December 1988

Fermilab Faces Life Without The SSC The selection of Texas as the site of the multibillion-dollar superconducting supercollider last month (see story, page 1) has big loser Fermilab worrying about its future. Within hours of the selection, recent Nobel laureate Leon Lederman, director of the Illinois accelerator complex, launched a preemptive strike against an expected decline in morale by assuring the lab’s nearly 400 physicists and engineers that a proposed expansion of the lab’s

More Support For Innovations? Congress is impressed enough with the Small Business Innovation Research Program to think about giving the scheme an extra boost. Begun in 1982, the.program funnels money to small new high-tech businesses in order to speed the flow of potentially commercial ideas from the laboratory to the market. The funds come from a tax on the research budgets of all large federal science agencies including NASA, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Department of Defense.

Cambridge Welcomes Entrepreneurs Cambridge University has traditionally lagged far behind its U.S counterparts in spawning a ring of high-tech industries (The Scientist, May 16, page 8), but now an “innovation center” founded by Trinity College in 1986 has been so successful that the college will open another this month. Meanwhile, St. John’s College has opened an incubator of its own on a 22-acre site owned by the college. To date, St. John’s has invested $9 million in

Beating The Japanese At Their Own Game You wouldn’t enter a fist fight with one hand tied behind your bad so why fight Japan’s technological prowess with the serious handicap of being thousands of miles away from the island nation A far better strategy, argues John R Stern, executive director of the U.S. Electronics Industry’s Japan office, is to set up shop in the Land of the Rising Sun. In a recent talk at the Industrial Biotechnology Association’s annual meeting, Ste

I’ll Bring The Ideas, You Bring The Cash What if you are an entrepreneur with a terrific prototype but without the cash to develop it further? Or maybe you are the head of R&D in a huge corporation and you need a few good ideas to jumpstart your division. In either case, the man you want is Ray Brill. His firm, Advanced Technology Innovations (ATI), has carved out a unique niche by matching the technological needs of large companies with the innovative solutions of small firms, universit

For Would-Be Biotechnologists The demand for biotechnologists is growing faster than the supply, according to the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS). As a result, the institute has created a new program: Biotechnology Research Training grants. NIGMS will fund an institutional training program as well as individual predoctoral, postdoctoral, and senior fellowships. These provide an annual stipend ranging from $8,500 to $31,500 for three- to five-year projects that apply engi

For the last five months, representatives of higher education associations and scientific societies have been working out guidelines on research fraud and misconduct The goal is to help universities to construct a process for dealing with any charges of impropriety made against members of faculty or staff. Universities must, by law, have such a process or forfeit eligibility for National Institutes of Health funding, and there are good reasons to believe that at least some institutions can, w

Seven years ago, Jerome Jacobstein, a nuclear physician at Cornell University began to suspect what he thought was serious research misconduct on the part of colleague Jeffrey S. Borer. Borer, a cardiologist, was working with Jacobstein on studies of how the heart functions under stress. While reading a draft of a report on their work by a medical student under Borer’s direct supervision, Jacobstein discovered that much of the methodology was, he thought, inaccurately described, with the

Two recent congressional investigations of “scientific fraud” (The Scientist, July 11, page 1) have rekindled a dispute about what it is, what causes it, and what to do about it. The current debate focuses narrowly on whether federal agencies will be required to develop and administer regulations, or whether universities can formulate and administer their own guidelines without external pressures. The record seems to indicate that external regulation is needed, because universit

[Ed. note: Thirty years ago, the eminent geneticist and statistician Ronald A. Fisher approached blood testing specialist Arthur Mourant with the idea for a joint research project. Why not use blood groups to see if smokers differed genetically from nonsmokers? Mourant was tempted for a number of reasons, not the least of which was maintaining his long and fruitful professional relationship with the famous Fisher, author of the classic textbook The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (Oxfor

Third World Collaboration Eugene Garfield’s commentary in the October 31 issue of The Scientist (page 10) concerning the connection of Third World scientists to laboratories in developed countries was of special interest to me. I applaud his arguments concerning the global value of such collaboration. I am the chairman of a subcommittee of the American Physical Society’s International Scientific Affairs panel, which is looking into the possibilities for extended collaboration bet

Eight years ago, Brookhaven assisted in setting up Just Kids Learning Center with a $15,000 no-interest loan from Associated Universities Inc., which operates BNL for the Department of Energy. That was just a year after Fermilab’s establishment of its Children’s Center, with $10,000 in seed money from Universities Research Association, the DOE contractor operating Fermilab. The AIM loan was paid off three years later, and though no financial ties or formal agreement exists betwee

In early 1975, psychologist Ronald Hutchinson was proceeding smoothly with studies investigating why rats, monkeys, and humans clench their jaws. The work, bankrolled to the tune of $500,000 by several federal agencies over a decade, had placed Hutchinson at the forefront of research into the biological causes of aggression. But that April, a fiscally conscious legislator from Wisconsin skewered the research with a “Golden Fleece Award,” the second ever, designed to he bestowed mon

Physicists working for the government, however, have less reason to complain about being underpaid by comparison to the industrial scale: While young government physicists may start around $37,000 (versus $44,300 for industry) and may stay comparatively underpaid during the early stages of their careers, the salaries of older government physicists compare more favorably with those of industry physicists. Among the most experienced of them, in fact, median salaries in government come very close

Dollar Amount By 1987, the elite group of 10 institutions was still getting its outsized share—19% of the extramural awards—but the dollar amount had more than doubled to $996 million. Membership in the top of 10 has not shifted significantly during the past decade. Of those institutions at the top in 1978, only one had dropped out by 1987. Moving down the list of NIH recipents for 1987, the top 100 institutions as a whole received a little more than three-quarters of the whol

Intel’s 80386 chip holds a lot of promise for scientists working in all areas of computer-supported research. In addition to increasing memory capacity over its immediate predecessor, the Intel 80286, the 386 packs far more power. With it, for example, scientists will be able to run complicated molecular modeling or number-crunching programs on their desktop PCs. But it will be a while before that potential is realized in the IBM-compatible world since, for the full 386 power to be “

New sophisticated radio-telemetry capsules based on a 30-year-old technology have been specifically developed for clinical use, but their applications have the potential to reach beyond the hospital into basic research laboratories. The ‘radio pill’ is the name given to a device developed in 1957 by Bertil Jacobson, professor of medical electronics at the Karolinska Hospital, Stockholm. He produced a very accurate radio-telemetry capsule, transmitting at 400 KHz, to measure press

Because of their high thermal conductivity beryllium oxide ceramics—also known as beryilia ceramics—have been used for years in electronics, laser, and nuclear research. But for parts manufacturers who use these ceramics as a thin substrate, they have been extremely expensive, since—due to their porosity and relatively course grain—they tend to become brittle as they become thinner. The thin substrates thus tend to chip and break during production, and manufacturers ar