Notebook

Baltimore Retraction Still In The Mail NAE Slow To Get The Message Tell Your Story To The World NSF Signs Lease On New Building On March 15, Nobel laureate David Baltimore, reacting to a draft of a National Institutes of Health report that criticized his behavior in the course of a five-year investigation of a scientific paper he coauthored when he was director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT (The Scientist, April 15, 1991, page 4), announced that he would retract the paper from Cell. One month later, however, a spokeswoman for Cell editor Benjamin Lewin said that the journal had received no material from Baltimore, that no retraction was scheduled, and that she did not wish to discuss the matter further. Alfred Kildow, a spokesman for Baltimore, now president of Rockefeller University, said that Baltimore has written to the other four coauthors--one of whom now lives in Brazil--seeking their permission to submit a retraction and was awaiting their answer. Kildow said that "other options" were available if Baltimore did not receive unanimous agreement, but that the retraction had not yet been written. The new class of 84 members elected to the National Academy of Engineering is, not surprisingly, an illustrious one, including such well-known figures in the engineering world as supercomputing wizard Steve Chen and Hewlett-Packard Co. chief executive officer John Young. Unfortunately, another unsurprising fact is that the group of new inductees includes 83 men and only one woman: Union Carbide Corp. researcher Edith Flanigen. Want to reach the masses on a hot issue of the day? David Jarmul, head of the op-ed service at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., would be happy to hear from you. Since 1983 the academy has mailed out to newspapers across the country a weekly, 750-word commentary from a noted scientist. The average piece gets picked up by some 30 to 40 papers of varying sizes, says Jarmul, who has coordinated the project since its inception. Topics have included child care and AIDS, and the goal is to bring scientific expertise to bear on an important public issue. This month the academy has published a selection of 75 such pieces in a book entitled "Headline News, Science Views." It can be ordered from the National Academy Press by calling (800) 642-6242; Jarmul can be reached at (202) 334-2138. NSF Signs Lease On New Building The federal government has signed a contract with the Evans Company of McLean, Va., to build a 12-story office building in Arlington, Va., that will become the new home of the National Science Foundation. The 363,000-square-foot structure will give NSF about 75,000 square feet more space than it now occupies in three buildings in downtown Washington. The interior will be "quite an improvement in terms of ventilation, lighting, and other environmental factors," says Joseph Burt of NSF's Division of Administrative Services. And those improvements won't come cheaply: The new annual rent is expected to be about $10.5 million, compared with NSF's current yearly payments to the government of $8 million. The move itself will cost NSF $15 million, to be split over its next two budgets if Congress approves. Last year NSF failed to receive a penny of its initial request for $5.5 million after the chairman of one of its appropriations subcommittees, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), tried unsuccessfully to persuade Bush administration officials to locate the building in the Maryland suburbs.

Notebook

The Scientist Staff

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