Articles by Ken Kalfus

The $30 billion space station planned by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is likely to be the biggest United States science project of the next two decades--employing the most scientists and engineers, drawing the most federal science funds, and commanding the most public attention of any government-supported research. Yet a growing consensus among U.S. scientists, several of whom have recently testified before Congress, is that the space station Freedom will not yield signifi

Michael T. White, former general manager of Brunswick Biotechnetics in San Diego, has joined the Research Institute of Scripps Clinic, La Jolla, as an associate to the industrial liaison officer. The new position was created to facilitate the management and protection of the intellectual properties of the Scripps Research Institute. White received a Ph.D. in botanical sciences and genetics in 1971 from the University of California, Los Angeles. He holds an MBA in marketing, earned in 1980, als

In its 173rd annual business meeting last month, the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) honored four scientists for their contributions to science and society. Vitali Goldanski, director of the Semonyov Institute of Chemical Physics of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow, received the $2,000 NYAS Award for his work in chemical physics, nuclear physics, and chemistry and biophysics. The award also recognized Goldanski, the chairman of the Soviet Pugwash Group, for "his contributions to disa

As the process of political decentralization accelerates in the Soviet Union, it is being matched by the decentralization of the country's massive science bureaucracy. The Ukrainian Scientific Association, founded in Kiev in June, is among the latest independent scientific organizations springing up throughout the USSR that are seeking direct contacts with foreign institutions. These organizations hope scientists from the United States will help them take quick advantage of perestroika and gla

The International Transplantation Society has awarded its first Peter Medawar Prize to two researchers in immunology. Jacques Miller and Sir James L. Gowans received the award last month at the society's 13th congress in San Francisco. The prize honors the late Medawar, winner of the 1960 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine and a pioneer in transplantation biology. The award emphasizes the society's commitment to research and clinical achievement and notes the importance of past organ transp

Rear Admiral William C. Miller has been appointed the chief of naval research. Miller, who will report directly to the secretary of the Navy, heads an agency that comprises the Office of Naval Research (ONR), created by Congress in 1946, and the Office of Naval Technology (ONT), established in 1980. The agency has an annual budget of more than $1 billion, which is allocated for research and development work conducted at universities and Navy laboratories and by industry. Miller is the 17th offi

After spending 17 years in the United States, Israeli-born physicist Mordehai Heiblum has returned to his native country to head the Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Center for Submicron Research at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. Since 1978, Heiblum has worked at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., where he most recently was the manager and a research staff member of IBM's microstructure physics group. His present interests include ballistic electrons

The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, recently redefining its organizational goals, has a new executive director to guide the organization in achieving these objectives. Michael Jackson, a physiologist who was dean of research at George Washington University Medical Center in Washington, D.C., takes the FASEB post this week. At a retreat in Williamsburg, Va., last year, representatives of the 31,000-member orgaanization decided that FASEB's seven constituent societies

Three scientists who have done key research in cell communication are the winners of this year's Bristol-Myers Squibb Award for Distinguished Achievement in Neuroscience. At a recent luncheon at the Pierre Hotel in New York, Bertil Hille, Erwin Neher, and Jean-Pierre Changeux each received a share of the $50,000 prize. Each was also given a silver medallion. Neher is best known for his development, with Bert Sakmann, of the patch clamp, which makes it possible to measure the current passing th

The metropolitan New York chapter of the Association for Women in Science has given four researchers the 1990 Outstanding Woman Scientist Award. In a June ceremony, the association honored physicist Gertrude Goldhaber, of Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, biochemist Birgit Satir, of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, N.Y., chemist Jeannette Brown, of Merck and Co., Rahway, N.J., and Patricia Broderick, a professor of pharmacology at City University Medical School in

Animal welfare activists are trying to open up the hearings of university animal care and use committees at state universities as part of their campaign to restrict or halt the use of animals in research. So far, however, they've had mixed success: State sunshine laws (which mandate open meetings of public bodies), public meetings, and the federal Freedom of Information Act have helped the activists obtain more data on research proposals, but acquiring the protocols for specific projects has re

People's Deputy Vitali Goldanski, a leading scientist and politician, steps up campaign against Russian 'monarcho-Nazis'. Extending his involvement in the politics of his troubled country, Soviet chemist Vitali Goldanski has launched an international appeal warning of the rise of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. Goldanski, director of the Semenov Institute of Chemical Physics and a member of the Soviet Congress of People's Deputies, wrote in January to his foreign colleagues about a new "mo

The New York-based scientific publisher Gordon and Breach has suffered a setback in the first round of its legal battle waged in European courts against the American Institute of Physics. The publishing firm had brought suits against AIP last year, claiming that an article in the July 1988 issue of the institute's monthly, Physics Today, reporting on a survey of journal prices (The Scientist, Sept. 4, 1989, page 4), was damaging to Gordon and Breach. The article, written by retired physicist He

If the editors of Poisk, a lively new science newspaper published in Moscow, need historical justification for their project, they can point to Lenin, who on his deathbed in 1922 called for a newspaper that would provide a forum for scientists. Or the editors can produce the letter Soviet physicist Pyetr Kapitsa wrote to Nikita Khrushchev in 1958 on behalf of his colleagues at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Kapitsa, who would later win the Nobel Prize in physics, humbly wrote: "I would like t

From dedication inscriptions accompanying 17th-century Jesuit astronomical texts to the genesis of today’s animal rights debate, the past and present of scientific discovery were put under the microscope last month as the History of Science Society met at the University of Flor- ida, Gainesville, for its 65th annual conference. To society officials, several aspects of the three-day event affirmed not only the current vitality of the organization, but also its promising future: overal