WASHINGTON—Elections are supposed to bring change. But the November 8 vote that denied Sen. Lowell Weicker (R-Conn.) a fourth term in office was not the sort of change scientists had in mind. “I have to talk through my tears,” laments lobbyist Lynn Morrison of the American Federation for Clinical Research. “Losing Lowell Weicker from the Senate is going to be tough for the entire biomedical community.”
Weicker’s narrow defeat at the hands of Connecticut’s Attorney General Joseph Lieberman was the most dramatic of a number of election results affecting science (see story, page 27). And it was a decid edly unpleasant reminder to the scientific community not to become complacent when counting up its friends in Congress.
A maverick liberal Republican, Weicker was a tireless advocate for increased health funding. Sometimes he lost. Last year, for example, he failed in an ambitious effort to transfer $200 million from the defense ...
