August 1991

Attending some scientific conferences can be as frustrating for the career-driven researcher as a stroll through a bookstore is for the book-starved browser. With offerings so vast, one simply may not have the time or the energy to satisfy the intellectual appetite. In the spring of 1990, the advisory committee to the NSF chemistry division decided to conduct its annual meeting a little differently. Instead of devoting one hour to one topic before moving on to another, committee members deci

Gilbert Levin has had sweet dreams for a long time. Levin is the president and founder of Biospherics Inc., a Beltsville, Md.-based environmental and health technology company. For nearly two decades, he has sought a noncaloric sweetener boasting both the bulk of table sugar and the ability to withstand cooking heat--in short, the ultimate food additive. Now he thinks he's found it, in a sugar called tagatose. He and the other Biospherics scientists who have studied the tagatose molecule hope

Clearly established research goals, awards of shorter duration, and vigilance over costs will do the trick, says the agency,s director BETHESDA, Md.--National Institutes of Health director Bernadine Healy hopes to increase by almost 50 percent the total number of grants the agency awards over the next several years. To do it, she says, NIH must trim budget requests by principal investigators and tighten up on indirect costs paid to institutions, manipulate the length of its grants awarded to av

WASHINGTON: On July 29, as Donald Kennedy announced his resignation as president of Stanford University, research institutions throughout the United States were rushing to meet a 5 P.M. deadline to comment on changes in the rules governing how much they can charge for the indirect costs of doing federally funded research. Although the timing was a coincidence, the simultaneity of the activities symbolized Kennedy's inability to quell, through personal response, the indirect costs controversy t

Although the timing was a coincidence, the simultaneity of the activities symbolized Kennedy's inability to quell, through personal response, the indirect costs controversy that has plagued the U.S. academic world for the past several months--a controversy that Kennedy and his institution principally precipitated. His peers in academe note that failure even as they give expression to their sympathy. "The events of the past year are a sorry climax to a brilliant career," says Richard Atkinson,

Volume 5, #16The ScientistAugust 19, 1991 LEFT-HANDED SUGAR GETS A FREE RIDE OUT OF YOUR SYSTEM Chemical compounds can exist in forms that are mirror images of each other. Like gloves, they can be either left-handed or right-handed. Sugars are such "handed" molecules. Human digestive enzymes have evolved to act upon right-handed sugar molecules, while often allowing left-handed forms to pass directly through. Both l-tagatose, the left-handed form, and d-tagatose, the right-hand

Volume 5, #16The ScientistAugust 19, 1991 WHERE ARE NSF'S CHEMISTRY DOLLARS HEADED This year, the National Science Foundation's chemistry division is asking Congress for a 10 percent increase, or $10 million above FY 1991's $100 million, to offset a trend of the past five years that merely kept the division's budget apace with cost-of-living increases. About half of the increase would be distributed across the board to the organic, inorganic, physical, and analytic subdivision

Volume 5, #16The ScientistAugust 19, 1991 PUT THEM ALL TOGETHER, THEY SPELL CHEMISTRY In the spring of 1990, the advisory committee to the NSF chemistry division decided to conduct its annual meeting a little differently. Instead of devoting one hour to one topic before moving on to another, committee members decided to hold the meeting like a retreat. Says NSF chemistry division director Kenneth Hancock: "We decided to sit back and literally ask where the intellectual frontier

Harvard Biochemist Jeremy Knowles Named To Top Arts And Sciences Post Veteran Computer Systems Designer Mayo Takes Helm as Bell Labs seventh President John L. Zabriskie Robert Gall Thomas Waldman Jeremy R. Knowles, a British-born chemist who has been at Harvard University since 1974, has been appointed dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In his new job, second in importance only to the presidency, Knowles oversees the finances, organization, and educational policies of Harvard Co

Roger Revelle, a California oceanographer who predicted global warming as early as the 1950s, died July 15 at the age of 82. He was a professor emeritus at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, at the time of his death. Revelle helped found UC-San Diego in 1960. One of the university's five undergraduate colleges is named Revelle College in his honor. Revelle's career, which spanned nearly 60 years, encompassed a wide range of interests. From 1951 until

Two years ago, the 60-carbon, soccer ball-shaped buckminsterfullerene was just a curiosity for Larry Lewis, a staff chemist at the General Electric Co. Corporate Research & Development center in Schenectady, N.Y. At the time, his interest in the recently identified molecule was restricted to "what if" questions inspired by perusing numerous journal articles about it. He couldn't do any lab work with it, though, Lewis says, because "there wasn't enough of the stuff to do chemistry with." But al

Volume 5, #16The ScientistAugust 19, 1991 Great Balls O' Carbon It was late on an August evening six years ago that Rice University professor Richard Smalley sat in his kitchen, cutting out shapes from a legal pad and taping them together. He was trying to come up with a model having 60 vertices to represent the 60-carbon molecule which he and his collaborators generated in the lab by laser-vaporizing carbon in helium gas. Chemist Harold Kroto was one of these collaborators. He

Volume 5, #16The ScientistAugust 19, 1991 BUYING BUCKYBALLS Restaurants succeed because people would rather buy the food than prepare and cook it themselves. The situation may be the same with fullerenes--and that's what a handful of companies are banking on. "You can get nice, pure stuff if you make it yourself, but that route is not without problems. It takes about a week to get 250 milligrams of pure material. So the prices are not out of line at all," says Christopher Foote

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