Notebook

Contents Abstractors, Indexers Protest Reinventing Peer Review Bowhead Bioremediation Pan-American Science Symposium Pigeon Perception The Sex Lives Of Trees Culpeper Scholarships 75-Year Headach Ends NIH Names Gene Therapy Panel Dreyfus Duo The Philadelphia-based National Federation of Abstracting and Information Services (NFAIS) has issued a call to journal publishers, libraries, authors, online distributors, and others in what it calls the "information chain" to come up with a solution to a problem affecting its members: Publishers are starting to charge abstracting and indexing services--known as secondary publishers--for journal subscriptions. Primary publishers, seeking market exposure, traditionally have provided their journals to secondary publishers gratis. Now, however--in an attempt to recoup lost revenue from declining subscriber bases caused by interlibrary loan, document-delivery services, and other new information-delivery methods--some have begun to make secondary publishers buy their publications. In addition, NFAIS says that several primary publishers are considering licensing and charging for the use of author abstracts in secondary services. According to NFAIS, New York-based John Wiley and Sons Inc. was the first to charge for its journals; Taylor and Francis, also of New York, and some smaller European publishers are now sending out licensing agreements. NFAIS warns that these charges could lead to price hikes for secondary-information services. For more information, contact nfais@hslc.org. Innovations in Materials Research, a new journal debuting July 1, has developed a new standard for peer review, eliminating the traditional system, which its editors denounce as having an "automatic bias against innovation" and causing "inordinate delays." Instead, the new publication--issued by World Scientific, headquartered in Singapore--will operate on the standard of what its staff terms as "super-peer review": Authors will be judged on their publication track record, rather than the details of their article. Academic authors who have published 50 papers (fewer for those in industry) prove their reputation by submitting a bibliography. According to a statement issued by the editors, "'Super-peer review' places the full responsibility for the content [of the submitted manuscript] on the author(s), and uses the authors' published record as guarantee." The standard for article acceptance, the editors say in the statement, will be "whether or not the work is really innovative--an unexpected result, new material discovered, special properties, new theories." Editor-in- chief of the new journal is Rustum Roy, Evan Pugh Professor of the Solid State at Penn State University, who has long decried standard peer-review practices (R. Roy, The Scientist, Sept. 6, 1993, page 11). For more information, contact Roy at (814) 863-9983. Fax: (814) 863-7040. E-mail: imr@alpha.mrl.psu.edu. A. Morrie Craig says bowhead whales can stomach alot. Some whale species are able to consume mass quantities of pollutant-laden krill--a tiny crustacean--and survive, with the help of unique intestinal bacteria. Equipped with this knowledge, environmental scientists from Oregon State University (OSU) are studying the bioremediation potential of anaerobic microorganisms found in the gut of bowhead whales. This month, at one of the last legal marine mammal harvests, the researchers and Native Americans of the Alaskan North Slope--who conducted the harvest--opened up the digestive tracts of five whales to extract samples of the microbes. These bacteria are believed to be able to degrade PCBs, anthracene, and napthalene--key ingredients of oil spills--and other environmental toxins. "We need to better define the microbes and develop engineering solutions to implement them. But it's clear they could play a role in oil cleanup that's now being accomplished by aerobic bacteria used on the surface," speculates A. Morrie Craig, a professor of veterinary medicine at OSU. The Association for Puerto Ricans in Science and Engineering (APRSE) (R. Finn, The Scientist, March 6, 1995, page 16) is putting together a Pan-American scientific meeting, to be held August 23-25 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The varied agenda for the meeting, titled "Interciencia," includes mo-lecular mechanisms of drug-resistant genes in plasmodium, protein structure and function, plantain extract as an alternative against tuberculosis bacillus, solar detoxification, and solar-energy cars, as well as challenges and opportunities in industrial microbiology and biotechnology in Latin America and science and technology policy in Western Hemisphere countries. For more information, contact Luis Salicrup, APRSE president, at (809) 722-8729 or (809) 723-3459. Fax: (809) 759-6411 or (809) 760-5638. As a species, human beings can be prideful about their abilities to recognize abstract relationships among objects and events. Animals have increasing cognitive powers as one progresses from primitive to advanced organisms, the thinking goes, with humans at the top. New studies by University of Iowa psychologist Edward A. Wasserman, however, reveal that pigeons, too, are surprisingly accomplished in these areas (American Scientist, 83[3]:246-255, 1995). Using a total of 32 symbols of such objects as a telephone, a pointing hand, a clock, and a train engine on a touch-sensitive computer screen, researchers showed that pigeons trained with one set of 16 symbols were then able to generalize learned concepts of sameness and difference to the remaining 16. "As we have used computers and video technology to present more elaborate and interesting images, we are finding that pigeons are capable of even abstract cognition," Wasserman says. "These new results, among others, force us to broaden the scope of species that exhibit advanced forms of cognition and to reconsider how and why cognition has evolved." Wasserman's work builds on scientific admiration for pigeons' thought processes that dates at least to behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner's World War II research on their homing abilities. Skinner found pigeons "extraordinarily subtle and complex," and capable of "responding to patterns and those classes of patterns called 'concepts.'" Although firmly grounded, oak tree "fathers" manage to be remarkably peripatetic sex partners, according to a six-year study conducted by Beverly Dow, a graduate student in ecology at the University of Illinois at Chicago (Journal of Theoretical and Applied Genetics, in press). "Most people don't think about trees having sex," Dow says. "It's a complicated thing, actually, because the plants are rooted in place." Using microsatellite technology, Dow compared the DNA from 280 acorns with that from the leaves of more than 150 adult burr oak trees on a 15-acre abandoned farm in Harvard, Ill., to determine parentage. All oak trees produce both male pollen and female flowers, and are capable of self-pollination with the help of insects or the wind. What Dow found was that one in 10 of the acorns collected from a "mother" tree was fathered by an oak from another, distant stand of trees. "That's not what I expected to find," Dow comments. "I thought more offspring would come from nearby trees, because studies of wind-carried pollen have shown that the density of pollen decreases rapidly with distance from the father tree." Two adult trees at her study site failed to father any of the acorns or saplings in the area, Dow says. "One theory is that a tree may be infertile for some reason." The Charles E. Culpeper Foundation is accepting nominations for its Scholarships in Medical Science, awarded to medical schools to provide up to three years of support, including salary and core research expenses, to physicians committed to careers in academic medicine. The foundation will provide $100,000 per year to the sponsoring institution. Up to $50,000 of this may be used for salary; the rest should support research. The program is open to M.D.'s who have graduated from a U.S. medical school no later than 1987 and have achieved no higher than a rank of assistant professor. Applicants should have at least one year of postdoctoral clinical training; all scientific research relevant to human health will be eligible for consideration. Deadline for applications is August 15. For more information, contact the Charles E. Culpeper Foundation, Financial Centre, 695 E. Main St., Suite 404, Stamford, Conn. 06901; (203) 975-1240. Fax: (203) 975-1847. After 75 years and a fair amount of political maneuvering, Bayer aspirin has come home, sort of. As of last month, Pittsburgh-based Miles Inc. began calling itself the Bayer Corp. The name change follows Miles' 1994 acquisition of pharmaceutical firm Sterling Winthrop's North American over- the-counter drug business--including its best-known product, Bayer aspirin--from Sterling parent company Eastman Kodak Co. of Rochester, N.Y. As part of that deal, the rights to the Bayer trademark and name in the U.S., Canada, and the Caribbean--which were confiscated as enemy property by the United States after World War I and bought by Sterling Winthrop at an auction of German business assets--were returned to German pharmaceutical manufacturer Bayer AG, which acquired Miles in 1978. The former Miles Pharmaceutical Division in West Haven, Conn., will be consolidated with a former Miles dental products business in South Bend, Ind., as Bayer Pharmaceutical Division, located on the West Haven site. Among other activities, it will conduct biological product and biotechnology research. NIH's new gene therapy panel will report to director Harold Varmus Fourteen people have been named to a National Institutes of Health panel to review the agency's investment in gene therapy. The panel's charge is to formulate recommendations on research priorities and funding mechanisms in gene therapy and to communicate these to NIH director Harold Varmus's advisory committee. The panel members are: Richard Axel, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and Columbia University; David Botstein, Stanford University; John M. Coffin, Tufts University School of Medicine; Pamela B. Davis, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine; Eric R. Fearon, Yale University; Uta Francke, HHMI and Stanford University Medical Center; Haig M. Kazazian, Jr., University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine; Thomas J. Kelley, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; Robert J. Lefkowitz, HHMI and Duke University; Bernard Moss, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; Arno G. Motulsky, University of Washington; Stuart H. Orkin, Children's Hospital, Boston; Thomas A. Waldmann, National Cancer Institute; Huda Y. Zoghbi, Baylor College of Medicine. The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation is accepting nominations for its Scholar/Fellow Program for Undergraduate Institutions, designed to encourage new Ph.D. recipients to undertake teaching and research careers in the chemical sciences at undergraduate institutions. The program provides a grant to the college or university on behalf of a nominated faculty member in the chemistry, chemical engineering, or biochemistry department, designated a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Scholar, who will be paired with a recent Ph.D. recipient, named a Dreyfus Fellow. The fellow will collaborate on research with the scholar and will teach in the department. Application materials, including a proposal of no more than 10 pages, are due from participating schools by June 30. Awards totaling $65,000 will be approved for two years, but may be spent in three. For more information, contact the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, 555 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. 10022-3301; (212) 753-1760.

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