunications and computer networks. So he quit a high-level job as a technical director at ITT Inc. in New York in 1984 and went into business for himself. The first few years were tough. Hardly anyone wanted to buy his invention. Luckily for him, Lieu had located his company

An epidemiologist's move to attend a closed meeting spurs debate over freedom of information versus the right to privacy WASHINGTON--No grant applicant had ever tried to breach the sanctity of an advisory council at the National Institutes of Health--until last summer, when University of Texas epidemiologist Darwin Labarthe knocked on the door. Notwithstanding the closed-door policy of the outside panel that advises the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, Labarthe told the NHLBI directo

NIDA offers financial and regulatory incentives, but reluctant pharmaceutical companies are worried about the legal risks WASHINGTON--The federal government wants to persuade the pharmaceutical industry to join its war on illegal drugs. At a two-day conference here this week the two sides will discuss financial and regulatory inducements to drug companies that create medications to fight mental illness to join the battle. Agencies within the Public Health Service are hoping that pharmaceutica

But while access to DOD data could be a boon to global change scientists, some of them worry about ties with the military WASHINGTON--The Department of Defense is planning a dramatic increase in its support of environmental research that could provide scientists with valuable data and resources in their study of global change. The Office of Naval Research (ONR) has proposed DOD's first-ever direct contribution next year to the government's interagency global research program, and last month C

Increased awareness and larger donations are drops in the bucket compared with the amount of federal dollars needed When President Bush signed a congressional resolution officially proclaiming the 1990s as the Decade of the Brain, a cry of triumph rose from patient advocacy groups across the country. Many of the roughly 70 voluntary organizations that represent victims of neurological and mental disorders--a number of whom raise money for research in basic neuroscience as well as for the study

The Hauglands cultivated their booming enterprise by anticipating the demand for new fluorescent probes It was 1975, and husband-and-wife chemists Dick and Rosaria Haugland were short on cash. Rosaria had taken time out from academic research in biochemistry to raise the couple's two children, and Dick regretted having no time for research in his first teaching job at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn. As a way to make extra money and as an excuse to spend more time in the laboratory Dick

Suppliers of laboratory chemicals and plastics are already beginning to feel the pinch from rising crude oil prices in the wake of the worldwide embargo of Iraqi oil. But it's not clear when-or if-scientists will have to pay more for those products. Officials at some companies, like J.T. Baker Chemical Inc. of Phillipsburg, N.J., one of the country's largest suppliers of laboratory solvents and other chemicals, say they plan to pass the cost increases onto their distributors, who could try to

Before parting with money to fund the NSF program, corporate backers demand to play a greater role in charting its development WASHINGTON--The National Science Foundation wants industry to invest more than $100 million in a new minority education program that would produce 50,000 baccalaureates and 2,000 Ph.D.'s a year in science and engineering by the year 2000. What the NSF doesn't want, say officials organizing the program, is a lot of advice from the businesses on how to set it up. That an

Allan Goldstein believes the thymosins he discovered can cure immune diseases, and he hopes his company and institute will prove it WASHINGTON--Science moves too slowly for biochemist Allan Goldstein. For most of his professional life, he has been trying to unravel the mysteries of the human immune system through a better understanding of a group of hormones known as thymosins. He discovered them 26 years ago, and their use in 1974 to save the life of a five-year-old girl, along with his encou