March 1990

No Thanks, We Already Do That As part of the bill setting NSF's annual budget, the Senate last fall asked the foundation to think about setting up an office of scientific integrity similar to the one created last spring by NIH. The legislators were worried that the present system, under which universities and other grantees have the primary responsibility for rooting out fraud, might not be adequate, and they urged NSF "to play a greater role" in overseeing scientific misconduct. Well, NSF offi

NCAR, French In Joint Doppler Project Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., have been saving their research pennies in hopes of building an airborne Doppler radar system to monitor large-scale storms and global atmospheric processes that would be several times more powerful than their current system. But the $11 million price tag was too high for the 29-year-old, NSF-funded center to afford by itself. So last month NCAR officials announced an agreement wi

From Detente To Entente East met West in a history-making way February 9, when Soviet physicist Roald Z. Sagdeyev, head of the Theory Division of the USSR's Space Research Institute, married Susan Eisenhower, granddaughter of the man who served as president of the United States during the height of the cold war. The couple, who met in 1987 at the Chautauqua Institution/Eisenhower Institute Conference on U.S.-Soviet relations, say they plan to live in Washington, D.C., during the academic year a

Coming To A Theater Near You With never-before-seen realism, the horrifying image leaps from the screen, engulfing the hapless viewer. Is it a 3-D Frankenstein? 3-D vampires? No, it's more like a 3-D mitochondria. By working with computer scientists, physicists, and other biologists, Fredric S. Fay, professor of physiology and pharmacology at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester, has developed a technology that lets researchers "walk inside a cell." Digital imaging micro

The Polish Connection For some Eastern European countries, the problem of gaining access to medical information has made it difficult to develop adequate health care systems. Poland's medical community, which has long suffered because of the high costs of printed material and insufficient foreign currency, has taken steps to acquire up-to-date research. The Polish Central Medical Library in Warsaw and the British Medical Association Library in London, coupled with the nonprofit, international h

Get A Grant, Share An Instrument The NIH Biomedical Research Support Shared Instrumentation Grant program will now fund equipment that costs up to $400,000, an increase of $100,000 from 1989. But expect stiff competition for 1990's $32.5 million (The Scientist, Oct. 2, 1989, page 18). Applications must come from institutions with at least three investigators who plan to use the equipment and who already receive peer-reviewed funds from the Public Health Service. The equipment must be used 75% o

Aklilu Lemma and Legesse Wolde-Yohannes, two Ethiopian researchers whose work focuses on schistosomiasis, have won the 1989 Right Livelihood Cash Award, which honors and supports research specifically geared toward improving the quality of human life. The prize is presented by the Right Livelihood Awards Foundation, a United Kingdom-based international charitable organization that has been giving four cash awards annually since 1980. The prize is the brainchild of Jakob von Uexkull, a Swedish-G

In the previous issue of The Scientist (Feb. 19, 1990), we devoted a sizable portion of editorial space to the international science community's golden opportunities and potential pitfalls stemming from the Soviet Union's dramatic policies of perestroika and glasnost. In that issue, physicist Sidney Drell poignantly discussed his friend Andrei Sakharov, who - with his dedication to intellectual freedom and open communication among nations - must be regarded as a prime mover toward the great re

The Scientist has asked a group of experts to comment periodically upon recent articles that they have found noteworthy. Their selections, presented herein every issue, are neither endorsements of content nor the result of systematic searching. Rather, the list represents personal choices of articles the columnists believe the scientific community as a whole may also find interesting. Reprints of any articles cited here may be ordered through The Genuine Article, 3501 Market St., Philadelphia,

For seven of the past 10 years, the Annual Review of Biochemistry has exhibited the highest impact of any review journal (or nonreview journal, for that matter) in the life sciences. In 1988, its impact rating stood at a towering 48.3, a figure well above the second ranking journal Pharmacological Reviews, which had a rating of 29.4. The accompanying table lists the top 10 review journals, according to their 1988 impact ratings. Impact figures are measures of how often the average article in a

In 1985, David Beach, yeast geneticist at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Long Island, N.Y., assembled a strong team of young researchers who proceeded to produce a remarkable series of highly cited papers. From their lab, located along a secluded, peaceful inlet 35 miles from Manhattan, the investigators, led by Beach, made important breakthroughs in understanding the biochemical pathway controlling cell division and engaged in several extremely successful collaborations with other researc

Rare is the scientist who embarks on a career in academia purely for the money. On the other hand, money can surely be a key factor in deciding when to leave that career, especially in light of revised pension policies and retirement laws. Consider the following: By working one year beyond the traditional retirement age of 65, a university researcher with 30 years of service conceivably can add as much as $50,000 to his or her pension fund, in addition to collecting a regular annual salary.

If the Franklin Institute Science Museum has its way, the prestige of its new Bower Award for Achievement in Science will someday rival that of the coveted Nobel Prize. The award, which carries with it an unrestricted minimum grant of $250,000, commemorates Benjamin Franklin, who viewed science and technology as a means to solve almost any societal problem. The grant accompanying the award is funded by the late Henry Bower (1896-1988), a Philadelphia chemical manufacturer and philanthropist wh

The California Institute of Technology has selected chemist Ahmed Zewail to be the school's first Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Physics. The recently established professorship honors the career and achievements of the two-time Nobel laureate. Pauling was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1954 for his research on the nature of the chemical bond and its application to the elucidation of the structure of complex substances. In 1963, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Zewail, 44, s

For years, the bold entrepreneurs who built the personal computer industry have envisaged - even promised - a day when we'd see a PC on every desk in every workplace, every home. It hasn't happened yet, of course; the general population of the United States is far from being on-line. Scientists can't be blamed for this, however. Indeed, given its density of PCs, the science community probably ranks right up there with banking and a few other commercial sectors as contributing most to the fulfi