May 1993

Life scientists are increasingly adopting the belief that microorganisms are virtually everywhere and are responsible for just about everything. This, plus the maturation of molecular- level methods of working with these tiny creatures, is a source of considerable optimism for microbiologists as the 93rd general meeting of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) convenes in Atlanta this week. What they see, in career terms, is that progress in their field is bound to yield an ever-widening

Reaction in the science community has been impassioned and partisan over the April 9 decision at the National Institutes of Health to "reassign" scientists Walter Stewart and Ned Feder to new posts, effectively ending their independent scientific integrity research at the institutes. Stewart and Feder's self- initiated investigative work, conducted over the past decade, has sparked intense controversy at times and has been central to a number of high-profile misconduct cases. The pair's probe

The Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology, and Government, created in 1988 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York as a five-year-long effort to assess the way science is taken into account in the formulation of United States policy, ends its tenure June 30. The commission, its advisory council, and its 15 committees and task forces have included "the elite of the science policy community in the country," in the words of Rep. George E. Brown, Jr. (D-Calif.)--among them three Nobel-ists (

The space station Freedom project, which underwent its most recent redesign in 1991, will face outright cancellation by Congress unless it can come up with yet a new design that cuts development and deployment costs in half, according to officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. At the behest of Vice President Al Gore, a blue-ribbon advisory panel, chaired by Massachusetts Institute of Technology president Charles Vest, is working with the space agency to work up options

Discussions of such disturbing national health issues as the reemergence of tuberculosis and cholera are among the highlights of the American Society for Microbiology's 93rd general meeting. At press time, an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 microbiologists were expected to attend the five-day conference, May 16-20, at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta. The meeting is expected to feature some 3,000 scientific presentations--a mixture of lectures, seminars, presentations, and poster session

BU Professor Wins FASEB Women's Science Award Citing the 22 years it took for her to gain tenure as a university professor, neuroendocrinologist Susan Leeman notes that her professional life has not been free of frustration. And she attributes much of this frustration to the fact that she is a woman. Moreover, the 63-year-old Leeman, recent winner of the Women's Excellence in Science Award, presented by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB), says the career pat

Citing the 22 years it took for her to gain tenure as a university professor, neuroendocrinologist Susan Leeman notes that her professional life has not been free of frustration. And she attributes much of this frustration to the fact that she is a woman. Moreover, the 63-year-old Leeman, recent winner of the Women's Excellence in Science Award, presented by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB), says the career path for women in science today is not much easier t

Notebook Modern Genetics Turns 40 The scientific community recently marked the 40th anniversary of the discovery of the world's most famous molecule, the DNA double helix, as dozens of molecular biologists traveled to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York to help its discoverers, James D. Watson and Francis H.C. Crick, celebrate. The pair shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1962 for their discovery of the messenger of genetic information, which they produced in 1953 at th

Clarification In the item entitled "Burying The Hatchet" in the Notebook column of the May 3, 1993, issue of The Scientist (page 4), the name of Hilary Koprowski, former director of Philadelphia's Wistar Institute, was misspelled.

Editor's Note: Scientists Walter Stewart, 48, and Ned Feder, 65, have been working side by side at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) in Bethesda, Md., since the late 1960s. Their employment agreements with NIDDK once required that they spend 80 percent of their time on health- related lab research and 20 percent on their investigations of scientific fraud and misconduct. However, their renown in the international science community stems virtually 100

The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) should reverse its directive stopping the work of researchers Walter Stewart and Ned Feder, reassigning them, and impounding their files. No public interest is served by silencing voices that speak out when something is amiss. The work of Stewart and Feder has focused on two areas. The first is the study of how the principles of science should guide the professional practices of scientists; the second is providing ad

Scientists As Advocates I contend that Scott Veggeberg's report on the Boston meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (The Scientist, March 22, 1993, page 1) misquotes me on two key points. He misses the essence of what I was trying to convey. The point I was attempting to make in my talk was that journalists covering scientific disputes should treat with skepticim scientists who adopt advocacy positions that are not directly related to their own research. I used

The Seeds Of Ignorance The problem of convincing Congress to fund plant research mentioned in "Genome Mapping Progress Catapults Plant Research" (Scott Veggeberg, The Scientist, Feb. 22, 1993, page 13) has caused a "downward spiral in basic plant-biology research and training," according to the National Research Council's 1992 report Plant Biology Research and Training for the 21st Century (National Academy Press, Washington, D.C.). One likely reason for the lack of support for plant biology

E-Mail Efficiency Thank you for publishing Joshua Lederberg's detailed descriptions of his attempts to cope with the literature (The Scientist, Feb. 8, 1993, page 10). I would like to make an additional comment about Internet use. The volume not only of publications but also of grant applications is expanding explosively. I manage the radiation study section (RAD) at the National Institutes of Health, Division of Research Grants. We meet formally three times per year. February 8-10 we rece

Animal Research We now read a lot about "grass-roots" education regarding pro- animal research at the school level (Ron Kaufman, "Opponents Set 1993 Tactics For Animal Rights Showdown," The Scientist, Jan. 25, 1993, page 1). Two recent events in Seattle illustrate that all isn't well at the professional level. For the 1991 fall quarter, the Washington Association for Biomedical Research had offered a course for science teachers: "Medical Research--The People Behind the Breakthrough." Owing t

Reemerging infections and drug-resistant microbes are topics that are capturing considerable attention among microbiologists these days. And evidence of their interest is by no means confined to such microbiology journals as the Journal of Virology or the Journal of Clinical Microbiology. Indeed, these topics dominated the entire August 21 issue of Science magazine last year. Writing in that issue, for example, was Harold Neu, a medical pharmacologist at Columbia University's College of Physic

At root, image analysis is the ability to convert a picture into hard data. Over the past few years, a family of versatile, easy- to-use software packages has emerged that promises to put that ability into the hands of more life sciences researchers than ever before. "If a picture's worth a thousand words, a number's worth a thousand pictures," says Paul Goodwin, explaining the technology's value to scientists. Goodwin is manager of the image analysis laboratory of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer R

Geology A.R. Hildebrand, G.T. Penfield, D.A. Kring, M. Pilkington, A. Camargo Zanoguera, S.B. Jacobsen, W.V. Boynton, "Chicxulub crater: A possible Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary impact crater on the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico," Geology, 19:867-871, 1991. Alan Hildebrand (Geological Survey of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario): "The discovery of the Chicxulub crater and proximal Cretaceous/Tertiary (K/T) ejecta deposits between the Americas has dramatically changed the decade-long K/T debate. The theory

Cell Biology J. Gautier, M.J. Solomon, R.N. Booher, J.F. Bazan, M.W. Kirschner, "cdc25 is a specific tyrosine phosphatase that directly activates p34 cdc2," Cell, 67:197-211, 1991. Jean Gautier (Station Zoologique, Villefranche sur mer, France): "Cell cycle regulation at the onset of mitosis is controlled by the activation of MPF, a complex formed by the p34cdc2 protein kinase, plus a regulatory cyclin subunit. The final step of this activation process is the removal of at least one inhibito

Genetics A. Edwards, A. Civitello, H.A. Hammond, C.T. Caskey, "DNA typing and genetic mapping with trimeric and tetrameric repeats," American Journal of Human Genetics, 49:746, 1991. C. Thomas Caskey (Baylor College of Medicine, Houston): "Tandem repeats of three or four nucleotides are common in the human genome and frequently contain different numbers of repeated units. They are, therefore, extremely useful for genetic linkage studies, personal identification, and, most recently, for diagn

Over the past three years, the National Science Foundation has joined with the National Institutes of Health and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to create and develop two funding programs for biodiversity projects. Studies supported under these programs focus on the variety among species and ecosystems in developing nations and assess the impact of global change on levels of diversity in those countries. The International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups (ICBG) Pr