Karen A. Holbrook, a professor of biological structure at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, has been elected by the Dermatology Foundation to chair its medical and scientific committee. Holbrook's primary role as new chairwoman will be to lead the Evanston, Ill., organization's grant application review process for basic research. The 16-member committee, which will oversee the foundation's 1992 Career Development awards, fellowships, and grants program, will have its f

PRINCE GEORGE'S COUNTY, MD.--Right now there are 24 acres of mud, grass, and trees. But when construction is completed by the fall of next year, two of the United States' largest physics societies will leave their cramped offices in New York and join a third group in moving to a brand-new, spacious, five-story office building just outside Washington, D.C. The move is designed to improve professional information gathering and interaction with government policy-making institutions and other scien

Chemical company Rohm and Haas has named Angelo A. Lamola, former head of the molecular biophysics department at AT&T Bell Laboratories, as the new director of the company's exploratory chemicals and exploratory plastics research divisions. Lamola begins his tenure as the leader of the two groups on October 1. Philadelphia-based Rohm and Haas, whose research laboratories are in Spring House, Pa., is a specialty chemical company that orients its basic and applied investigative facilities towa

Frederick Francis, an emeritus professor of food science and nutrition at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has been elected chairman of the board of directors at the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH). The council is a nonprofit consumer education and public health consortium made up of scientists and physicians. The author of more than 300 technical papers and seven books, Francis has received several national and international awards for excellence in science. But, he s

Robert D. Ballard, director of the Center for Marine Exploration and senior scientist at the Deep Submergence Laboratory at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, received the Robert Dexter Conrad Award from the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the Navy's highest honor for scientific achievement. The 50-year-old oceanographer and marine geologist received the award on June 15. In the early 1970s, Ballard promoted using manned submersibles as a way to explore the mid-Atlantic ridg

Donald Boisvert, a research professor in the department of surgery at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, has left his research post in Alberta to become executive director of the Canadian Council on Animal Care (CCAC), based in Ottawa. He began in the position August 4. CCAC is a peer-review organization that monitors the scientists who use animals for research, education, and testing. There are roughly 2 million animals in Canadian labs, and Boisvert says he hopes to make CCAC more accessi

Alluding dramatically to the vast scope of their achievements, President Bush recently presented 15 researchers and inventors and one corporation with the United States govemment's highest scientific honors, the National Medal of Science and the National Medal of Technology. The number of 1992 award recipients was significantly less this year than in previous years. The 1991 crop of both science and tecbnology medal winners, for example, totaled 33; the medals numbered 31 in 1990 and 22 in 1989

CHALLENGING THE BASIC TENETS When the Heidelberg Appeal, delivered to the leaders of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, assails an "irrational ideology" that questions technology and idealizes a so-called natural state, it is attacking, among others, those who embrace these notions, namely those who have come to be known as "neo-Luddites." The label "Luddite" originates from an early 19th-century English labor movement, inspired by Ned Ludd, who, upon seeing the industrial revolution repl

Ralph E. (Chris) Christoffersen has left a position as senior vice president and director of research at SmithKline Beecham PLC in Philadelphia, one of the largest pharmaceutical corporations in the United States, to become president and CEO of one that is tiny by comparison, Ribozyme Pharmaceuticals Inc. (RPI). Christoffersen says, however, that despite the company's relatively small size, RPI offers no dearth of opportunities. "I am really looking forward to being the leader of a research tea

Bernard Fisher says his life's work has been emphasizing the importance of biological testing in clinical trials. As the newly elected president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), he says he hopes to influence oncologists worldwide to explore the benefits of these trials as testing mechanisms. Testing scientific hypotheses in a clinical setting is, according to Fisher, a superior way to search for new medical therapies as well as fortifying old biological principles. "T

Professors hotly debated it, students protested it, and volumes of legal documents were drafted concerning it. But after nearly 2 1/2 years of turmoil, controversial race research at the University of Delaware will be allowed to continue. On April 29, the university's administration quietly reached a settlement of a labor grievance with two educational studies professors, allowing them to accept previously blocked funds for conducting research into the relationship between race and intelligen

During his 20 years as a professor of geophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sean Carl Solomon has led students toward a greater understanding of the principles of planetary seismology. Now, as the new director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM), he will have the opportunity to encourage his fellow scientists in the same direction. In September, Solomon will oversee the Washington D.C.-based DTM, one of five research departments of the C