Notebook

Monday mornings can be tough, even if you're Bill Gates. The head of Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft Corp. ran into a few glitches at a presentation he was giving at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Seattle. In the middle of a demonstration on February 17 aimed at showing how Web browsers and E-mail will soon merge, the modem connection failed. A computer-vision demonstration by a Microsoft researcher didn't work, either. Then, during a question-and-answer session after the presentation, Gates had to contend with a self-described "physician-philosopher" in the audience, who posed this situation to him: A man worth about $28 billion was to lose his eyesight. A genie offered to restore his vision in exchange for the man's $28 billion. What would he do? Gates didn't hesitate, replying that he would want his sight. He then drew sustained laughter and applause by wondering aloud what the genie would do with the money. Photo: Franklin Hoke OPPOSING VIEW: Robert Gallo thinks attention paid to new AIDS therapies does not sufficiently credit earlier work. Outspoken AIDS researcher Robert Gallo, director of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, voiced his opinion on developments in the field before his AAAS lecture on February 14 entitled "Basic Science Leading to Major Advances in Therapy Against HIV and AIDS." At a press briefing the day before his talk, he seemed to be imparting a message about David Ho, scientific director at New York's Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center. Ho was honored by Time magazine as 1996's "Man of the Year" for pioneering a drug cocktail that the magazine predicted "just might lead to a cure." Possibly alluding to the media spotlight on Ho, Gallo-credited with codiscovery of HIV in 1984-said, "Everybody knows that there have been major advances in therapy. It's been talked about an awful lot in the newspapers and magazines and here in the last six months. This did not happen in the last six months; this has been a gradual phenomenon. . . . We knew about proteases a long time ago, and we knew that they were part of HIV's replication cycle at least 11, 12 years ago, and we know that these were targets to attack HIV." Gallo continued, "Combination therapy . . . [is] a concept that is not new with AIDS. There's no new concept, no new principle, and no new idea that led to the advances that are headlined in the last six months to a year." He elaborated: "It's steady progress made by the virologists of the '70s, the virologists of the '80s, the chemists who purified the protease inhibitors . . . and the people who work out systems to study HIV and demonstrate its causative role in the early to mid-'80s that brought us where we are today in antiviral chemotherapy. REMINDER: Kevin Aylesworth pointed out that unhappy scientific job-seekers are likely to be voters. In a February 14 AAAS session entitled "Ethics, Employment, and Graduate Education," the harsh realities of the job market were discussed by administrators, scientific society officials, and young researchers. One topic of lively discussion was the situation of postdoctoral fellows, who are counted as "employed" in National Science Foundation and other job-market surveys although they are in temporary, low-paying positions. Diane Hoffman-Kim, a neuroscientist now doing her second postdoc at Harvard University, observed that administrators frequently treat a postdoc "as someone who's using up electricity and supplies, not as someone who's contributing to the university." Kevin Aylesworth, an American Physical Society Congressional Fellow and founder of the Young Scientists Network, predicted that a negative impact on the public's support of science would result "if more than 50 percent of [science graduates] feel lousy about their education" because of lack of career opportunities. "They're very smart, they're likely to vote and to have big mouths-to tell people how they feel about it." He also lamented that the M.S. was often viewed in the scientific community as "a failed Ph.D." Jan Reha, a Seattle-area career counselor who presented a Saturday-morning workshop entitled "Career Planning for the 21st Century," apparently was not aware of the tendency among many academic researchers to devalue the M.S. At her workshop, Reha-whose remarks were largely based on work with engineers at Boeing Co. and Microsoft Corp.-met with vocal disagreement from the grad students and postdocs who had come seeking help when she suggested that a master's degree was more highly sought by employers than a Ph.D. What a difference a year makes. At AAAS's 1996 meeting in Baltimore, a pair of symposia portrayed alternative medicine positively. In Seattle this year, however, a February 14 symposium entitled "Alternative Medicine in a Scientific World" featured six decidedly unsympathetic speakers: Ursula W. Goodenough, Saul Green, Barry L. Beyerstein, Wallace Sampson, Paul R. Gross, and Robert L. Park. "All of us have a lot of skepticism about these therapies, and a lot of concern about their impact on the scientific literacy of [the U.S.]," noted Goodenough, a professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis and one of the session's organizers. While a symposium with both backers and skeptics likely would have produced some fireworks, Michael S. Strauss, AAAS's staff scientific program director, tells The Scientist that the association does not solicit representatives of particular viewpoints to speak at its annual meetings. He advises groups complaining that their views aren't included to "develop a proposal" for the next year's program. Goodenough told her audience that this year's alternative-medicine discussion was "in one sense a response to those two [previous] symposia." All proposed sessions must be screened by AAAS's peer-review process and approved by the annual-meeting program committee, Strauss explains. Photo: Joel Levin ALARMED: Claire Fraser and Leroy Hood were caught off guard by a PTO official’s statement about patenting ESTs. The patentability of expressed sequence tags (ESTs)-fragments of DNA used in discovering human genes-is once again causing consternation for some genome researchers. At a February 14 AAAS session entitled "Patenting Human Genes: An Incentive or Impediment to Research?", assistant commissioner for patents Lawrence J. Goffney said that ESTs would be considered patentable by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). In 1991, the National Institutes of Health was widely criticized by the scientific community for attempting to patent ESTs. In 1993, the patent office threw out NIH's application, primarily because the agency had not sufficiently explained the commercial value of ESTs. Goffney's statement surprised many in the audience. When later asked in a press briefing what they thought of Goffney's declaration, two genome scientists, Claire M. Fraser from the Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Md., and Leroy E. Hood from the University of Washington, both expressed extreme dismay. "It's an appallingly bad thing to have happened," said Hood. "It should make for some interesting theater," said Fraser, referring to biotech companies' "duking it out" for patent rights. PTO spokeswoman Lisa-Joy Zgorski notes that Goffney's interpretation of EST patenting "probably referred to" a recent change in PTO policy. Last October the agency announced that it would require applicants for multisequence gene patents to limit claims to 10 independent and distinct nucleotide sequences for each application and that for such applications, no fees would be charged. ESTs were not mentioned specifically in the October PTO statements. Participants in February 17's AAAS symposium on the future of scholarly publishing on the Internet don't think the sharp increase in electronic journals is a temporary trend. But they note that many researchers find tenure and promotion committees do not give equal weight to papers published only electronically, and there are questions about whether such papers are as rigorously screened by peer-review processes. "Flaky ideas can be all right in physics," remarked Drummond Rennie, an adjunct professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and a deputy editor of JAMA-Journal of the American Medical Association. But "the closer you get to the bedside, the more lethal flaky ideas can get." There are other worries. Vicky Reich, the assistant director of HighWire Press, a division of Stanford University Libraries that places print journals online, contended that there are no substantive electronic-only science journals, which drew murmurs of disagreement from audience members. Currently, noted Janet H. Fisher, associate director of journals publishing at MIT Press, people have strong emotional ties to paper, but Fred Spilhaus, president of the American Geophysical Union, predicted that "you won't see recognizable print journals in 2020. Photo: Dan Lamont SHOW ME THE STORY: University of Washington geneticist Mary-Claire King gave her rules for working with journalists. Scientists frequently seize upon the AAAS meeting-which includes the annual gathering of the National Association of Science Writers-as an opportunity to comment on the media, and this year was no exception. Pioneering cancer geneticist Mary-Claire King of the University of Washington told a February 16 AAAS audience composed mostly of science journalists and public-information officers that she has a "top-30" list of reporters to whom she prefers to speak and a set of guidelines for dealing with journalists. Most important, she suggested, was never to go to the press before a story is ready. King, a strong advocate of working with university media offices to handle press relations, cautioned her colleagues to take dealings with the media "as seriously as those with other scientists." In addition, she recommended that scientists consider "what they say [to reporters] as on the record," and to insist on having the reporter read back the story or quotes, and better yet, check for accuracy by E-mail. But Sharon Dunwoody, a professor of journalism and mass communications at the University of Wisconsin, challenges King's rules. Dunwoody, who attended the session, questions whether King wanted too much control of the journalistic process by asking reporters on deadline to send copies of stories. Though Dunwoody concedes that much of King's advice was sound, she tells The Scientist, "it's not a good idea for scientists to control the [reporter's] product. For one thing, they don't have as good an idea of the audience's needs. Once the journalist sits down to write, he is now the expert in this part of the interaction." She also wonders if excluding general-assignment reporters and small publications from lists such as King's "top 30" denies information to a large segment of readers. Queries from the audience at a February 15 AAAS press briefing on epidemiology, genetics, and the immune system elicited impassioned replies. Epidemiologist Bruce N. Ames from the University of California, Berkeley, was asked a pointed question about the avoidance of "mistakes" such as recent large-scale studies that found participants taking placebos had a lower incidence of cancer than those taking beta carotene. (Last year, because of those unexpected results, a National Cancer Institute-sponsored clinical trial was forced to abruptly end three-quarters of the way through.) "They're not mistakes," responded Ames emphatically. "Diet is so complicated, and epidemiology isn't that great a mechanism for seeing small differences." National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases immunologist Polly Matzinger also weighed in on the subject: "I think it's actually your job to point out that perhaps it's not a mistake," she admonished assembled media members. "When you're working on the edge and you don't know what the questions are; you don't know how to ask them; and you don't know how to do the experiments-you do what you can, and 90 percent of what you do fails. You have to be a masochist to be a scientist. PRIVATE PARTS : Jim McDermott plans to reintroduce his medical-privacy bill in Congress. Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) thinks that the Human Genome Project and genetic testing could have wonderful results. But he also worries about potential misuse of the information they provide, which is why he will reintroduce his Medical Privacy in the Age of New Technologies Act to the 105th Congress. McDermott, a trained psychiatrist, told his AAAS lecture audience on February 17 that patients deserve more information on how their medical records might be used, greater access to those records, and more "meaningful" informed consent to be tested. He said that his bill "assigns to the individual control over what's done with that information, and who sees it, and why." A similar bill never made it out of committee during the 104th Congress, and McDermott acknowledges passing the act "is going to be heavy lifting."

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March 1997

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