The rancor of the White House cost David T. Kingsbury, National Science Foundation assistant director for behavioral and biological sciences, a trip to Paris last month. It seems that officials of the Administrations’s Office of Science and Technology Policy are trying to punish him because of allegations that he advised a California biotechnology firm while a government official (see The Scientist, November 2, 1987, p. 3). So they forced Kingsbury’s superiors at NSF to withdraw his name from the guest list of a biotechnology meeting sponsored by the multinational Organization of Economic and Cooperative Development. This gailed the NSF officials because their investigation had cleared Kingsbury of alleged conflict of interest last summer. But he’s not yet free of the Justice Department, which is moving very slowly on its own investigation of charges first made last fall.
Financial tremors are running through the controversial NSF-funded Earthquake Research Center that the ...
