Notebook

Nobel laureate David Baltimore will assume the presidency of the California Institute of Technology this fall. Baltimore, 59, tells The Scientist he is leaving his post as a professor of molecular biology and immunology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has been since 1994, because Caltech is "one of the premier scientific organizations in the world." Baltimore's tenure as president of Rockefeller University in New York lasted just 18 months; he resigned in late 1991 in the midst of a furor caused by a paper (D. Weaver et al., Cell, 45:247-59, 1986) he coauthored with Thereza Imanishi-Kari, who was accused of falsifying data to obtain better results. Baltimore, who was not accused of wrongdoing, nevertheless became a lightning rod for controversy and a subject of congressional hearings for defending Imanishi-Kari, who was later cleared by an appeals panel of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (B. Goodman, The Scientist, Aug. 19, 1996, page 1). Baltimore believes the appeals panel decision has vastly changed the circumstances from his Rockefeller days, vindicating him and Imanishi-Kari. Asked why a life scientist would take the reins at Caltech, he replies that the school wants to increase its involvement in biology and to "catalyze" research that links biology with other sciences. Caltech provost David L. Goodstein, a professor of physics and applied physics and the Frank J. Gilloon Distinguished Teaching and Service Professor, reports that "the entire faculty is delighted" about Baltimore's appointment. As for possible concern over his stormy Rockefeller tenure, Goodstein tells The Scientist: "We believe that his experience at Rockefeller would have been an extremely positive one, except that he was blindsided by, shall we say, an exercise of congressional power." Baltimore will remain as head of the National Institutes of Health's AIDS Vaccine Research Committee, and will continue to conduct immunology research at his MIT lab. The French codiscoverer of HIV is coming to America. Luc Montagnier will leave his post as head of the department of virology at the Institut Pasteur in Paris to join Queens College, part of City University of New York, as the first Bernard and Gloria Salick Distinguished Professor in Molecular and Cellular Biology, a newly endowed position. Montagnier, who was unavailable for comment, and his team isolated HIV in 1983 (Opinion, The Scientist, Dec. 13, 1993, page 11). In addition to funding the professorship, the Salicks' $4.5 million gift will provide the initial funding to construct a molecular and cellular biology center at Queens, which Montagnier will direct and whose goal will be the development of AIDS treatments. Corporate, private, and federal funds also will be used to build the center. Montagnier plans to begin his work in New York in October, though he will remain as president of the nonprofit World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention and continue to run a lab at the Institut Pasteur. Photo: G. Paul Bishop 'LONG AGO' DISCOVERY: Bruce Ames is one of the four recipients of this year’s Japan Prize. Last month Bruce N. Ames, 68, director of the Environmental Health Sciences Center at the University of California, Berkeley (http://mendel.berkeley.edu/Center.homepage.htm), was awarded the Japan Prize for his lifelong work with carcinogens. He shared the award for biotechnology in medicine with Takashi Sugimura, 70, president, emeritus, of the National Cancer Center and president of Toho University, both in Japan. Two robotics engineers-Joseph F. Engelberger, 71, chairman and director of Danbury, Conn.-based HelpMate Robotics Inc., and Hiroyuki Yoshikawa, 63, president of the University of Tokyo-shared the award for systems engineering for an artifactual environment. Each received a medal and 25 million yen (about $210,000) at a ceremony in Tokyo on April 25. Ames and Sugimura were honored for their independent discoveries that many carcinogens were also mutagenic. In the late 1960s Ames created a widely used tool-commonly called the Ames test-that determines if a carcinogen is mutagenic. "When people ask me if I'm the 'Ames' of the Ames test, I say: 'That was so long ago, that was my father,'" he jokes. Ames, also a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at UC-Berkeley, and his collaborators currently are examining the relationship of aging, nutrition, and cancer. Their work appears in four papers in the April 1, 1997, issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: T.M. Hagen et al., 94:3064-9; M.K. Shigenaga et al., 94:3211-6; S. Christen et al., 94:3217-22; B.C. Blount et al., 94:3290-5. Teaching assistants (T.A.'s) at four University of California (UC) campuses-UC-Berkeley, UC-San Diego, UC-Santa Cruz, and UCLA-staged brief strikes earlier this month to win recognition of their respective unions as official bargaining units. T.A.'s at UC-Santa Barbara were preparing to vote on a strike proposal at press time. A similar strike hit UCLA, UC-Berkeley, and UC-San Diego last fall (R. Finn, The Scientist, Jan. 6, 1997, page 1). "There's a moral obligation to respect the democratic rights of workers to union representation," contends Scott Prudham, an executive board member of the Association of Graduate Student Employees (AGSE), UAW Local 2165 at UC-Berkeley, who points out that more than 1,000 of the campus's 1,700 T.A.'s have signed up with AGSE. Last September, a California Public Employee Relations Board (PERB) administrative law judge ruled that T.A.'s at UCLA are entitled to collective bargaining; however, UC officials say it applies only to UCLA, not the entire system, and have appealed the ruling. The university contends that collective bargaining would "strain academic relationships," since many grad students work closely with their faculty-member mentors, and could interfere with graduate and undergraduate students' learning. "The informational activities by the students interested in collective bargaining have been very minimal, and to date the work stoppages have been very limited," says Ellen Switkes, UC's vice president for academic advancement. Photo: Michael Dinneen FINALLY FUNDED: After months of delay, Alaska’s Dennis Fisher has received a $3 million federal grant to study if needle-exchange programs halt the spread of the hepatitis B virus. A controversial needle-exchange clinical trial led by University of Alaska, Anchorage, psychology professor Dennis G. Fisher finally received the go-ahead this month from federal officials. The $2.7 million, three-year study, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), will compare the incidence of hepatitis B virus (HBV) among intravenous drug abusers who obtain clean syringes through needle-exchange programs and those who purchase syringes at pharmacies. The goal is to determine whether one method is better at preventing the spread of disease. The study had been delayed since January, a week after NIDA offered its verbal approval, when Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), who chairs the House Subcommittee on Human Resources, asked National Institutes of Health director Harold Varmus for further review of the project. In October, Washington, D.C.-based consumer watchdog group Public Citizen complained that the study design denied equal access to clean syringes, putting many subjects at risk for hepatitis, and that an infectious disease was an inappropriate study end point. But Fisher said that no one was restricted from obtaining clean needles and that vouchers for hepatitis vaccines would be provided. Varmus subsequently appointed a special review panel, which okayed the study in December (S. Benowitz, The Scientist, Feb. 3, 1997, page 1). Shays's request that Varmus reexamine the study led to extra funding for additional vaccine vouchers, a lengthening of the informed consent document, and greater detailing of infection risks. While Fisher is relieved he can go on with the work, the subcommittee will continue to monitor the study. AWARDEES: H. Guyford Stever, left, recipient of NSF’s Vannevar Bush Award, and Eric A. Cornell, who won the Alan T. Waterman Award A pioneering planetary scientist and two physicists were honored at the National Science Board's annual awards dinner in early May. The late Carl Sagan was posthumously given the National Science Foundation Director's Public Service Award for lifetime achievement. Eric R. Cornell, 35, a fellow at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics-a cooperative program between the University of Colorado and the National Institute of Standards and Technology-received the Alan T. Waterman Award, which honors "an outstanding young U.S. scientist who is at the forefront of science." Cornell, who was on the team that first demonstrated the Bose-Einstein condensation in a gas (M.H. Anderson et al., Science, 269:198, 1995), will receive $500,000 over the next three years. He notes that "it certainly means I won't need to write a grant proposal this fall." Physicist H. Guyford Stever, 80, was honored with the Vannevar Bush Award for his 55-year career in scientific research, policy, and education. During World War II, Stever worked for Bush as a liaison with the British Anti-Aircraft Projectile program. "Bush had a tremendous impact on my life," recalls Stever, who was named NSF director in 1972 and the first head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy four years later. Since 1977 Stever has worked extensively in the private sector, on university-research associations, and with the national academies of engineering and sciences. Amid studies indicating that women in science still face more difficulties than men do (E.R. Silverman, The Scientist, April 14, 1997, page 1), eight of the United States' top female scientists gathered at the Emma Willard School in Troy, N.Y., on May 16 and 17 for a symposium entitled "Curiosity & Confidence: Girls Claiming Science." The eight talked about changing how science is taught and obstacles women face, among other topics. "In spite of all that we've done to obliterate the inequalities for boys and girls, it's still very hard," says participant Nina Fedoroff, the Willaman Professor of Life Sciences and director of both the Biotechnology Institute and the Life Sciences Consortium at Pennsylvania State University. "Cultural biases remain. The younger that young women acquire the feeling that they can be anything they want to be, the more likely it is that they will do that." Jaleh Daie, president of the Association for Women in Science, moderated a discussion on the relationship of science, confidence, and curiosity. She urged girls in the audience not to let "norms and rules and culture to exclude you from succeeding in science." She laments to The Scientist: "Children are born like a question mark. By the time they go through the educational system, we turn them into periods." Surveys show that high school students worry about AIDS more than the environment or drugs, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that new AIDS cases among 13- to 25-year-olds infected through sex and intravenous needles jumped 20 percent between 1990 and 1995. Such information has led in part to a new program that combines workbook and video lessons to put AIDS education into biology classrooms. Launched earlier this year, "The Science of HIV" teaches teens about the biology of HIV infection. It was developed by the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) of Arlington, Va., and Abbott Park, Ill.-based Abbott Laboratories. "While health-education classes present HIV and AIDS in terms of prevention and in the context of sex education, we thought some focus should be on the science and biology of HIV," says NSTA assistant editor Jocelyn Lofstrom, who adds that project developers wanted to avoid moralizing. "We thought that learning some of the biology added more context, rather than just telling them what behaviors to avoid." The curriculum includes a 184-page teacher's guide with lab activities, readings, and discussions, along with a 30-minute video. The focus is on cell biology, virus and HIV structure, immune system function and virus infection, and the latest drugs and prevention methods. "The ultimate hope is that kids change their behavior," says Lofstrom. BODIES OF WORK: Nearly 120 prints, drawings, and anatomical atlases exploring the link between anatomy and art are on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through June 15. "The Ingenious Machine of Nature: Four Centuries of Art and Anatomy" features works dating from the late 15th century to the early 19th century, including Jacques Gameline’s "Skeleton Kneeling in Prayer before a Shelf of Books" (1779), and Peter Paul Rubens’s "Ecorche Warriors in Combat" (1606-10).

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