Articles by Gregory Byrne

Ed Connors wants to send an SOS message to Congress: “Sorry, Out of Scientists.” That message makes Connors, a professor of mathematics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the winner of THE SCIENTIST’s slogan contest (see November 2, 1987, p. 2). Readers were invited to submit “the best phrase to describe the pending shortage of scientific manpower in the United States” in five words or less. Connors tried but failed to get a local slogan competition

For some time now, I’ve been followmg with interest media accounts of the effects of glasnost on life in the Soviet Union. It’s certainly been heartening, for example, to witness the release of the dissident Soviet physicists Andrei Sakharov, Yuri Orlov, and Anatoly Shcharansky. Now if only another major Soviet science figure currently living in internal exile would receive a kindly phone call from Mr. Gorbachev! I’m speaking, of course, of Yerosha, the brave little monkey

WASHINGTON—National Geographic magazine invited its readers to smell an armpit and, strangely enough, 1.5 million of them did. Readers put their noses to the grindstone as part of the magazine’s Smell Survey, a joint effort with the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia to sniff out data, on our olfactory sense. The data are now available to researchers. The September 1986 issue of the magazine included a scratch-and-sniff sheet (odorants encased in polymers) that conta

There is cheering news from Washington, D.C., for inveterate bedtime smokers. Scientists at the National Bureau of Standards have announced that it is possible to produce cigarettes that are less likely to set the mattress on fire should they tumble from the lips of smokers succumbing to the lures of Morpheus. Moreover, the scientists say, these modem marvels will contain no more tar or nicotine than do low-tech cigarettes! (Cigarette ad, 1988: “Same great taste; won’t lay the hou

Poor Pluto. Poor misunderstood, maligned, underrated, way-out-there Pluto. 

In 1887 the U.S. federal government established a little one-room laboratory on Staten Island, N.Y., and called it the Laboratory of Hygiene. Today, that lab is called the National Institutes of Health. All year long NIH has been bombarding the media with press releases on its centennial events, including a July 1 Capitol Hill “photo opportunity” with some of the nation’s 25,000 centenarians. But they’ve failed to mention many of the more interesting stories. For ex

My friend Goodbeaker has had one of the more quilted scientific careers I know of, yet one that somehow always seems to follow the cutting edge of research. An academic biologist of no great repute, she thought her career was made last year when her department chairman fled the groves of academe for Turkey in search of Noah's Ark. Passed over for promotion, she languished teaching freshmen the difference between sperm and ova until eight weeks ago when she somehow jumped on the superconducter ba

I'm sending the tuition bills to Stephen Jay Gould. After, all, it was hearing me read aloud a charming essay of Gould's in The New York Times about his early love of dinosaurs that prompted my son, Brendan, to confide, "Daddy, I love dinosaurs, too. I wanna be a planeatologist when I grow up." Of course, some days it's a spaceman or a detective, but just as often his career goal at age 5 has something to do with dinosaurs. It's not entirely Gould's fault. Dinosaurs have been Brendan's obsession

WASHINGTON—Surgeon General C. Everett Koop's plan to "revitalize" the Public Health Service's commissioned corps has drawn the fire of researchers at the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control. And the outcome of a May 18 NIH meeting designed to soothe them is not clear. "It looks like some of you came loaded for bear and weren't sure I was a bunny, so you shot anyway," Koop said following a series of pointed questions from the audience. Putting members back into

When I was growing up, there were perhaps only three facts of geography I knew for sure: the equator was exactly 25,000 miles long, heaven was located just above the Van Allen radiation belt, and Mount Everest was the highest mountain in the world. These were scientific facts of the first order, known to all parochial school children, and inculcated through repetition and regular use of the chart and pointer by Sister Mary Geography. It is a sign of the faithless age in which we live that no o

Every scientist or technical innovator has had an illustrious predecessor who has paved the way and provided inspiration for some stroke of brilliance. Paul Dirac had Niels Bohr, Pasteur had Lavoisier, Sol Snyder had Steve Brodie. And David Hunter has Spider-Man. Actually, David Hunter has Jack Love, a circuit court judge in Albuquerque, N.M., who saw a Spider-Man cartoon on television in 1983 that helped paved the way for another technical advance: electronically monitored home incarceration. I

When I was 20 I had an English literature professor who insisted on the virtues of one's keeping a literary log—a chronicle of all the books read over the course of the year. All great men and women of letters did this, he said. In fact, it appeared that journal keeping was something of a prerequisite for being a man or woman of letters. With the enthusiasm and single-mindedness that often propel us (arid render us insufferable) when we're 20, I began such a project. At the end of two mont

CHICAGO—A new National Academy of Sciences report will recommend that basic science become "the principal objective of the space program." Speaking here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Thomas M. Donahue outlined some of the major recommendations of the Academy's Space Science Board report, entitled "Major Directions for Space Science: 1995-2015." Donahue is an astrophysicist at the University of Michigan and chairman of the Space Science Bo

WASHINGTON—Six months after the federal government published its set of proposed regulations governing biotechnology, two lawsuits aimed at overturning those regulations have failed. On December 22 Judge Gerhard A. Gesell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed a suit filed by environmental activist Jeremy Rifkin that sought to overturn the June 26 announcement on the grounds that it bypassed established federal rulemaking procedures. The same day, Gesell dismisse

The arrest of Soviet physicist and U.N. employee Gennadi F. Zakharov on espionage charges this fall was the exception that proves the rule. Very little scientific spying is actually done by scientists. An FBI listing of 62 espionage prosecutions from 1945 to the present includes quite a few engineers and technicians and the expected large number of military and intelligence personnel. But other than Zakharov, who was ex changed in October for journalist Nicholas Daniloff after being indicted for