February 1995

A marketing partnership between the Arthritis Foundation and McNeil Products stirs controversy among rheumatologists Last fall, the Arthritis Foundation, Atlanta, and Fort Washington, Pa.-based McNeil Consumer Products Co.--a Johnson and Johnson Inc.-affiliated pharmaceutical firm best known for producing Tylenol--teamed up to market a line of nonprescription analgesics called Arthritis Foundation Pain Relievers. According to foundation officials, a minimum of $1 million from sales of the pr

Questions remain about the low-key director's handling of clinical research, Congress, and scientific misconduct Not yet two years into his tenure as head of the National Institutes of Health, Harold E. Varmus is getting high marks from many scientists for his low-key, but thorough efforts to rejuvenate the agency's biomedical research effort. Initiatives to sharpen the basic science being done on campus and to streamline the peer review of proposals from outside researchers are bringing new

After 22 years at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) the last six as director Samuel Broder will retire in April to become chief scientific officer at IVAX Corp., a Miami-based pharmaceutical company, at a salary reported to be about twice his current pay of $120,000. There is more than money behind Broder's December decision to leave, however. His is a portrait of a scientist frustrated with the politics of government service and increasingly estranged from scientific colleagues, cancer patie

National Science Foundation officials have set an ambitious goal for the agency and the scientific community--to make women an equal part of the United States scientific work force by the turn of the century. For its role in the effort, NSF has appropriated $7 million in each of the last two fiscal years, toward expanding its programs to train, encourage, and retain women in science. The funding figures, which officials hope to maintain in the current budget process, represent a 200 percent in

The 1994 Bower Award and Prize in Science--the most lucrative United States science prize--will be presented in May to Chen Ning Yang, a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist. The $250,000 award is bestowed annually by Philadelphia's Franklin Institute to a "distinguished scientist for outstanding work in the life or physical sciences." Yang is being honored for his work in forming the Yang-Mills theory, which is widely held by physicists to be as basic a contribution to science as Albert

Denis B. McWhan, Chairman of Synchrotron Light Source Assumes Associate Directorship at BNL Academic Psychologist and Health Policy Analyst, Terrie T. Wetle, New Deputy Chief Of National Institute of Aging Obituary -- Bernard Nathan Fields Denis B. McWhan, who served as the chairman of the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) since 1990, assumed the position of associate director for basic energy sciences at the Upton, N.Y., laboratory on January 1.

About the pros and cons of destroying the world's last remaining stocks of smallpox virus [K.Y. Kreeger, The Scientist, Nov. 14, 1994, page 1]: It is amusing that the advocates of preserving the virus imply that only virologists can appreciate the value of saving it. I submit that the issue of the likelihood that terrorists or criminals could obtain the virus is one that falls into the province of historians, not virologists. The deliberate release of the smallpox virus is likely to be devast

A longtime reader and periodic contributor to a "fast-track" journal the past 21 years and an editorial board member thereof the past nine years, I read with considerable interest the article "Journals Feel Pressure To Speed The Publishing Process" (R. Lewis, The Scientist, Sept. 19, 1994, page 21), but found no mention of the journal Medical Science Research (MSR). Launched in 1973 by ier Science Publishers (Amsterdam), initially under the title IRCS Medical Science and currently published by