November 1995

Government Just Says No Author: Peter Gwynne Can smoking marijuana help to alleviate the loss of appetite and weight that accompany AIDS? Much as they would like to know, people with AIDS and their physicians seem unlikely to get a definitive answer to that question any time in the near future. FIELD OF DREAMS: The University of Mississippi grows marijuana for NIDA, for use in reserach that meets the institute's criteria. For more than three years, a physician proposing to undertake a pilot

Investigator-Initiated Basic Grants Author: Lee Katterman At a time when biotechnology and some pharmaceutical companies are working hard to finance research and product development, a small number of firms are tapping a pot of federal money generally thought to support only projects led by academic scientists. Some industry officials value this source of support for studies a company might not otherwise be able to afford, while others avoid it because of the strings that come with it. SEPAR

Prodded by savings-hungry Republicans in Congress, the colossus that is the Department of Energy (DOE) awakened in January to find itself under attack and its offspring-a cherished, $6 billion network of national laboratories-at risk of being orphaned. Alarmed, DOE embarked upon a campaign to save the department and reshape the laboratories, by shrinking and restructuring them. At the last moment, one day before the deadlock that led President Bill Clinton to shut down much of the federal gov

The Scientist 9[23]:1, Nov. 27, 1995 News Scientists' Heated Debate On Immigration Mirrors Issues Argued Throughout U. S. By Robert Finn Sidebar:INTRA-ETHNIC COMPARISONS OF NATURAL SCIENTISTS ON SELECTED VARIABLES Several recent studies demonstrating dramatic increases in the number of scientists and engineers coming to the United States from other countries have ignited controversy that mirrors the current national debate over immigration. Critics are blaming this inf

Institute Of Medicine Author: Edward R. Silverman Sidebar: Members of the IOM With the election last month of its latest slate of members, the Institute of Medicine (IoM)-an honor society affiliated with the National Academy of Sciences-will have more women in its ranks than at any other time in its 25-year history when the honorees are inducted next year. Including the 15 women who are among the crop of 55 new members elected in October, women now constitute 21 percent of the society's 519 r

William G. Baxt, professor and chairman, department of emergency medicine, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine; chief, emergency services, Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania Arthur L. Beaudet, investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and professor and acting chairman, department of molecular and human genetics, Baylor College of Medicine Helen M. Blau, professor, department of molecular pharmacology, Stanford University School of Medicine Murray F. Brennan, chairm

SELECTED VARIABLES Total Number Percent Median Percent Percent Ethnic Group Number per College+*Income Female Under 35 100,000 Non-Hispanic White Native-born 338,730 336 37.3% $33,072 25.1% 42.5% Foreign-born 22,726 714 69.8% $35,086 28.8% 34.6% Black Native-born 15,004 124 20.7% $30,573 38.8% 49.1% Foreign-born 2,167 256 52.7% $30,793 13.8% 39.0% Chinese Native-born 1,305 862 53.2% $30,403 38.5% 57.1% Foreign-born 8,338 1,225 80.5% $36,311 32.8% 30.1% Filipino Native-born 566 400 19.9% $28,66

ACROSS 1 Common carbohydrate 4 Egg-laying 9 Thought spot 10 Soft tissue scan, for short 11 Compound that smells like rotten eggs 12 Windpipe flap 13 Kind of radical 15 They're lost in childhood 17 Result of chemically combining elements 18 Slide type 22 Skullcap? 26 Emit coherent light 27 Having only one of a pair of genes 30 It helps with the daily grind 31 Kind of cholesterol: abbr. 32 Peptide binding site 33 Interspecies tissue transplant 34 Solution strength DOWN 1 Experimentee 2 Nucleotid

Study Author: Karen Young Kreeger Researchers have been comparing parts of genomes at the individual gene level for years. Portions of the genomes of tens of thousands of species-from bacteria to humans-reside in private and public databases around the world. Pharmaceutical scientists sift through these collections, panning for potential drugs and therapies, while basic investigators in an array of fields search for similarities and differences in the species' blueprints for life. But what re

Equipment Author: Robert Finn Last August, Brett Lane found himself on the horns of a dilemma. The scientists at VivoRx Inc., a Santa Monica, Calif.-based company that's developing diabetes treatments, needed a specific type of Shimadzu spectrofluorometer. But as VivoRx's director of facilities, Lane knew that the year-old company couldn't justify spending the nearly $20,000 that a new model would cost, especially since the instrument would get only occasional use. So Lane started calling use

Scientific Innovation Author: Fred M. Cowan The "information age" with accompanying "big science" has emphasized data generation, analytical thinking, and specialization. This may have had the unfortunate consequence of segregating mainstream science from the novel and abstract ideas, often created at the margins of science, that stimulate rapid progress and invention. Has too narrow a focus on empirical phenomena slowed the innovations that benefit society and prove the utility of science?

The Government's Rush To Judgment On Bernard Fisher's Work, Reputation The Scientist, Vol:9, #23, pg.12 , November 27, 1995. Author: Eugene Garfield                       Most readers of The Scientist probably are familiar with the case of Bernard Fisher, the University of Pittsburgh professor who had directed the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project (NSABP) for more than two decades. Over that time, the 100 or so papers

Hon Fong Louie Mark's commentary "The Plight of Women in Science Continues" [page 13] and Ricki Lewis's article "Balancing Academic Research and Motherhood Is A Precarious Task" [page 16] in the Sept. 18, 1995, issue of The Scientist both ignore one very important issue. Unless the women in question are all single mothers, these children all have another parent! This other parent should be assuming some child-care responsibilities, also. I was amazed to read these articles in 1995, since we we

Unquestionably a major concern of the professoriate, especially at large research universities, is the issue expressed in the article "Growth in Untenured Academic Science Jobs Seen Hurting Careers" (F. Hoke, The Scientist, Sept. 18, 1995, page 1). To that point, a study done by a University of Michigan faculty committee (May 1995) shows all too vividly that this is a very real pattern, not just in the sciences, but university-wide. Their report, entitled "The Changing Nature of the Professor

Regarding the articles "Growth In Untenured Academic Science Jobs Seen Hurting Careers" [F. Hoke, page 1] and "Pressures Wearing Down Researchers" [M. Watanabe, page 1] in the Sept. 18, 1995, issue of The Scientist: Scientists who can continue on extended postdocs or similar positions are the lucky ones. One scientist with whom I did a postdoc was supporting himself, the last I heard, by part-time substitute teaching in local schools. Another, after five years as a postdoc and two as a faculty

Although I agree with many of the brutal observations that Elie Shneour finds so deplorable yet essential to articulate ["Of Semantics And The Scientist Population: Are There Too Many Of Us?" The Scientist, Sept. 18, 1995, page 12], I must take issue with his arbitrary division of investigators into scientists and technicians. His vision of the scientist as a mystical individual with sweeping knowledge encompassing all of science is not accurate. I will give two reasons. First, the amount of

In a commentary promoting the concept that public science literacy could stem the tide of anti-science sentiment (The Scientist, July 10, 1995, page 13), Leon Lederman underestimates the impact that fundamentalism does and will have on our and all other societies. Fundamentalists are not interested in promoting scientific understanding. On the contrary, they want to severely diminish the voice of scientists. The pursuit of science is inherently the pursuit of knowledge through reason, experime

I enjoy reading The Scientist very much and was pleased to see the article titled "Citation Records Show U.S.'s Top Schools in Clinical Medicine" in the Oct. 30, 1995 issue [page 14]. However, I was displeased to find a serious error in the article. The text of the article and the tables that rank various institutions mistakenly refer to the "University of Texas at San Antonio" as being the institution that has shown the greatest improvement in citation impact. This is not the case. The Univers

Kenneth Olden Director, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and National Toxicology Program, Research Triangle Park, N.C. "THE SCIENTIST is an excellent way to keep up with what's going on in science, with balanced coverage of programs, developments, and what the movers and shakers are thinking." The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences is dedicated to discovering how environmental agents disrupt biological processes and using this knowledge to prevent disease.

Edited by: Karen Young Kreeger F.J. de Sauvage, P.E. Haas, S.D. Spencer, B.E. Malloy, A.L. Gurney, S.A. Spencer, W.C. Darbonne, W.J. Henzel, S.C. Wong, W.-J. Kuang, K.J. Oles, B. Hultgren, L.A. Solberg, Jr., D.V. Goeddel, D.L. Eaton, "Stimulation of megakaryocytopoiesis and thrombopoiesis by the c-Mpl ligand," Nature, 369:533-8, 1994. (Cited in 102 publications through September 1995) Comments by Dan L. Eaton, Genentech Inc., South San Francisco, Calif. This paper describes the purification,

Edited by: Karen Young Kreeger T.S. Bellows, Jr., T.M. Perring, R.J. Gill, D.H. Headrick,"Description of a species of Bemisia (Homoptera: Aleyrodidae)," Annals of the Entomological Society of America, 87:195-206, 1994. (Cited in 29 publications through September 1995) Comments by Thomas S. Bellows and David H. Headrick, department of entomology, University of California, Riverside. This article is the formal taxonomic description of a new species of whitefly in the genus Bemisia. "In the two

For Genes Author: Holly Ahern For a geneticist, pinpointing a mutation in a human gene that might be responsible for an inherited disease can be likened to the proverbial search for a needle in a haystack. While mo-lecular biologists sift through the 3 billion base pairs in the human genome in search of disease-causing genes, other scientists choose to approach the problem from the perspective of the mouse, a model system for mammal research. Because mice and humans are members of the same gr

NIH Neuroscientists Sent Packing Out of This World Leech Locomotion Peaceful Research Honored Scent of a Book Deal Women Scientists: The Sequel The Great Beyond Online Wellcome Awards New Head at CCR Switches At Bell Labs The shutdown of the U.S. government on November 14, occasioned by wrangling between Republicans and Democrats over stopgap budget bills, sharply curtailed representation of National Institutes of Health researchers at the Society for Neuroscience meeting, held in San Diego Nov