November 1991

Scientific conferences intimidated me when I was a graduate student. Even under the wing of my thesis adviser, a well-known scientist and a good mentor, my awful insignificance and inexperience were readily apparent to all. As my own professional wings spread, conferences became less formidable. My steadily growing credentials gave my words weight. I grew to express the unexpected and controversial, and even to help plan some of the meetings that had once awed me. Meetings became fun. Basis A

AUTHOR: Elie A. Shneour, pp.14 The standing and credibility of the United States scientific community are under unprecedented political and economic challenge. At issue are such matters as animal rights terrorism; limits on reproductive and fetal research; discrediting of scientific evidence in the making of public policy; accountability in the management of research funds; and a parasitic bureaucracy purporting to define, review, and punish scientific misconduct. The contrast with the post-W

I would like to comment on the two recent articles by Susan L-J Dickinson that appeared in The Scientist: one on the confrontation between Temple University and Carlo Croce's group [June 24, 1991, page 1], and one on nomadic scientists [July 22, 1991, page 1]. One aspect of American science that has made American scientists so successful is their mobility. This mobility has been generated by the system of grants, which makes the scientist essentially independent of university funds. Serious p

"It should be painfully clear to every scientist now that if they have good record-keeping habits, they're not going to get themselves into that kind of bind in the future," says Howard M. Kanare, manager of chemical services for Construction Technology Laboratories in Skokie, Ill., and author of Writing the Laboratory Notebook (American Chemical Society, Washington, D.C., 1985). Keeping a good notebook is a skill that goes with the territories of science and cuts across all boundarie

November 11, 1991 HHMI's Krebs And NHLBI's Stadtman Welch Foundation Gives $250,000 Award To HHMI's Krebs And NHLBI's Stadtman The Houston-based Robert A. Welch Foundation has named Edwin G. Krebs and Earl Reece Stadtman corecipients of the 1991 Robert A. Welch Award. Krebs is a senior investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a professor in the department of pharmacology at the University of Washington in Seattle. Stadtman is the chief of the laboratory of biochemistry at t

The United States Department of Energy has narrowed the scope of its University Research Instrumentation Program. The program offers grants to colleges and universities to purchase specialized instruments for energy-related research. This year, applications must be limited to instruments applicable to one of five areas: biological and environmental research, chemical science, university infrastructure for high-energy physics, materials science, or mechanistic plant and microbial research. The

Industry and government scientists will be working overtime to comply with new demand for fuller information on nutrients WASHINGTON--When President Bush signed the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act (NLEA) into law on November 8, 1990, he set in motion a process that's expected to increase the work load for food chemists in government and industry and raise a new set of scientific questions for academic researchers who study nutrition. The new Nutrition Labeling and Education Act