September 1990

Before parting with money to fund the NSF program, corporate backers demand to play a greater role in charting its development WASHINGTON--The National Science Foundation wants industry to invest more than $100 million in a new minority education program that would produce 50,000 baccalaureates and 2,000 Ph.D.'s a year in science and engineering by the year 2000. What the NSF doesn't want, say officials organizing the program, is a lot of advice from the businesses on how to set it up. That an

Cellcor's new approach to immunotherapy links patient and lab; the firm's success is tied to skirting the FDA bottleneck BOSTON--What do you get when you cross research with clinical care? The answer, immunologist Michael Osband says emphatically, is a new industry--"biocare." His Boston-based company, Cellcor Therapies Inc., is one of about a half-dozen firms worldwide that are developing therapies tailor-made in the laboratory for individual patients. It's been eight years since Michael Osb

New York alliance offers guidance and support to Russian researchers who are seeking employment in their adopted country Alexander Bolonkin, a mathematician specializing in aerodynamics, has a 10-year gap in his r‚sum‚, from 1972 to 1982, because he was serving time in a Soviet prison camp. Bolonkin is now studying English, but he still has quite a bit to learn; he says he came to the United States "1« hours ago" when he means "1« years ago." Since arriving in the U.S.,

As the shock over the mirror defect in the Hubble Space Telescope begins to wear off, some 1,000 astronomers, many of whom had anticipated funding from NASA and all of whom expected unprecedented pictures and data from the $1.6 billion instrument, are trying to salvage their research plans. Scientists at NASA headquarters in Washington D.C., the Space Telescope Science Institute (STSI) in Baltimore, the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and here throughout the world are analyzing

Allan Goldstein believes the thymosins he discovered can cure immune diseases, and he hopes his company and institute will prove it WASHINGTON--Science moves too slowly for biochemist Allan Goldstein. For most of his professional life, he has been trying to unravel the mysteries of the human immune system through a better understanding of a group of hormones known as thymosins. He discovered them 26 years ago, and their use in 1974 to save the life of a five-year-old girl, along with his encou

Love of their institutions motivates many to make the transition from university laboratories to executive offices What's it like to be a medical school dean? Geneticist Leon E. Rosenberg, dean of Yale University's School of Medicine, describes the experience as sometimes elegantly harmonious, sometimes extraordinarily fast-paced--and rarely dull. "When I'm feeling serene," Rosenberg says, "I say that [the job] is sometimes like being a conductor of an orchestra: searching for the right sound

"It seemed that whenever four or more scientists got together, the most frequent topic of conversation--aside from tenure-- was what great things were being done in research with the help of computers. What we wanted to do was provide some kind of overview on how scientists in a variety of disciplines were using computer technology." That's how anthropologist and National Academy of Sciences staffer John Clement explains the genesis of Information Technology and the Conduct of Research: The U

Although the United States continues to be recognized as a world leader in science, our industries have increasingly been buffeted by global competition. Other nations, particularly Japan, have often been swifter than we in moving their own scientific and technological advances from the laboratory to the marketplace. Supercomputing offers an opportunity for the United States to address these problems, using a homegrown technology in which we still maintain a lead. For example, circuit simulati

Today, more than ever, scientists are finding themselves immersed in "hot" fields--highly publicized, hyperdramatized research areas in which pursuit of funding is wildly competitive and change is quick. The media, ever in pursuit of the big story, the banner headline, stoke the fire, seizing every opportunity to trumpet sudden breakthroughs. Thus perpetuated is the public's widely held misapprehension that scientific progress is achieved primarily in sudden flashes of genius or serendipity by

The article "Ruling Could Inhibit Peer Review Candor" [The Scientist, June 25, 1990, page 1] surprised me by its one-sidedness. Although the Penn/EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] case was briefly described, the article explored only the ruling's potential negative impact, and only from the point of view of the academy. Surely, there are meritorious counterarguments or other viewpoints worth mentioning. In fact, if the ruling were to inhibit "candid" expositions of race or gender

I would like to compliment you on a fine review of the events that occur during a radioactive decomposition that is transmitted through several phase shifters and is eventually detected as photons ["Environmentalists Toast New Liquid Scintillation Cocktails," The Scientist, June 25, 1990, page 23]. This is truly a "black box" for quite a few people. I would, however, like to present my views, which differ significantly from yours, on the use of drain- dischargeable cocktails. As you point out,

Your article concerning the award of the 1990 Rossi Prize to Stirling Colgate [The Scientist, June 25, 1990, page 21] contains one error. The work Dr. Colgate did in the 1960s on neutrino emission from supernovae was done at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, not at Los Alamos. Dr. Colgate defected from California to New Mexico after the work you cited was completed. It was a privilege, a pleasure, and an education to work with him during his tenure at Livermore. There is a long-standing, frie

What does it take to win the Nobel Prize in chemistry? Does the prize-winning research involve, for instance, discovering a never-before- seen molecular structure? Or must one do something bordering on alchemy? In this issue, The Scientist continues its three-part series on potential candidates for the Nobel Prizes. Two weeks ago, the focus was on physicists (The Scientist, Sept. 3, 1990, page 16). Now, The Scientist examines citation data compiled by the Philadelphia-based Institute for Scien

  NAME FIELD CITATIONS 1965-78 351. OPPENHEIM J.J. Immunology 3,631 352. LOENING U.E. Molecular Biology 3,626 353. RECTOR F.C. Physiology 3,623 354. RICE S.A. Physical Chemistry 3,622 355. JACOB F.* Molecular Biology 3,603 356. ORCI L. Histology 3,600 357. ERNSTER L. Biochemistry 3,592 358. TRUMP B.F. Pathology 3,581 359. LU A.Y.H. Pharmacology 3,578 360. PERRY R.P. Molecular Biology 3,577 361. BAULIEU E.E. Endocrinology 3,573 362. TEMIN H.M.* Virology 3,570 3

The articles listed below, all less than two years old, have received a substantially greater number of citations than others of the same type and vintage, according to data from the Science Citation Index of the Institute for Scientific Information, Philadelphia. Why have these research reports become such standouts? A comment following each reference, supplied to The Scientist by one of the authors, attempts to provide an answer. K.V. Visvanathan, S. Goodbourn, "Double-stranded RNA activates

News that a National Institutes of Health grant review committee intends to make a site visit causes many principal investigators to reach for aspirin and antacids. And indeed, a poor presentation to the committee virtually assures a research group that NIH will not fund its project. Yet a site visit need not be a traumatic experience. In fact, a clever PI can often turn the site visit into an opportunity to convince the NIH committee of the value and scholarship of a project. And remember: Si

Rear Admiral William C. Miller has been appointed the chief of naval research. Miller, who will report directly to the secretary of the Navy, heads an agency that comprises the Office of Naval Research (ONR), created by Congress in 1946, and the Office of Naval Technology (ONT), established in 1980. The agency has an annual budget of more than $1 billion, which is allocated for research and development work conducted at universities and Navy laboratories and by industry. Miller is the 17th offi

B.F. Skinner, 86, died of leukemia last month in Cambridge, Mass. The noted behaviorist had received a lifetime achievement award two days earlier from the American Psychological Association at its meeting in Boston, during which he offered a 15-minute address on his work. Born in Susquehanna, Pa., in 1904, Burrhus Frederic Skinner earned his B.A. at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., in 1926 and received his Ph.D. in 1931 from Harvard. He joined the psychology department at the University of

After spending 17 years in the United States, Israeli-born physicist Mordehai Heiblum has returned to his native country to head the Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Center for Submicron Research at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. Since 1978, Heiblum has worked at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., where he most recently was the manager and a research staff member of IBM's microstructure physics group. His present interests include ballistic electrons

A recently published study by the National Science Foundation's Division of Science Resources Studies reports that as the 1980s wore on, unemployment among new science graduates with bachelor's and master's degrees declined. However, according to the report, the starting salaries of these fledgling scientists were lower than those of newly minted engineers. What's more, women were receiving lower starting salaries than their male colleagues. Similarly, newly graduated black scientists were pai

When the sixth annual Scientific Computing and Automation Conference and Exposition begins in Philadelphia tomorrow, conferees will be hearing about hundreds of scientific software packages that are now on the market. By contrast, in 1985, when the first conference was held, only a few applications were available for technical users of microcomputers, mostly in the area of data management and statistics. There were no more than a handful of software packages at the dawn of the so-called microc

Who Says Science Can't Be Fun? Playing The Odds Sign Of The Times Bridging The Gap The Invisible Professor The organizers of next month's annual meeting of the Association of Science-Technology Centers in Orlando, Fla., have made a bold bid to boost attendance by including in the registration packet a one-day pass for three popular theme parks in the area -- Universal Studios, EPCOT Center, and Sea World. The ploy is one way for ASTC, an association of more than 300 museums and affiliated insti