Notebook

From Limelight to Hotspot George, Eat Your Broccoli! These Jobs are the Pits No Loose Lips Here Merging Cultures Lifting Off Early Stanford University president Donald Kennedy, who last fall took a lot of heat from Congress for the school's management of indirect costs associated with federally sponsored research grants, is headed for the very venue from whence the heat arose. After stepping down as president this coming August, Kennedy--in January 1993--will become the first faculty member in residence at Stanford's new environmental internship and tutorial program at its satellite campus in Washington, D.C. David Danelski, who directs the Washington campus, says that this transitional position for Kennedy, who headed the Food and Drug Administration under President Carter, will allow him to get back into the Washington loop. Noted broccoli hater George Bush is missing out on an important cancer-fighting element by eliminating this vegetable from his diet. The element is (-)-1-isothiocyanato-(4R)-(methylsulfinyl)butane, known as sulforaphane, according to pharmacologists at Johns Hopkins University, who reported their results in the March issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (89:2399-2403). What Yueshang Zhang and colleagues found is that if the president were eating his broccoli, sulforaphane would be inducing his liver, stomach, and small intestine to produce enhanced levels of quinone reductase, an enzyme that detoxifies carcinogenic compounds. Interestingly, the broccoli used in the study was grown in Caribou, Maine, in the extreme northeast corner of the state--about as far as you can get from Kennebunkport and still be in the same state. The difference between a prune and a plum? "Experience," says John Trattner, vice president of the Council for Excellence in Government, who's just completed The Prune Book: The 60 Toughest Science and Technology Jobs in Washington (New York, Madison Books). The Prune Book is a response to what is known as "The Plum Book," a broad, election-year listing of positions filled by the president. But where the Plum Book merely lists positions, the Prune Book spends eight to 10 pages on each of 62 major jobs, interviewing current and past jobholders and describing responsibilities. The following admonition was delivered by the Classified Office of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to all employees: "The fact that classified information has appeared in print, on TV, in speeches, or in open meetings does not make it unclassified." Late last month, the Association of Biotechnology Companies announced a merger with the Tissue Technology Association. The merger will bring 11 new members to ABC (TTA had 13 members, two of whom had already joined the biotechnology association). Former TTA president Armand Karow, president of Xytex Corp., a biotech firm in Augusta, Ga., says his group never approached the larger Industrial Biotechnology Association about a merger: "We talked about it in passing, but dismissed it. We felt like we would be lost" within the larger group. Although ABC itself has been contemplating merging with IBA, such a move is not likely to happen in the near future, according to ABC executive director William Small: "It's not that we wouldn't welcome [a merger]; it's that we have different agendas, and different needs." During the week of February 16-22, nearly 1,000 NASA engineers visited schools throughout the nation, sharing their scientific experiences with those who can benefit the most. "They were kind of on the tough side," says engineer Randy Segert, vehicle systems manager in the shuttle program office, of the questions posed by three eighth-grade classes he spoke to at the Frederick Douglass Middle School in Washington, D.C. "But I think it kind of spurred some interest." Besides answering questions and explaining "what engineers do, what you need to study to become an engineer," says Segert, he showed slides of the shuttle. "At the eighth-grade point, if they're interested [in joining the space program] they really need to start thinking about how to do this."

Notebook

The Scientist Staff

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