Notebook

By the end of next year, United States Department of Energy researchers hope to build a new computer powerful enough to engage in virtual nuclear explosions so realistic that real-world bomb tests could become obsolete. The computer-development project responds to President Bill Clinton's call for a "science-based stockpile stewardship program" to maintain a safe, secure, and reliable nuclear deterrent without underground testing. Key to the proposed simulation approach to testing will be creation of a so-called teraflops computer-"tera" meaning 1 trillion, and "flops" meaning floating point operations per second-a massively parallel supercomputer much faster than any in existence today. The fastest computing speed to date is 281 gigaflops-"giga" meaning 1 billion-whereas the new computer will aim for 1.8 teraflops. Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel Corp. will provide thousands of P6 microprocessors-the successor chip to its Pentium chip-for the $46 million project, which will involve the Sandia, Los Alamos, and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories. Perhaps under special security arrangements, other countries with nuclear arsenals might also be able to test their devices using the American computer. If so, nuclear tests in the environment-such as recent, widely criticized explosions by France and China-could be eliminated. It may not have the humorous appeal of David Letterman's "top 10" lists, but the MacSciTech Association-a Worcester, Mass.-based organization of ore than 1,500 scientists and engineers who use Macintosh computers-recently released its annual listing of the top concerns of its membership. Enumerated from 1 to 10 (unlike Letterman's lists, given in reverse order), the society would like Apple Computer Inc. of Cupertino, Calif., to: publicly demonstrate a corporate commitment to engineering and scientific users and developers; "get its act together" for marketing to scientists and engineers; entice more science/engineering application developers; deal with the "tech support crisis at hand" (according to the society, 50 percent of developers and 26 percent of end users say they have difficulty getting technical information on new Apple products); improve system software performance; improve input/output performance; provide easier-to-use development tools; standardize the interface for peripherals; deliver technologies in a more timely fashion; and keep attuned to the low end of the market (for example, by encouraging technical market clones). For more information about MacSciTech, contact the society at 49 Midgley La., Worcester, Mass. 01604; (508) 755-5242. Fax: (508) 795-1636. E-mail: scitechmac @aol.com A three-member panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned a lower court's finding that Vassar College discriminated against biology professor Cynthia J. Fisher because she was a married woman (B. Spector, The Scientist, July 25, 1994, page 1). According to a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education (C. Leatherman, Sept. 22, 1995, page A33), Judge Dennis G. Jacobs, writing for the three-member appeals-court panel, found that "plaintiff's statistical case is built on gerrymandered data and a series of statistical fallacies." The evidence presented by Fisher compared married women scientists' citation counts, grants received, papers presented at professional meetings, and teaching-evaluation scores with those of their male and unmarried female colleagues to conclude that no married woman scientist had been tenured at the school in the 30 years before her tenure decision. The appeals court, however, accepted Vassar's argument that Fisher had omitted psychology from the category of hard sciences, and that tenured married women psychologists should have been counted in her statistics. According to the Chronicle report, Fisher is prepared to appeal to the Supreme Court. Although many graduate students have recently returned to classes after a summer of intense research, some are starting to make plans for next summer. To that end, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), an international research organization located near Vienna, Austria, announced its 1996 Young Scientist's Summer Program last month. SUMMER ABROAD: Study in style at IIASA's palatial headquarters -- outside, left and inside. The program provides master's and doctoral students, as well as postdoctoral fellows, with three-month interdisciplinary work-study oppor- tunity at its palatial headquarters near Vienna. Research areas covered by the program are global environmental change; global economic and technological transition; and analytical methods, including computer science and mathematical modeling for multidisciplinary studies conducted at the institute. Last summer, nearly 60 young scholars from about 15 countries participated. Eight were from the United States. Applications are due in late January. For information, contact Alan McDonald, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 136 Irving St., Cambridge, Mass. 02138; (617) 576-5019. Fax: (617) 576-5050. E-mail: amdonald @amacad.org. Marcia Goldberg, an assistant professor of microbiology and immunology at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine, and Leila Josefowicz, a classical violinist, will be the recipients of the sixth annual Melini awards in the science and arts categories respectively. The awards were established by Gruppo Italiano Vini, the Italian wine company that makes the Melini wines, and Frederick Wildman and Sons Inc. of New York City, the company with the exclusive rights to import Melini wines to the United States, as a formal recognition of the arts and sciences. The awards ceremony will take place on November 2 at Sette MoMA, the restaurant of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Goldberg is being recognized for her work in developing vaccines against bacteria implicated in food poisoning. In addition, she was part of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War delegation that went to Oslo to receive the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize. Josefowicz, a student of the Philadelphia-based Curtis Institute of Music, has performed with various symphonies in North America, and this year will be playing with the Boston Symphony at Carnegie Hall in New York. The National Research Council will offer approximately 50 three-year predoctoral fellowships and 20 one-year dissertation fellowships to Native American Indians, Alaskan Natives (Eskimo or Aleut), African Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Pacific Islanders (Polynesians or Micronesians), and Puerto Ricans as part of the Ford Foundation Predoctoral and Dissertations Fellowships for Minorities Program. The predoctoral fellowships are intended to support beginning graduate students and the dissertation awards to provide help for the final year of dissertation writing. Predoctoral fellowships provide an annual stipend of $12,000 to the fellow, as well as a $6,000 annual institutional grant. Dissertation fellows receive a one-year stipend of $18,000. Fellowships will be awarded in the behavioral and social sciences, humanities, engineering, mathematics, and the physical and life sciences, or for interdisciplinary programs composed of two or more eligible disciplines. The deadline for entering the fellowship competition is November 3. For information, contact Ford Foundation Predoctoral and Dissertation Fellowships, Fellowship Office, TJ 2039, National Research Council, 2101 Constitution Ave., Washington, D.C. 20418; (202) 334-2872. E-mail: infofell@nas.edu. The Protein Society, formed in 1986 in recognition of the growth of the interdisciplinary field of protein science, recently elected to join the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB). Founded in 1912 as an organization of all scholarly societies concerned with the life sciences, FASEB is the largest entity of its kind in the United States. The 2,800-member Protein Society inclusive, FASEB now has 10 affiliated societies, with more than 43,000 members. The union is seen as mutually beneficial to both sides: while FASEB increases in its size and scope, the Protein Society will have more of a voice in the public arena, say officials from both organizations. For years, organic chemists have tried to duplicate one of nature's strongest materials: spider-web silk. The protein from which the tiny threads are made has the potential to be stronger than Kevlar-the synthesized substance that bullet-proof vests and white-water kayaks are made of. De-spite more than a decade of re-search by several groups, problems remain in devising a cheap method that mimics the strength of natural web silk. Now, two private biotech firms- Lebensmittel Consulting in Fostoria, Ohio, and Plant Cell Technologies of Chatham, Mass.-have an-nounced that they have cloned full-length spider-silk proteins. "We start with what nature already has," explains Glenn Elion, president of Plant Cell Technologies, of the process. The companies claim that their new technique is less expensive and quicker than current experimental methods to produce silk. A cheap replacement for Kevlar is a potential product, speculates Elion. The researchers excise the entire gene for the protein, insert it into bacteria or yeast, which, as they multiply, produce more and more of the protein. The spider protein is then separated from the bacterial or yeast proteins. If genes that encode for the color of the spider web are excised along with the protein gene, the resulting protein is imbued with the natural color of the spider's web. For example, if genes from the golden-orb weaver spider are used, the resulting protein is yellowish-gold. The companies are also experimenting with red and purple proteins; however, ordinary white proteins remain the cheapest to produce. "This basic approach and new method have broad applicability in the isolation and production of naturally occurring proteins in plants and animals, not just for spider silk," says Richard Basel, Lebensmittel's president. The companies are now working on the technology to spin the protein into thread. The National Association for Biomedical Research (NABR) and the Foundation for Biomedical Research (FBR) have established home pages on the World Wide Web (WWW). The NABR Web site address is http://www.fiesta.com/NABR. For FBR, the address is http://www.fiesta.com/FBR Another new Web site has been established, called Fluorescent Chemosensors and Biosensors, intended to give cell biologists and others with a need for new and selective fluorescent sensors a place to post their requirements. Chemists monitoring the home page will then know "what needs making and who to collaborate with," says Tony Czarnik, director of bioorganic chemistry for Parke-Davis, who has agreed to serve as editor of the page. Czarnik encourages his cell-biology colleagues to distribute the Web site address- http://www.cursci. co.uk/fluoro/ -to colleagues via E-mail and fax. Czarnik can be reached directly at czarnia@aa.wl.com. (The Scientist, Vol:9, #19, pg.30 , October 2, 1995) (Copyright © The Scientist, Inc.)

Notebook

The Scientist Staff

Oct 1, 1995

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of