September 1991

A `good-neighbor' policy at the nuclear weapons lab inspires researchers to aid paleontological digs in the New Mexico hills It stands to reason that the pursuit of dinosaur bones is not part of Los Alamos National Scientific Laboratory's official research portfolio. After all, this is the home of the first atom bomb, its resident researchers are primarily involved in the physical sciences, and nuclear weapons development is still pretty much the name of the game. So why have electron microsc

Still reeling from recent bouts of bad P.R., and in a bind for funding, some schools are reassessing their research missions As the academic year begins, university executives, research administrators, and others are reviewing with considerable trepidation a deskload of headaches affecting their 1991-1992 research agendas. There are stacks of articles about university misconduct and fraud from major newspapers and magazines, accounting ledgers revealing budgetary shortfalls, and memos from di

With tougher laws and renewed investor confidence, opportunity blossoms for many scientific disciplines Imagine a machine that enables you to dump waste in one end and get products out of the other. No sorting required. No noxious gases or hazardous byproducts produced. Sound like science fiction? Well, it is science, but thanks to a new technology being developed at Cambridge, Mass.-based Molten Metal Technology, such a scenario is no longer fiction. Molten Metal is one of a handful of young

WASHINGTON--Senators and representatives return next week from their annual August recess knowing that they still face many important issues. But what to do about big science should not be one of them. That debate appears to have been settled, at least for this year. A series of votes this summer attempted to establish an acceptable balance between funding huge teams of scientists working on multibillion-dollar construction projects and continuing to nurture individual investigators engaged in

It is obvious--clearly documentable, in fact--that the quantity of scientific literature is increasing. And it is clear that researchers must find imaginative ways--through computer searches, for example--to be more selective in their approach to taking advantage of the proliferation of printed material. But it is inappropriate to embrace the notion that scientists are being swamped by--indeed, that they are threatened with drowning in--an ever-mounting flood of scientific journals. I've been

Funding For Low-Birth-Weight Studies The National Center for Nursing Research and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health offer grants for research into the prevention of low birth weight in infants. Program officers are especially interested in studies involving collaboration among nurses, physicians, physiologists, and behavioral scientists. Studies to be funded include research into risk factors for low-birth-weight babies and resea

Yale's Leon Rosenberg Moves To Industry After Fruitful 25-Year Career In Academia; Texas' McDonald Observatory Leader Awarded NASA's Public Service Medal 

SLAC Management? Willenbrock Bids NSF Adieu? Then Try, Try Again NRC Report Criticized Massey Fills Two Posts? Nobelist Burton Richter, director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, is angry over allegations by a former employee who claimed he was ordered to inflate estimates of damages caused by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake so that Richter's lab could receive more money from the Department of Energy. The charges were raised earlier this year, as part of a personnel grievance, by

The case of Scientific American vs. Forrest Mims III raises controversial issues and appears to have raised a storm of emotional responses in the "Letters" section of The Scientist [April 29, 1991, page 12]. Naturally, it is the right of Scientific American to hire whom it pleases. Scientific American may even have the freedom to change its mind. It is, of course, our right to be offended when Scientific American dismisses a newly hired writer based on that writer's personal belief system. We

In the story on the Westinghouse Science Talent Search in the April 15, 1991, issue of The Scientist [page 20], National Science Teachers Association Executive Director William Aldridge addressed the issue of inequity in resources devoted by schools like Bronx High School of Science and Stuyvesant High School of New York City to competitions like the Westinghouse. According to Aldridge: "The individual kids who succeed in this program have undoubtedly worked very hard. But the thing that bother

I am writing to clarify information included in your May 27 analysis "Will Wall Street's Love Affair With Biotech Continue?" [page 1]. In that article, Amgen Inc.'s 1990 earnings from recombinant erythropoietin were incorrectly stated at $800 million. In fact, this figure represents approximate worldwide sales for the product, including those for Amgen's partner, Kirin Brewery Co. Ltd., and various licensees. In the United States, where Amgen markets recombinant erythropoietin for dialysis pa

One milestone of the modern scientific era was the first publication by George W. Beadle (1903-1989) and Edward L. Tatum (1909-1975) on the biochemical genetics of Neurospora (PNAS, 27:499-506, 1941). Its 50th anniversary is being commemorated in several places this summer. Beadle and Tatum's work is worthy of fond celebration not only for its inherent scientific merit--its impact on biochemical research continues to resonate today--but also because it convincingly affirms the value of a kind

It is obvious--clearly documentable, in fact--that the quantity of scientific literature is increasing. And it is clear that researchers must find imaginative ways--through computer searches, for example--to be more selective in their approach to taking advantage of the proliferation of printed material. But it is inappropriate to embrace the notion that scientists are being swamped by--indeed, that they are threatened with drowning in--an ever-mounting flood of scientific journals. I've been

Microbiologist J.K. Arap Keter is betting that some recently collected strains of the bacterial genus Rhizobium will soon join the family of other nonpolluting, inexpensive, microbial biofertilizers currently in use by thousands of East African farmers on legume crops. But first he and colleagues in the department of soil science at the University of Nairobi in Kenya must show that the new isolates can foster different plants' growth by helping the plants use nitrogen. After that, they must cu

S. Ghosh, D. Baltimore, "Activation in vitro of NF-kB by phosphorylation of its inhibitor IkB," Nature, 344:678-82, 1990. Sankar Ghosh (Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Cambridge, Mass.): "This paper brings together two areas of rapidly moving research: the role of protein phosphorylation and control of transcriptional regulation. The inhibitor IkB not only keeps the transcription factor NF-kB in the cytoplasm--away from DNA--but also directly prevents it from binding to DNA. By sh

Muon Collaboration: J.G. Ashman, B. Badelek, G. Baum, J. Beaufays, et al., "An investigation of the spin structure of the proton in deep inelastic scattering of polarised muons on polarised protons," Nuclear Physics B, 328:1-35, 1989. J.G. Ashman (University of Sheffield, England): "In the past 20 years many experiments have studied the structure of the nucleon via deep inelastic scattering of charged leptons and neutrinos from unpolarized targets. This has led to the confirmation of the quark

D. Kabelitz, A. Bender, S. Schondelmaier, B. Schoel, S.H.E. Kaufmann, "A large fraction of human peripheral blood g/d+ T cells is activated by Mycobacterium tuberculosis but not by its 65-kD heat shock protein," Journal of Experimental Medicine, 171:667-679, 1990. Dieter Kabelitz (University of Heidelberg, Germany): "T cells expressing the g/d+ T cell receptor constitute a distinct class of T cells with as-yet-unknown function. Several groups have recently shown that murine (and some human) g/

When Linus Pauling first began investigating vitamin C in the 1960s, it wasn't difficult for him to stay current with the latest findings--because he was the one doing most of the discovering. Now, he says, there are "probably 3,000 papers a year" that involve vitamin C. If anyone has the stamina to read them all, it would be Pauling, now 90. He is an avid reader, logging a minimum of five hours a day. Of course, Pauling's work goes way beyond the vitamin he claimed could cure the common cold

Following the exhilaration of being appointed to one's first job, reality sets in for a new assistant professor. There's a lab to equip and staff, new courses to teach, departmental politics to learn--and, of course, a research program to initiate. Universities often provide start-up funds to a certain extent, but an outside grant is usually essential to give the new scientist's research program the extra momentum it needs to get off the ground. The search for outside funding gives young scien

Texas' McDonald Observatory Leader Awarded NASA's Public Service Medal Author: Rebecca Andrews (The Scientist, Vol:5, #17, pg. 22, September 2, 1991) (Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.) -------- Harlan Smith, director of the Mc-Donald Observatory at the University of Texas in Austin for more than 25 years, has been awarded NASA's Distinguished Public Service Medal. Smith was presented with the medal in a ceremony on July 17. When Smith joined the university in 1963 as director of

In the mid-1980s, when personal computers with word processing software found their way into scientists' offices and labs, the look of scientific documents--whether a student's thesis, a textbook manuscript, or a paper for publication--improved considerably. Cutting and pasting capabilities, proportional fonts, and laser-printed output gave these papers a typeset appearance. However, the embedded equations and diagrams common to many math, chemistry, and physics publications were still difficu