August 1989

The U.S. Department of Energy may well have expected applause when it announced in June that it would allow independent researchers to analyze the health records of workers at the nation's nuclear reactors and weapons facilities. After all, the decision was meant to address the public's growing concern about the environmental impact of the nation's 45-year experience with nuclear materials. At the same time, the decision would reverse a long-time DOE policy of restricting access to its employees

Until six months ago or so, ecologist H. Ronald Pulliam never bothered with fax machines. Now his work depends on them. Every day he and 20 colleagues use the machines to iron out the details of a multimillion-dollar, multidisciplinary, multi-university proposal to study how plants interact with the atmosphere. But fax machines aren't the only things that have changed the way Pulliam, director of the Institute on Ecology at the University of Georgia, carries out his work on global change. Indeed

LIVERMORE, CALIF.-Last summer Edward Teller, founder of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, took his protégé, Livermore theoretical physicist Lowell Wood, to the White House. There they met with President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George Bush to discuss Wood's latest idea for a weapon to defend the country against incoming Soviet missiles. Joining them was John Nuckolls, a nuclear physicist who a few months earlier had become the director of Livermore, the Department of

WASHINGTON-In the beginning there was an idea. And the idea was good: The National Science Foundation would bring high-performance computing to the scientific masses through a national network of supercomputing centers. Although some feared the network would cater to the computational elite, the five centers created in 1985 have now emerged at the crest of an extraordinary electronic revolution that promises to open wide the doors of numerical simulation to scientists in nearly every discipline.

WASHINGTON-A recent decision by the U.S. House of Representatives to spend $110 million to begin construction of the superconducting supercollider is expected to break a political and financial logjam that has stymied advocates of the 53-mile-long laboratory. The lopsided House vote on June 28 (see page 11 for excerpts of that debate) has been greeted by SSC backers as the first tangible commitment by Congress to build the $6 billion accelerator. Although the mammoth project must now clear a sim

WASHINGTON-In the early 1980s, the lonely voices seeking funds for AIDS research were barely audible amid the din from the biomedical community as a whole. Over the past eight years, however, with the public also demanding that science step up its battle against the devastating-disease, the United States government has poured $5.5 billion into the AIDS epidemic, including $2.1 billion in the current year ending September 30. So far, about 40% of that total, nearly $2.2 billion, has been spent on

WASHINGTON-In an ambitious answer to the National Institutes of Health's Human Genome Project, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has sprouted plans for a parallel project to map the genetic structure of key food plants. The proposal, presented by USDA program manager Jerome Miksche at a meeting of the NIH genome project's advisory committee in June, would identify genetic traits that can increase yield and disease resistance. The price tag is estimated to be $500 million over 10 years. In recen

TENERIFE, SPAIN—Europe's astronomical community, meeting in the Canary Islands last month for its annual convention, has taken steps to establish the first Pan-European astronomical society. In addition to increasing the astronomical community's power by speaking with one coherent voice, one of the major goals of the new European Astronomical Society will be to enable closer collaboration between astronomers in the East and West portions of the continent, and to increase support of the Eas

[Editor's note: The recent vote in the U.S. House of Representatives on whether to spend $110 million to start building the superconducting supercollider turned out to be a breeze for proponents of the Texas project (see story on page 2). But even with the outcome of the House vote known, the debate offers a fascinating look at the arguments both sides are expected to use throughout the coming decade as Congress wrestles with funding for the $6 billion accelerator. Supporters, in an effort to bl

Handwringing over "scientific illiteracy" in the United States is at an all-time high. Recent studies of science achievement place U.S. students below students in most other industrial countries, and surveys of U.S. adults reveal that few seem to understand even the most common scientific terms and concepts. Pundits forecast dire consequences of this illiteracy for our nation, ranging from declining economic competitiveness to weakening democratic institutions: Industrialists struggle

The size of science as measured by the number of journals being published "tends to double within a period of 10 to 15 years," Derek J. de Solla Price observed in his 1963 classic book Little Science, Big Science (New York: Columbia University Press). Price found that this "fundamental law," as he called it, held true not only for the period between the end of World War II and the early 1960s, but also consistently since the early 18th century. However, while Price's data sup

The Scientist has asked a group of experts to comment periodically upon recent articles that they have found noteworthy. Their selections, presented here in every issue, are neither endorsements of content nor the result of systematic searching. Rather, the list represents personal choices of articles the columnists believe the scientific community as a whole may also find interesting. Reprints of any articles cited here may be ordered through The Genuine Article, 3501 Market St., Philadelphia,

W.W. Lamph, P. Wamsley, P. Sassone-Corsi, I.M. Verma, "Induction of proto-oncogene JUN/AP-1 by serum and TPA," Nature, 334 (6183), 629-31, 18 August 1988. William W. Lamph (Molecular Biology and Virology Laboratory, Salk Institute, La Jolla, Calif.): "This paper demonstrates that routine proto-oncogene jun is inducible in NIH 3T3 cells with serum or TPA and, hence, like proto-oncogene fos, belongs to the immediate early family of genes. The coordinate expression of these genes, fos and jun, is

T.T.M. Palstra, B. Batlogg, L.F. Schneemeyer, J.V. Waszczak, "Thermally activated dissipation in Bi2.2Sr2Ca0.8Cu208+ð," Physical Review Letters, 61 (14), 1662-5, 3 October 1988. PL. Gammel, L.F. Schneemeyer, J.V. Waszczak, D.J. Bishop, "Evidence from mechanical measurements for flux-lattice melting in single-crystal YBa2Cu3O7 and Bi2.2Sr2Ca0.8Cu2O8," Physical Review Letters, 61 (14), 1666-9, 3 October 1988. Bertram Batlogg (AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, N.J.): "Both of these papers

The spectrophotometer is one of the most frequently used instruments for the identification of unknown chemical compounds, determination of enzymatic activity, analysis of chromatographic separations, and study of polymerization reactions. The sensitivity and performance of a given instrument depend on the quality and design of both the optical and the electronic components. In addition, today's sophisticated spectrophotometers are computer-controlled and thereby facilitate such studies as enzym

United Biomedical Inc., based in Lake Success, N.Y., recently received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to market a new type of AIDS antibody screening and diagnostic test. The UBI-Olympus HIV-1 enzyme immunoassay (EIA) was jointly developed by United Biomedical Inc. and Olympus Inc. The UBI-Olympus test will be manufactured by UBI and marketed worldwide by Olympus Optical Co. Ltd. The new AIDS antibody test is based on I highly specific and conserved small peptide segments of