U.S. students found their summer in Japanese labs professionally as well as culturally productive, but not many plan to return WASHINGTON--A National Science Foundation program to forge closer ties with Japanese scientists is gaining popularity among the next generation of United States scientists, say NSF officials. The Summer Institute in Japan, which sent 25 U.S. graduate students in science and engineering to Japanese research facilities last summer, will support 50 such students this com

When scientists are wed to their labs as well as to each other, they can encounter extraordinary personal and professional challenges In 1939, on the eve of war in Europe, Gertrude Scharff felt that marriage to a fellow scientist working in the United States offered her the best chance to survive as a physicist. Her husband, she hoped, represented her ticket to greater opportunities to carry out research. Forty years later, the tables were turned for neurobiologist Patricia Goldman. Goldman w

Augmenting old devices and procedures with the latest computer-based techniques yields new opportunities for today's neuroscientist ST. LOUIS--In 1984, five fighter pilots spent three days hooked up to one of the world's most sophisticated machines for probing the brain's electrical impulses. But it was only last month that San Francisco neuroscientist Alan Gevins presented his results from that experiment. The project, hailed by colleagues as a synthesis of various research techniques, was a

NEW HAVEN, Conn.--Patricia Goldman-Rakic, sitting in her office at Yale University, is talking to a visitor about the problems and pleasures of being married to another scientist when her department chairman knocks on her door and enters. He explains that he's normally more polite but that, since she is his wife, he takes certain liberties. They smile, then he gets down to the business at hand--copy for an advertisement for a new journal, Cerebral Cortex, of which they are coeditors. She skims

Following is a list of all eleven married couples who are members of the National Academy of Sciences. It includes the year of their election to NAS as well as their discipline and affiliation: Maurice Goldhaber (1958) and Gertrude Scharff-Goldhaber (1972), Physics, Brookhaven National Laboratory Leo M. Hurvich (1975) and Dorothea Jameson (1975), Psychology, University of Pennsylvania John W. Kappler (1989) and Philippa Marrack (1989), Microbiology and Immunology, Howard Hughes Medical Inst

UPTON, N.Y.--Gertrude Scharff-Goldhaber has pulled out a few faded, blue three-ring binders, several books, and other reprints. It's a two-foot pile of paper that provides tangible evidence of her half-century of work as a physicist. The documentation is unnecessary. The fact that she belongs to the National Academy of Sciences seems proof enough that her work is important. But Scharff-Goldhaber persists. As one-half of a marriage that began during an era when women scientists were consistentl

But advocates wonder if the kind of research body they have in mind can survive turf skirmishes in the Washington ecosystem WASHINGTON--Ecologists scored a victory last month when Congress earmarked $400,000 for the Environmental Protection Agency to sponsor an independent evaluation of the nation's environmental research. Scientists view this study, which EPA initially opposed as unnecessary, as a first step toward creating a national environmental research institute. As envisioned, this new

For funding to keep pace with the field's progress, researchers work to keep the public aware of their discipline's achievements When the Society for Neuroscience meets this week in St. Louis, the group's 18,000 members will have their first opportunity to reflect on the first year of the Decade of the Brain, a designation given the 1990s by Congress and President Bush in recognition of the need to better understand mental and neurological disorders. About 50 million people in the United Stat

U.S. AGENCIES TO PLAN BRAIN RESEARCH AGENDA Author: Elizabeth Pennisi (The Scientist, Vol:4, #21, pg. 8, October 29, 1990) (Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.) -------- While the neuroscience community mobilizes and plans its Decade of the Brain campaign, those involved in brain research within the federal government are doing a bit of housekeeping themselves. The executive branch's Office of Science and Technology Policy has set up a Subcommittee on Brain and Behavioral Sciences u

EUGENE, Oreg.--Janis Weeks looks up and smiles as the sounds of young voices drift through an open window on the University of Oregon campus. The neurobiologist points out her young son, one of a half-dozen youngsters walking hand-in-hand across the quad to the day care center. Her belly bulging, Weeks is expecting her second child sometime this month. Weeks is a proud mother and she is also the proud recipient of a 1989 Presidential Young Investigator (PYI) award, a prestigious honor bestowed

Before Margaret Rossiter wrote her book Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1982), science historians had not paid much attention to women scientists. There was the occasional bibliography, but no survey of what Rossiter found were large numbers of underrecognized and underemployed women who had managed to work in the lab. Rossiter transformed dusty records archived letters, manuscripts and obituaries of women's past scientif

Inspired by the mandate to find alternatives, researchers link up to create new technologies and substitute chemicals WASHINGTON--Leslie Guth always thought her research was too technical for casual conversations. Not anymore. Now when Guth, a materials scientist for AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., mentions that she's looking for new ways to finish electronic circuit boards without using chlorofluoro-carbons, people are eager to hear more about her battle against what many env