WASHINGTON-A new program at the National Science Foundation will give institutions a larger voice in training researchers in the life sciences. The initiative, which NSF plans to launch with a $4 million investment next year, is also aimed at stimulating interdisciplinary research in the nation’s universities. Called the Research Training Group Awards, the program is sponsored by the NSF’s Biological, Behavioral and Social Sciences (BBS) directorate. The foundation hopes to award

In 1973, Jessica Tuchman Mathews was a promising young biochemist, with a departmental chair or a leadership role at a biotechnology company in her future. But she believed there were gaps in her knowledge of how science fit into society, and curiosity got the better of her. “I had this feeling that I should see what I was missing,” she says. So Mathews left academia and traveled to Washington, D.C., as one of the first Congressional Science and Engineering Fellows sponsored by

WASHINGTON—At the National Center for Health Statistics in Hyattsville, Md., James Massey and his colleagues are holding their breath and waiting with fingers crossed for word from Dallas. Starting Sept. 26, researchers will be knocking on doors to collect blood samples and information about possible risk behaviors for AIDS from 1,600 Texans. The results of this pilot study will determine the future of the National Household Seroprevalence Survey, a planned $25 million project to canva

Five years ago, Mac Hyman began to worry about AIDS. “I was convinced that the problem was very much larger than the people around me were reacting to,” recalls Hyman, a mathematical modeler at Los Alamos (N.Mex.) National Laboratory. “There just wasn’t any other problem that was crying out like this.” Driven by this conviction, Hyman convinced fellow mathematicians, social scientists, computer specialists, and medical experts to help him build a theoretical mod

WASHINGTON—”A frightening noise and then a blast of wind hit us, and we saw fire falling from the sky.” That was one of the many descriptions that reached the Scientific Event Alert Network (SEAN) after Ruiz, a volcano in Colombia, blew up Nov. 13, 1985. Peaceful for 140 years, Ruiz erupted and killed more than 22,000 people. Only three volcanoes have taken more lives; in contrast, Mount St. Helens, which got far more attention, is blamed for only about 60 deaths. But the

WASHINGTON—A decade ago, the United States whetted the world’s appetite for biotechnology with a tempting platter of Western hors d’oeuvres including hybridoma technology, diagnostic tests, and a handful of new drugs. But aromas from biotech kitchens across the Pacific have some U.S. experts worned that the main course will be served with chopsticks, not forks. One telling sign of this is Rand SNell's business card. Apolitical scientist conducting a study for the U.S. Off

WASHINGTON—Pressure has been building in Congress to provide higher pay for federal biomedical researchers. But it’s unlikely that any of three bills currently under congressional scrutiny—one of them a well-publicized proposal from President Bush that applies to employees at all government agencies—will make it into law this year. The driving force behind all three of the plans is a desire on the part of federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health to

Until six months ago or so, ecologist H. Ronald Pulliam never bothered with fax machines. Now his work depends on them. Every day he and 20 colleagues use the machines to iron out the details of a multimillion-dollar, multidisciplinary, multi-university proposal to study how plants interact with the atmosphere. But fax machines aren't the only things that have changed the way Pulliam, director of the Institute on Ecology at the University of Georgia, carries out his work on global change. Indeed

WASHINGTON-In the early 1980s, the lonely voices seeking funds for AIDS research were barely audible amid the din from the biomedical community as a whole. Over the past eight years, however, with the public also demanding that science step up its battle against the devastating-disease, the United States government has poured $5.5 billion into the AIDS epidemic, including $2.1 billion in the current year ending September 30. So far, about 40% of that total, nearly $2.2 billion, has been spent on

Last fall Congress gave Leo Young a tall order. In four months, Young—a staff specialist at the Department of Defense—was to pick 20 or so technologies deemed crucial for future national security and assess where the United States ranked, compared with other nations, in developing those technologies. The congressional request re flects the recent national preoccupation with icoking over its shoulder to see which countries are challenging its technological superiority. Ever since P

WASHINGTON—Government scientists, in an unusual display of consensus, have spelled out research priorities for the burgeoning field of global climate change. Their plan, contained in a report that was scheduled for official release this month, is the most comprehensive description of how the federal government hopes to increase its understanding of environmental changes throughout the world. “We tried to examine what we need to know about the earth system and what is most problema

TORREON, MEXICO— On a dusty movie set in the Mexican desert, J. Robert Oppenheimer—or, more correctly, actor Dwight Schultz is writing equations on a blackboard. The setting is Los Alamos in 1944, and the actor is portraying the famous physicist as he excitedly describes a key step in the process of constructing the first atomic bomb to the general—played by Paul Newman—in charge of the new wartime laboratory. In minutes the camera stops rolling, and one of the actors str