Government Briefs

Even before it finishes up new rules on misconduct, NIH is already looking ahead to the next set of possible guidelines for grantees. These rules would cover standards of conduct to avoid real or imagined conflicts of interest by scientists who get government grants. The complex topic, believed by many observers to be a more serious problem than fraud itself, has already drawn congressional attention in light of federal pressure to strengthen ties between academic scientists and industry, and NIH issued a general statement on the subject in January. But NIH officials want to learn more, and have scheduled a two-day open meeting this week on the Bethesda, Md., campus to explore various aspects of the subject.

If it seems as though the program officers you deal with at NSF are not afraid to speak their minds, it's no accident. Director Erich Bloch wants those administrators, many of whom serve for only a few years before returning to their university, to use their knowledge of cutting-edge science to select the best of the 25,000 proposals that NSF receives each year. 'We are urging the program officers to exercise their own judgment," Bloch explained to members of the National Science Board at its meeting last month. "The choices are not always clear-cut." Although he didn't mention it by name, Bloch also took a swipe at the NIH system, in which each proposal receives a priority score based on a scale from 100 to 500. "We don't want to get mired in a bureaucracy, where numbers dictate what we must fund," Bloch said. Autonomy is important, he said, because "it's the only way we can continue to attract the best people, and support the best work." Commenting on a 1988 NSF report on merit review, Bloch says that he's not troubled by the fact that program officers act counter to the consensus view 25% of the time. And he believes that the foundation as a whole should conduct fewer reviews. "I think 4.7 [the average number of reviews per proposal] is too high a number."

NSF has long hoped that its new program of science and technology centers would link scientists from different institutions in a common search for new knowledge. But it was a practical quest for funds that succeeded in uniting computer scientists and mathematicians at Caltech and Los Alamos National Laboratory with those at Rice University and Argonne National Laboratory. The groups had all recognized the importance of a center on research in parallel computing, but a tight deadline for submissions forced the two universities to submit separate proposals to NSF. However, when each application made it to the final round of site visits, the two teams decided that there was strength in numbers "We realized that combining the two aspects made it a much stronger proposal," says Caltech's Herbert Keller. "And since Texas had a lot fewer site visits than California, we figured that picking Rice as its home would improve our chances." Keller regrets that the merger forced Caltech to pare away a substantial portion of its original proposal. But he's not complaining about the $4.1 million that NSF awarded in the first year, and the promise of $23 million over five years. "The only problem," he says, partly in jest, "is that we didn't put enough money in the budget for travel."