December 1987

WASHINGTON—Recent increases in the number and type of longterm grants from the National Institutes of Health may intensify competition between new awards and grants continued from previous years. But officials say the self-limiting nature of the new longterm grants and new institute controls should prevent problems that forced elimination of seven-year awards in the 1970s. “In any given year, about 85 percent of the NIH budget is a commitment [to grants] from previous years,”

BRUSSELS—In 1972 Victor Brailovsky, then a 37-year-old cyberneticist, and his 32-year-old wife Irma, a computer scientist, applied for a visa to leave the Soviet Union. Four years later Victor was granted permission to emigrate to Israel but Irma was not. The reason, according to Soviet authorities, was that “she had been able during her work to listen and hear something secret.” Fifteen years later the Brailovskys finally arrived in Israel. Last month, at a meeting here orga

A three alarm fire gutted half of a $5 million animal care facility under construction at the University of California Davis. At UC-Riverside, intruders ripped doors from their hinges, smashed equipment and poured red paint mixed with glue on computers before making off with 467 research animals. At the U.S .Departmen t of Agriculture research institute in Beltsville, Md., raiders sprinted away three dozen cats and seven pigs, leaving vegetarian recipes as calling cards. More than 25 raids on U

LOS ALAMOS, N.M.—A British journal has taken a carrot-and-stick approach to encourage scientists to make their data on nucleotide sequences available quickly to the international research community. The controversial approach is being watched closely by officials of GenBank, the U.S.-funded project here that is expanding its data collection efforts. Beginning January 1, the journal Nucleic Acids Research will require authors to prove that their data have already been submitted to the E

WASHINGTON—The start of a report to Congress on fetal research, due next May, is being delayed by differences on abortion among the 12 congressional members of the Biomedical Ethics Board. Last August the board was able to appoint only the dozen “expert” members to its advisory committee. Their disagreements have prevented their filing the two slots reserved for citizens “who possess no specific expertise” in research, medicine or ethical issues. The advisory com

LONDON—Britan’s in vitro fertilization teams are preparing for a major battle to defend their research against hostile lawmakers. The U.K. government last month published the framework for comprehensive legislation to regulate IVF treatment and embryo research. But in a neat sidestep, ministers gave members of Parliament the option of either authorizing experiments under strict limitations or in effect banning research entirely. Debate on the legislative proposal is expected to

SYDNEY—The Australian government’s increasingly pragmatic attitude toward academic research has dismayed many scientists here and reinforced their feeling that the universities’ central activities are under assault. Their concerns recently have focused on the Australian Research Grants Scheme (ARGS), the annual round of competitive grants for scientists and others at the country’s 20 universities. Total funding under ARGS for 1988 is $32.3 million Australian ($22 milli

WASHINGTON—It’s hard to escape the dominance of Japan in worldwide technology, even if the subject is France. Gallic pride took a beating when its government asked American research administrators for their views on French technology. The U.S. executives said that France provides the United States with its stiffest competition in only two. categories—nuclear energy and aeronautics. The Japanese came out on top in a majority of the 11 categories, covering automobiles, comput

WASHINGTON—White House science adviser William Graham has formed a new committee to shape administration policy in the life sciences. The 24-member coordinating committee will be chaired by Beverly Berger, assistant director for life sciences in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. It will consist of representatives from nine Cabinet-level departments and nine federal agencies, including several with the duty to regulate rather than finance research in the life sciences. The co

LONDON—A consortium of four universities and three polytechnics in northwest England will host a new think tank aimed at improving Britain's ability to exploit its scientific research and development. The Centre for Exploitation of Science and Technology (CEST), funded by the government and private industry, is expected to remain independent of its academic hosts but conform to the standards of academe. Based in Manchester, it will maintain close links with all consortium members. CEST

SANTA ROSA NATIONAL PARK, COSTA RICA—Biologists must join the fight to save tropical species or face the loss within a generation of the edifice upon which bioscience is built, says an eminent tropical ecologist. “Many, many scientists don’t understand that if they’re not out there proselytizing for the maintenance, development and actual preservation of the systems they work on, some competitive force is going to take it away from them,” said Daniel Janzen, a

WASHINGTON—The American Society of Mechanical Engineers has thrown a life buoy to the Marine Technology Society. The support comes in the form of a two-year, interest-bearing loan and a temporary donation of office space, worth a total of $200,000. MTS, a 25-year-old interdisciplinary society, derives its $350,000 annual budget from dues of its 2,500 members, conference fees and publication sales, but the prolonged crisis in’the oil and gas drilling industry has put a squeeze on t

Ask Carl C. Peck of the Food and Drug Administration how important research is to his job, and he’ll simply point to the title of the center he heads. 

‘You crack an atom, what’s left? Particles, bits. It’s like Meccano: proton, neutron, quark. Don’t you see.. The things you knew. The rest of us set our horizons at the girls’ school down the road. Whatever you dreamed of, you left us in the dark. (‘I couldn’t follow him’, one friend confessed after the fact, then ‘Why? The waste, the waste! then again, ‘Did he know something we don’t?’) '... . there’s nothing to it

Scientific fraud has received much attention lately, both within the scientific community and increasingly beyond it. In this issue, in fact, you will find continuing discussions of the problem and its impact. (See pp. 11-13.) Unfortunately, some journalists with a taste for the sensational have exaggerated its frequency. The obvious example is William Broad and Nicholas Wade’s Betrayers of Truth (Simon & Schuster, 1982). (On the other hand, careful science journalists have detected genui

Although it is painful to recount, I think it will be beneficial to share my experiences as a whistle blower—in my case, a postdoctoral fellow who had the “audacity” to commit such an act against his mentor. I arrived at Case Western Reserve Univer sity in Cleveland in 1979 to do a postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Philip W. Lambert an endocrine researcher. My first year of research went well and I was awarded a National Research Service Award from the National I

There are differences of opinion over the precise definition of scientific misconduct and over how to deal with it. We also don’t have a very good idea on how often it occurs. It probably is not unreasonable to assume, however, that it happens much more frequently than the few highly publicized cases would suggest—if only because it is unlikely that all instances of misconduct are discovered and, of those discovered, that all become public knowledge. Moreover, my own experience s

Several years ago Patricia Woolf; a respected sociologist of science whose specialty is misconduct, testified before Congress that scientists who observe scientific misconduct not only have an obligation to report the mis- conduct, but that failure to do so would plactheir careers in jeopardy. She said that there are “considerable penalties” for the “scientist who knows but doesn’t tell.” The facts suggest otherwise. In this. issue of THE SCIENTIST, three scient

U my life I have been on the edges of science. At the start of the century, my father, J.S. Haldane, deeply engaged in the problem of alveolar air, probably didn’t notice that I was having fun on the lab floor, playing with blobs of mercury and occasionally licking them. I knew even then that science was important; and I was very proud of having small blood samples taken for some purpose. Later my brother, J.B.S. Haldane, and I discovered chemistry and made splendid volcanoes in the gard

Spanish biochemist and administrator Federico Mayor Zaragoza, who on November 15 began a six-year term as director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, picks up the reins at a critical time for the institution. One challenge is to reverse Western nations’ sense of alienation from UNESCO, and to induce the United States, the United Kingdom and Singapore, which withdrew from the organization in 1984-85, to return to the fold, adding their funding

MAKING WEAPONS, TALKING PEACE A Physicist’s Odyssey from Hiroshima to Geneva. Herbert F. York. Basic Books, New York, 1987. 392 pp. $22.95. The most curious thing about Making Weapons, Talking Peace is the title itself; here we have strong implications of duplicity on the part of an unnamed culprit (the United States?, the Soviet Union?) whom the author intends to expose for wearing a peaceful mask while covertly engaged in war-like machinations. Happily, the book is nothing of the sort

NATIONAL SECURITY CONTROLS AND UNIVERSITY RESEARCH Information for Investigators and Administrators. Association of American Universities, Washington, D.C., 1987. 13 pp. Free. Selected Readings. 116 pp. Free. Statutes Regulations and Policy Statements. 225 pp. Out of stock but copies are available at most major institutions. National security control over scientific and technical information is characterized by the competing demands of national defense and academia’s freedom to com

THE SPACE STATION A Personal Journey. Hans Mark. Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 1987. 288 pp $24.95 SPACE The Next Twenty-Five Years. Thomas R. MoDonough. John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1987. 228 pp. $17.95. SPACE 2000 Meeting the Challenge of a New Era. Harry L Shipman. Plenum Publishing Corp., New York, 1987. 442 pp. $19.95. The Space Shuttle Challenger tragedy of 1986 and the rash of launch failures that followed it left the U.S. space program in a quagmire of uncertainty and recriminati

AGRICULTURAL BIOTECHNOLOGY Strategies for National Competitiveness. Committee on a National Strategy for Biotechnology in Agriculture Board on Agriculture National Research Council. National Academy Press, Washington, DC, 1987. 205 pp. $14.95. While the benefits of biotechnology have been visible more in the arena of human health care than in agriculture, this technological revolution ultimately may have its greatest impact in the enhancement of efficient agricultural productivity. Whether th

WOMEN OF MATHEMATICS A Biobibliographic Sourcebook. Louise S. Grinstein and Paul J. Campbell, eds. Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, 1987. 292 pp. $45. A recent article in THE SCIENTIST called upon readers to question reports of shortages of scientists and engineers (“Science Shortages: Real or Not?,” Edith. Fairman Cooper August 10, 1987, p. 30). Whatever, the employment patterns are for mathematicians, 19 percent of doctorates in the field currently are awarded to women. Over the pa

NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SHALER And the Culture of American Science. David N. Livingstone. The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, AL, 1987. 395 pp. $32.95. David Livingstone, in his analysis of the writings of Nathaniel S. Shaler (1841-1906), documents Shaler’s attempt to reconcile the conflicts between science and theology that dominated scientific discussion in the late 19th and early 20th century. Shaler, a Harvard geologist and prolific writer, was often prophetic in his discussi

TENNIS SCIENCE FOR TENNIS PLAYERS Howard Brody. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1987. 168 pp. $14.95. Every tennis player now has a new excuse for the flubbed shot: the laws of nature. Tennis existed before Newton but his laws determine the motion of a " tennis ball just as they do the motion of the planets. Tennis is as much a game of string tension, ball trajectories and coefficients of compression and restitution as it is a game of watching the ball, bending knees and swin

CELLULAR AUTOMATA MACHINES A New Environment for Modeling. Tommaso Toffoll and Norman Margolus. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1987. 222 pp. $30. Addiction to cellular automata games is a sort of disease, like the PC Disease that afflicts the so-called computer hacker. Ever since mathematician John Horton Conway devised the game Life in the late 1960s, the disease has run rampant among scientists that are fascinated with cellular automata and the unique operations that these massive arrays of

SEX AND SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY Sandra Harding and Jean F. O’Barr, eds. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago, 1987. 304 pp. $10.95. Science has been regarded traditionally as sexless, and therefore removed from individual and institutional biases tha may influence less rigorous, more interpretive scholarly fields. How ever, as the papers in this volume demonstrate clearly, the assumption of gender neutrality in science is highly controversial. Indeed, as women have become increasingly a

ANIMAL SCIENCE The Natural History Reader in Animal Behavior. Howard Topoff ed. Columbia University Press December, 245 pp, $17 PB, $30 HB. Collection of articles from Natural History that discusses new research on animal behavior, including animal orientation and habitat selection. ASTRONOMY New Ideas in Astronomy: A Symposium Celebrating the Sixtieth Birthday of Halton C. Arp. Barry F. Madore, ed. Cambridge University. Press: December, 400 pp, $49.50. Explores the present state of the n