Notebook

The National Science Foundation has joined the National Institutes of Health in considering changes to its peer-review system of rating grant applications (T.W. Durso, The Scientist, Dec. 9, 1996, page 1). NSF's current four-criteria system-assessing research performance and competence, intrinsic merit, utility or relevance, and the research's effect on science and engineering infrastructure-has been in place since 1981. NSF officials say it's time to revisit the criteria and that the proposed changes would be clearer to applicants and easier for them to respond to. The new, two-part system, recommended by a Task Force on Merit Review established by the National Science Board (NSB), NSF's governing body, would require applicants to describe the "intellectual merit and quality" of their proposals, as well as their "broader impacts." The proposal is posted on NSF's Web site (http://www.nsf.gov), where researchers can respond with their views. Comments also can be E-mailed to meritrev@nsf.gov and are due by January 31. NSB will consider the recommendations and public comments this spring, and any changes would be implemented later this year. The 3,000 tenured faculty members at the University of Minnesota have escaped significant revisions to the school's tenure code (R. Finn, The Scientist, Nov. 11, 1996, page 1). Amid a faculty push to unionize, Minnesota's Board of Regents recently imposed less radical changes only on 35 tenured law-school faculty members, who could not collect enough signatures to consider unionizing. (The regents cannot change personnel policies for the rest of the faculty until its unionization issue is resolved.) The controversial original proposal would have allowed tenured faculty members to be fired if their programs were eliminated, provided for reductions in base pay without formal procedures, and instituted a rigorous post-tenure review system. The new code for the law faculty members eliminates the layoff provision and allows base salaries to be reduced during fiscally troubled times, only collectively and by a vote of the regents and Faculty Senate. "That [revised] tenure code is certainly less harmful than what the board originally proposed," comments Ernst Benjamin, an associate general secretary for the Washington, D.C.-based American Association of University Professors, who was in Minnesota discussing tenure and academic freedom while deliberations on the proposal were occurring. Still, Benjamin worries that the regents may decide to change the tenure policy at Minnesota's medical school and wonders what the board will do if the faculty eventually unionizes. "It's really a time of waiting and seeing," he says. ADVOCATE: FASEB's John Suttie wants NIH's budget boosted again in FY98 (FASEB) is urging Congress to hike its National Institutes of Health budget outlay for FY98. The Clinton administration is currently hammering out its proposed budget for NIH and other agencies. FASEB president John Suttie, a professor of biochemistry and nutritional sciences at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, announced December 9 that the organization recommends a 6.5 percent increase over the FY97 level for NIH research. This increase is approximately the same percentage as the one NIH received for FY97 over the FY96 level. "In the past few years, Congress has consistently supported NIH," says Suttie. "We recognize that funds are scarce, but we feel we need this increase to maintain the nation's investment in biological research." The budget negotiation process will heat up in February, he notes, when President Clinton submits his budget request to Congress. One of the most elite liberal arts schools in the United States has named a cancer researcher as its next president. Thomas R. Tritton, the vice provost at the University of Vermont, will take the reins at Haverford College, located in suburban Philadelphia, on July 1. Tritton has held his current post for the last five years; prior to that, he was a professor of pharmacology in Vermont's College of Medicine and a member of Yale University's pharmacology department. As a researcher, Tritton studies cancer chemotherapy; as an administrator, he tells The Scientist, he has tried to apply a "scholarly, scientific, analytical, quantitative" approach. Asked whether he will continue his research, the 48-year-old Tritton is noncommittal: "Haverford is a very different kind of place. My real interest is in trying to participate in the education of the next generation of scientists. Haverford is really full of hot young students and faculty doing science." GOAL: Incoming Haverford president Thomas Tritton wants to educate scientists AUCTIONED OFF: This rare triceratops skull was sold for $65,000. A FINE SPECIMEN: This opalescent ammonite was also on the auction block. of possible relic biogenic activity in a Martian meteorite was reported (D. McKay et al., Science, 273:924-9, 1996), Phillips Fine Art Auctioneers in New York recently held what was billed as the largest sale of meteorites-including four specimens from Mars-ever to take place. Rare dinosaur eggs, other fossils, and gems were also listed in the preview catalog for the December 14 sale. In total, close to 400 specimens were being auctioned off. Some of the premier pieces did not reach the undisclosed minimum bid requested by their sellers, so they were not sold at the event. Three pieces of the Zagami meteorite, which landed in the Katsina Province of Nigeria in 1962 and was confirmed in 1995 to have originated from Mars, were on the block. The largest chunk, weighing in at 7.6 grams and estimated to bring in $14,000 to $18,000, did not sell. Bidding on it stopped at $11,000. Smaller pieces of the same meteorite did find buyers: a vial containing 12 grains weighing a total of 0.1 gram sold for $550, while a 1.3-gram, triangular piece went for $2,000. According to David Herskowitz, who organizes Phillips's annual natural history auction, these were records in terms of dollars-per-gram paid for Martian meteorites. Two rare dinosaur eggs with exposed embryonic skeletons also remained unsold. Bidding on those stopped at $32,000 each. Other dinosaur fossils fared better. A nest of five raptor eggs, each measuring about six inches, sold for $9,000. And a 94 percent complete skull of a young adult triceratops found in South Dakota sold for $65,000. ENERGY-SAVING: Michigan's Beverly Strassman has developed an alternative theory of why women menstruate. According to biological anthropologist Beverly Strassman at the University of Michigan, women menstruate to save energy. The monthly growth and retreat of endometrial tissue in the uterus takes less energy than keeping the blood-filled endometrium ready to receive an embryo. Her argument, reported in the Quarterly Review of Biology (B.I. Strassman, 71:181-220, 1996), rebuts a rival theory from Margie Profet (M. Profet, Quarterly Review of Biology, 68:335-86, 1993) that proposes that menstruation evolved to cleanse the uterus of sperm-borne bacteria. "Maintaining the endometrium when it's not needed-when there's no fertilized egg-is a waste of energy," says Strassman, an assistant professor of anthropology who found that whole-body metabolic rate is about 7 percent lower after menstruation than during the time of implantation of an embryo. "It makes sense that it's partly shed and partly resorbed." She based her paper on her review of the literature and her experience with the polygamous Dogon women in Mali, West Africa, who menstruate rarely. Dogon women between ages 20 and 34 have an average of four periods in two years because they are usually pregnant or nursing. Yet the women continue to have intercourse without added bacterial infections, and menstruation doesn't offer any protection. What's more, Strassman contends, if menstruation evolved to prevent bacterial infections, then those who have sex more frequently should have heavier menstrual flows-but she found no evidence of that happening. Strassman studied the Dogon for 31 months, which allowed her to document the absence of menstruation when contraception was not used. Ever since their discovery in 1985, researchers have proposed that buckyballs-the 60-carbon-atom spheres named for architect R. Buckminster Fuller-would be the new rage in drug delivery (see story on page 14). Now, a team of Italian chemists headed by Maurizio Prato of the University of Trieste has shown for the first time that the soccer-ball-shaped molecules can be used to fight infection caused by certain bacteria and fungi. The group attached a nicotine molecule to a buckyball to form a new substance they termed fulleronicotine (M. Prato et al., Journal of Organic Chemistry, 61:9070-2, 1996). Nicotine, they note in the paper, "has a range of biological activities and is used as a pharmacological tool in a number of applications." They also attached a modified glycine molecule to the nicotine appendage to make the fulleronicotine water-soluble, which is necessary for biological screening. The researchers showed that fulleronicotine was active against a wide range of pathogens, including Mycobacterium avium, an emerging species of bacteria associated with HIV infection and resistant to most antimicrobial drugs. Although Prato will not go so far as to say that this research constitutes a new area of biomedicine, he does state that "we may certainly say that now it will be easier to study the still-unexplored biological properties of buckyballs. We are currently exploring the mechanism of inhibition of the fullerenes on the growth of bacteria and trying to increase that activity." Acclaimed fossil-hunter Mary Leakey, 83, once dubbed "the grande dame of archaeology" by biographer Virginia Morell, died on December 9 in Nairobi, Kenya. According to an obituary in the New York Times (J.N. Wilford, Dec. 10, 1996, page A1), Leakey had spent more than 50 years in Africa "scratching the dirt for clues to early human physical and cultural evolution." Says paleontologist Alan Walker, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Biology at Pennsylvania State University, who worked with Leakey in 1985: "She set the standards in archaeology with her meticulous documentation." Among her accomplishments, Leakey and her husband, anthropologist Louis Leakey, who died in 1972, unearthed the fossils of the 1.75 million-year-old Homo habilis at Tanzania's Olduvai Gorge in 1964, making the name Leakey "synonymous with the study of human origins," according to the Times report. In 1978, she made her most sensational discovery: the earliest footprints of a human ancestor, which she uncovered in volcanic ash at Laetoli in Tanzania. The finding showed that the human ancestor Australopithecus afarenses walked upright much earlier than previously thought, roughly 3.7 million years ago, and exhibited the earliest known traces of human behavior. Leakey, who never finished high school, retired from field work in 1983. She was an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and she received nine honorary doctorates from such prestigious universities as Yale, Cambridge, and Oxford. Says Walker: "She was one of the world's great originals."

Notebook

The Scientist Staff

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of