April 1996

Tenure To Female Chemist Colleagues 'Dismayed' By Decision 'SOMEWHAT SURPRISED': Sharon Palmer, who will have to leave next year, says "I thought it couldn't quite happen." When C. Pauline Burt was hired by Smith College to teach chemistry, the periodic table numbered 86 elements. The neutron had yet to be discovered. Pluto, too, was unknown. United States President Woodrow Wilson presided over the first meeting of the League of Nations. Babe Ruth still played for the Boston Red Sox. Burt wa

Battles between unions of graduate students and university administrators are heating up at institutions around the United States. This academic year is seeing an upwelling of union activity and an increasingly polarized debate between union activists and university administrators. Most notable among these was a highly visible protest by teaching assistants at Yale University, who refused to turn in students' fall-semester grades. ACTIVIST: U. Michigan union president Scott Dexter is a stude

Review But many critics are urging still other changes, including easier approval of 'off-label' uses DÉJÀ VU: NCI's David Parkinson sees parallels with AIDS drug testing. By Oncologists, industry officials, and cancer-patient advocacy organizations are applauding recently announced policy changes at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that speed up the approval process for cancer drugs. The plan, announced on March 29 by President Bill Clinton, aims to immediately streamlin

Mathematicians With Awards Two life scientists are among the 13 researchers receiving awards from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in Washington, D.C., today as part of NAS's 133rd annual meeting. A 'CALL FOR NOMINATIONS' For the first time in five years, there are no women among the individuals receiving awards from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 1996. Catherine Didion, executive director of the Washington-based Association for Women in Science, stresses that each of this y

By Eric Albert Email: ealbert@world.std.com ACROSS 1 Immune response elicitor 5 Nervous follower? 9 Experiment 10 Malignant epithelial tumor 11 Lymphocyte-producing organ 12 Class of jawless vertebrates 15 Doc Edgerton's school: addr 17 Vitamen E compound 20 Sex-linked hereditary disorder 23 Gastric juice component, chemically 24 Use of PET or CAT, e.g. 26 Tobacco _____ virus 29 Relaxed person's EEG output 31 Starch, after hydrolyzation 32 Effective, as a drug 33 Skin color DOWN 1 One of a m

The Scientist JUDITH SWAIN, Chief of the division of cardiovascular medicine and professor of genetics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia "THE SCIENTIST provides me with new perspectives on science and scientists. I look forward to each issue to learn more about a broad range of topics both within and outside my own research focus." Along with creating a health care network for cardiovascular medicine at Penn, Judith Swain is deeply involved in two research projects that hold promise

De-emphasis Of Scholarship I have just returned from another study-section meeting. During a typically excruciating discussion of the most minute and insignificant details of a grant proposal, my mind wandered off a little, and I began to wonder about the enterprise that I have been part of for almost 30 years. What is science, anyway? At its best, science is an attempt to understand the natural world through a shared idiom-an understanding that can be enjoyed by anyone who is willing to lear

Depends On Following Agencies' Rules Securing research support increasingly occupies the time and energy of academic scientists. As a program officer with a private foundation supporting biomedical, behavioral, and educational research, I am experiencing first-hand how the shrinking supply of federal funding dollars is driving more and more investigators to the terre incognito of private foundation funding. Recently, The Scientist provided some tips on how to improve the chances of a submissio

The recent Opinion essay by S. Fred Singer on the awarding of the Nobel Prize in chemistry for research on chlorofluorocarbon-ozone chemistry [The Scientist, March 4, 1996, page 9] is a continuation of a well-orchestrated political campaign, using a small group of self-appointed "skeptics," that is aimed at undermining research into environmental problems. The implication that it is the Nobel Prize committee that is politicizing the basic science issues of CFC-ozone chemistry is disingenuous at

While it is true that at present relatively few associate editors of biomedical journals are women (L. Katterman, The Scientist, March 4, 1996, page 1), the situation is not as bleak as stated. Four of the eight associate editors of Fundamental and Applied Toxicology, an official journal of the Society of Toxicology, are women, all of whom were members of the journal's editorial board prior to their appointment as associate editors. The discipline of toxicology as an outgrowth of pharmacology

I was surprised by the lack of comment on your article on foreign-born scientists (R. Finn, The Scientist, Nov. 27, 1995, page 1). In particular, I was disappointed by the lack of support from scientists whose research has benefited from the work of foreign-born students and postdocs. It was interesting to note that the report from the Center for Immigration Studies cited in the article focused on scientists who were "visibly" foreign-that is, those from Asia or Latino countries-and largely ov

In the "Notebook" section of the March 18, 1996, issue of The Scientist [page 30], there is a short piece about someone who has constructed a mnemonic device to remember 167 digits of the number p. The first sentence of the piece wrongly states that 22 over 7 "is represented by p." p is an irrational number, which means that it cannot be written as the ratio of two whole numbers. 22/7 is rational because it is the ratio of two whole numbers. Any rational number can be written either as a decima

Begins To Pay Off Parasites evoke a gut reaction, both literally and figuratively. The synonyms for the worms, insects, and protozoans that survive off the life force of other animals are skin-crawling and stomach-churning: bloodsuckers and leeches, to name a few. And it's not by accident that these words evoke such feelings. Once they are firmly ensconced in various viscera, internal parasites produce a range of debilitating and deadly symptoms. Such conditions are more than metaphorical for

T.A. Wynn, I. Eltoum, I.P. Oswald, A.W. Cheever, A. Sher, "Endogenous interleukin 12 (IL-12) regulates granuloma formation induced by eggs of Schistosoma mansoni and exogenous IL-12 both inhibits and prophylactically immunizes against egg pathology," Journal of Experimental Medicine, 179:1551-61, 1994. (Cited in nearly 50 publications as of February 1996) Comments by Thomas A. Wynn and Alan Sher, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases After malaria, schistosomiasis is the second

D. Waters, L. Higginson, P. Gladstone, B. Kimball, M. Le May, S.J. Boccuzzi, J. Lesp}rance, Canadian Coronary Atherosclerosis Intervention Trial Study Group, "Effects of monotherapy with an HMG-CoA reductase inhibitor on the progression of coronary atherosclerosis as assessed by seral quantitative arteriography: The Canadian Coronary Atherosclerosis Intervention Trial," Circulation, 89:959-68, 1994. (Cited in nearly 60 publications as of February 1996) Comments by David Waters, Hartford Hospit

Multiple Editing Challenges Scientists love multi-author books, a fact easily seen by how worn such volumes are in libraries. Each offers varied perspectives on a research topic. "In putting together a multi-author book, it is important to choose a theme, and to choose contributors who are doing interesting work," explains Rudolf Raff, a professor of biology at Indiana University in Bloomington, who has edited two such books. The tone and pace of the articles contained within the covers of mul

Purification Process For some researchers, isolating and purifying DNA is a housekeeping task: a routine but necessary part of most experiments, and one often taken for granted-until, of course, a restriction enzyme fails to cut a plasmid or a PCR reaction fizzles. For others, including contributors to the Human Genome Project, DNA purification represents an important, rate-limiting step in a lengthy quest for information. Yet wherever scientists' interests lie along this spectrum and whatever

Average full-time salaries in academia for 1995-96 rose more rapidly than the Consumer Price Index for the third consecutive year, according to a newly released survey by the Washington, D.C.-based American Association of University Professors. This year's edition of the annual study found that average faculty pay increased 2.9 percent, or 0.4 percent above the 2.5 percent inflation rate. However, Daniel S. Hamermesh, author of the survey report, cautioned in his text (Academe, 82[2]:14-108, Ma