Notebook

As Congress readied for recess, approaching the end of the 1996 fiscal year on October 1, it hurriedly passed several spending bills for fiscal year 1997. Some, such as the Veterans Administration, Housing and Urban Development, and Independent Agencies bills, included provisions for various R&D agencies, including the National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Other agency budgets, such as that of the Department of Health and Human Services, weren't finalized by the October 1 deadline and were lumped into a catch-all bill, the Omnibus Appropriations Bill. For many agencies, the congressional move was a welcome change from last year's series of continuing resolutions. NSF received a $3.27 billion budget, a 2 percent hike (or $50 million) over the FY 1996 level. "It's the first time in my memory over the last six years that we've had our budget passed before the fiscal year began," says David Stoner, NSF senior legislative policy analyst. "The problem is, when you're part of a package bill, it's not as easy to make sure the appropriations committee pays attention to those areas of interest that concern you. Overall, given the budget climate, NSF is extremely pleased." The National Institutes of Health fared even better, receiving $820 million over last year's funding level, or a 6.9 percent raise, to $12.7 billion. Rep. George E. Brown, Jr. apparently believes in the old axiom that if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. The California Democrat had heard both Bill Clinton's and congressional Republicans' plans to balance the federal budget by the year 2002, and was not happy with how either proposal would treat science funding. In a recent news conference, Brown unveiled his own balanced-budget-by-2002 plan, under which research and development would enjoy an annual increase of 5 percent, resulting in about $38 billion more than the president has offered and $49 billion more than the GOP plan. Brown calls for discretionary spending on defense to remain at the level Clinton proposed for 1997-eliminating Clinton's proposed cuts over the next two years as well as both his and the GOP's planned increases in the ensuing "out years." Growth in defense R&D would be mostly in basic and applied research instead of weapons systems development. Domestic, nondefense discretionary spending would remain constant, rather than decreasing as in the other plans. The necessary cuts would come in areas of "programmatic reform," such as the recently passed welfare bill. Brown would increase revenue by closing tax loopholes and not instituting a tax cut. He tells The Scientist that his blueprint came at least partly out of budget-related conversations with Clinton and his staff. "Part of the reaction I get when I talk to the president and Leon Panetta, both as chief of staff and when he was head of [the Office of Management and Budget], is, 'George, what other parts of the budget are you going to cut if you want increases in R&D spending?'" Because he had heard the question so often, he opted to create a scenario in which the budget gets balanced and federal support for research and development is extended. "This is a vehicle to help persuade, but we're hopeful [the president] will respond to it," Brown states. As House members departed the 104th Congress to set about the task of conducting re-election campaigns, an ad hoc group was assessing how they voted on science issues. Calling itself Science Watch (no relation to the newsletter published by the Philadelphia-based Institute for Scientific Information) and including several Nobel laureates and former government science officials, the organization tracked 30 roll-call votes, mostly on amendments to bills, to develop the Science Scoreboard. According to Science Watch's Martin Apple, who also is the executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Council of Scientific Society Presidents, the votes, "whether favorable or unfavorable, impact the quality review process of science; promote or prohibit specific types of research; eliminate or increase what we thought was science needed to improve national decision-making; promote or curtail science education; or directly increase investment or decrease it." Only about 90 legislators earned what Science Watch considers a satisfactory score, defined as voting on the "correct" side of an issue at least 75 percent of the time. Democrats who scored well included Reps. John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania; Rick Boucher of Virginia; George E. Brown, Jr. of California; Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland; Tom Bevill of Alabama; and Ken Bentsen, Sheila Jackson-Lee, E.B. Johnson, Ronald D. Coleman, and Martin Frost of Texas. Their GOP counterparts were James A. Hayes of Louisiana; Amo Houghton, Sherwood L. Boehlert, and James T. Walsh of New York; Nancy L. Johnson of Connecticut; James C. Greenwood and William F. Clinger, Jr. of Pennsylvania; Constance A. Morella of Maryland; Thomas M. Davis III of Virginia; C.W. Bill Young of Florida; Paul E. Gillmor of Ohio; and Vernon J. Ehlers of Michigan. Apple concedes that the Science Scoreboard is not perfect. Still, he contends that it can be useful in helping to "provide a leading indicator on the long-term future health of science." Last month marked the start of an international effort to completely sequence the first plant genome. The consortium of researchers from the United States, Japan, and Europe hopes to have the full sequence of Arabidopsis thaliana, a member of the mustard family, by 2004. In the U.S. the National Science Foundation is the lead agency, providing two-thirds of the $12 million U.S. contribution. The Department of Energy (DOE) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture are also supporting the project, with the National Institutes of Health contributing expertise, but no money. Researchers at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory; Washington University in St. Louis; Applied Biosystems Corp., a division of Perkin-Elmer Corp. in Forest City, Calif.; Stanford University; the University of Pennsylvania; the University of California, Berkeley; and The Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Md., will participate. Investigators hope to learn basic botanical information on the plant life cycle, as well as an array of practical applications. These include potential agricultural and pharmaceutical spinoffs. DOE is hoping the plant genome will eventually reveal new ways to clean up polluted soils at the agency's former nuclear weapons sites. "We're interested in phytoremediation, along with the production of biomass for alternative fuels," remarks Gregory Dilworth, director of DOE's division of energy biosciences. SLICE OF LIFE: The subjects featured in the Visible Human Project It's amazing what the elimination of formaldehyde can do. A little less than two years ago, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) posted its Visible Human Project on the Internet (Notebook, The Scientist, May 16, 1994, page 4), and the hits just keep on coming. The stars of the show are a 39-year-old convicted murder who was executed by lethal injection in Texas and a 59-year-old Maryland housewife who died of a heart attack. Both had willed their bodies to science. NLM funded Colorado researchers who sliced the bodies into 1-millimeter-thick sections, then used digitized photography, computerized tomography, and magnetic resonance imaging to produce a three-dimensional image database of the two. Anyone can access the project; the only stipulation is that users must sign a licensing agreement and keep NLM informed of how they are using the information. According to library officials, more than 600 such agreements covering 26 countries have been signed. "It's astounding to us," project director Michael Ackerman, NLM's assistant director for high-performance computing and communications, tells The Scientist. "We never near envisioned 600 licenses." Last week, NLM officials were scheduled to conduct a press briefing demonstrating some of the project's uses-dissecting a cadaver without destroying the specimen, for example, and practicing surgical techniques without actually operating on a patient. But there have been nontraditional uses as well. Lawyers are accessing the project to demonstrate clients' injuries to juries, and artists to gain better views of the human form. Some parents believe the project will give their kids a better shot at medical school. Not that NLM minds the different applications. As Ackerman puts it, "We're a public institution, and we're happy to oblige." The Visible Human Project can be found at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible/. TELEVISION STAR: Mr. Wizard and guest. Children's television icon Don Herbert, more commonly known as Mr. Wizard, was recognized last month for his continuing contribution to science education. He received a plaque from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences during the 50th anniversary celebration of children's television, held in North Hollywood, Calif. Herbert started his career 45 years ago with the weekly series "Watch Mr. Wizard," which lasted for 14 years. On each show, Herbert and his grade-school-aged guests would explore scientific principles by performing simple experiments. Herbert, who has produced television science shows since 1951, says the celebration "emphasizes that there has been some good children's television over the years." His newest project, "Teacher to Teacher with Mr. Wizard," is a series of TV documentaries depicting teachers doing hands-on, inquiry-based science. These programs are meant for teachers to videotape for later use. "We're sort of using television as a distribution medium," notes Herbert. But you'll have to get up early to turn on the VCR-"Teacher to Teacher" airs at 5:00 a.m. Tuesdays on Nickelodeon. WARTS AND ALL: Cell biologist Kristen Kroll of Harvard University and a transgenic tadpole Embryos of Xenopus laevis, or the African clawed frog, have long been friends of embryologists because they are easily accessible and readily develop in a culture dish. Yet researchers finds the frog embryos frustratingly difficult to genetically manipulate and to follow through development into a tadpole. But Kristen Kroll, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of cell biology at Harvard Medical School, along with colleague Enrique Amaya, now at Wellcome/CRC Institute in Cambridge, U.K., hope to have alleviated such problems. They have devised an inexpensive, no-frills method of making transgenic frogs. Kroll expects the new technique to help open the study of frog embryology to modern genetic manipulation, as has occurred with transgenic and knock-out mice. The idea, she explains, is to watch how the introduced gene affects development. Genes Kroll has inserted include a muscle-specific actin promoter and a nerve-specific promoter. These link to various proteins and allow scientists to follow cell expression. "We linked it to a jellyfish fluorescent protein, and if you link to this muscle-specific actin protein, you can see [the frogs'] hearts beating and glowing. That lets us look at embryos developing in real time, and [even to look at] bits of tissue in our dish, deciding what they're going to be, turning on and off genes," she says. "For scientists interested in studying early development and understanding the cascade of genes involved, it will be useful to look in frogs. It will be useful for scientists studying other vetebrates who want to find the control elements of a gene and want a rapid test of what their gene does." She plans to use the method to study specific molecular pathways of tissue and organ development.

Notebook

The Scientist Staff

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