Notebook

Robert Walker (R-Pa.) surprised many of his colleagues both in and out of Congress with his December 15 announcement of plans to resign his seat when his term ends later this year. Walker, known as a staunch supporter of government-funded basic research, has headed the committee since 1995. He has also been a controversial figure, advocating merging federal science committees into a single cabinet-level agency. Many contend that Walker's departure will leave a void that will be difficult to fill. National Science Foundation director Neal Lane applauds Walker's effort on behalf of securing dollars for the nation's basic research. "He'll be missed. NSF has enjoyed support from both sides of Congress. I expect he'll continue to push hard for federal science programs while he's in office," Lane says. "It's difficult to speculate what will happen after he leaves." Robert Park, director of public information for the American Physical Society in Washington, D.C., thinks the House Science Committee will "lose some memory . . . and at a time that institutional memory is important, it is a significant loss. When we lose seasoned people like Walker, who also sits on the budget committee and is a powerful member of Congress, that has to have serious effects." IMPRESSED: NCHGR director Francis Collins calls the latest breast cancer gene discovery a "significant finding." Scientists at Duke University Comprehensive Cancer Center and the United Kingdom's Institute of Cancer Research have located a second breast cancer susceptibility gene. The newly found gene, dubbed BRCA2, likely accounts for the majority of inherited breast cancers-only about 5 percent of all such cancers-not caused by BRCA1, which was uncovered in September 1994 by a team of researchers led by Mark Skolnick of the University of Utah and Myriad Genetics Inc. in Salt Lake City. As with BRCA1, scientists expect that women who inherit the faulty gene may have up to an 85 percent risk of developing breast cancer in their lifetime. The discovery eventually may help lead to improved genetic testing for women from so-called breast cancer families, scientists say. P. Andrew Futreal, an assistant research professor of surgery and an assistant professor of genetics at Duke, and Michael Stratton of the Institute for Cancer Research in Surrey, England, led a team of scientists from five countries. They studied DNA from families with several cases of early-onset breast cancer that did not have BRCA1 mutations, and tracked the gene to a region on chromosome 13. Their findings appeared December 21 in the journal Nature (R. Wooster et al., 378:789-91, 1995). In a Duke statement, the researchers note that, unlike BRCA1, inheriting a copy of BRCA2 does not significantly heighten the risk of ovarian cancer, though the risk is higher than in the general population. Yet they suspect that BRCA2 works similarly to BRCA1; both are tumor suppressor genes that, when working normally, keep any unnatural cell growth and potential cancer in check. When one copy of the gene is damaged or lost, the gene won't protect against cancer anymore. "It's a significant finding," Francis Collins, director of the National Center for Human Genome Research, tells The Scientist. "Between these two genes they account probably for the majority of inherited breast cancers. But that still leaves the other 95 percent unexplained." Collins says that there's little evidence for or against either BRCA1 or BRCA2 involvement in the development of sporadic, or non-inherited, breast cancers, though a recent report points to a possible role of an aberrant BRCA1 protein. Early last month, the final version of the National Science Education Standards-four years in the making-was unveiled by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The document addresses science content for K-12 sciences classes, teaching methods, assessment, and state and school-district-level programs (K.Y. Kreeger, The Scientist, March 20, 1995, page 1). This last incarnation of the standards is the accumulation of tens of thousands of comments from educators, scientists, school-district administrators, parents, science-teacher educators, and policymakers. Shelley Fisher, president of the Washington, D.C.-based National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) and a ninth-grade science teacher from Sand Springs, Okla., declares that the document "represents a landmark consensus in the science-education community." Various groups are planning different ways to encourage teachers to use the standards. On January 9, NAS plans to hold the first of several open-forum discussions on how to infuse the standards into the classroom. And NSTA is developing books, CD-ROMs, training kits, and workshops for classroom teachers. For a copy of the report, contact the National Academy Press, 2101 Constitution Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20418; (800) 624-6242. The report overview is available on the NAS home page: http://www.nas.edu/nap/online/nses/. NAS officials say that an online version of the entire report will be available-for an as-yet-undetermined fee-at end of January. When Russian virologist Daniel Golubev emigrated to the United States in 1992, one of his first work-related activities was to approach the New York-based Association of Engineers and Scientists for New Americans (AES), an organization that assists job-seeking immigrant scientists, with an idea. Golubev proposed a conference to celebrate the centenary of the 1892 discovery of viruses by the Russian microbiologist Dmitry Ivanovsky. Through filtration experiments, Ivanovsky isolated the viral cause of mosaic disease that was infesting Crimean tobacco plantations. Three years later, Golubev, who was head of the virology department at St. Petersburg University, has seen his mission accomplished. Last month, through the help of AES and sponsorship by the Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. in New York, the conference, "Molecular Pathogenesis of Viruses: A Centennial of Discovery," convened. The meeting was part of the pharmaceutical company's annual symposium on infectious diseases. Eminent American and Russian scientists, including James Wilson from the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center and Vadim Agol from the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, gave presentations on such topics as host-defense models and viral receptors. The organizers of the conference-Golubev, now vice president of research and development at Biovirus Research Inc., a private biotech firm in New York; and New York-based virologists Peter Palese from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Marshall Horwitz from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine-are working on a summary of the meeting's talks. WILL WORK FOR SCIENCE: NSF director Neal Lane points out the morale costs of shutting the government down. When the government closed its doors on December 17, the second such shutdown in five weeks, some government-sponsored research projects were teetering on the edge of becoming endangered species, or political prisoners at the very least. Universities, national laboratories, and other research institutions, for example, don't receive funding from government agencies such as the National Science Foundation during government shutdowns, notes NSF director Neal Lane. Although at press time, it was too early to know the complete fallout from the latest shutdown, during the previous November stoppage, fewer than 25 of NSF's 1,300 employees stayed on the job. NSF makes some 18,000 new grants and awards a year, and the agency lost about a month of productivity in working on these grants, says Lane. Particular programs are also imperiled. NSF-sponsored programs in Antarctica, for example, may be temporarily downsized or sidetracked for lack of funds. Discussions on the new NSF program in supercomputing, the Partnership for Advanced Scientific Computing, were scheduled to go before the NSF National Science Board in November, but then were pushed back to December, impacting the potential funding for programs at many of the nation's supercomputing centers, Lane adds. Francis Collins, director of the National Center for Human Genome Research (NCHGR), part of the National Institutes of Health, laments the hassles caused by the budget impasse. Collins says that officials at NIH have hesitated to make new grants for biomedical research because of the uncertainty of the final budget for fiscal year 1996. Collins explains that NCHGR was about to give $10 million in funding to scientists to begin sequencing the genome, the next step after mapping the genome. "Jumpstarting the sequencing [process] takes this extra boost; now it's in limbo because these budget resolutions we've been working with are based on the 1995 budget, and the sequencing initiative is for 1996," he says. "The scientists have assembled their teams and now we have to tell them to wait. The NCHGR is in a precarious position." Adds Lane: "The worst cost is in morale. These people are highly skilled and motivated, and are highly engaged in their work. There's no way to estimate what is lost-there's a human cost, as well." A newly published, lavishly illustrated biology book for young people and curious laypersons is designed to "take the fear and incomprehension out of a usually complex subject," according to its publisher. And, if the statements by Nobel laureates and other luminaries circulated by the publishing company are to be believed, it has succeeded. The Way Life Works (New York, Times Books, 1995), by molecular biologist and National Academy of Sciences (NAS) member Mahlon Hoagland, and illustrator Bert Dodson, uses cartoons and diagrams to explain such concepts as how living creatures transform energy, how DNA's instructions are transcribed into molecules of RNA and then translated into proteins, and how a fertilized egg becomes a baby. Hoagland-emeritus president of the Shrewsbury, Mass.-based Worcester Foundation for Biomedical Research-and Dodson write in an authors' note that their aim is to "persuade our audience that a deeper understanding of nature would enhance their appreciation of its beauty-and thereby enrich their lives." In a blurb circulated by the publisher, DNA double helix codiscoverer and Nobel laureate James D. Watson writes that the book "intelligently and charmingly strips away the veil of ignorance that too long has separated the general public from the molecules that make possible life and its evolution into the grandeur of today's multitudinous life forms." Similar accolades come from NAS president Bruce Alberts, former National Institutes of Health director Donald S. Frederickson, and Stanford University biochemist and Nobelist Arthur Kornberg, among others. Norwalk, Conn.-based Perkin-Elmer Corp. has announced that entries are being accepted for the 1996 Perkin-Elmer/Dow Young Researcher Award in Process Analytical Chemistry, sponsored by Perkin-Elmer and Dow Chemical Co. of Midland, Mich. The award honors a chemistry or chemical engineering graduate student at a United States university for the "most important and creative basic and applied research related to real-time process analysis." Entries will be accepted until June 1. The winner and two finalists will be announced at the Fall Instrument Society of America (ISA) '96 Conference in Chicago, October 7-10. The winner will receive a sculptured crystal award, $1,000, and travel sponsorship to the conference. For information, contact Jerry Workman, Jr., Perkin-Elmer Corp., Real-Time Systems Division, 761 Main Ave., Norwalk, Conn. 06859; (203) 761-2794.

Notebook

The Scientist Staff

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