September 1992

Officials, scientists, and others agree that her close ties to Bush policies could cost the agency director her job More than ever before, the future direction and leadership of the National Institutes of Health will hinge on the outcome of a United States presidential election. There is strong feeling among many key congressional staffers and other Washington observers that NIH director Bernadine Healy, because she appears to be inextricably linked to the Bush administration and its policies,

Researchers are perturbed by the weak support being given to a discipline that they consider vital to planet Earth's survival The job market for agricultural scientists has shown little or no net growth over the past several years. Fortunately, in a sense, the same weak economic climate that's slowed job creation has also slowed the flow of students through the agricultural science departments, say university officials nationwide. Thus, the production of Ph.D.'s today generally matches the num

The fifth NIH Research Festival, an in-house showcasing of hundreds of research projects supported by the 13 institutes operating under the National Institutes of Health aegis, will be held at the Bethesda, Md., campus September 21-25. Events scheduled for NIH's 16,000 researchers and other staff include five symposia, 31 workshops, three poster sessions with more than 450 presentations, and a scientific equipment show. Although originally planned to serve the intramural research community at N

Weissmann v. Freeman battle is revived as Dingell subcommittee decides to launch a new investigation Since the age of two, Heidi Weissmann says, she always wanted to be a doctor. She started college when she was 15, began medical school when she was 19, and by age 30 her supervisor was calling her one of the nation's premier authorities on biliary imaging in nuclear medicine. Yet now, at age 41, Weissmann is unemployed. Since 1987, she has claimed the United States radiological community has b

PRINCE GEORGE'S COUNTY, MD.--Right now there are 24 acres of mud, grass, and trees. But when construction is completed by the fall of next year, two of the United States' largest physics societies will leave their cramped offices in New York and join a third group in moving to a brand-new, spacious, five-story office building just outside Washington, D.C. The move is designed to improve professional information gathering and interaction with government policy-making institutions and other scien

In the July 20, 1992, issue of The Scientist (page 20), an article by scientific consultant Liane Reif-Lehrer discussed ways in which young academic researchers can bring their scientific expertise and abilities to the attention of potential mentors and employers. Reif-Lehrer, a former senior scientist at the Eye Research Institute of Retina Foundation in Boston and a former associate professor at Harvard Medical School who leads workshops on such topics as proposal writing and time management,

In my recent commentary (The Scientist, May 25, 1992, page 12), I stressed the importance of having the textbook one chooses support one's teaching objectives, but I made no mention of how this should be done. Therefore, as a postscript to my essay, let me discuss the benefits a textbook can offer if its chapters are supplemented by (and teachers make use of) questions and problems, with answers. From my experience, these problems compel students to think about and learn to use the information

A summary of events affecting J. Philippe Rushton that appeared on page 6 of the July 6, 1992, issue of The Scientist claimed that the university's order for Rushton to offer his lectures on videotape was overturned. The article incorrectly stated that "Though university officials said they did it for safety reasons, a London, Ontario, court disagreed and ordered his lectures open to students." The matter was not taken to civil court; hence, there was no court order against the University of We

No matter how esoteric their pursuits may be, scientists cannot afford to be indifferent to public opinion. The nonscientific public, after all, strongly influences the direction of research and the disbursement of funding. And as scientific research is translated into product development, public acceptance can become the key determinant of success. It follows that researchers are wise to keep the public well informed on scientific undertakings--especially those projects that could potentially

Plant science gets short shrift when it comes to research funding compared to the booming biomedical field, say many in the discipline, especially in light of the fact that through photosynthesis, plants are the source of life on earth. According to a recent government report, most funding goes toward research on agricultural problems and pests. The report says that research on plant genetics, biochemistry, and physiology in the United States needs help to avoid being trapped in a downward spir

When the technique of pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) was first described by David C. Schwartz and Charles R. Cantor almost a decade ago (Cell, 37:67-75, 1984), many molecular biologists recognized its potential immediately. A flurry of innovation in instrumentation based on the idea followed in the next half-dozen years. Despite this interest and activity, only in the past few years has PFGE secured its place as a mature, integral laboratory tool in molecular genetics generally and the

P. Langacker and M. Luo, "Implications of precision electroweak experiments for mt, rho(lc)0, sin2 theta(lc)w, and grand unification," Physical Review D, 44:817-22, 1991. Paul Langacker (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia): "This paper presents a systematic analysis of the implications of all high-precision electroweak experiments, including those at the new e+e- collider LEP at CRN in Geneva. It shows that our present `standard model' correctly describes nature down to a distance scale

With the pool of federal funds for research steadily shrinking, an increasing number of academic scientists these days are going after corporate grants. Corporate money can be especially beneficial to new assistant professors trying to launch research careers, investigators whose federal grants have been reduced or eliminated, or those seeking to leverage one source of funding with another. Although the number of university researchers seeking grants from industry may have increased recently, t

Joseph Jordan, a chemistry professor at Penn State University for more than 35 years, died on August 14 at his home in State College, Pa. He was 73 years old and had retired two years ago. In the mid-1950s, Jordan performed pioneering bioelectro-chemistry work on the structure and function of hemoglobin. Born in Romania in 1919, Jordan received his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1945. He emigrated to the United States in 1950. W. Lincoln Hawkins, a plastics researcher who was

On August 25, John T. Stock, an emeritus professor of chemistry at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, was presented with the Dexter Award for Outstanding Achievement in the History of Chemistry. The award was given out at the national American Chemical Society meeting in Washington, D.C. The award was presented by the Dexter Corp. of Windsor Locks, Conn., a company focusing on advanced aerospace and electronics technology. Stock was honored for his longtime professional interest in the hi

Karen A. Holbrook, a professor of biological structure at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, has been elected by the Dermatology Foundation to chair its medical and scientific committee. Holbrook's primary role as new chairwoman will be to lead the Evanston, Ill., organization's grant application review process for basic research. The 16-member committee, which will oversee the foundation's 1992 Career Development awards, fellowships, and grants program, will have its f

Salaries for college and university faculty rose in the 1991-92 academic year by an average of 3.5 percent, which was the smallest annual increase in more than 20 years, according to a recent survey by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Science faculty were among those affected by the across-the-board dip in pay raises, say science professors at schools across the United States. Adjusted for inflation, the average pay hike for all faculty was 0.4 percent. Even when newly