University Briefs

Volume 3, #2The Scientist January 23, 1989 UNIVERSITY BRIEFS Scientists Take To The Silver Screen When movie director Roland Joffé set out to chronicle the dawn of the Atomic Age, he sent out an unusual casting call. Rather than use actors to portray most of the Los Alamos physicists of the 1940s, he decided that only real scientists would do. So he and his crew passed around the word at several universities, and he soon recruited 50 scientists, engineers, and physicians. Actors have the leading roles - Paul Newman is Major General Leslie Groves and Dwight Schultz plays J.Robert Oppenheimer - but the real scientists figure prominently. Caltech professor of theoretical physics, David Politzer, for example, portrays physicist Robert Serber, Oppenheimer's young protegee. The film, named "Fat Man and Little Boy" after the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is scheduled to be released this fall. But the experience of acting in it is unlikely to convince any of the scientists to leave their labs. Stanford psychology professor Brian Wandel, who agreed out of curiosity to spend several weeks last summer on the movie set in Durango, Mexico, says that his brush with stardom was enough to convince him that he made the right decision when he chose science over show business. Other researchers who will be seen on the screen with Paul Newman include Stanford psychophysics graduate students David Brainard and Allen Poirson, and physician Roger Cubicotti, son of a Manhattan Project chemist. Robert Cornog, former chief engineer at Los Alamos, was recruited to guarantee the authenticity of the bombs, and there is even an appearance by UCLA cancer specialist Robert Gale, who helped victims of the Chernobyl disaster. Time Fleeting? Stanford Wonders Why More and more university professors are complaining that they don't have enough time for science. In fact, their grumbling has grown so loud at Stanford that the university's Committee on Research decided last month to investigate what, exactly, the problem is and how it should be addressed. So far, committee chairman Arthur Bienenstock, who directs the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory, has observed that the lack of time seems to afflict scholars in the humanities as well as scientists across the nation. As a result, he speculates that heavy administrative responsibilities may be partly to blame. Another possible culprit is the shrinking research dollar, making it more difficult to find funding. "More time is spent per dollar raised than previously," says Bienenstock. As part of its investigation, the committee will be looking at a Stanford study published earlier this year that shows the average number of active grants and contracts per principal investigator has risen from 2.4 to 2.9 since 1977. The study reports that scientists need this increase in the number of grants just to maintain the same level of support. Colorado Reaches Toward New Heights The Colorado Advanced Technical Institute, a state office set up in 1983 to encourage cooperation between industry and university scientists, is ready to move forward with a host of new projects, including a software engineering institute, a bioprocessing center, and a ceramics microfactory. All it needs to begin is a tidy $4.7 million that it has requested from the state legislature. The money and the projects would be spread among the state's four research universities - Colorado School of Mines, Colorado State University, University of Colorado, and University of Denver - and reflects CATI's newly declared commitment to four areas: information technology, biotechnology, advanced materials processing and fabrication, and manufacturing technology. But don't hold your breath waiting for these ventures to get funded. Although CATI can point to the leverage power of its cash - for every $1 of state money administered in its programs there are $6.11 dollars of matching private funds - this spending plan represents a 114% percent increase over CATI's FY 1989 budget of $2.2 million.

University Briefs

The Scientist Staff

Jan 22, 1989

UNIVERSITY BRIEFS

Scientists Take To The Silver Screen

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