More Cracked Than Shattered

(p.4) More Cracked Than Shattered Underfunded States Get DOE Boost Supercollider Lab Looks Outward NIH Makes First Shannon Awards Down For The Count More Cracked Than Shattered Are women being repressed in their scientific pursuits? The presence last month of a standing-room-only audience of more than 400 women (and perhaps a half-dozen men) in an NIH auditorium testified to the pertinence of the question at a Women's Equality Day program on the issue of "Shattering the Glass Ceiling." Several members of the audience offered anecdotes of personal encounters of barriers to equal employment facing women at NIH. Program moderator Diane Armstrong, director of NIH's Division of Equal Opportunity, offered some numbers to back up their stories: Women constitute 81 percent of the lower-ranking (GS 7-9) employees at NIH, but only 14 percent of the agency's elite Senior Executive Service. "I don't think I've shattered the ceiling," said panelist Yvonne Maddox, deputy director of the biophysics and physiological sciences program at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. "But perhaps I've put a few cracks in it." Underfunded States Get DOE Boost The Energy Department, emulating a 1985 move by NSF, has launched an effort to strengthen university research in states that historically are on the low end of the federal-funding priority roster. Eighteen of these states received $100,000 each last month under DOE's Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). The money will allow each state to draft a proposal for energy-related, campus-based research tailored to meet the needs of both public- and private-sector interests. The proposals are due in September 1992, for research to begin in 1993. The DOE program also handed out $250,000 each to eight states to fund up to 20 graduate traineeships this year. Supercollider Lab Looks Outward Nuclear physicist Eduardo Duek, 42, has been named head of a new office of international coordination at the SSC laboratory in Dallas. Duek, who has previously worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory and at the Center for International Leadership in New York, has been active in various efforts to foster international scientific cooperation, and last fall the Argentine-born scientist organized a meeting of Latin American high-energy physicists to brief them on the SSC. Duek's workload depends in part on the ability of Energy Department officials to entice foreign governments into helping to pay for the $9 billion supercollider; so far, only India has agreed to a $50 million, in-kind contribution. But even without that support, a significant percentage of the scientists who will be building the accelerator's massive detectors are located outside the United States, and Duek says he's "looking forward to keeping the worldwide high-energy physics community interested" in the project. NIH Makes First Shannon Awards Some 310 scientists who fell short of obtaining regular NIH funding will be able to remain productive thanks to the institutes' new two-year, $100,000 Shannon awards. Sue Ohata, who coordinates the program, says that recipients fall into three categories: young researchers who missed out on NIH's special awards for first-time grantees; experienced scientists who want to move into a new area and lack the track records of those already in the field; and investigators who need something to tide them over until their next, full-fledged grant. The grantees come from 146 institutions, and the distribution of specialties corresponds roughly to how extramural funds are allocated across NIH's 13 institutes. Down For The Count The U.S. Census Bureau, whose resident statistical scientists presumably try to stay at the cutting edge of their discipline, has already admitted that it failed to count about 5.3 million people last year. Now, the news gets worse: A report from the General Accounting Office (GAO/GGD-91-113) says that this official undercount--some 2 percent of the country's reported overall population of 248.7 million--masks even more serious problems in the 1990 census. According to the GAO, census takers made at least 14.1 million mistakes--and possibly nearly twice that many--such as counting people more than once, counting fictitious persons, and assigning real individuals to the wrong locations.

Notebook

The Scientist Staff

More Cracked Than Shattered

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of