May 1989

Forty-five years ago Los Alamos was home to the Manhattan Project and its boy wonder scientists, a group whose average age was only 29. Since then the lab has aged and so have its scientists, lab officials complain. Director Sig Hecker noted recently in an in-house newsletter that the lab’s staff has reached an average age of 44, and as high as 46 in the applied divisions. The lab’s newest staff members aren’t much younger, Hecker remarked. The average new hire at Los Alamos i

‘When biologist David Baltimore testified earlier this month before a congressional panel that has spent two years investigating charges of impropriety in connection with his 1986 paper in Cell, he wasn’t alone. Sitting in. the audience and offering moral support to the director of MIT’s Whitehead Institute were some two dozen colleagues, many with scientific reputations to match the Nobel laureate’s. “David is very important to the scientific community,” say

Mt. Graham Takes First Steps Forward Despite protests in which two environmentalists chained themselves to a road grader last month, the construction of the largest telescope in the world is back on track (See The Scientist, November 28,1988, page 5). A management plan hammered out by the University of Arizona, the U.S. Forest Service and the Fish & Wildlife Service allows initial work on the Mt. Graham International Observatory in southeastern Arizona. The plan’s first order of business

Cambridge BioScience hopes to turn its first profit this year with a new kit to detect Lyme disease, a tick-borne illness that can lead to serious neurological ailmerrts. The firm, founded in 1981 by Harvard molecular biologist William Haseltine, has marketed several enzyme immunoassay tests, including two for the presence of the HIV-1 antibody. Its Human Lyme EIA kit detects the IgM and lgG antibodies that indicate the presence of Lyme disease. The firm Interpreting AIDS Research For Laypeopl

The U.S. Patent Office, Inc.? The latest scheme to speed patent processing would give the Patent and Trademark Office quasi-corporation status. The study, prepared by a panel from the National Academy of Public Administration at the behest of the Washington, D.C.-based lobbying group Intellectual Property Owners, suggests that the office should become a semiautonomous unit within the Department of Commerce. The proposal, which has yet to be endorsed by the IPO, would give the new office the po

Ocean Institute: Marriage At Sea When the Exxon Valdez foundered in Pnnce William Sound in March, clean-up efforts were stymied by gaps in the current knowledge of marine engineering. The newly established Ocean Institute, based in Washington, D.C.. intends to close these gaps. Working on projects commissioned and funded by private industry, the government, and the Navy, the institute will evaluate what research in ocean engineering needs to be done. The institute’s workers will be dra

The Deafness Research Foundation has pared down the size of its 1990 grant application form to a sleek six pages in an attempt to stem the paper tide that was flooding its review board. “We were getting applications 40, 50 pages long,” says a staffer. “It was ridiculous.” Beginning with this year’s cycle (deadline: July 15), applications received on other forms will be rejected. The New York-based public charity, started 30 years ago by a grateful Collette Ramsey

But Leakey’s tenure has not been without controversy. This past winter, amidst an uproar over public comments he made criticizing the African nation’s government for its lack of effectiveness in preventing elephant poaching, and a press campaign against Leakey personally,. Kenya’s vice president called for Leakey’s resignation. Now,just three months later, Leakey has been promoted to Director of Wildlife in Kenya (see story, page 1), formally responsible for handling th

NSF’s Short Circuit I read with interest about NSF’s plan for electronic submission of grant proposals (“NSF Short-Circuits Electronic Submissions Project,” The Scientist, March 6, 1989). The NSF should know that commercial products now exist that could solve its problem. I worked on one such product at AT&T—a product offering interoperability and revisability between word processing systems on IBM PCs running DOS and UNIX systems, including workstations. Graphs

Supercomputer Surge The age of supercomputers has arrived, but not with a small price tag. Single institutions can rarely afford to purchase and operate their own supercomputers. I was surprised that your article, “Supercomputers Snapped Up By State Campuses” (The Scientist, March 6, 1989), overlooked the efforts that Ohio has made in providing supercomputing to a vast number of universities and industries. In 1985, the need for high-end computing was plaguing researchers at Ohi

Animal Welfare In the April 17, 1989, edition of The Scientist ("Association Briefs,” page 8), the Scientists Center for Animal Welfare (SCAW) is described as “the only group devoted exclusively to the care and treatment of lab animals.” Far from the truth, SCAW and its medical counterpart— “Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine”—are using scientists’ true concem for animals in research to dominate and even destroy biological research by

DNA fingerprinting has been hailed by law-enforcement officials as the 20th century’s most important breakthrough in forensic science. They are eager to use the new technology to identify and prosecute violent criminals as well as to exonerate innocent persons who are suspects in criminal cases. Although DNA finger printing has not yet been adequately tested in the courts, the State Attorney General of California recently proposed creating a computerized data base of genetic information

GEOSCIENCE BY PETER J. SMITH Department of Earth Sciences Open University Milton Keynes, U.K. " Data from isotopes and incompatible elements show that the Kolar Schist Belt in southern India’s Dharwar Craton is a suture zone marking the accretion of distinct terrains during the Archean. Plate-tectonic processes were thus shaping the Earth’s crust as early as 2500 million years ago. EJ. Krogstad, S. Balakrishnan, D.K. Mukhopadhyay, V. Rajamani, G.N. Hanson, “Plate tectonics

During the last four years, a protracted debate has been evolving in an effort to explain the existence of solids with “forbidden symmetries.” The debate ensued following the 1984 discovery (D.Shechtmanetal., Physical Review Letters, 53, 195 1-3, 12 November 1984) of an aluminum-magnesium alloy whose atomic structure appears to have an icosahedral symmetry—a symmetry that is supposed to be impossible, according to a century-old dictum of solid-state physics. The icosahedron

PLANT AND ANIMAL SCIENCES BY FRANCISCO J. AYALA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology University of California, Irvine Irvine, Calif. " Male threespine sticklebacks exhibit a red nuptial coloration on the throat that functions to attract females and intimidate rival males. The red nuptial trait does not occur in some populations, a phenomenon that has been attributed to selection by salmonid predators. However, there is no corre,lation between nuptial-color loss and presence or abse

PHYSICS BY FRANK A. WILCZEK School of Natural Sciences Institute for Advanced Study Princeton, NJ. " Although the standard model of particle physics largely crystallized in the mid-1970s and has been verified by numerous experiments, some of the conceptually clearest and most decisive experiments have been difficult to perform for various technical reasons. It is a pleasure to note that two such experiments have been done recently that mark milestones in our understanding of the microworld. O

CHEMISTRY BY MARYE ANNE FOX Department of Chemistry University of Texas, Austin Austin, Tex. " The assignment of the resonance Raman spectra in the fingerprint region for the initial picosecond interval of the bacteriorhodopsin photocycle establishes the primary event as involving a configurational change in the retinal chromophore. G.H. Atkinson, T.L. Brack, D. Blanchard, G. Rumbles, “Picosecond time-resolved resonance Raman spectroscopy of the initial trans to cis isomerization in th