Issue | September 1993 | September 1993 | The Scientist Magazine®

News

Academic Scientists Launch Into 1993-94 School Year With Little Hope Of Easing Serious Funding Problems

On campuses across the United States, academic scientists and research administrators are beginning the 1993-94 school year with no expectations of relief from the fiscal and regulatory difficulties that have marked the past several autumns. States continue to cut back on support for public and private colleges and universities; moreover, the pool of federal funding is not growing sufficiently to keep up with the increased numbers of scientists vying for grants to support their research. "

Oregon Environmental Chemist Gets USGS Career Service Award

Vincent Joseph Schaefer, a chemist at General Electric Co. for more than 20 years, died July 25. He was 87 years old. Schaefer is best known for inventing artificially induced precipitation, called "cloud seeding," by dropping dry ice through natural clouds to produce snow. He worked at GE in Schenectady, N.Y., from 1933 to 1954, the first five years as research assistant to Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir, who won the prize in 1932 for studies in surface chemistry. In 1959, Schaefer founded t

Notebook

VOLUME 7, No:17 The Scientist September 6, 1993 Notebook(p.4) An Inspiring Message McBrontosaurus Pumping Up The Volume Interesting Alliance On-The-Job Learning Instructive Award New Kids On The Block . An Inspiring Message Faculty in Yale University's computer science department were greeted with a message from a familiar name on their E-mail early last month. Computer science professor David Gelernter, the victim of mail-bomb attack on June 24 (C.

Opinion

Science Publishing Is Urgently In Need Of Major Reform

VOLUME 7, No:17 The Scientist September 6, 1993 Opinion Science Publishing Is Urgently In Need Of Major Reform AUTHOR: RUSTUM ROY, pp.11 The function of science publishing today is to get information about new findings in science to at least three different communities: Group A, the specialists working in the same field as that in which the findings were made (numbering anywhere from 10 to 1,000 scientists); Group B, the general community of scientists and engineers who, a

Letter

Humane Society

AUTHOR: Martin L. Stephens, pp.12 Patrick Cleveland accuses me of "artful use of language" (The Scientist, May 31, 1993, page 12) in my defense of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) against his mischaracterization of the organization (The Scientist, Feb. 22, 1993, page 10). Yet his verbal attacks border on McCarthyism, with the suppression of animal rights activism being the new goal. His main thesis is that HSUS is now a radical animal rights organization seeking to abolish all an

Research

Huge Microbe's Value Lies In More Than Just Sheer Size

"Word's biggest bacterium found in a fish," declared the front- page headline in a March 1993 edition of USA Today, while the New York Times trumpeted its coverage with: "In the world of bacteria, a behemoth." Even the relatively staid science journals couldn't resist. Science announced the identification of "Monsters from the guts," and Nature's header read "Giant among the prokaryotes." The extraordinary flurry of interest--and imagery--was over an article in Nature (E.R. Angert, et al., 362: