October 1992

Better Late Than Never Gruesome Child's Play Breath-Taking Advance Accelerated Science Foundation Taking A Global View Different Strokes... Just Like Grandma Used To Make Thomas Alva Edison finally got his B.S. degree yesterday--61 years after his death. Thomas Edison State College in Trenton, N.J., which specializes in adult education, conferred upon Edison a posthumous degree in applied science and technology, with a specialization in electrical technology, at commencement ceremonies

Maria Rosenzweig's letter in the August 17, 1992, issue of The Scientist (page 12) draws an inaccurate picture of scientific publication, certainly as regards microbiology. She states that "Journals ...publish manuscripts of well-known scientists regardless of ...merit...." As editor of the Canadian Journal of Microbiology and of Archives of Microbiology, I have on many occasions had to reject papers by quite well-known scientists. It is rare that such scientists--or any others--have had manuscr

Scientific issues now permeate a multitude of legal matters--the presentation of criminal evidence, cases involving intellectual property, environmental disputes, and so on. And, by all accounts, the courts are handling this surge of scientific adjudication poorly: Mishandling of scientific matters in court has been blamed for outrageous tort awards, improper criminal convictions, and even the erosion of the United States' competitiveness. In my view, the legal system's inability to properly

Each four-year presidential election cycle frames an era of United States politics, including science in high politics. The greenhouse effect, the Valdez oil spill, and biodiversity; AIDS, tuberculosis, and other emerging diseases; fetal tissue research, genome mapping, DNA patents, and DNA fingerprinting; chemical weapons and unemployed Soviet bomb scientists; the space station and the supercollider: The past term has been a busy one for science in the White House. The next term will be b

Bolstered by new scientific evidence, research into how self- replicating organisms emerged from basic organic molecules present on the early Earth is moving away from the scientific fringe and into the mainstream. Although there are only a handful of people who would call themselves origins-of-life researchers, the field is undergoing a renaissance, with a wide array of disciplines, such as radio astronomy, planetary science, molecular biology, and biochemistry, converging to make advances.

J. Martin, T. Langer, R. Boteva, A. Schramel, A.L. Horwich, F.-U. Hartl, "Chaperonin-mediated protein folding at the surface of groEL through a `molten globule'-like intermediate," Nature, 352:36-42, 1991. F.-Ulrich Hartl (Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York): "Molecular chaperones, proteins that help other proteins to fold, have emerged over recent years as an important topic of research in biology. While their physiological significance has been established through a combination

A. Simeone, D. Acampora, V. Nigro, A. Faiella, M. D'Esposito, A. Stornainolo, et al., "Differential regulation by retinoic acid of the homeobox genes of the four HOX loci in human embryonal carcinoma cells," Mechanisms of Development, 33:215-228, 1991. Edoardo Bonicelli (H. S. Raffaele, Istituto di Ricovero e Cura a Carattere Scientifico, Milan, Italy): "This paper put some order into the zoo of vertebrate homeobox genes controlling positional information necessary for the appropriate body s

S. Saito, A. Oshiyama, "Cohesive mechanism and energy bands of solid C60," Physical Review Letters, 66:2637-40, 1991. Susumu Saito (NEC Corp., Ibaraki, Japan): "In 1990, I was delighted to hear that an icosahedral geometry of the C60 cluster was confirmed and that these molecules actually crystallized like ordinary atoms. I had already obtained the electronic structure of C60 and C60K (where K is trapped inside the C60 cage) clusters. So, we immediately studied the electronic structure of so

In the sophisticated research laboratory of today, scientists have become increasingly dependent on computers as a means of enhancing and accelerating their investigations. A growing number of lab instruments now rely on a computer for their efficient operation; and the modern lab commonly has numerous other computers scattered about to handle such day-to-day chores as data analysis and report writing. While the benefits of computers in the lab are clear, incompatibility among devices from a