September 1988

Criticism Builds Over Nature Investigation AUTHOR:BERNARD DIXON Date: September 05, 1988 There may be no solution that can’t be diluted, but this is one controversy that won’t die out; Maddox vs. Benveniste LONDON--La'affaire Benveniste has been this summer’s, best soap opera—another thrilling episode in “As the World of Science Thins.” Who could have imagined that Jacques Benveniste, a scientist at a prestigious French government laboratory would claim to

Technical problems plague Stanford’s Linear Collider, threatening its ability to produce breakthroughs in particle physics Expectations were running high. For months, the Stanford Linear Collider (SLC), an innovative particle accelerator nearing completion at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Facility (SLAC) in Palo Alto, Calif. had been preparing for its debut. This was the machine that would mint a million Z0 particles a year. Close study of the Z0—it’s mass, for example̵

Nobelist Sam Ting says his CERN experiment is like the United Nations—‘except we get something done.’ Here’s why GENEVA--"I don’t know what your rules are,” the particle physicist Sam Ting tells. the officials from the Soviet Union as they drink coffee in his Geneva office. “I don’t even care. What I am saying is this: When the announcement of a discovery is made, the people on the podium are the people who get the. credit. If you want your sci

Inside Bell Labs: Excitement On The Bench; Concern On High AUTHOR: SHARON BEGLEY Date: September 05, 1988 Researchers have never felt freer, but some lab heads and a prominent former manager see major changes since divestiture The stockholder was annoyed. Why, he demanded, was AT&T paying Thomas Gradel, a middle-aged scientist, to tromp around the Jungles of Brazil studying ants, when the dollars could be better used to fatten up Bell’s notoriously meager dividends? The irate stoc

Biotech Patent Bottleneck Harms Makers Of Better Mousetraps AUTHOR:RON COWEN Date: September 05, 1988 While the U.S. Patent Office fiddles, small firms lacking earnings records may be losing potential investors WASHINGTON—Chemist George Rathman won’t soon forget July 1, 1987, the day that the worth of his company’s stock dropped $10 million in six hours. President and CEO of Aragen Inc., an eight-year-old biotechnology firm in Thou- sand Oaks, Calif., Rathmann calls the ex

WASHINGTON—Starting next month, NSF will be allowed to pay up to $95,000 to scientists accepting temporary positions in Washington. The new rule represents a boost of $17,500 in the federal pay ceiling created last December by Congress. But the higher cap comes at a price—a new ceiling on salaries for thousands of NSF grantees. That annual ceiling has also been set at $95,000, although typically NSF funds only the summer salaries of university scientists. The ceiling will be appl

PARIS-- In a country where thousands of physicians practics ho- meopathy the Beneviste affair has generated widespread publicity, much of it favorable to the French scientist. Paris Match magazine, for example acclaimed the initial paper about the alleged memory of water as a stupendous breakthrough, but did not mention Nature's subsequent investigation. The newspaper Le Point reported with tongue not in cheek, rumor that several Nobel Prize-winning physicists met in Bermuda, somewhere near

Benveniste’s “high-dilution” experiments are not the first to raise concern about science journals’ proper response to unconventional results. Twice before, Nature published papers dubious enough to warrant accompanying editorials questioning the results. And in one eerily parallel precursor incident, Nature’s then editor actually swooped down on a yet another Paris lab with “The Amazing” Randi and a third party to debunk unorthodox results—and

Keith Davies has made Chemical Design a world leader in molecular modeling LONDON—By now we’ve all seen the numbers and heard the gloomy forecasts. Science in the United Kingdom is suffering from a dearth of funding, incentives, and political clout. The lack of commitment to R&D on the part of both the private and public sectors in Britain has sparked an alarming emigration of scientists and high-tech entrepreneurs. But for every rule there is an exception, and Keith Davies is

The Scientist has asked a group of experts to periodically comment upon recent articles that they have found noteworthy. Their selections, presented here in every issue, are neither endorsements of content nor the result of systematic searching. Rather, they are personal choices of articles they believe the scientific community as a whole may also find interesting. Reprint. of any artieles cited here may be ordered through The Genuine Article, 5501 Market St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19104, or by tel

The Scientist has asked a group of experts to periodically comment upon recent articles that they have found noteworthy. Their selections, presented here in every issue, are neither endorsements of content nor the result of systematic searching. Rather, they are personal choices of articles they believe the scientific community as a whole may also find interesting. Reprint. of any artieles cited here may be ordered through The Genuine Article, 5501 Market St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19104, or by tel

The Scientist has asked a group of experts to periodically comment upon recent articles that they have found noteworthy. Their selections, presented here in every issue, are neither endorsements of content nor the result of systematic searching. Rather, they are personal choices of articles they believe the scientific community as a whole may also find interesting. Reprint. of any artieles cited here may be ordered through The Genuine Article, 5501 Market St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19104, or by tel

The Scientist has asked a group of experts to periodically comment upon recent articles that they have found noteworthy. Their selections, presented here in every issue, are neither endorsements of content nor the result of systematic searching. Rather, they are personal choices of articles they believe the scientific community as a whole may also find interesting. Reprint. of any artieles cited here may be ordered through The Genuine Article, 5501 Market St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19104, or by tel

The Scientist has asked a group of experts to periodically comment upon recent articles that they have found noteworthy. Their selections, presented here in every issue, are neither endorsements of content nor the result of systematic searching. Rather, they are personal choices of articles they believe the scientific community as a whole may also find interesting. Reprint. of any artieles cited here may be ordered through The Genuine Article, 5501 Market St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19104, or by tel

Scientists who have joined the ranks of secretaries, journalists, data processors, and others who spend most of the day glued to a VDT screen, take note. Last month James Sheedy, chief of the University of California, Berkeley’s Video Display Terminal Eye Clinic, reported that an eye-focusing problem in people in their 20s and 30s was the number one problem in clinical studies of 153 patients. The study did not prove a causal relationship between regular VDT use and difficulty with eye

At its annual meeting in June, the Iondon-based Royal Society elected one new fellow and six new foreign members. Also at the meeting, the Council of the Society announced the recipients of its medals and honors for 1988. In honor of her contributions to the history of contemporary science, Margaret Gowing was elected a fellow of the society. Cowing, a specialist on the implications of atomic energy in Britain and the person responsible for establishing the Contemporary Scientific Archives

Heinz R. Pagels, executive director and chief executive officer of the New York Academy of Sciences, died in a mountaineering accident on July 23 while attending the summer session of the Aspen Center for Physics. A theoretical physicist, Pagels, 49, worked in the areas of relativistic quantum field theory and cosmology and was noted as being a popularizer of science. He authored three books on science: The Cosmic Code (1983); Perfect Symmetry: The Search for the Beginning of Time (1985); an

After years of passivity, the astronomy community is protesting telescope closings, cramped quarters, and scanty maintenance Our understanding of galaxies is at a primitive level, and we are still perplexed by basic questions. For instance: 1. Why do things such as galaxies exist at all, with their observed characteristic dimensions—typically 10^11 stars within radii of about 10^4 parsecs? 2. What is the dark matter that constitutes so large a part of galaxies?We know that more than 9O

The British government’s scheme for “rationalizing” support for science, begun last year with an eval nation of earth science departments, has sparked considerable controversy. Having suffered major cuts in 1981, many U.K. university scientists are chilled by the prospect of further reductions for those departments that receive low performance ratings. Next to be scrutinized are departments of chemistry and physics. The Institute for Scientific Information recently undert

“Where do you see the most important or interesting progress occurring in immunology over the next few years.” That was the question recently put to some two dozen senior immunologists by the editorial staff of the Institute for Scientific Information’s Atlas of Science: Immunology. The scientists surveyed—a distinguished, international group that represents academia, independent laboratories, and industry—serve as the editorial advisory board of the journal. In

The articles listed below—all less than a year old—have received a substantially greater number of citations than others of the same type and vintage. A citation-backing algorithm of the Institute for Scientific Information has Identified these articles. W.S. Argraves, S. Suzuki, H. Arai, K Thompson, M.D. Pierschbacher, E. Ruoslahti, “Amino acid sequence of the human fibronectin receptor,” Journal of Cell Biology, 105(3), 1183-90, September 1987. H.M. Cherwinski,

{WantNoCacheVal} How A Research Proposal Moves Through NIH When a grant proposal arrives at NIH's, Bethesda. Md., headquarters it is routed directly to the agency's Division of Research Grants. There, one of a dozen or so "referral officers" identifies the scientific field to the most appropriate of the agency's 93 standing commit- tees review to the so-called "study sections." A study section consists of from 14 to 20 scientists representing a widerange of specialties: The Surgery, Anesthesi

Only five years old, Pennsylvania’s Ben Franklin Partnership Fund, a statewide technology-transfer program, has already become a model for states that want to encourage scientists and engineers to develop the commercial potential of their research. Since its founding, the Partnership’s support of collaboration between small bus inesses and academic scientists has produced a wide range of results, including: * Products to detect drugs in saliva " SO2 and HCI sensors for use

According to numbers put together in August by the University of California, San Francisco, its School of Medicine’s fiscal 1988 support from the National Institutes of Health had reached the $110 million level While the official total for the year will he made by NIH, UCSF’s preliminary reckoning shows an $8 million increase in NIH support compared with last year. This in-house figure, however, suffices as a strong indication that UCSF will rank first among U.S. medical schools

Below is a list of notable grants recently awarded In the scIences—large fedreal grants as well as awards of all sizes from private foundations. The individual cited with each entry Is the project’s principal Investigator. Olfactory and neuroendocrine functions. $1.9 million over seven years from the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke to Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, Shrewsbury Mass.: F. Macrides Resistance to anticancer d

Below is a list of notable grants recently awarded In the scIences—large fedreal grants as well as awards of all sizes from private foundations. The individual cited with each entry Is the project’s principal Investigator. Olfactory and neuroendocrine functions. $1.9 million over seven years from the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke to Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, Shrewsbury Mass.: F. Macrides Resistance to anticancer d

Most people working with personal computers don’t have degrees in computer science and don’t write their own programs. But in the population of people who do program, scientists make up a large percentage. Off-the-shelf software often doesn’t provide just what laboratory scientists are looking for therefore, many of them tinker with altering these store-bought packages or develop their own. If you do a little programming on an IBM PC, you should know that some reasonably pri

Volume one, number one, of the first scientific journal to be simultaneously published in hard copy and on computer diskette has been released by Tetrahedron Publications, a division of Pergamon Press. Called Tetrahedron Computer Methodology—or TCM— and touting itself as “the international electronic journal for rapid publication of original research in computer chemistry,” the new publication also is the first chemical journal to offer scientific research reports that

Amino acid sequencing has become a highly automated and efficient process. It plays an invaluable role in protein biochemistry, and is making an increasing contribution to modern molecular biology and to the interpretation of DNA sequences. But things have changed since Frederick Sanger, a pioneer in protein chemistry, first determined the amino acid sequence of insulin more than 30 years ago. The advent in recent years of rapid nucleic acid sequencing techniques has taken much of the drudg