Notebook

Martin Marietta Boosts Royalty Split SSC Magnets Attract Criticism PBS Series Looks At Astronomers Chips In The Edifice Of Science NSF Cleans Up Its Antarctic Act Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and four other DOE facilities operated by Martin Marietta Energy Systems in Tennessee, Ohio, and Kentucky will get higher royalties under a new policy adopted by the government contractor. Martin Marietta will now give inventors of licensed technology 15 percent of gross royalty receipts, up from 10 percent under the old policy, and those who invented or supported unlicensed technology will get 5 percent of gross royalties from all licenses, up from the current 4 percent. The new policy also removes a $100,000 cap per license. Nearly 100 employees have received a total of $200,000 since the program was begun in 1984, says William Carpenter, the company's vice president for technology transfer, and Martin Marietta has received $1.3 million in royalties on some 49 licenses. "Nobody's reached the limit [on potential royalty earnings]," says Carpenter, "but it's nice to know that we've helped some employees buy new cars." Officials responsible for the 10,000 superconducting magnets that will be needed for the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) may not be exerting enough control over the process of manufacturing and testing them to ensure that they will work properly, according to a report from a government watchdog agency. The General Accounting Office (GAO) compared the procedures being used at the $8.2 billion SSC with the approach taken by German officials at the newly completed Hadron Electron Ring Accelerator (HERA) in Hamburg and found that the SSC fell short in several areas. Among the most important procedural deficiencies, according to the GAO report, are the absence of one person at the SSC with the authority and knowledge to make all decisions involving the magnets, the failure to identify all the specifications for the magnets before accepting bids from industry to build them, and a decision not to fully measure and test each magnet itself before installing it into the accelerator ring. The report, which also examined the growth in cost estimates for the SSC, was requested by Sen. Jim Sasser (D-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. A six-part series on the lives and work of today's leading astronomers begins this week on public television. The topics covered in the series, entitled "The Astronomers," will include the search for the universe's "missing mass" as well as phenomena like black holes and gravity waves, focusing on leading scientists in each specialty. Narrated by Richard Chamberlain, the project is funded by a $5.3 million grant from the W. M. Keck Foundation. Last month's draft report from NIH's Office of Scientific Integrity charging that Tufts University immunologist Thereza Imanishi-Kari had falsified and fabricated data relating to a 1986 paper in Cell also questions two major tenets of the scientific process. The first is that any important finding will be replicated, and the second is that coauthors should be familiar with everything to which they affix their names. Specifically, NIH found that, despite the paper's significance, "no such replication has occurred" in the past five years despite "repeated claims" to the contrary by coauthors. On the second point, NIH takes to task two coauthors, MIT's David Weaver and Nobel laureate David Baltimore, because of an "inappropriately narrow focus" on the issues that the paper addressed. That focus made them blind to any possible errors or questions raised by Imanishi-Kari's data, the report concludes. In particular, the report scolds Baltimore for failing to exert "his seniority and standing" to resolve questions about the accuracy of the data in the Cell paper. Open burning is no longer occurring at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, NSF announced last month. And the foundation has also closed a landfill that for the past 30 years has been the repository of solid and liquid waste generated by scientists who work there. NSF has been accused by environmental groups of dragging its heels on a scheduled five-year, $180 million cleanup of the frozen continent. Sensitive to that criticism, foundation officials emphasized that their decision to build a temporary incinerator on site--to burn food wastes and other easily combustible materials--allows them to move up their original timetable for an end to open burning by at least six months. NSF expects to have a permanent incinerator, assembled in the U.S. and shipped to Antarctica, in operation sometime this fall.

Notebook

The Scientist Staff

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