Notebook

Average full-time salaries in academia for 1995-96 rose more rapidly than the Consumer Price Index for the third consecutive year, according to a newly released survey by the Washington, D.C.-based American Association of University Professors. This year's edition of the annual study found that average faculty pay increased 2.9 percent, or 0.4 percent above the 2.5 percent inflation rate. However, Daniel S. Hamermesh, author of the survey report, cautioned in his text (Academe, 82[2]:14-108, March-April 1996) that while such an average increase sounds generous, "it should be compared to the increase among all colleges and universities for continuing faculty." Hamermesh, a professor of economics at the University of Texas, Austin, explained in the report that increases for "continuing faculty"-those who were on the same campus last year and this year-exceeded by 1.1 percentage points those for all faculty, meaning all those present in a given year. "The reason for this excess is that among the faculty members who are included in the All Faculty data . . . are new hires, most of whom are lower-paid junior faculty. Most of those excluded from those data are people who retired after 1994-95, most of whom are higher-paid," he wrote. Thus, "for a campus to have kept up with the national average salary increase last year, its [increase] for continuing faculty would have needed to be 4 percent. In short, at a time when average salaries are rising in real terms, faculty members should not be fooled into thinking that their campus is keeping up with the average when the administration announces an [average increase] for continuing faculty that is just slightly ahead of inflation." NEW RITUAL: Slide shown at Godfrey Oakley's lecture depicts bride taking folic pill. You won't need to check out Bloomingdale's bridal registry before going to a wedding if you follow Godfrey Oakley's advice. Oakley, director of the division of birth defects and developmental disabilities at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, pointed out in a talk April 8 at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia that we are in the midst of an epidemic of birth defects, an epidemic that is curable by a simple method. Speaking at a symposium in honor of Jefferson pediatrician and teratologist Robert L. Brent (Notebook, The Scientist, April 1, 1996, page 30), Oakley recommended that women of reproductive age take a folic acid supplement daily. Numerous studies have shown that the higher the dose of folic acid given a mother, the lower the percentage of babies born with spina bifida and neural tube defects. Oakley explained that the currently recommended dose, 400 mg per day, really is not high enough, and women should be taking 700 mg or as much as 1,500 mg per day as a supplement. In the United States in 1993, 2,400 children were born with neural tube defects. Folic acid supplementation would decrease that number by 75 percent or more. That's where the bridal registry comes in. Oakley suggested that the best present you can give a bride is a year's supply of a folic acid supplement (or, if you can't find plain folic acid, a multivitamin containing at least 400 mg of folic acid, but preferably 700 to 1,500 mg)-and make sure she takes her first tablet at the wedding reception. Jeff Baxter has played guitar for the Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan, is a two-time Grammy Award winner, and continues to produce albums and write music for commercials, films, and television shows. But his new gig is considerably more highbrow: serving on a congressional advisory panel on missile-defense technology. The assignment, from Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), created a bit of a stir when Defense Week magazine reported that Baxter's claim to have worked for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was untrue. "He did work with scientists for NASA," Weldon's press secretary, Pete Peterson, states. "When he wrote his r}sum}, he wrote it as working for NASA. It was a misunderstanding in that regards." While the task may seem like heady stuff for a rock-and-roller, Baxter actually has a bit of a background as an amateur scientist. His review of defense trade publications on new technology that could be used in musical instruments and recording equipment he was developing led to a concern for missile-technology issues, and he wrote an unpublished paper on the AEGIS naval missile defense system six years ago. The paper, and the response it generated when he circulated it privately, caught the eye of Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), whom Baxter now advises on science and technology issues. "[Weldon] met him when he was holding field hearings in California with Dana Rohrabacher," Peterson tells The Scientist. "He was amazed at how knowledgeable [Baxter] was on this issue. He knows missile defense technology inside and out, according to the congressman." Baxter, a 47-year-old college dropout, has also written op-ed pieces about NATO (Los Angeles Times, Jan. 9, 1994, page M-5; Washington Times, Jan. 10, 1994, page A-23). He plans to clean up his résumé and has a response to critics who demean his credentials: "They're more than welcome to say what they want, but when I talk to people in the Navy and in the aerospace industry, they're curious. They want to know if you can walk it as well as you talk it. And I've gotten very favorable comments. . . . There's a great deal of information available out there. If you do your homework, you can avail yourself of a tremendous amount of knowledge." No, this isn't the late Jerry Garcia's band. It's medical database-searching software from the National Library of Medicine (NLM). The newest version, Internet Grateful Med, debuted earlier this month. Now, equipped with a password and access to the Internet, physicians, researchers, and students will be able to more quickly search MEDLINE, the medical database of peer-reviewed journals. However, a recent contract dispute between two data-input services-General Services Graphics and Atlis Publishing Services-puts a damper on this news. Because of the disagreement, a backlog of citations has been accumulating at about 1,700 per day since late February. But, remarks Sheldon Kotzin, chief of the bibliographic services division, NLM staff and temporary government employees have been entering about 600 references and abstracts per day to try to keep up with the most important journals. According to NLM, Internet Grateful Med obviates the need to purchase the software or upgrades, although existing connect charges will remain. NLM reports that 48 percent of Grateful Med searches are used for research, with 52 percent used directly for patient care. For more information, contact Larry Kingsland, NLM, 8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, Md. 20894. Phone and fax: (301) 496-9300. E-mail: kingsland@nlm.nih.gov. Access Internet Grateful Med by visiting NLM's World Wide Web home page at http://www.nlm.nih.gov. The Human Genome Project, the United States government's ambitious 15-year program to detail the entire human genetic legacy, is preparing for its third and final stage: figuring out the order of approximately 3 billion chemical bases of human DNA. The National Center for Human Genome Research (NCHGR), a key project player and part of the National Institutes of Health, is launching a pilot study to find out if large-scale genome sequencing is feasible. The project will involve six U.S. research centers and is estimated to cost $60 million over three years. "This initiative gives as many labs as possible an opportunity to pursue their ideas about the best way to scale up" sequencing the human genome, maintains Mark Guyer, NCHGR assistant director for program coordination. "Then we'll assess which strategies work best and which groups have the best capabilities." Yet, he says, "the big question is, when does scale-up become inefficient?" Stanford geneticist Richard Myers, who heads one of the six funded centers, explains that the research teams will sequence roughly 5 percent of the human genome in the next three years. "We hope we'll learn how to improve the rate, decrease the costs, improve automation-everything that will let us do the other 95 percent [of the genome] after that." One of the concerns is over accuracy. The teams will strive for a level approaching one error in 10,000 bases, or 99.99 percent. But, Guyer notes, no one knows yet if that level is necessary, or cost-effective. The results will be placed in public databases, including GenBank, Genome Sequence DataBase, and World Wide Web pages of project sites. The recipients and their first-year awards are Washington University, St. Louis ($6.7 million); Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Cambridge, Mass. ($4.1 million); The Institute for Genomic Research, Rockville, Md. ($3.2 million); Stanford University ($2.5 million); Baylor College of Medicine, Houston ($1.3 million); and the University of Washington, Seattle ($1 million). FIRST PRIZE: Beatrice Mintz and Ralph Brinster won inaugural March of Dimes award. Two Philadelphia scientists have been awarded the first March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology. Beatrice Mintz, a senior member of the Institute for Cancer Research at the Fox Chase Cancer Center, and Ralph L. Brinster, the Richard King Mellon Professor of Reproductive Biology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, were honored at a ceremony earlier this month in New York. The two researchers shared the $100,000 cash award. The White Plains, N.J.-based March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation will give the award every year to recognize those who have made "a seminal discovery" in developmental biology relevant to research on birth defects, and "who have not previously received a major prize for their work." Working independently, Mintz and Brinster were honored for contributions in developing transgenic mice, now a staple in labs worldwide. As a basic biomedical researcher, Mintz is heartened by the award, saying it's "remarkable" for the foundation to recognize fundamental investigations, "not specific applications," especially for an organization's initial prize. Brinster notes that "the work of [mouse geneticist] Leroy Stevens at the Jackson Laboratory [in Bar Harbor, Maine] really stimulated me. I think he also influenced everyone in the field." Stephens's research on teratocarcinomas in the 1950s and 1960s led to Brinster's development of culture techniques that are key in making the genetically engineered mice. The paper describing that methodology (R.L. Brinster, Experimental Cell Research, 32:205-8, 1963) has been designated a Citation Classic by the Philadelphia-based Institute for Scientific Information, having been cited in more than 350 publications through February 1996. Mintz's landmark paper on chimeric mice, those containing DNA from several individuals (B. Mintz, K. Illmensee, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 72:3585-9, 1975), has been cited in nearly 550 publications. Another ground-breaking paper describing this research is B. Mintz, Science, 148:1232-3, 1965. In 1994, Mintz won the city of Philadelphia's John Scott Award (N. Sankaran, The Scientist, Dec. 12, 1994, page 23). The March of Dimes prize was created to honor Jonas Salk, the developer of the polio vaccine. As a tribute to the April 12, 1955, announcement that the vaccine was safe and effective, the March of Dimes plans to give the award on April 12 each year. When we last left Viktor Brenner, the State University of New York, Buffalo, doctoral psychology student was posting his online survey of psychological effects of Internet use and abuse to determine whether the phenomenon of Net addiction exists (Notebook, The Scientist, March 18, 1996, page 30). Preliminary results indicate the answer is yes. More than 400 users visited the survey site on the World Wide Web; of the 185 people who completed it, 17 percent reported spending more than 40 hours a week on the Net, although it could not be determined how much of that time is job-related. Forty percent of respondents tried to arrange a face-to-face meeting of people they had met through the Net, and nearly half felt their work may have suffered as a result of their time spent surfing. The average number of hours spent online per week was 21. Brenner's take is that "there is a subgroup of people who, as a result of Internet use, experience more interference than normal with their other roles in life." Brenner, a counselor at Marquette University, says: "The fact that almost everybody that took the survey has had some kind of time-management problems at some time . . . was quite striking." For lack of a better term, he refers to it reluctantly as "Internet addiction," although he claims it's more like pathological gambling in the way both lead to interference with a person's roles in life, such as those concerning family, friends, and employment. "The term addiction is misleading because technically it implies some kind of psychological dependence on the substance," Brenner explains. He hopes to continue analyzing results and refining the survey to get a more representative sample of Net users, and has submitted his first set of results to a journal he declines to name. The survey is accessible at http://www.mu.edu/dept/ccenter/intro_srv.html; results can be found on the Web at http://www.ccsnet.com/prep, on the psychology preprint bulletin board.

Notebook

The Scientist Staff

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