Notebook

Rejection Rate Rises at NIH Bromley Bids Farewell to Sununu Good Swaps Science Advisory Post Kassirer Won't Play the Name Game Stick to Politics and Religion Congress thinks that NIH's peer reviewers, who in 1990 rejected only 5 percent of the proposals they judged as members of NIH study sections, are too easy on scientists, and last year they asked NIH to do something about it. So last fall, as part of a broader series of changes in the peer review system, NIH created a new category--"not recommended for further consideration"--and told study sections to apply it to applications that reviewers felt did not make the grade. Preliminary results show that it's working: After the first round of study section meetings, some 15 percent of proposals are falling into the new category. That leaves NIH officials with a slightly smaller pool from which to make awards (only about one-third of proposals that pass muster with study sections wind up being funded), as well as a screening process that should be a bit more to Congress' liking. Presidential science adviser Allan Bromley says that he and former White House chief of staff John Sununu were birds of a feather on science policy issues. "I'll miss him," Bromley said about the former Tufts University engineering professor during a news conference last month. "He was very knowledgeable, very easy to work with, and we very rarely disagreed" about any matter involving science. But Bromley rejected the suggestion that the loss of Sununu's expertise would leave a gap in the ability of the White House to review technical issues. He cited the technical experience of such top domestic policy aides as financial adviser Richard Darman and economist Michael Boskin, combined with his own presence, as proof that the administration is capable of handling such issues. Mary Good, senior vice president for technology at Allied-Signal Inc. in Morristown, N.J., has resigned from the National Science Board to accept an appointment to the 12-member President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST). Good had been a member of the science board, which oversees the National Science Foundation, since 1986, and was its president for the past 3 1/2 years. Replacing her as board president is James Duderstadt, president of the University of Michigan, who last year was appointed to a second six-year term on the board. Good and Thomas Murrin, dean of the School of Business and Administration at Duquesne University, are the first replacements on PCAST. They succeed original appointees Walter Massey, now NSF director, and Bernadine Healy, now director of the National Institutes of Health. Too many names spoil the broth, says Jerome Kassirer, the new editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. That's why he has imposed rules that limit the number of investigators associated with the results of any large-scale clinical trial. "I don't think our readers want to read pages of names and long lists of committees," says Kassirer, who became NEJM editor in July. As an example of the problem, Kassirer points to a 12-page manuscript he received recently that contained an additional five pages of acknowledgments. "That's ridiculous," he says. "Over the years, the practice of giving people credit for contributing to a clinical trial has gotten completely out of hand." In a recent editorial (NEJM, 325[21]:1510, 1991), Kassirer announced a 12-person limit on authorship and a one-column limit on the length of acknowledgments submitted with any paper. Leave it to a scientist to find a connection between sex and industrial policy. Harold Hall, former vice president of Xerox Corp., poked fun at the Bush administration's hostility to the concept of federal support for selected high-tech sectors of the economy by comparing its attitude with the Victorian era's approach to sex, a century ago. "I see four parallels," Hall explained last month to an audience gathered at the National Academy of Sciences to discuss a draft report on the future of the U.S. academic research enterprise. "We have an intensive need for it. We never talk about it in polite company. We try not to think about it. And what happens spontaneously and in the dark is preferable to anything that is planned."

Notebook

The Scientist Staff

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