January 1988

McDonald is on the staff of THE SCIENTIST.

Although such appropriations and bond issues promise to foster excellence throughout the state, the primary beneficiaries of much pump priming are usually state colleges and universities. These efforts, in turn, have triggered recruitment wars between established research institutions and newer programs trying to join the top echelon. The bidding is particularly fierce in such fields as ceramics, computers, chemical engineering and all aspects of biotechnology. And although higher salaries alo

LONDON-A major new trade union has emerged in Britain with the goal of organizing skilled workers in the new technologies. With trade union membership falling, the new organization, known as Manufacturing, Science and Finance (MSF), hopes to extend the frontiers of organized labor into areas where recruitment has been difficult. Its co-leaders, Clive Jenkins and Ken Gill, are confident that the new union can establish its identity quickly. MSF is the product of the merger of two medium-sized

Recent events have resulted in a great deal of publicity about competitiveness. Among the so-called races in high technology, the biotechnology race has attracted much attention and comment. In the United States, there is much concern about the perceived possibility that history may repeat itself, and that a technology that was invented in the United States may find its most impressive commercial applications developed in Japan. It is all very well to talk about competitiveness, not withstandi

STOCKHOLM--The Nobel Foundation plans to sell stock in a new firm being formed to preserve the value of the annual prizes it awards.. . . This year's prizes.. . will each be worth $340,000... . Shrewd investments in the past decade. . . have reversed years of declining value for the prizes, and have raised the foundation's assets to near the real value of the original estate in 1900. --From THE SCIENTIST October 5, 1987, p.4. Lend an ear to hear the story of my galloping success. I was onc

When I started Syntex Pharmaceuticals in Britain nearly a quarter of a century ago, the triumvirate to whom I reported in Mexico were all youngish scientists themselves, and all paper millionaires by their own remarkable efforts. The chairman of the corporation, George Rosenkranz, not only was one of the founders of the modern steroid industry, but he also had seen himself through the Eidgenössiche Technische Hochschule in Zurich by playing soccer for the Grasshoppers, acting at the Stadt

The development of the free-flyer will give us expertise in many areas, including control over our own low-gravity materials processing studies and in the various areas of robotics which will be involved in helping maintain and service parts of the platform. In general, Europe will have more freedom than if it had only the attached module. DEPENDENCE ON PUBLIC MONEY Q: Would you explain the rationale behind putting large sums of money from governments, rather than from the private sector, int

For one thing, no computer is as natural as pencil and paper. Placing a word in a certain location, writing in big letters or changing to script or Greek can be done almost without thinking when using a pencil, but all these actions require explicit commands when using a keyboard. It's difficult to build a system with easy-to-remember commands, in large part because ease of use depends upon personal preference. For many people, typing "center," or the command "ce" to center a line is easier tha

MACTeX Version 2.0 FTL Systems Inc. 234 Eglinton Avenue East Suite 205 Toronto, Ontario Canada. M4P I K5 (416) 487-2142 Requirements: MacPlus, Mac SE or Mac II. Hard disk highly recommended. Printer support: Apple Laserwriter Laserwriter Plus and any PostScript based printing device. Documentation: Comes with its own 110-page manual. TeXbook and LaTeX Price: $750 TeXtures Version 1.0 Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. 6 Jacob Way Reading, MA 01867 (617) 944-6795 RequIrements: Runs on Mac 512,

PCTeX Version I .50f Personal TeX Inc. 12 Madrofla St. Mill Valley, CA 94941 (415) 388-8853 Requirements: IBM PC/XT, AT, PS/2 and machines compatible with the IBM line. 512K RAM. PC-DOS or MS DOS version 2.0 or later. Text editor capable of producing a generic ASCII file. Hard disk strongly recommended. Printer support: Drivers can be purchased separately or bundled with the program. Documentation: Comes with its own 254-page manual and a 20-page installation guide. Price: PCTeX (Includes TeX

Today much information has recently become available, including U.S. Atomic Energy Commission files and FBI files on Fuchs' statements and on his and Gold's confessions, as well as memoirs published by Fuchs' communist associates in England. From these and other sources it is clear that many aspects of the case were kept from the public in order to conceal important political secrets, not just atomic ones. One political secret was how Fuchs' spying was discovered in the first place. We now kno

Pediatric Research Center Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh $15.0 Million Institute of Human Genomic Studies, Mt. Sinai (N.Y.) Medical Center $12.7 Million Science Facility, Oregon Health Science University $10.0 Million Cancer Research Center, Medical University of South Carolina $8.0 Million Institute of Nuclear Medicine, University of Medicine and Denistry, Newark $7.5 Million Center for advanced Microstructures, Lousiana State Universtiy $12.0 Million Center for Applied Opti

In the past few years, this type of headline has begun to appear more and more frequently Why? In times more economically secure than these-before Gramm-Rudman, the volatile stock market, dramatic takeovers, and increased shareholder awareness-a company set out to do a job, hired staff and hoped to be successful. If, along the way, the company experienced sudden growth, it hired to accommodate the new orders. When business slowed, it laid people off. What companies attempted to do on a large s

Push Up Prices Very few ";first quality" manuscripts-meaning seminal works on a subject familiar to the public, such as Newton's Principia-ever appear on the market, said Dillon, a specialist in historic scientific and medical books. They tend instead to be housed in institutions, as Principia has been for the last 250 years at a Cambridge University library. But the record price does focus interest on scientific manuscripts, Dillon said, and plenty of Einstein manuscripts of moderate importan

Agres is assitant managing editor of The Washington Times

WASHINGTON--Two years ago Soviet officials were in the midst of a vigorous international campaign of disinformation about the U.S. Army's supposed role in the spread of AIDS. This week top officials from the American and Soviet national academies of science and medicine are scheduled to meet in Moscow to discuss cooperative scientific ventures between the two countries, including possible collaboration on immunological and vaccine research that could help in the fight against AIDS. It is too

"In terms of being a constituency group, the scientific community may not even exist as an organized body." That comment from neuroscientist Donald Stein of Clark University could also serve as the epitaph for the Washington. D.C based National Coalition for Science and Technology. Its demise last month marked the end of a six year effort to build a grassroots organization to lobby for more federal support for all of science. NCST never enrolled more than a few hunderd individual members and

Our titanic national debt will eventually force hard decisions. Science funding will not be exempted. When that time comes, a public that has heard from the scientific community about why its work is valuable will more likely support science than one that hasn't. We cannot expect the public to respond positively if we have not told them our story. We can only do so through the media. Molecular biologist Bryan Sykes of Oxford University recently spent seven weeks working for a British televis

"In terms of being a constituency group, the scientific community may not even exist as an organized body." That comment from neuroscientist Donald Stein of Clark University could also serve as the epitaph for the Washington. D.C based National Coalition for Science and Technology. Its demise last month marked the end of a six year effort to build a grassroots organization to lobby for more federal support for all of science. NCST never enrolled more than a few hunderd individual members and

Our titanic national debt will eventually force hard decisions. Science funding will not be exempted. When that time comes, a public that has heard from the scientific community about why its work is valuable will more likely support science than one that hasn't. We cannot expect the public to respond positively if we have not told them our story. We can only do so through the media. Molecular biologist Bryan Sykes of Oxford University recently spent seven weeks working for a British televis

Textbook Errors, by Stanley Kirschner Pigs in Space, by Charles Ditlow Archaeopteryx Arguments, by Fred Hoyle Japan and The United States , by Kenneth M. Matsumura I would like to comment on "Let's Put an End to Textbook Nonsense" (November 30, 1987, p. 11) by Stephen J. Hawkes. Basically, Hawkes is right. We should make a determined effort to put an end to textbook errors. Hawkes also points out that it is no easy matter to correct errors-even well- known ones-in textbooks, and he cite

Although Stanford University's Donald Knuth released the initial version of TeX (pronounced "tech" nearly 10 years is still one of the most powerful and flexible typesetting programs available. In 1982, Knuth rewrote the program extensively, producing the TeX that today remains unsurpassed in typesetting mathematical and scientific sumbols. Until 1984, it ran almost exclusively on mainframes, minicomputers and workstations; since then, however, a number of implementations have appeared for micr

A Nobel Ode STOCKHOLM--The Nobel Foundation plans to sell stock in a new firm being formed to preserve the value of the annual prizes it awards.. . . This year's prizes.. . will each be worth $340,000... . Shrewd investments in the past decade. . . have reversed years of declining value for the prizes, and have raised the foundation's assets to near the real value of the original estate in 1900. --From THE SCIENTIST October 5, 1987, p.4. Lend an ear to hear the story of my galloping succe

LabTrak Schedule-Manager is a software program that provides automated personnel scheduling for hospital, industrial, pharmaceutical, biomedical and reference laboratories. The date files accept information on job types, employees and companywide holidays. The program then accesses these data to assign qualified personnel for each job and to coordinate employee days off and vacations. The program can also automatically rotate personnel according to their skills and the company's needs. The Sc

The Tourist Trade Prince Charles to The Rescue? Conflicts of Interest In Pursuit of Truth Problems In Portugal Is Chemistry a Dirty Word? Crushing Our Conservative Shell Doing Nothing and Lying About It R.R. Was Here A Welcome and Exciting Change A Plea from Jane Goodall Superconducting Supercollider: Not a Now or Never Decision Practitioners Are Not Just Slow Scientists The Glamour Factor As I see it, enterprising scientists will have to resort to the tourist trade like everyone [in Bri

PEOPLE AWARDS DEATHS OPPORTUNITIES ETCETERA MEETINGS NEW PUBLICATIONS Clayton F. Caills, director-at-large of the American Chemical Society board, has been elected ACS president for 1989. Callis retired from his position as director of environmental operations for Monsanto Fibers & Intermediates Co. in 1985, and became vice president of Chelan Associates, an environmental consulting firm in St. Louis. Ernest L. Ellel, ACS board chairman and WR. Kenan Professor of Chemistry at the Univers