The meeting was part of a two-day program cosponsored by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR). The council's 2,000-plus membership, for the most part, is composed of science faculty and administrators at undergraduate schools throughout the United States. It had organized the event with the aim of stimulating dialogue among its own members and representatives of NIH and NSF on the subject of funding opportunities and grant administration policies as they pertain to the smaller colleges and universities.
Earlier this year in The Scientist (Feb. 22, 1993, page 10), CUR's immediate past president, Laura Mays Hoopes, offered cogent, qualitative arguments in support of her recommendation that undergraduates be drawn into "high-risk but low-budget experiments that can launch whole new fields of investigation." I agree that hands-on research is immensely important as a means of encouraging young people to enter and ...
