BOSTON--By significant margins, and in surprising numbers, members of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) have voted to oppose the administration’s SDI program and military funding of their discipline. About 7,000 members nearly twice the number that normally vote each year for the society’s officers, cast ballots on one or more of the five resolutions. The first resolution, passed by 57 percent of those who voted, expressed the society’s refusal to lend “a spuriou

BOSTON—Two federal agencies have recently tightened procedures to avoid potential financial conflicts of interest among staff members. The new procedures at the National Science Foundation and the Office of Technology Assessment follow public disclosure that a staff member at each agency had ties to companies whose products were related to their work. This perennial thorny issue resurfaced last fall after reports that David T. Kingsbury, assistant director of NSF and chairman of the Wh

BOSTON—The American Mathematical Society (AMS) has agreed to ask its 20,000 members to set a policy on the role of the military in funding mathematics research. The vote, to be taken in January, will cover five motions touching on the nature of federal support for the discipline. The society’s decision to poll its membership comes after two controversial motions on the topic of military funding generated heated debate during the society’s meeting last January. One of these

BOSTON—The executive director of Sigma Xi, one of the nation's oldest and most prestigious scientific societies, has been forced out in a bitter dispute over the proper role of the organization. C. Ian Jackson, hired in 1981 as an outsider with a new vision for the 101-year-old honorary society, was asked to leave June 19 by the organization's board of directors. The board was scheduled to meet last weekend to discuss plans for choosing his successor. "I am not leaving voluntarily," Jackso

BOSTON—Thousands of scientists and engineers who have been in the United States illegally over the past decade after arriving as students may not be able to gain amnesty under an interpretation of the new immigration law by Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officials. The law, which promised amnesty to foreigners living illegally in this country since before 1982, is being applied "very liberally" to those who entered the country illegally—primarily undocumented workers fr

CAMBRIDGE, MASS.—Medical researchers in this university town are no longer allowed to use two well-known animal toxicity tests after passage of the first legislation of its type in the country. The Cambridge City Council voted May 18 to ban the Classical LD-50 Acute Toxicity Test and the Draize Eye-Irritancy Test. The move is the latest step in a heated local debate on the use of laboratory animals. (A survey by city officials found that at least 50,000 research animals, mostly rats, were

BOSTON—Two hundred and eight days after he began a fast to protest the nuclear arms race, astrophysicist Charles Hyder stood in the rain across the street from the White House to announce his decision to run for president. He admitted his "candidacy" is an attempt to draw attention to his campaign to get the United States and Soviet Union to begin to dismantle their nuclear arsenals. But his willingness to die for his beliefs has posed a dilemma for many scientists active in the disarmame

BOSTON—A court settlement last month that requires an environmental assessment of the military's biological warfare program could bolster efforts to define the impact of other federally funded research programs. The Defense Department agreed to such an assessment February 12 to resolve a suit brought by the Foundation on Economic Trends, a public interest organization founded by Jeremy Rifkin. The suit, filed last fall in U.S. District Court, claimed that the Pentagon had violated the Nati

BOSTON—The company that agreed to market the world's first genetically engineered pseudorabies livestock vaccine has charged the vaccine's developer with "fraudulent misrepresentation" of the vaccine's safety and efficacy. According to a claim filed November 13 in U.S. District Court in Houston, TechAmerica Group Inc. would not have entered into its agreement with Novagene Ltd. "had it known the truth with regard to such statements, representations and omissions" in the data presented on t

Date: December 15, 1986 BOSTON-A sharp increase in U.S. military spending for research on biological warfare agents has raised concern about its effect on related fields and sparked debate on the nature of the work. The Defense Department expects to spend $73.2 million in 1987 on biological weapons research, a figure that has risen from $14.9 million at the start of the Reagan administration. Douglas Feith, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Negotiations Policy, told a House sub-co