HEALY URGES SCHOOLS TO TIGHTEN THEIR BELTS Author: JEFFREY MERVIS Date: January 20, 1992 National Institutes of Health director Bernadine Healy says that university administrators need to act more like their private-sector colleagues when it comes to dealing with the issue of indirect costs. If they don't, she warns, rising overhead rates will eat into the amount of new money available for academic research grants. "Every corporation in this country is trying to hold down it

Sidebar: NIH's Nealy to Play the Numbers Game Sidebar: NSF's Ambitious Plans Outpace Budget Hikes Despite big budget hikes for NIH and NSF, many researchers and officials claim that government backing is inadequate WASHINGTON--The budgets of most federal research agencies rose this year, some by double digits, as Congress once again was generous to science. The primary sources of money for academic research had good years: the National Institutes of Health's budget increased by 9 percent, t

David Sanchez presides over a $600 million budget as assistant National Science Foundation director for the mathematical and physical sciences. But even with steady growth each year in that budget, he says he's hard-pressed to find the money next year to continue work on, among other projects, a $211 million laser interferometer gravity wave observatory (LIGO), a $192 million eight-meter telescope, and a $120 million high magnetic field laboratory. "If we put in much less than what the proje

National Institutes of Health director Bernadine Healy says she is trying to shift the debate over adequate funding for biomedical research away from scientists and toward health as she sells the idea of a larger NIH budget to Congress and the public. But sometimes it's hard to separate the needs of her colleagues and the needs of the country. "I'm not talking about a full-employment program for scientists," she told a recent meeting of the director's advisory committee that was focusing on

Controversy over propriety is rekindled as new physics and marine biotech centers make their respective moves to gain federal allocations WASHINGTON--Buried within the 1992 appropriations bill signed last month by President Bush for NASA, the National Science Foundation, and several other federal agencies is an allocation of $43 million to start the building of two new academic research facilities. One--a $211 million observatory to measure gravity waves, to be built at two sites thousands of

WASHINGTON--A panel of high-energy physicists has recommended slashing experimental programs at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Fermilab, and Brookhaven National Laboratory in response to expected budget cuts of up to 15 percent to be proposed by the Department of Energy (DOE). The cuts, if contained in the fiscal year 1993 budget that President Bush will submit in January to Congress, could mean layoffs of hundreds of scientists, the early termination of several research efforts, and

A House panel questions methodology, motivation behind agency's warning that a huge shortfall threatens the work force WASHINGTON--A congressional committee is investigating whether political considerations influenced the National Science Foundation's prediction that the United States faces a cumulative shortage of some 675,000 college-educated scientists and engineers over the next two decades. The NSF prediction, based on studies conducted since 1985 by agency policy analyst Peter House and

WASHINGTON--The National Science Foundation has reshuffled its grant-making bureaucracy to give greater prominence to the social and behavioral sciences. The reorganization, announced earlier this month by NSF director Walter Massey, also addresses simmering problems within the foundation's policy analysis and survey research programs that have led to congressional inquiries and heated debate within the field. The new NSF organizational chart, as described by Massey during a meeting of its gov

A recent [Department of Defense] report defines technology transfer as the transition of R&D programs from research to application by a user. It begins when an R&D agency shows the users, early in the planning stage of a project, how a technology can be applied to their needs. Based on that definition, there is very little evidence of technology transfer from federal agencies to the industrial sector.... Despite the fact that the U.S. makes major investments in R&D, the results are not reflect

A `good-neighbor' policy at the nuclear weapons lab inspires researchers to aid paleontological digs in the New Mexico hills It stands to reason that the pursuit of dinosaur bones is not part of Los Alamos National Scientific Laboratory's official research portfolio. After all, this is the home of the first atom bomb, its resident researchers are primarily involved in the physical sciences, and nuclear weapons development is still pretty much the name of the game. So why have electron microsc

WASHINGTON--Senators and representatives return next week from their annual August recess knowing that they still face many important issues. But what to do about big science should not be one of them. That debate appears to have been settled, at least for this year. A series of votes this summer attempted to establish an acceptable balance between funding huge teams of scientists working on multibillion-dollar construction projects and continuing to nurture individual investigators engaged in

Clearly established research goals, awards of shorter duration, and vigilance over costs will do the trick, says the agency,s director BETHESDA, Md.--National Institutes of Health director Bernadine Healy hopes to increase by almost 50 percent the total number of grants the agency awards over the next several years. To do it, she says, NIH must trim budget requests by principal investigators and tighten up on indirect costs paid to institutions, manipulate the length of its grants awarded to av