 
                          THE SCIENTIST
 
VOLUME 7, No:3                              February 8, 1993
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
 
===============================================================
Articles published in THE SCIENTIST reflect the views of their 
authors and not the official views of the publication,         
its editorial staff, or its ownership.                         
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     *** THE NEXT ISSUE OF THE SCIENTIST WILL APPEAR ON ***
     ***                FEBRUARY 22, 1993                ***
 
 
 
 
THE SCIENTIST 
CONTENTS  PAGE
(Page numbers correspond to printed edition of THE SCIENTIST)
 
 
NSF'S FUTURE DIRECTION: The National Science Foundation and the 
National Science Board are wrestling over the practical 
implementation of the recommendations contained in an NSB 
commission report on the agency's future, a task being 
complicated by disagreement over the document's interpretation, 
the board's role in shaping an NSF science and technology policy, 
and the uncertainty of the agency's influence in the new 
administration  
Page 1 of newspaper
 
 
SCIENTISTS AND INDUSTRY: With few exceptions, the outlook for the 
hiring of scientists in industry is only marginally optimistic 
and generally tied to the sluggish recovery of the economy, 
analysts say. Other factors--such as the changing world political 
map, a new administration, and the shifting perception by 
companies of how much basic research they can support--cloud the 
picture further  
Page 1 of newspaper
 
 
MOVING TOWARD THE MAINSTREAM: As his Biosphere 2 project 
encounters technical difficulties and controversy, Texas 
billionaire environmental philanthropist Edward Bass appears to 
be moving his attentions and largess closer to more conventional 
scientific research by financing the establishment of the Yale 
University Institute for Biospheric Studies  
Page 1 of newspaper
 
 
An interview with Edward Bass  
Page 9 of newspaper
 
 
AAAS ADDS STRENGTH: This year's meeting of the American 
Association for the Advancement of Science, being held in Boston 
this week, will be a "stronger" one, according to AAAS officials, 
because of enhanced quality-control measures used in selecting 
topics and speakers; it will also continue a trend of examining 
controversial issues, such as science and religion and AIDS  
Page 3 of newspaper
 
 
AAAS meeting highlights  
Page 3 of newspaper
 
 
SCIENTIFIC COMMUNICATION: The constant perusal of scientific 
literature is fundamental to the research process, but keeping up 
with the flood of books and papers is a daunting chore for the 
busy researcher. According to Nobelist Joshua Lederberg, 
electronic publishing--as long as it preserves the salient 
virtues of print publishing--provides a way for scientists to 
keep up on their reading of current research literature  
Page 10 of newspaper
 
 
COMMENTARY: Eugene Garfield, publisher of The Scientist, 
discusses the publication's recent move in electronic publishing 
(it's now on NSFnet) and the ways in which readers can benefit  
Page 12 of newspaper
 
 
 
INTERFACING: Joint investigations between chemical engineers and 
biologists are beginning to bear fruit, and the greater challenge 
today, say those collaborators, is to get these two scientific 
cultures to interact  
Page 15 of newspaper
 
 
HOT PAPERS: An astrophysicist discusses solar neutrinos  
Page 16 of newspaper
 
 
 
 
REAGENT KIT BUILDING: With the Human Genome Project in high gear 
and biotechnology laboratories busier than ever, the need for 
molecular biology reagent kits--prepackaged chemicals and their 
directions used to perform a myriad of biological tests--is 
intense, with manufacturers rushing to fill it. (Also see Reagent 
Kit Directory on page 31)  
Page 19 of newspaper
 
 
SOCIAL GRACES: Whereas good scientific credentials used to be 
enough to determine hiring decisions, with today's emphasis on 
interdisciplinary investigations and teamwork, high-technology 
companies are increasingly looking to applicants' interpersonal 
skills, as well  
Page 21 of newspaper
 
 
START-UP FUNDS: The American Association for Clinical Chemistry 
provides much-needed seed grants for clinical chemists, 
scientists who relate the chemical composition of tissue and body 
fluids to different illnesses  
Page 22 of newspaper
 
 
MIT METEOROLOGIST EDWARD LORENZ has been named the first 
recipient of the Roger Revelle Medal, presented by the American 
Geophysical Union  
Page 23 of newspaper
 
 
 
NOTEBOOK  
Page 4 of newspaper
 
 
CARTOON  
Page 4 of newspaper
 
 
LETTERS  
Page 12 of newspaper
 
CROSSWORD  
Page 13 of newspaper
 
OBITUARIES  
Page 23 of newspaper
 
REAGENTS AND REAGENT KITS DIRECTORY  
Page 31 of newspaper
 
               ===================================
 
 
 
U.S.  Economic  Woes  Expected To  Limit  Job  Opportunities  For 
Scientists In Industry
 
Slowdowns in corporate R&D are foreseen, which, experts reason, 
will cut employment potential for researchers in 1993
 
BY SUSAN L-J DICKINSON
(Page 1 of newspaper)
 
The 1993 employment outlook for scientists in industry is 
marginally optimistic, at best, according to various economic 
indicators and industry experts. With the exception of a few 
sectors that, as a result of sustained consumer demand, appear 
relatively recession-proof, such as the pharmaceutical and 
biotechnology industries, hiring will be tied to the sluggish 
recovery of the economy as a whole, they say.
 
But it is more than fallible macroeconomic forecasts that cloud 
the picture of industrial R&D in the near future, analysts say. 
Other factors include: a new, untested Democratic administration; 
the world's changing political map; and a shifting perception of 
just how much basic research, independent of market demands, 
corporations can afford to finance. All of these ingredients 
contribute to a puzzle that many analysts and industry insiders 
are finding difficult to put together.
 
And though the cyclical swings in the economy and resultant ebb 
and flow in the demand for new employees are to be expected, some 
industry insiders are predicting that, with this recession, the 
nature of corporate R&D may have changed forever.
 
"I am not optimistic that corporate basic R&D is going to make a 
big comeback," says Trueman Parish, director of special projects 
development at Eastman Chemical Co. of Kingsport, Tenn. "Even if 
we have a very robust economic turnaround, the overall 
expenditures for a corporation might go back to the same level, 
but they will have a very different character. There has been a 
real shift toward emphasis on business organizations and market-
driven re- sponses to market needs, vs. just developing new 
technology in a vacuum and hoping there is a market out there."
 
To be sure, outside of the aerospace and defense industries, 
companies are doing some hiring. And certain technical 
specialties, such as hydrology and other environmental-related 
disciplines, and industry sectors, such as biotechnology, should 
see significant expansion throughout 1993, industry observers 
predict.
 
But Tom Parent, manager of professional recruiting for General 
Electric Co.'s corporate R&D division in Schenectady, N.Y., is 
one of many recruiting managers who are being inundated by 
applications from an increasing number of frustrated scientists. 
"These are good people who would like to contribute," he says, 
"but the jobs are just not there."
 
Indeed, a July 1992 survey of 141 of the 257 R&D company members 
of the Washington, D.C.-based Industrial Research Institute (IRI) 
resulted in the institute's prediction that "1993 will see the 
recession continuing for industrial R&D in the United States."
 
The survey found that 28 percent of responding companies expected 
to decrease their total R&D expenditures from 1992 levels (vs. 19 
percent in 1991 and 16 percent in 1990); only 10 percent expected 
to increase hiring of new graduates, while 40 percent expected a 
decrease; and 84 percent expected their R&D professional staffing 
level to remain unchanged or to drop from 1992 levels.
 
And Columbus, Ohio-based Battelle Memorial Institute, an 
organization that develops, commercializes, and manages 
technologies, forecasts--based on information compiled from the 
National Science Foundation federal budget documents, and other 
sources--that 1993 industrial support of R&D will be $83 billion. 
This represents an increase of just 2.4 percent from 1992, a rise 
that shrinks significantly when juxtaposed with the expected 1993 
inflation  rate  in  excess  of 2 per-cent.
 
Eastman's Parish, one of the authors of the IRI report, says he 
wasn't surprised by the institute's results. "R&D is about the 
last place companies are willing to go back and expand after a 
recession," he says. But the appearance of a downswing is 
exacerbated, Parish says, when compared with the boom years of 
the 1980s, at which time most R&D companies saw an annual growth 
rate in the 5 percent to 6 percent range. "Compared to that, the 
current 1 percent growth in budgets is depressing, and doesn't 
create the demand for many people."
 
Through an examination of surveys and an informal sampling of 
some R&D leaders in a variety of industry areas, The Scientist 
has attempted to gain a better picture of the employment outlook 
for scientists in industry over the coming year.
 
Chemical and Engineering News (Oct. 19, 1992, page 24) has called 
1992 "perhaps the worst year in a decade to be looking for a job 
in chemistry or chemical engineering." Indeed, an annual survey 
conducted by the American Chemical Society has found that the 
unemployment rate has risen dramatically since 1990, that the 
length of average unemployment increased during 1992, and that 
more Ph.D. chemistry graduates are taking postdoctoral 
appointments, rather than finding jobs.
 
The ACS prediction for its members in 1993 is that the outlook 
for Ph.D. chemists is "bleak." Industry is hiring some chemists, 
albeit at a reduced level (Edward R. Silverman, The Scientist, 
Jan. 25, 1993, page 21). And, because the fortunes of chemical 
companies are tied so closely to the economy as a whole, ACS 
predicts that employment of chemists overall will improve, but 
slowly, throughout 1993.
 
At Dow Chemical Co. in Midland, Mich., a hiring freeze has been 
in place for all of Dow North America since late last year. And 
Dennis Guthrie, manager of Ph.D. recruiting for Dow, reports that 
he expects to hire fewer than 30 scientists for corporate R&D in 
1993--less than half of the number of positions filled during an 
average year. E.I. Du Pont de Nemours & Co. Inc. of Wilmington, 
Del., has been downsizing over the past couple of years, too. 
According to Parry M. Norling, planning director for corporate 
R&D at Du Pont, most of this has happened through the use of 
incentives for early retirement.
 
And while Norling projects that hiring there will be up 20 
percent to 30 percent over the coming year, he also says that Du 
Pont's research budget is tightening (normally $1.3 billion, it 
is set at little over $1.2 billion for 1993, he says).
 
Norling reports that strategic approaches to R&D at Du Pont are 
changing as a result. "We're looking for more efficient and 
effective ways to get the job done," he says. Whereas in the 
past, for instance, Du Pont might have had three people working 
on the safety of and regulations regarding the use of lasers, now 
the firm is trying to spread the talents of one employee more 
effectively. "We're doing a better job of leveraging our support 
work across the company," he says.
 
Aerospace, defense, and, to some extent, electronics firms have 
had to institute aggressive layoff and voluntary separation 
policies in response to the dramatic decline in the defense 
industry, and that trend will not change in the foreseeable 
future, industry experts predict. Even large corporations like 
General Electric, whose operations comprise 13 different 
businesses, are facing some rough times. Parent reports that, 
while to date GE has not had to actually lay anyone off, it has 
been downsizing through attrition: "We've been in a nonexpansion 
mode for the last four to five years." Parent adds that in 1993 
he expects to hire only 50 scientists within corporate R&D, all 
of whom will be replacement hires.
 
The situation for earth scientists employed in the petroleum and 
gas industries is expected to continue to decline, as well. Nick 
Claudy, manager of human resources for the American Geological 
Institute of Alexandria, Va., reports that these firms have been 
forced to lay off technical staff members as existing sources dry 
up and competition has increased from abroad over the past couple 
of years (Edward R. Silverman, The Scientist, Dec. 7, 1992, page 
23). The American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) in 
Tulsa, Okla., reports that employment prospects in the mining and 
minerals industry are also pretty flat.
 
But there is some good news on the horizon for earth scientists. 
With the current trend toward environmental awareness, both 
associations report a bright outlook for hydrologists, 
hydrogeologists, and scientists experienced in the areas of toxic 
waste and waste management. Oil companies need people to help 
them develop "cleaner" methods of drilling and are looking for 
more efficient ways to extract oil from existing wells, Claudy 
says. And Larry Nation, spokesman for AAPG, anticipates that many 
petroleum geologists will return to school for retraining in 
geology and hydrology, as the demand for environmental 
consultants skyrockets.
 
Another industry sector that appears to be weathering the 
economic downturn intact is the pharmaceutical business. The 
Washington, D.C.-based Pharmaceutical Manufac- turers Association 
reports that R&D spending by its approximately 105 member 
companies increased in 1992 to $8.8 billion in the U.S. and $10.9 
billion worldwide (up from $7.7 billion and $9.6 billion, 
respectively, in 1991). But while research budgets and hiring 
needs are expected to continue to increase moderately throughout 
the pharmaceutical industry, some external factors could 
negatively impact this market sector in the near future.
 
One, says Ann Price, a scientific recruiter who works in the San 
Francisco Bay area, is potential drug price capping legislation 
that has been under discussion in Congress. "If drug companies 
are worried about how drug prices will be regulated and are not 
confident regarding their lobbyists' impact on a new 
administration, they will tighten their belts," she predicts. And 
Erwin Posner, president of the Professional Advancement and 
Placement Institute, a science recruiting firm in Southfield, 
Mich., says that the large number of prescription drugs slated to 
come off patent--and therefore become open to competition from 
generic equivalents--in the next few years also poses a problem 
for the large pharmaceutical firms. "They are tightening up on 
their research budgets now because they are concerned about how 
their income is going to support the continuing research," he 
says.
 
Posner has been surprised over the past year to have some of his 
traditional corporate pharmaceutical clients tell him that they 
have a hiring freeze--even though, judging by their current 
sales, they appear to be doing well.
 
The one area of optimism for corporate R&D appears to be 
biotechnology. Though Price stresses that, owing to the nature of 
science, fortunes and the demand for staff can change literally 
overnight, she has not witnessed any kind of slowdown in demand 
or opportunities for scientists in biotech; nor does she expect 
to over the coming year.
 
The biotechnology industry has experienced some major setbacks in 
the past year and a half, but most of them have been attributable 
to regulatory agency complications, rather than to the troubled 
U.S. economy. The most recent example has been Malvern, Pa.-based 
Centocor Inc.'s January 18 announcement that it was stopping 
clinical trials of its antisepsis drug Centoxin because of 
problems. Last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration 
rejected Cen-tocor's request for approval of the drug, citing 
deficiencies in the company's data. A subsequent trial was halted 
after an unexpectedly high number of patient deaths.
 
The news caused the company's stock to plunge 62 percent and 
raised questions about the health of the entire industry. But 
analysts disagree about the consequences of these setbacks, and 
many companies are moving ahead with research and clinical trials 
of their products.
 
At Amgen Inc. of Thousand Oaks, Calif., for example, Chris 
Giffin, associate manager of research affairs, anticipates a 25 
percent to 30 percent growth of employees for his company in 
1993. (Amgen currently employs 600 to 700 scientists.) "We're in 
the human therapeutic business, developing treatments for 
diseases which currently have no adequate therapy; these kinds of 
things are not really influenced by swings in the economy," he 
says. Indeed, the success of Amgen's therapeutics Epogen and 
Neupogen is funding the company's current expansion. And the 
unprecedented number of biotech products expected to hit the 
market from several different companies over the next few years 
should help the outlook of this industry as a whole.
 
Both Price and Giffin report that, as the biotech industry has 
matured, there has been a broadening in the types of scientists 
whom firms have been seeking. Whereas 10 or 15 years ago, 
companies were primarily hiring just molecular biologists, now 
they also are recruiting various types of cellular biologists, 
physiologists, neurobiologists, and organic and synthetic 
chemists, they say.
 
But whatever the demand for scientists in any specific area, 
recruiting managers across virtually all industry sectors are 
reporting increasing competition for the jobs that are available. 
Norling at Du Pont reports that currently, for about 200 openings 
in corporate R&D, his company has roughly 2,000 active 
candidates. "Our pipeline is full right now," he says, "and the 
quality of candidates is excellent."
 
Meanwhile, Dow's Guthrie reports an increase in students who want 
on-campus interviews with the company, as well as older 
applicants who already have industry experience. At GE, Parent is 
happy to reflect on the positive side of such a tight job market: 
It allows him to "cherry pick" the best people for his company. 
Suzanne Simala at Eli Lilly & Co. in Indianapolis also reports 
that the steady increase in the ratio of applicants to openings 
means that her company can be more choosy in whom they hire: In 
1992, 40 percent of all scientists hired by Lilly had prior work 
experience in their fields.
 
The recession also has caused industry executives to reassess the 
goals of their research. At Du Pont, Norling says, management is 
"spending more time looking at how long-range research ties into 
the long-term business outlook, and we are focusing research more 
on fundamental technologies that cut across a number of areas 
that will be in market demand."
 
At GE, too, "the charge increasingly is to get R&D projects out 
into a business division," says Parent. He points out that this 
objective has real ramifications for the type of scientists GE is 
seeking to hire. "We are more interested in looking for a person 
who is interested in taking what has been done in the lab and 
putting it into business to become more competitive, vs. the 
person we would have hired a few years ago, who is interested in 
developing basic new technology."
 
What other traits on a scientist's resume might strike the right 
cord with corporate recruiters? Du Pont's Norling says that, 
however tough the times,  his company is specifically
 
concerned with recruiting "new blood" into the organization, to 
ensure that Du Pont keeps abreast of newer technologies and 
techniques, such as innovative methods for making polymers. With 
this in mind, he says that Du Pont "still desperately needs to 
bring polymer chemists, chemical engineers, and biologists on 
board."
 
Betty Devinney, employment manager for Eastman Chemical Co., 
reports that changing political and economic geography is having 
a direct impact on whom she hires. "Our market is no longer a 
domestic one, it's global: Fifty percent of our sales are 
international, and we are in the process of moving our 
manufacturing sites closer to our customers."
 
As a result, while technical fit is still the first thing she 
looks for in a job applicant, she is increasingly concerned with 
finding scientists who can help Eastman's multinational effort 
succeed. Willingness to relocate overseas, international 
residency, having worked or traveled abroad, and bi- or multi-
lingual skills--"anything that signifies appreciation or 
understanding of other cultures"--all raise her interest in a 
scientific candidate.
 
John Oxton, manager of corporate Ph.D. recruitment for Armonk, 
N.Y.-based IBM Corp., cites the litany of characteristics he 
looks for in a candidate: "technical expertise, a track record of 
proven accomplishments, motivation, leadership and interpersonal 
skills, initiative, independence, the ability to generate ideas 
and communicate abilities, and raw intellectual power."
 
 
 
Susan L-J Dickinson is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia.
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #3, February 8, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
CORPORATE R&D: THE CLINTON INFLUENCE
(Page 7 of newspaper)
 
 
Although  the specifics of President Clinton's first budget  will 
not  become  known until late winter or early spring,  Albert  H. 
Teich, the American Association for the Advancement of  Science's 
director  of science and policy programs, says that there  are  a 
number  of specific tools Clinton could use to help brighten  the 
outlook for corporate R&D:
 
* An R&D tax credit. This would provide financial incentive for a 
corporation to invest in research and development.
* Technology extension services, modeled after the current United 
States Department of Agriculture program. These would send 
government-employed technical experts out into the field to 
provide assistance and advice to small businesses that don't have 
their own R&D capabilities.
* Consortia, formed by industrial firms in a given sector and 
with government support (modeled on the Sematech consortium of 
semiconductor manufacturers). These would help corporations 
advance their common interests by sharing work at the 
precompetitive level of underlying technologies.
* A revision of antitrust legislation. Joint research is already 
allowed under current antitrust law, but Teich suggests that 
Clinton might expand this practice to manufacturing.
* Government programs to facilitate the redeployment of highly 
trained scientists displaced from the aerospace and defense 
industries.
Finally, Teich points out that "all of the things that would 
improve the climate for industrial research would improve the 
employment possibilities for scientists."
 
 
 
--S.L-JD.
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #3, February 8, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
 
NSF  Still Wrestling With Science Board Over Recommendations  For 
Agency Future
 
NSB report's ambiguity and a lack of consensus on implementation 
hamper foundation's strategic planning
 
BY BARTON REPPERT
(Page 1 of newspaper)
 
In the face of congressional pressures and a climate of unease 
among university-based researchers, the National Science 
Foundation and its oversight body, the National Science Board, 
are wrestling to develop a plan for implementing policy 
recommendations set forth in a report by a special NSB commission 
on the agency's future.
 
Their efforts are being complicated by lack of consensus about 
how to interpret the commission's findings in areas such as the 
relationship of basic and applied science, grant allocations, 
science education, and NSF's role in developing a national 
science and technology policy. There has also been disagreement 
between NSB and NSF director Walter E. Massey over the role the 
science board should play in shaping specific agency policy 
initiatives.
 
At press time, the picture was clouded further by the 
announcement that Massey will leave the agency in April. The 
announcement throws into question the status of these policy 
issues, as well as the disposition of a plan being prepared by 
NSF that attempts to outline specific steps toward implementation 
of the NSB report.
 
Meanwhile, several Washington-based science policy-watchers 
outside the government say they have mixed views about the NSB 
commission's report and its value in helping to shape longer-
range strategy and goals for the NSF.
 
Bruce L.R. Smith, a science policy analyst at the Brookings 
Institution, says about the report: "It's like the Dead Sea 
Scrolls, written in some kind of strange code. You have to know 
who said what. Obviously there was a lot of internal head-
knocking. And they came out with this strange and interesting 
document."
 
Many NSB members attending a meeting last month of the science 
board's executive committee told Massey of mounting worries among 
NSF grantees concerning the possible impact the current drive to 
rede-fine the foundation's mission and scope may have on their 
research fields and career futures. "Believe me, we're generating 
intense insecurity," warned Thomas B. Day, NSB's vice chairman 
and president of San Diego State University.
 
Another science board member, Peter H. Raven, director of the 
Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, said during the January 
15 meeting in Philadelphia that researchers are worried over the 
possibility of "some kind of murky move that will make it 
difficult for them to get money." Raven added that any indication 
NSF may trim back support for investigator-initiated basic 
research "sends thousands of people out to the windowsills, ready 
to jump."
 
At the meeting, Massey distributed to NSB members copies of a 
draft "strategic vision" document that sketches more specific 
long-range aims for NSF. He said a final version of the document 
is not expected to be publicly released until after a meeting of 
the full science board, scheduled for February 11-12. Massey also 
said that he and his staff are trying to develop an 
"implementation plan" to state specifically how recommendations 
of the special commission will be carried out.
 
Mary E. Hanson, an NSF public affairs officer, says that the 
"strategic vision" document is the result of a long-range 
planning process that included the formation of the NSB 
commission, and that seeks to incorporate the commission's 
findings.
 
According to Hanson, the document presents five "strategic 
themes" for the foundation: "intellectual integration," involving 
"the synthesis of knowledge and skills occurring throughout 
research and education"; "organizational integration," referring 
to "cooperative arrangements and partnerships with other 
agencies, industry, or local governments"; "investing in people" 
to help develop a scientifically literature citizenry; 
adaptability; and accountability.
 
Massey and James J. Duderstadt, NSB chairman and president of the 
University of Michigan, have strongly praised the report by the 
board's Commission on the Future of the NSF, cochaired by William 
H. Danforth, chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis, 
and Robert W. Galvin, chairman of the executive committee of 
Motor-ola Inc. of Schaumburg, Ill. A number of science policy 
observers, however, say that on key points such as grant 
allocations, the role of the agency in national science policy 
and advancing U.S. competitiveness, and the scope of NSF support 
for science, the panel adopted language that many in the U.S. 
scientific community may view as troublingly ambiguous.
 
In its report, released on November 20, the 15-member commission 
concludes that NSF should have two goals in allocating its 
resources: "One is to support first-rate research at many points 
on the frontiers of knowledge, identified and defined by the best 
researchers. The second goal is a balanced allocation of 
resources in strategic research areas in response to scientific 
opportunities to meet national goals."
 
The report says "the commission urges that the role of the NSF be 
further clarified within an overall national policy, the goal of 
which should be to maintain the premier position of U.S. science 
while regaining America's lead in the commercialization of 
technology."
 
At the same time, it cautions that NSF can play only an indirect 
role in bolstering U.S. competitiveness in world markets. "The 
universities and the NSF should complement rather than replace 
the roles of those engaged in technology development," the panel 
says. "Redirecting the NSF's activities from research and 
education would have little or no effect on the U.S. competitive 
position in the near term, but would severely restrict prospects 
for the long term."
 
While omitting discussion of any specific budget figures, the 
report says "the NSF will find it difficult to respond to these 
new challenges without an increase in resources, for the budget 
of NSF already is inadequate to support its present 
responsibilities and programs." It recommends that the size of 
NSF grants be examined because "many believe that on average, NSF 
individual research grants are too small."
 
The commission urges that "the [National Science] Board and those 
involved in the planning resist any pressures to strip the NSF of 
its full spectrum of research goals and linkage mechanisms, from 
engineering research centers, to computer networks, to pure 
science and mathematics. The great strength of American science 
and of American universities is the absence of rigid cultural 
barriers between science and engineering and between pure 
research and its applications." (See page 8 for more excerpts 
from the report.)
 
Marye Anne Fox, an NSB member who also served on the special 
commission and attended the January 15 meeting, says she believes 
that "by and large" the scientific community is "very favorably 
impressed" with the commission report. "What they're worried 
about is ... how it's going to be implemented," she says, adding 
that "we're going to keep our eyes open on this implementation 
business."
 
Fox, who holds the M. June and J. Virgil Waggoner Regents Chair 
in Chemistry at the University of Texas, Austin, indicates some 
concern over whether the science board will have a chance to vote 
on the Massey implementation plan before it is put into effect. 
"If you go back to the [1950] charter of NSF, it's NSB that's 
supposed to be doing the policy-making. So I would assume that if 
the implementation represents a shift in policy, it would have to 
be put up for a vote," she says.
 
The special commission was formed last summer amid stepped-up 
efforts in Congress--particularly by the Senate Appropriations 
Com-mittee's subcommittee on independent agencies, chaired by 
Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.), which controls NSF funding--to 
channel the foundation more toward "directed" or "strategic" 
research and involvement with technology transfer.
 
In its report accompanying a fiscal 1993 appropriation bill, the 
subcommittee said that, while recognizing NSF's role in 
establishing U.S. leadership in basic research, it believes that 
"the new world order requires the foundation to take a more 
activist role in transferring the results of basic research from 
the academic community into the marketplace." NSF, the 
subcommittee said, should "play the key role in making the 
nation's academic research infrastructure more accessible to 
those endeavoring to build America's technology base and improve 
U.S. economic competitiveness."
 
The Mikulski subcommittee set minimum levels for NSF's support of 
manufacturing science and technology, high-performance computing, 
and interdisciplinary research on the environment. This get-tough 
message to NSF was dramatically underscored when the Senate and 
House appropriations committees rebuffed the Bush 
administration's request for an 18 percent increase in the NSF 
research budget--and instead appropriated $1.859 billion, down 
$13 million from fiscal 1992.
 
In December, Massey sought to interpret the NSB special com-
mission's recommendations in a politically favorable light when 
he sent to key members of Congress a letter saying he views the 
November 20 report "as an important step in validating NSF's 
efforts to strengthen the links between academic or curiosity-
driven research and strategic research focused on issues of 
national concern.
 
"More importantly, I feel the report provides a strong policy 
basis for an accelerated expansion of programs that link 
scientific and engineering research to key technologies in such 
areas as materials, biotechnology, electronics, and information 
and communication."
 
Detailing NSF's "current plan" for the 1993 fiscal year, Massey's 
December 21 letter said that with regard to various "strategic 
research" areas:
 
* Manufacturing research and education will increase by 18.7 
percent to a level of $104.4 million. "We will devote particular 
attention to working closely with the Defense Department in 
defense conversion efforts," Massey wrote.
 
* The advanced materials and processing program will increase by 
14.2 percent to $303.6 million.
 
* Biotechnology research funded by NSF will increase by 9.3 
percent to $190.2 million.
 
* High-performance computing and communications will increase by 
12.5 percent to $225.1 million.
 
* The global change research program is slated to increase by 
15.2 percent over last year's level. "This represents about 30 
percent of the original increase requested and will require us to 
forego a number of planned international activities," the letter 
says.
 
A Senate Appropriations Committee staff member, speaking on 
condition of anonymity, says that from the committee's point of 
view, "there's some progress that's been made." He says some in 
the research community overreacted because they "misunderstood 
the language and intent of the committee," which wasn't meant to 
suggest that "all research must be applied research." Instead, 
the subcommittee believes that "you can have basic research that 
is strategic in nature," he says.
 
The committee aide says NSF is "making progress towards providing 
a vision, that is articulable, that does say we can focus basic 
research, based upon strategic areas--recognizing that we don't 
have enough money to fund every good idea, every good intention."
 
On the other side of the Capitol, the House Science, Space, and 
Technology Committee's science subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Rick 
Boucher (D-Va.), is expected to review the commission's report 
and recommendations as part of its NSF reauthorization hearings, 
which a subcommittee aide says could get under way as soon as 
late February.
 
The Brookings Institution's Smith, who previously worked at the 
White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, says that, 
as he views the situation, Massey "made an effort, under pressure 
from Mikulski and the Senate [appropriations] committee, to try 
to move NSF toward a prominent role in technology transfer. And 
the scientific community kind of went bananas, in a semi-
hysterical fashion. I think [moving toward a technology-transfer 
role is] dead in the water."
 
Commenting on the report's brevity--11 pages--and its lack of 
detailed explanation for the recommendations presented, Smith 
notes that with only three months to complete the study, the 
commission was "under a very tight deadline."
 
Nevertheless, he adds, "we deserve a little more profound 
wrestling with the issues and a clearer charting of the future. I 
think in that sense the report was a disappointment."
 
Erich Bloch, who served as NSF director in 1984-90 and is 
currently a distinguished fellow at the privately funded Council 
on Competitiveness, says the commission's report is "a 
confirmation, in my opinion, of what NSF has been doing over the 
past few years"--programs balanced between basic and applied 
research, between individual grants and support for groups and 
centers, and also between research and education.
 
According to Bloch, "the report points out that NSF has to become 
more proactive--more proactive with regard to its relationship to 
industry.... NSF has to reach out more and involve industry 
members more in its deliberations, be it on the [science] board, 
in advisory committees, or you name it."
 
Kathy Ream, director of the American Chemical Society's 
department of government relations and science policy, says the 
commission's report is "not the be-all and end-all on what the 
foundation should be doing."
 
She observes that, despite Massey's attempt to interpret the 
report in a favorable light, "I don't see the commission's report 
as being in the thrust that the Senate Appropriations Committee 
seems to want the foundation to go. I think we're going to still 
have certain battles up there."
 
H. Guyford Stever, who served as NSF director in 1972-76 and is 
now a commissioner with the Carnegie Commission on Science, 
Technology, and Government, comments about the report: "I think 
the [NSB] special commission did a good job, although they didn't 
go overwhelmingly in one direction or the other. My personal 
feeling is that the National Science Foundation's best effort is 
heavily loaded on the basic research side, but applied research 
is fine if it's done in the kind of climate that they're best 
suited to, which is American universities."
 
Stever indicates that he believes the NSB commission should have 
taken more time in order to do a more comprehensive study, 
saying: "I personally think it's much too important to get this 
right than try to rush it."
 
Charles Chambers, executive director of the American Institute of 
Biological Sciences, calls the report "certainly intelligent and 
reasonable." He says that some of the report's ambiguous language 
or other shortcomings may have been inevitable in view of the 
circumstances under which it was drafted.
 
"When you have such a broad range of people of different views, 
operating on a very, very short time frame, in the midst of a 
national election, you find people perhaps pointing with pride 
rather than marching ahead," Chambers says.
 
"And I think it's a document which will, of course, take on more 
character  and  more flavor as the new administration settles in, 
[and as] NSF decides where it wants to be and how it wants to do 
what it's doing."
 
 
Barton Reppert is a freelance science writer based in Gaithersburg, Md.
 
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #3, February 8, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
AMPLIFICATION
(Page 5 of newspaper
 
The article "Advance Planning Is The Key To Avoiding And 
Surviving Layoffs, Career Experts Say" (Ricki Lewis, The 
Scientist, Jan. 11, 1993, page 20) mentioned the Young Scientists 
Network (YSN), an electronic mail-based organization. The 
electronic mail address for information on subscribing to YSN, 
which is available through the Internet, is:
ysn-adm@zoyd.ee.washington.edu
 
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #3, February 8, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
REPORT ON NSF FUTURE
(Page 8 of newspaper)
 
Following are excerpts from the report, "A Foundation for the 
21st Century: A Progressive Framework for the National Science 
Foundation," prepared by the National Science Board's Commission 
on the Future of the National Science Foundation. The report was 
released on Nov. 20, 1992.
 
"Despite having only about three percent of the total federal R&D 
budget, the NSF has for over 40 years played an essential role in 
the scientific primacy of the United States....
 
"An important national priority is to improve the relative 
industrial strength of the United States. The National Science 
Foundation can make contributions to economic success, but 
developing a plan to do so must begin with an understanding of 
the system and the reasons for failure of some industries in 
world markets.
 
"Failures in the market place have not been the result of slow 
transfer of academic science to industry. In fact, American firms 
have been the first to commercialize virtually all innovative 
products, but have lost market share to competitors with shorter 
product cycles, lower costs, and superior quality.
 
"... The universities and the NSF should complement rather than 
replace the roles of those engaged in technology development. 
Redirecting the NSF's activities from research and education 
would have little or no effect on the U.S. competitive position 
in the near term, but would severely restrict prospects for the 
long term. . . .
 
"The United States should have a stronger and more coherent 
policy wherein science and engineering can contribute more fully 
to America's strength.
 
"The [National Science] Board is encouraged to work with the 
president, his science adviser, and the Federal Coordinating 
Council on Science, Engineering and Technology to assess the 
health of science and engineering broadly and to generate a 
stronger policy into which the NSF mission fits....
 
"Society's voice is welcome and needed.... In accepting society's 
support, the scientific community naturally assumes an obligation 
to be both responsive to national needs voiced by society as well 
as the intellectual priorities solely initiated by the scientist 
or engineer....
 
"The commission strongly supports the initiation of proposals by 
investigators and selection of those to be funded by merit review 
carried out by experts. This method has proved to be the best way 
of tapping into the creativity of research scientists and 
engineers....
 
"The board and foundation's key role in the support of research 
in science and engineering should be strongly reaffirmed.
 
"The NSB and the NSF should encourage interdisciplinary work and 
cooperation among sectors. Nature knows nothing about 
disciplinary boundaries....
 
"Many believe that on average, NSF individual research grants are 
too small. Examination of separate fields and wide consultation 
within the community would help in understanding the issues....
 
"The foundation should more aggressively lead in communicating 
the `case' for science and engineering, which deserve a high 
priority in the mind of public officials and citizens alike....
 
"The NSF should both set an example and work with others in 
fostering international coopera-tion....
 
"A major priority for the NSB and the NSF should continue to be 
education in science and engineering. NSF's support of education 
has a cascading influence. The foundation should be at the 
leading edge of ever-emerging improvements in curricula and 
methodologies of teaching and training for research....
 
"NSF should continue to support shared, common-use facilities 
that cannot be built and maintained by individual 
institutions....
 
"The commission urges that the role of the NSF be further 
clarified within an overall national policy, the goal of which 
should be to maintain the premier position of U.S. science while 
regaining America's lead in the commercialization of technology.
 
"... The NSB, in helping to develop a national science and 
technology policy, should move quickly to propose a role for the 
NSF based on its past mission and a vision of what is needed 
today.... The plan should include a response to the 
recommendations of this commis- sion....
 
"The NSF will find it difficult to respond to these new 
challenges without an increase in resources, for the budget of 
the NSF already is inadequate to support its present 
responsibilities and programs....
 
"... All roads need not lead just to the public treasury. We have 
one additional suggestion--expanded contributions by business to 
complement public funding for selected science, engineering and 
technology programs."
 
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #3, February 8, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
 
 
Billionaire Bass Moves Beyond Biosphere 2
 
BY SCOTT VEGGEBERG
(Page 1 of Newspaper)
 
Texas billionaire Edward Bass, best known for his bankrolling of 
Biosphere 2, now appears to be focusing his largess a bit closer 
to the scientific mainstream. The Biosphere 2 project, an 
experiment set up near Tucson, Ariz., attempting to establish a 
sealed, self-sustaining, three-acre module with eight humans 
inside, has taken a beating from the press and scientists over 
its lack of scientific credibility, not to mention allegations 
that the project is essentially the work of a survivalist cult.
 
The scientific shortcomings of Biosphere 2 (B2) are being 
addressed in the wake of an analysis conducted last year at the 
behest of Bass by Smithsonian Institution ecologist Tom Lovejoy 
and other scientists.
 
And, in another move toward greater scientific credibility for 
proj-ects he funds, Bass has provided $20 million to form the 
Yale University Institute for Biospheric Studies (YIBS). In 
November, Yale officials announced the formation of seven on-
campus centers for ecological research and the intent to hire 
seven new faculty members. According to YIBS director Leo Buss, 
although Bass is chairman of his institute's external advisory 
board, YIBS and B2 have "no more to do with each other than with 
the number of other projects Mr. Bass supports" (see story on 
page 9).
 
On the B2 front, last July Lovejoy released a report of his 
team's analysis of the problems with the project. The report 
said, "Although good potential exists for [Biosphere 2] to be a 
top-grade scientific effort, several related factors have held 
back scientific development." Those factors included the lack of 
a "well- developed, written scientific plan," which has resulted 
in an "ad hoc mix of scientific initiatives of varying quality." 
Lovejoy also cited an "overconcern with proprietary information," 
which has "impeded the flow of scientific information and 
interaction." Other problems mentioned in the report include 
possible "embellishments" of data.
 
The report recommended that B2's managers create a position of 
scientific director and begin publishing and discussing their 
work more openly. Lovejoy and his team of B2 analysts were 
optimistic, however, that the $150 million project could be set 
straight: "We believe that, given an adequate scientific 
reorientation, Biosphere 2 can fulfill its vision and become an 
important and unique contributor to scientific knowledge." 
Specifically, the report said B2 could make important 
contributions in the fields of biogeochemical cycling, the 
ecology of closed ecological systems, and restoration ecology.
 
Yale emeritus botany professor Arthur Galston, an expert in space 
biology and a longtime consultant to NASA on space-based farming, 
has in the past been critical of the Arizona project, calling it 
"unregulated and unscientific." But even he acknowledges that 
some credible findings may yet emerge from the B2 experiment. 
"Tom Lovejoy will certainly help them shape up," he says. "If 
they mend their ways and have a proper scientific organization, 
they can contribute not only to basic science but to NASA's 
Controlled Ecological Life Support System [CELSS] mission-
oriented proj-ects." Galston and colleagues reported in the 
July/August 1992 issue of BioScience (42[7]:490-535) on NASA-
sponsored research that aims to develop "bioregenerative life-
support systems to produce, process, and recycle biomass."
 
 
Biosphere To Shape Up
"We want to assure people that there is serious science going on 
here at Biosphere 2," says B2 spokesman Chris Helms. As for the 
position of scientific director, which was announced via 
advertisements in Science, "we are very close to some finalists 
for that position," he says, but at press time no candidate had 
been selected. Publications of results from B2 are in production 
and one has already appeared in print, Helms says.
 
But aside from the credibility issue, another problem the B2 
managers have to deal with is the declining oxygen levels inside 
B2. For reasons as yet unexplained, what should be a 21 percent 
level has declined to less than 15 percent oxygen, roughly 
equivalent to that available at 12,500 feet elevation. Scientists 
are puzzling over this gradually dwindling oxygen supply, and 
some believe it may be getting bound up in the soil. But Roy 
Walford, a University of California, Los Angeles, pathologist 
known for his research on aging and the only trained scientist 
inside the B2 structure, says it is not a bane but a bit of a 
boon. He says he is using the declining oxygen levels as an 
opportunity to conduct research on a phenomenon in high-altitude 
acclimation he is observing and will report on in future papers. 
But he and fellow biospherians have been suffering breathing 
problems, insomnia, and fatigue. "When those things get too much 
for us, then I'll call it a halt," he says.
 
And in fact, on January 13, project managers decided to 
ameliorate the atmospheric conditions inside B2 by pumping in 
oxygen to achieve a 19 percent level, says Helms. However, no 
further additions of oxygen are anticipated from now until the 
biospherians' scheduled emergence on September 26.
 
Walford has already published a paper in the Proceedings of the 
National Academy of Sciences that takes advantage of one of B2's 
other major problems--the inability of the closed ecosystem to 
supply 2,500 calories per day worth of food to the biospherians, 
as was targeted at the time B2 was closed in September 1991. The 
title of the paper sums up his findings: "The calorically 
restricted, low-fat, nutrient dense diet in Biosphere 2 
significantly lowers blood glucose, total leukocyte count, 
cholesterol, and blood pressure in humans" (R.L. Walford, et al., 
PNAS, 89:11533-37, 1992).
 
Speaking by telephone from inside B2, Walford says, "We just kind 
of, by serendipity, find ourselves in a situation we've been 
studying for years in animals" (R. Weindruch and R.L. Walford, 
The Retardation of Aging and Disease by Dietary Restriction, 
Springfield, Ill., Charles C Thomas, 1988). He says having what 
amounts to rigorously sequestered human subjects for such a long 
period provides a unique setting by ensuring that everyone 
receives the same amounts of food and that no one is cheating on 
the diet. In the summary of the paper, he writes that the B2 
caloric restriction demonstrates that "radical and possibly 
beneficial changes in physiological risk factors can be produced 
in normal affluent individuals in Western countries quickly and 
reproducibly by dietary manipulation." The biospherians have all 
lost quite a bit of weight--some of them more than 50 pounds--and 
according to press accounts they appear quite thin.
 
As with many of the goings-on at B2, this paper has attracted 
attention from the popular press. Speaking of Walford's study, 
Neil Stone, a professor of medicine at Chicago's Northwestern 
University and chairman of the American Heart Association's 
nutrition committee, told the Associated Press in December that 
the research hasn't shown that the diet can20increase life span.
 
"He didn't show any of that," Stone told AP. "It's one thing to 
say that I think this diet does this in animals. It's another 
thing to show it in humans."
 
Meanwhile, at YIBS, director Buss says the Bass donations were 
fortuitous, coming at a time when Yale was endeavoring to grow 
substantially in the environmental science area. To choose the 
centers that would be part of YIBS, environmental science faculty 
were invited to submit innovative proposals on what areas Yale 
should focus its attentions.
 
"The process of deciding [on] these centers has brought together 
faculty from across departments and schools that was 
unprecedented," says Buss. "We found as a rule that the most 
exciting areas were ones that span more than one academic unit." 
That is, interdisciplinary proposals fared the best, he says. 
"The center's leaders are among the most prestigious members of 
Yale's faculty. Without exception, they are noted for their 
ability to encourage interdisciplinary research and promote 
synergism."
 
 
YIBS Projects
The Center for the Study of Global Change will examine variations 
in energy released from the Earth's interior and from the sun, 
fluctuations in ice caps, sea temperatures and levels, and 
atmospheric gases. The Center for Computational Ecology will 
study "artificial life," which involves computer simulations of 
how living organisms evolve and interact. The Center for Earth 
Observation will gather and analyze satellite data to monitor 
storms, forest damage, ozone depletion, and so forth, and act as 
a library for such data. Another center, called ECOSAVE, will 
study the ecology and systematics of animals on the verge of 
extinction. 
 
The Center for Molecular Ecology and Systematics will utilize 
Yale's Peabody Museum and its vast plant and animal collections 
to genetically analyze population patterns and to classify 
species. The Center for Human Ecology, Environment and Infectious 
Diseases will chart the impact of social and environmental 
changes, such as deforestation, on infectious human diseases. The 
Center for Biological Transformation will concentrate on ways to 
utilize bacteria to detoxify chemical wastes.
 
Bass's donation is intended only as seed money to get the centers 
off the ground, says Buss, who adds, "We are aggressively 
pursuing ongoing funding." Other grants are starting to 
materialize, such as $389,000 from the General Reinsurance Corp., 
headquartered in Stamford, Conn., to the Center for Biological 
Transformation for studies on bacteria that consume toxic waste.
 
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #3, February 8, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
EDWARD BASS ON BIOSPHERE STUDIES
 
(Page 9 of Newspaper)
 
Edward Bass is 46 years old and--as heir to a fortune that 
originated with his great-uncle Sid Richardson, a Texas oil 
wildcatter--is one of the wealthiest men in the United States. 
But although many of his siblings' interests run more toward 
luxury and high-stakes business ventures, he prefers a down-to-
earth lifestyle. He drives his own car, flies commercial 
airlines, and doesn't spend a lot of money on fancy houses, says 
his publicist, Terrell Lamb. He is also one of the largest 
benefactors of environmental research in the world, not all of 
which attract as much interest--and derision--as Biosphere 2.
 
Besides funding Biosphere 2 and the Yale Institute for Biospheric 
Studies, Bass is on the board of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF); 
the New York Botanical Garden; the African Wildlife Foundation; 
and the Jane Goodall Institute for Wildlife Research, Education 
and Conservation. In a July 1992 article in Vanity Fair, Bruce 
Bunting, vice president of WWF, said of Bass, "The common 
denominator in all his projects is that Ed Bass wants to build a 
better world."
 
To learn more about what motivates Bass's environmental largess, 
The Scientist conducted the following interview. Bass shares at 
least one trait in common with the rest of his family, however--a 
reluctance to speak and appear in public. These questions, 
therefore, were submitted in writing through his publicist, as 
were the responses.
 
 
Q  How do you account for your extraordinary interest in the 
environment?
 
A  I consider I was lucky when I was growing up. My father had a 
great love for the out-of-doors and for wildlife, and he exposed 
me to that. I also was educated at a time when ecological issues 
were beginning to be focused upon. The growing awareness of 
humankind's role in the biosphere, a role that can be 
detrimental, has developed in the last 20 or 30 years as an area 
of considerable scientific interest and significance.
 
Q  Why do you invest so much in environmental projects, and what 
satisfaction do you derive from this investment?
 
A  I've invested a great deal in ecologically oriented ventures, 
not only in monetary terms, but also in terms of my own time, 
efforts, and energies. I've done this because I think there is a 
great future in it. I see it as good business, and I see it as 
responsible stewardship of the resources of wealth.
What I enjoy most about  the projects I'm involved with around 
the world is the opportunity to go out and work in the field. For 
example, I give a significant chunk of my time every year to work 
in the field with the World Wildlife Fund, principally in Asia. 
This includes everything from participating in program 
development and negotiations on a diplomatic level to expeditions 
in the most remote reaches of Bhutan and Nepal. I have been quite 
involved in programs for the conservation of the Greater Asian 
one-horned rhino in the lowlands of Nepal, and in the creation of 
a unique, pioneering Conservation Trust Fund for Bhutan.
 
Q  Besides being a 1968 graduate of Yale, why did you choose this 
university to create an Institute for Biospheric Studies?
 
A  I am convinced that Yale has extraordinary potential among 
universities to take the lead in advancing understanding of the 
biosphere and in refining creative approaches to environmental 
issues in this country and around the world. Yale has a great 
strength in the basic sciences which inform these matters, and it 
is unique in having a professional school devoted to natural 
resources management and envi- ronmental studies; a magnificent 
natural history collection in the Peabody Museum; a law school 
that has been a pioneer in environmental law; an international 
studies program that will focus increasingly on worldwide 
environmental concerns; and a growing interest in the economics, 
politics, ethics, and public health issues relating to the 
environment.
 
Q  What are your plans for improving the scientific merits of 
Biosphere 2?
 
A  With any new scientific endeavor, gaining scientific 
credibility is a very definite, step-by-step process. Since we 
first conceived of Biosphere 2, I've been confident it would have 
scientific significance, and I think that as we progress, we will 
be increasingly acknowledged for our scientific interest.
Also, we now have an independent, outside scientific advisory 
committee, chaired by Dr. Thomas Lovejoy of the Smithsonian. The 
committee reviews all pertinent aspects of the project, and their 
reports are made available to the scientific community.
 
--S.V.
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #3, February 8, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
 
AAAS Gathering In Boston
 
BY RON KAUFMAN
(Page 3 of the newspaper)
 
 
The 1993 meeting of the American Association for the  Advancement 
of  Science--which AAAS officials foresee as being  a  "stronger" 
meeting  than those of past years--convenes this week in  Boston. 
The six-day gathering, February 11-16, will feature 22  symposia, 
including  more  than 200 lecture sessions, and  1,200  speakers. 
Especially noteworthy to some attendees may be sessions  focusing 
on such volatile subjects as "Science and Religion," "Confronting 
AIDS," and "Examining and Reforming the Economic System."
 
Treatment of controversial topics like these, in addition to the 
hard-core science matters traditionally within the AAAS meeting 
domain, furthers a trend established during recent years. Last 
year's symposia included one session on the crisis in health care 
in the United States; another dealt with the problem of world 
hunger. The 1988 meeting featured speeches from 14 Soviet 
scientists about research challenges in a communist system.
 
However, the agenda of topics for the 1993 meeting, which is to 
take place at the Hynes <M%-2>Convention Center,  were chosen in 
a manner different from that of previous years. In the past, 
symposia proposals from individual members were submitted to the 
AAAS program office, which--with the advice of whomever the 
office wished to consult--set the meeting docket.
 
For the 1993 convention, symposia topics were chosen by a 14-
member program committee, chaired by current AAAS president F. 
Sherwood Rowland. This group reviewed all suggestions for 
scientific merit and the status of the proposed speakers in their 
respective fields.
 
"One of the feelings that the board of directors had, as well as 
the program office, was that the system [of choosing symposia] 
needed some revamping," says Rowland, a chemistry professor at 
the University of California, Irvine. He says that AAAS members 
were complaining that some symposia were weak, with low 
scientific interest and speakers considered on the fringe of that 
particular scientific area.
 
This year, Rowland says, "there is much more quality control of 
symposia selections. With that in mind, we think this will be a 
stronger program."
 
More than 4,000 scientists are expected to attend the event. In 
addition, some 600 journalists, many in Boston to attend 
simultaneous annual meetings of the National Association of 
Science Writers and the International Science Writers 
Association, are expected at the AAAS gathering.
 
Linda Wilson, president of Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Mass., 
will give the keynote address, replacing original lecturer Jean 
Mayer, the  former  chancellor  of Tufts University, who died 
January 1.
 
Wilson's speech is entitled, "The Scientific Community at a 
Crossroads: Discovery in a Political and Cultural Context."
 
The conference, subtitled "Science and Education for the Future," 
will also offer programs geared toward students and teachers 
interested in science, says meeting director Robin Woo. For 
example, on Saturday, February 13, newly designated Surgeon 
General Joycelyn Elders will give the keynote address for a 
"Student Caucus," a feature intended to--for the first time--give 
students a forum so their voices can be heard by the members of 
AAAS.
 
Although many of the symposia will be of interest to 
nonscientists--students, teachers, journalists, and so forth--
four special seminars are aimed at a scientifically sophisticated 
audience. These include: "Mapping the Human Brain," "Protein 
Kinases and Phosphatases," "Human Obesity," and "Teaching Ethics  
in  Science  and Engineering."
 
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #3, February 8, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
 
 
                           AT A GLANCE
 
(Page 3 of Newspaper)
 
1993 AAAS Meeting: Science And Education For The Future
 
More than 4,000 scientists are expected at the annual meeting of 
the American Association for the Advancement of Science, to be 
held in Boston February 11-16.
 
Meeting highlights:
 
Three days of symposia entitled "Future Chemistry: From Carbon to 
Silicon," February 14-16. Nano-engineering will be the focus of 
lectures by 20 different speakers.
 
* A special one-day symposium, "Science Education Reform in 
America," Saturday, February 13. Among the sessions is a detailed 
discussion of AAAS's Project 2061, a proposal for science 
education reform.
 
* A one-day workshop, "Regulated Gene Expression and Chromosome 
Structure," presented by AAAS and the American Society of Cell 
Biology, Saturday, February 13.
 
* On Saturday at 2:30 P.M., symposia entitled "Biological Science 
in the Public Domain," featuring a lecture by Harvard University 
evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould.
 
* Lecture by former Office of Science and Technology Policy 
director Allan Bromley, "The Theory and Practice of Science 
Advising in the United States and Abroad," Monday, February 15, 
at 1:15 P.M.
 
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #3, February 8, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
                            NOTEBOOK
(Page 4 of newspaper)
 
 
First, The Bad News
Academicians who believe that the way to start the day off  right 
is  sitting down with a newspaper and a cup of coffee might  want 
to  avoid  a  new  publication by  the  American  Association  of 
University  Professors  until  the  afternoon.  The  College  and 
University  Fiscal  Crisis Update, which debuted in  January,  is 
filled  with the latest in bad budget news from  campuses  around 
the  United States, and is punctuated by  comprehensive  national 
lists  of  funding  and job cutback  statistics.  Highlights  (or 
lowlights)  of the January issue include reports  that  Louisiana 
has  been forced to shave $45 million in state funding  from  its 
colleges  and universities; the University of Wisconsin  system's 
$10.2  million budget reduction will necessitate hiring  freezes, 
elimination  of some classes, and student support services  cuts; 
and  Florida  State University is experiencing a  "brain  drain," 
caused by $18.9 million in cuts over the past two years. For more 
information  about the AAUP newsletter, contact Iris Molotsky  at 
(202) 737-5900, Ext. 3009.
 
The Spring Of Her Discontent
In 1962, zoologist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, which 
spawned, many believe, the environmental movement as it's known 
today. One of the first two women ever hired by the United States 
Fish and Wildlife Service, Carson, fighting cancer herself, took 
on the chemical companies, the Department of Agriculture, and 
agribusiness by exposing in the book the dangers of DDT and other 
pesticides and herbicides to the environment. She died April 14, 
1964, and as part of its "The American Experience" series, PBS 
examines the impact of Carson's book and her struggle. Included 
in the show will be readings from the book by actress Meryl 
Streep and interviews with foes and friends, including then-
Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall, one of the early 
champions of her controversial work. Check local listings for 
broadcast and possible rebroadcast times. 
 
An Ounce Of Prevention
The National Safety Council's First Aid Institute has developed a 
Bloodborne Pathogens Training Program to ensure the safety of 
employees who may be exposed to HIV or hepatitis B infection. 
Included on the list of occupations considered at risk are 
workers at clinical and diagnostic labs. The program, which can 
be taught by noncertified instructors, satisfies OSHA guidelines. 
An instructor training package, which includes a manual, slides, 
and a video, enables employers to train staff on-site. For more 
information, call Bill Markowski, technical marketing specialist, 
National Safety Council, (708) 775-2105.
 
Just One More Bowl
The bowl season didn't entirely end last month. The third annual 
National Science Bowl will be held April 18-19 in Washington, 
D.C. Teams of high school students from all 50 states--more than 
15,000--are expected to participate in the academic competition, 
aimed at heightening interest in mathematics, engineering, 
technology, and science. Regional competitions will produce the 
44 teams that will qualify for the national finals in Washington. 
Cosponsored by the Department of Energy and Cray Research 
Foundation in Washington, prizes will include international and 
domestic science trips, computer hardware and software, teacher 
scholarships, and linkup to the National Education Supercomputer, 
located at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 
Livermore, Calif. For information, contact the National Science 
Bowl Coordinator, Office of University and Science Education, 
DOE, Washington, D.C. 20585; (202) 586-8949.
 
The Key To A Breezy Presentation
The National Center for Atmospheric Research offers a library of 
videos, color slides, black-and-white photos, transparencies, and 
computer simulation prints on weather, climate change, and 
related topics. The visual aids can be used to enhance 
presentations, articles, and classroom lectures. For a free 
catalog or more information, contact NCAR Information Services, 
P.O. Box 3000, Boulder, Colo. 80307-3000; (303) 497-8600 or (303) 
497-8606.
 
Fulbright Season Opens
Competition for the 1994-1995 Fulbright Scholar Awards for U.S. 
faculty and professionals begins March 1. Some 1,000 grants will 
be awarded for research, research and lecturing, or university 
lecturing in nearly 135 countries. Specific openings exist in  a 
wide range of the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and 
arts. Eligibility requirements are U.S. citizenship and a Ph.D. 
or comparable professional qualifications. University or college 
teaching experience is expected for lecturing awards. The 
deadline for applications is August 1. For application materials 
and information, contact the Council for International Exchange 
of Scholars, 3007 Tilden St., N.W., Suite 5M, Box NEWS, 
Washington, D.C. 20008-3009; (202) 686-7877.
 
Maybe It Will Start A Trend
While the price of all things medical seems to be going up, the 
cost to subscribers of the National Library of Medicine's MEDLINE 
and other NLM online databases have gone down as much as 40 
percent. Beginning in January, the price of access to most of the 
databases was reduced from the approximately $30 per hour of 
connect time to about $18 for most subscribers. High-volume 
users, such as hospitals and academic centers, will also have a 
new discount plan available to them. Commercial database vendors 
whose systems supply compact disk products containing MEDLINE 
data will pay for the cost of reproducing and handling database 
tapes, but will no longer have to pay user fees. For information 
and a price schedule, contact the National Library of Medicine, 
National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md. 20894; (301) 496-
6308.
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #3, February 8, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
                             OPINION
 
 
Communication As The Root Of Scientific Progress
(Page 10 of newspaper)
 
Editor's Note: The thorough and timely review of scientific 
literature pertaining to a researcher's chosen specialty is 
fundamental to the process of science, says Nobel Prize-winning 
geneticist Joshua Lederberg. However, says Lederberg--former 
president of Rockefeller University and now University Professor 
at that institution--keeping up with the steady, potentially 
overwhelming flow of significant published documents can be a 
daunting chore for the diligent, conscientious researcher. In 
October 1991, Lederberg offered his views on this matter--and his 
suggestions for ways in which a melding of print and electronic 
publishing processes promises great progress--in a lecture at the 
Sixth International Conference of the International Fed- eration 
of Science Editors in Woods Hole, Mass. Following is an edited 
version of his lecture. The event took place subsequent to 
Lederberg's leaving his post as Rockefeller's president and 
resuming his focus on laboratory experimentation.
 
BY JOSHUA LEDERBERG
 
I don't do very much editorial work these days; I'm back working 
in the laboratory after a lapse of 12 years, and that has kept me 
very busy trying to reacquaint myself with the literature of my 
own field. So I will offer you the perspective of a scientific 
reader. Now, some people tell me that's a vanishing species. For 
anyone to say that, even with some sense of irony, is an 
atrocity.
 
One of my main functions with my own laboratory group is that I 
try to be its principal reader. If something goes on in the world 
outside and none of us has heard about it for two or three weeks, 
I'm the one who feels responsible. I want to be alert to events 
that might have a very important bearing on the way we think 
about our own research, our planning, of the data coming in, of 
the sources of error.
 
 
The Act Of Publication
Let me begin with a few truisms, just to be sure that we are 
operating on a common ground of reverence for the publication 
process. Publication is, to start with, just that: publication. 
It converts private to public knowledge, in the service of 
registering a private claim of original authorship--in science, 
of discovery. Above all, the act of publication is an inscription 
under oath, a testimony. It is accepted as valid until firm 
evidence to the contrary is presented. There is an extremely high 
standard of accountability for what is published under a given 
person's name. Just look at the daily headlines. It is the 
essential ingredient to make scientific work responsible in the 
sense that one cannot readily retreat from assertions that have 
been signed, delivered to the printer, and made available to 
thousands.
 
These publicly asserted claims also play an extremely important 
role in the allocation of resources--the ability of different 
scientists to survive in the competition with other legitimate 
claims for expenditures, for support of laboratories, for 
positions at the institutions, for space in the journals, for the 
attraction of students and collaborators.
 
Both author and audience benefit from the successful assertion of 
those claims: One doesn't have to spend an inordinate amount of 
time reexamining every detail of an individual's output if that 
person has established credibility through prior publication and 
exposure.
 
Publication also results in a repository, constructing the 
tradition of science. Up to this point, it can hardly be 
anonymous in order to perform the functions that I have just 
indicated. But as time goes by, we have the reassimilation of the 
content of scientific work, and as it settles in and survives the 
criticism that it should have had at its early stages of the 
process, it becomes the common tradition, the unquestioned shared 
wisdom--often becoming anonymous by obliteration.
 
The literature is also a forum. It's a gladiatorial arena for 
competing claims, resolving discrepancies in data or 
interpretation. There used to be oral duels, and we revel in 
stories like Louis Pasteur's confrontation with Felix Pouchet 
that finally put spontaneous generation to rest in 1864. Today, 
our battles are more often fought out in print, which is indeed 
appropriate because the testimony then becomes available to the 
universe, not simply to the immediate onlookers.
 
Despite the opportunity for very broad dissemination, there is 
the paradox, nevertheless, that broadcast restricts individuals' 
access to feedback. The publication system, at least in 
principle, should allow a dialectic to appear in more symmetrical 
terms so that anyone with something purposeful to say has a way 
to get into the system.
 
If the literature is a forum, it is also a rumen, a place for the 
digestion and assimilation of the variety of inputs whereby 
scientific claims go through a period of seasoning, modification, 
modulation. Even the truths look different five or 10 years 
later, regardless of explicit criticisms. We can expect a process 
of reinterpretation, a post-historical reexamination of the 
meaning of their terms.
 
And now I need only to remind you of the term imprimatur (a 
wonderful metaphor): the imprinted witness that an article, 
having appeared in a refereed journal, has survived a critical 
process, a conspiracy if you like, of the editors and the 
publishers and the referees--that something has appeared that is 
worthy of the shared interest and precious attention of the 
community.
 
 
 
The Work Of A Reading Scientist
Reading the scientific literature has been my primary vocation 
for 50 years. May I tell you what I do as a reading scientist 
today?
 
Books play a diminishing role. Today they are mostly for targeted 
reference. In the scientific domain, we rarely have the leisure 
now to read a book from cover to cover. A few biographies command 
attention. I just finished Carl Djerassi's life story, The Pill, 
Pygmy Chimps and Degas' Horse (New York, Basic Books, 1992); 
another of that genre was Fran~ois Jacob's revelation of the 
development of his scientific work, The Statue Within (New York, 
Basic Books, 1988). These are, obviously, not very contributory 
to the details on how to do my next experiment, but they tell me 
a lot about the scientific personality, providing object lessons 
and models for emulation.
 
Rarely, I do see a work that compels total ingestion--for 
example, Physiology of the Bacterial Cell (Sunderland, Mass., 
Sinauer Associates, 1990) by Frederick Neidhardt, John Ingraham, 
and Moselio Schaechter. This is such a magnificent synthesis at a 
fairly elementary level of exposition that I really marveled at 
the deliberation and distillation that went into the telling. 
Wonderful books like that are rare. In printed form, they surely 
will be the survivors of any electronic revolution.
 
At an intermediary level of indispensability as books in print 
format are the Annual Reviews. They are reference works for 
whatever you have to look up; but they also give a chance to 
browse through an enormous literature with some coherence. 
Compare an Annual Reviews of Genetics with current issues of the 
journal Genetics. Even if I had the time to read every article in 
that journal, I wouldn't have the background to be able to place 
each one of them in the appropriate context of what comes 
through--and I regard this as my home discipline! People will 
spend varying amounts of their time and energy, as well, in 
trying to understand what is going on in science beyond the 
window of their own specific work in their research and teaching.
 
There are about a dozen journals that I subscribe to, and maybe 
seven or eight of them that I do scan from cover to cover: 
Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 
The Journal of Bacteriology, Microbiological Reviews, Genetics, 
Biochemistry--those are the very general ones. I pick up a "hot 
paper" now and then from The Scientist, and I look at The 
Sciences, New Scientist, American Scientist, and Scientific 
American for general scientific culture. I'm talking about a 
textual sampling, not immersion. You couldn't read every article 
in a critical and detailed fashion in just the publications I 
have listed within the number of hours that there are in the 
week. What you can do within a couple of hours a day is to scan 
that range of material and try to pick out those things that 
might be of interest. To follow the structure of argument just in 
one's own specialty, you must go to the detail of trying to check 
the numbers on the graphs and see if they match the authors' 
assertions--an arduous task.
 
We are well served by those kinds of journals in terms of 
maintaining a general currency about what is going on in the 
field, and they match very well the energy and interest and 
intellectual acuity that our scientific readers are able to put 
into the proc-ess.  I see no occasion for those to be altered. 
Most scientists are very grateful for them: They provide the 
material that thousands of scientists will share as common 
currency, to carry in their briefcases and read on the airplanes 
and the commuter rides, with all the convenience of the present 
print format.
 
Information Retrieval
My main problem is: How do you reacquire, retrace that 
intellectual traffic? What do you do with all of your marginal 
notes, and how do you synthesize a coherent system of what you've 
read? Well, to try to deal with this on a current basis, I get 
the weekly Current Contents on Diskette with all of its 
embellishments. I eagerly await the five or six diskettes that 
have to be loaded, every week, and I am sometimes impatient about 
how long it takes to load them and get going with that week's 
literature. My stored profiles work out reasonably well, but have 
to be embellished from time to time. You discover new keys, other 
notations that authors insist on in changing fads and 
idiosyncrasies of language. I can warrant that my profiles 
recover on a current basis about 90 percent of what I have read 
or would want to read. God help me if I lose my notes on the 
rest!
 
Then, how to keep up with what's closest to my immediate 
specialty? Acquiring a couple or three papers a day is not hard.  
And, even with a fairly detailed critical examination, down to 
checking the points on the graphs and so on, reading them as they 
come in is entirely doable. My problem is the arithmetic of 
accumulation. After a decade, I've got about 10,000 papers that I 
have got to keep track of--the texts, my marginal notes, and so 
on. And here my system is absolutely broken down! A technological 
fix is on the way: document scanners that can store page images 
and digitize scripts on searchable media. One or a few CD-ROMs 
will take care of the storage. But what a lot of bother for 
information--yes, full text--that I should be able to acquire 
electronically in the first place. This is all the more urgent 
for specialty journals and references to be searched on demand.
 
Within a given discipline, there are usually one or two journals 
that specialists must see. There may be only a couple of hundred 
people who have such a level of interest that they will look at 
every article. There are the journals of broad appeal, and then a 
very flat distribution of the other sources. For my part, of an 
additional 30 articles a month, perhaps half of them come from 
about 15 journals; you can probably extrapolate to the rest using 
Bradford's Law, which states that a relatively small number of 
journals accounts for the great majority of significant 
publications in any field. Thus, about 90 percent of the most 
significant articles will come from about 35 journals, and then 
there is a gradual asymptote out to the vanishing returns from 
the total coverage that the system is going to offer. In spite of 
our most systematic efforts, an important article does pop up 
serendipitiously from an obscure place.
 
So each of us faces the task of selective retrieval from a cosmic 
domain of stuff that every other eager beaver in the world has 
been busily putting into the repository. Our present technology 
affords the researcher an approximation of recovery with 
reasonable confidence. Keeping track of what you have accumulated 
on pieces of paper is the frustration. That's not your bedside 
reading, well served by the print-on-paper version. The next 
step, to integrate that into your own private library of useful 
knowledge, is simply not achievable with last year's technology.
 
 
Information Overload?
The fact is that scientific literature inherently has grown 
beyond the scope of any hundred people to have understood it and 
gone into it in some depth; it is built into the growth of 
knowledge that past improvements in communication and storage 
aren't going to alter.
 
What are the consequences? For one thing, the problematics of 
assessing the literature reinforces all the other drives to 
specialization. The ambitions of scientists have changed, to 
focus on ever-narrower targets. It's just too much hard work to 
master an interdisciplinary area on top of all the other 
institutional obstacles. Never mind the intellectual conceptual 
problems. Never mind the problem of getting funding or moral and 
fiscal support, just to get hold of the necessary expertise and 
information! But that impediment is in principle remediable.
 
At the same time, are we drowning in information, inundated by 
the numbers of journals? You know, when you come to any specific 
issue, when there is some important, special fact that you would 
like to know all about, it's another matter altogether. My usual 
experience in asking a new question tells me the odds are that 
the exquisite detail needed to take the next step has just never 
been completed. So here, far from being drowned, I have a great 
deficit of specific and detailed knowledge of exactly what 
happens in such and such a system with such and such reagents, 
and so forth.
 
Our systems for acquisition of that kind of material are not 
perfect, but they are getting a lot better with devices like 
keyword searching, related articles, and full abstract searching, 
which is just about what the technology does offer today. 
Accordingly, I can feel reasonably confident that explicit 
matters of factual detail--such as whether somebody has done a 
particular experiment before--can be retrieved, but often only 
with a lot of effort.
 
Much more difficult, has anybody else had a good idea that would 
be pertinent to my search? Those keys are so much more difficult 
to catalog. Often it takes a great creative act to recognize that 
a concept developed in one context really is pertinent to 
another. So there will never be a guarantee that those can all be 
acquired. But there is at least the hope of finding it in that 
literature, and it is a very important hope to try to preserve.
 
 
Adaptations
There are different adaptations to the information flood, and 
more and more do we see what I can only describe as a scandal, 
that scientific literature is not always taken seriously anymore. 
In polls of scientists, many will say that the primary source of 
their information about scientific work in their field is not 
with the published literature. It's by word of mouth, it's by 
telephone networks, by attendance at meetings, and so on. Perhaps 
that can't be helped--people have got to do what they've got to 
do.
 
But I find those kinds of sources so unreliable! I feel very 
uncomfortable when the only place that I have heard about 
something is by word of mouth. If I can't pin it down, if I can't 
hold its source accountable by saying that was in a published 
item, I can't look at it in detail, ruminate about it, think 
through what second-order reactions I would have. I don't know 
whether my colleagues share that passion for the literate mode. 
They may feel that they don't have any alternative except to pick 
up what's on the rumor mill, but I think great mistakes can be 
promulgated in that fashion.
 
The telephone is a wonderful instrument, but when I try to use it 
to get information, people who have what I am looking for are all 
pretty busy. I hate to impose on their time, and, if I do, there 
is usually a round of telephone tag of three or four attempts to 
catch somebody before I actually do get hold of them for the 
information. If it's a reference, I am delighted. If it's an 
attribution, it cannot be pinned down more definitely than: "You 
know, this is what I think." I don't feel like I have made a 
great advance over what I had before.
 
Not taking literature seriously reinforces the trend that sees 
libraries, in desperation, canceling subscriptions to journals 
that they don't see being very much read locally. And it doesn't 
make any sense to have a local copy of a serial in which perhaps 
one in a hundred titles will ever be examined by anybody in that 
institution. Some of these journals, de facto, are approaching 
the point at which they might as well print only one copy, send 
it to the National Library of Medicine or some other repository, 
and let it redistribute reprints by interlibrary loan. Here, 
however, the economics just doesn't add up. The fundamental 
problem lies in trying to foist an inappropriate number of 
vehicles on an outmoded mechanism for the purpose of 
dissemination--and that would fall of its own weight. You can see 
what I'm leading to: go from 1,000 to one to zero print copies.
 
Meanwhile, the libraries are in a great dilemma, trying to figure 
out exactly what to do. They get a fight from the faculty--what a 
librarian hears when he or she wants to drop a journal, you would 
think that every professor was reading every issue of every 
journal in the library. For the operational procedures by which 
libraries can make sensible decisions about acquisition 
priorities, they could get any number of technical aids on that 
point, but it does put them in a very tough spot. Besides the 
budgetary crunch, the libraries are also running out of space. 
The older stuff is deteriorating, anyhow. Maybe ink on paper was 
not a totally bad idea, for that reason alone, provided one clean 
copy remains available; unfortunately, things don't always work 
out that way.
 
One direction things could take if we don't reform the system of 
scientific communication is that invisible colleges will take 
over as the principal but unreliable routes of communication. 
Archival copies of material will eventually be sent in to some 
repository, but there will be a limbo of material that doesn't 
know if it is going to go to hell or heaven for four or five 
years--while it is still cooking and unaccountably available--on 
a basis far from equitable. So, in due course there has to be a 
wholehearted exploitation of the new technologies, and I don't 
have to plead for it. It's happening because electronic networks 
are becoming more and more available to people working in a 
variety of fields. A couple of dozen of them now operate with a 
routine exchange of preprints. The central problem facing the 
journal has been a radical change in the economics and technology 
of printing, without an adequate recognition of the essential 
value added in the print-publishing process.
 
From Gutenberg's time until mechanized and computerized 
composition, publishing's added value was in providing the 
capital and the entrepreneurship and the organization to 
facilitate a process whereby an expensive and precious printed 
article was the product. It was characterized by rather high 
capital investment in the initial composition of any material. 
Once it was composed, there was a rather low variable cost for 
further dissemination. We had a market system for determining 
what was worthy of that degree of capital investment. Well, today 
the capital investment in the printing technology is almost zero.
 
 
Editorial Value
The important value added--which is an intellectual and aesthetic 
rather than economic value--is the editorial process, including 
issues of selection and, subsequently, of editorial work and 
improvement. And, finally, we have that very precious imprimatur. 
When something comes out in a journal of high repute (to make a 
circular argument), that's a journal worth my time and worth my 
attention. If it is just thrown up in the air without having 
undergone that kind of editorial review, it will not have been 
refined in terms of the presentation, and perhaps even substance, 
of the argument, and it won't have the imprimatur of other 
people, whose judgment I trust, that it's worth reading and can 
be relied upon for accountability.
 
Whether the article then gets into print is almost an irrelevancy 
at this point. Any of a variety of communication media could 
follow on that editorial process. What should be promoted is the 
marriage of that editorial role, on one hand, with, on the other, 
a production role that uses the electronic technologies rather 
than print.
 
And that's where the spontaneous bulletin boards don't quite make 
it. They quickly get filled up with obscenities, literal and 
otherwise, for lack of that sort of control. I don't mind the 
obscenities as long as I don't have to plow through them, but I'd 
like a truth-in-advertising framework that tells me what's worth 
reading. I'd like to know that x, y, or z editorial committee had 
been established as a guide for what is worth capturing the 
priority of my attention.
 
I think it will be the societies that provide the most likely 
framework for the organization of those editorial functions. This 
won't make any money to start with. But the economics and the 
technology will converge with the social necessities for this 
kind of improvement. Technically, we don't need much more than 
what we now have. There are a few problems about transmitting 
graphics and formatting manuscripts. Some standards have to be 
established, along with some minor fixes, especially on the 
graphics. But we are basically right there.
 
Machines with gigabyte storage and ever-smaller 25-megabyte 
processors are very routine today. You will find them by the 
hundreds in the laboratories and the libraries and so on, with a 
halving of capabilities-per-unit costs every couple of years. So 
in 10 years, today's so-called supercomputer will certainly be 
available in every institution, and to a large degree in every 
laboratory. Communication links won't grow quite as fast as that, 
but if you consider the bandwidth of a package of CD-ROMs, you 
have a variety of technologies for all the communication we need. 
So those are not limiting factors, either. They are not very 
expensive.
 
The machinery, the social framework, the decisions involved, the 
wetware, the distribution channels, the marketing, and so on, 
really are all that stand in the way. There are not the same 
kinds of profit incentives that drive paper publishing; so I 
think the not-for-profit institutions will start taking over. 
Perhaps the for-profit publishing houses will provide the 
essential technical services--because they can have the economy 
of scale, the organization, the hardware, and so on--and then 
contract that out to the societies for providing the other 
elements of the equation.
 
That partnership could be a very productive one for the entire 
scientific community. One feature of that kind of a system, to 
which we have only a crude approximation today, is feedback, 
dialectic. It shouldn't take a federal case for reactions to a 
paper to be elicited from the scientific community--and not just 
on the rumor network, but some place where everybody else can see 
it. This is the bulletin board system of commentary, and it would 
complement what the fixed board of editors would have to say.
 
 If there is a good dialectical system and the critical community 
has an opportunity to express its views, even ex post facto, 
that's how the scientific process works at its best. Here the 
economics and the technology for dialectic give a great edge to 
the electronic systems over the printed ones, if for no other 
reason than their ability to provide propinquity. I mean, if an 
article has been printed and then, a little later on, I write a 
critical reaction to it (even in the rare case that the journal 
accepts that sort of commentary and further dialogue), the 
article and the reaction do not adjoin one another on the 
shelves. It's a nuisance trying to find them.
 
Let's say I wrote something six months ago and one of my friends 
writes a blistering critique sometime after that. How are the two 
of them going to be brought together? That kind of reshuffling of 
the units is very hard with printed paper. It's trivial, of 
course, to do it with electronic media via the networks of 
linkage of material and commentary. That potential for 
reaggregation stands just after mechanized search and tempo of 
availability as the greatest advantage that these new kinds of 
media can offer. 
 
 
Sharing Information
Let me make one further comment about global access, something 
very dear to my heart. There was a remark in my letter of 
invitation to this conference: "You may feel like you are in a 
flood, but people in the Third World are in a real drought. They 
never get the journals that you complain of getting too many of."
 
The economics of sharing will shift dramatically with these 
media. For trivial, marginal costs you can provide 100 CDs a 
year, which would far exceed the total volume of publication that 
people in developing countries could ever hope to get in any 
other way. There is no other way in the world that we can 
duplicate all the paper libraries that we now have as a 
privileged treasure.
 
Another feature about globality that electronic systems will 
offer is built-in translation aids. I am not talking about the 
nirvana of automated, perfectly smooth translation. Most of us 
here have a smattering of two or three foreign languages; a few 
of you are great linguists. But when I am reading an article in 
German, which I am fairly fluent in, wouldn't I love to have a 
built-in dictionary to help out when I run into a phrase that I 
don't understand? 
 
I'll take the risks of that crude translation. It may come out 
with some of the ridiculous puns for which machine translations 
are notorious. Again this becomes trivially easy in terms of its 
marginal cost, and will greatly extend the global accessibility 
of literature to a wide variety of people whose command of the 
current international standard English may not be perfect.
 
Fortunately, current systems of scientific communication, like 
these proceedings and the forum for opinion in The Scientist, 
will help sustain the debate that may help bring about the 
necessary reforms.
 
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #3, February 8, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
THE SCIENTIST ON THE INTERNET
(Page 14 of newspaper)
 
 
The  Scientist is now available on-line via NSFnet, as  files  of 
about  3,000 lines in length. To gain electronic access  to  this 
valuable biweekly information source, follow these instructions:
Type: ftp nnsc.nsf.net
Use the login "anonymous"
Use your username@bitnet~ address as password
Type: cd the-scientist
Files will be added every two weeks, with file names 
corresponding to date of publication. To access the Nov. 9, 1992, 
issue, for example, type:
get the-scientist-921109, or, to access the Nov. 23, 1992, issue:
get the-scientist-921123
Jan. 11, 1993, is available as: the-scientist-930111; Jan. 25, 
1993, is available as: the-scientist-930125, and so forth.
For a full listing of issues of The Scientist in the NSFnet 
directory, type: ls * or type: get index-the-scientist 
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #3, February 8, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
                           COMMENTARY
                       by Eugene Garfield
                     (Page 12 of newspaper)
 
Electronic  Publishing  Extends Reach Of Scientists  And  Of  The 
Scientist
 
In  his  essay on page 10 of this issue,  Nobel  laureate  Joshua 
Lederberg  describes the many potential benefits to  the  science 
community  of  electronic  publishing.  I  certainly  concur   in 
advocating  its use, as witness my recent decision to  mount  The 
Scientist on NSFnet and the Internet.
 
Originally  planned  primarily  to  facilitate  access  to  large 
mainframe  computer programs and data files, NSFnet  has  evolved 
into  a  major  communications network and a  splendid  means  of 
disseminating the valuable information our publication presents.
 
Last  year I attended a conference on networking at which  I  had 
the  pleasure  of  meeting Vinton Cerf,  vice  president  of  the 
Corporation for National Research Institutes and one of the gurus 
of networking. Cerf, in turn, introduced me to Corrine Carroll of 
the   NSF  Network  Service  Center  in  Washington,  D.C.,   who 
eventually  obtained all the necessary clearances for making  The 
Scientist available on NSFnet.
 
It has been suggested that electronic availability might 
undermine The Scientist's popularity as a print publication. 
Although some readers on a tight budget may very well switch to 
the electronic version in order to avoid the annual subscription 
fee, I don't foresee that happening.
 
At present, only text is included on NSFnet; photographs and 
other graphics, cartoons, crossword puzzles, display and 
classified advertising--that is, all of the other valuable 
components responsible, along with the text, for the 
publication's increasing acceptance--are omitted.
 
So why have we gone electronic? It seems to me that The Scientist 
online serves a different function. First, it overcomes the 
inherent delay in using the postal system. This may be 
insignificant to many readers, but it might be of real value to 
those,  including science journalists, who can never receive 
their information early enough. The significance is even higher 
for scientists overseas, where the delays and cost of postage are 
much greater. While our European colleagues may have to pay local 
communication charges to use the  Internet, they can access the 
file once and then redistribute the information locally over 
their own internal networks.
 
In order to access The Scientist electronically, a PC and modem 
are required. Transfer of files is quite rapid. There are two 
basic modes of access. Either you can transfer the entire file of 
each issue into your local PC (using file transfer protocol, or 
"ftp"), or you can request that the NSF info server send one or 
more issues to your Internet mailbox. In the former case, you are 
online only as long as it takes to download the contents of each 
issue.
 
Once you receive an issue, you can browse the file as you would 
any other ASCII text--scanning the contents page and then 
skipping to the full text of each article.
 
Even if you are not a hacker and do not spend a lot of your time 
at the console, you might consider using this facility as a 
simple method for forwarding electronic copies of articles to 
interested colleagues. Among other virtues, this eliminates a 
trip to the copying machine and the delay in using the mail. You 
could send a fax, but that isn't very convenient unless you can 
transmit directly from your PC.
 
In any case, regular readers of The Scientist should feel free to 
post these files onto their bulletin boards.
 
Any reader who wishes to comment directly concerning material 
published in The Scientist--or on our new experiment in 
electronic publishing--can contact me, via Bitnet, at 
garfield@aurora.cis.upenn.edu; or, via CompuServe, at 
70550.130@compuserve.com.
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #3, February 8, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
                             LETTERS
 
 
New Spin On Ultracentrifuges
(Page 12 of newspaper)
 
The article on analytical ultracentrifugation (Franklin Hoke, The 
Scientist,   Nov.  9,  1992,  page  18)  was   well-written   and 
informative but had one omission. It did not mention the National 
Analytical  Ultracentrifugation  Facility, which is part  of  the 
Biotechnology  Center  at  the University  of  Connecticut.  This 
facility was set up by an initial grant from the National Science 
Foundation  in  1988. The principal investigators  are  Emory  H. 
Braswell,  Todd M. Schuster, and David A. Yphantis. The  facility 
is  staffed with two master's-level scientists and one  master's-
level engineer.
 
In  addition to the new Beckman XLA, the facility maintains  four 
model E instruments equipped with advanced electronics and  cells 
developed  at  the  facility, increasing the  efficiency  of  the 
technique more than 20-fold. Although it has been suggested  that 
we  are maintaining the most complete working museum of Model  Es 
in  the  world,  for some studies the Model E has  not  yet  been 
superseded by the new machine.
 
Utilizing software and research strategies developed at the 
facility, we do complete analyses of self-association and hetero-
association of molecules, such as DNA oligomer proteins, 
peptides, and inorganic complexes. We are also studying 
nonaqueous systems, such as buckyballs in toluene.
 
After an initial development period, the facility has been 
involved in 30 research projects with 18 academic and 12 
industrial collaborators.
 
We have worked closely with Beckman Instruments Inc. of 
Fullerton, Calif., helping them in the development of a data-
analysis package, and have been influential in shaping the 
development of Beckman's current and future centrifuges.
 
The facility provides workshops for researchers interested in 
applying the new research strategies and analysis techniques in 
their own laboratories.
 
It's interesting that this old technique, kept alive during the 
dark ages by a few dedicated researchers, is once again on the 
cutting edge, this time making important contributions to 
biotechnology.
 
EMORY H. BRASWELL
Head
Analytical Ultracentrifugation
Facility
Biotechnology Center
University of Connecticut
Storrs
 
 
 
 
Liberal Arts Colleges
(Page 12 of newspaper)
 
I am sure my colleagues at liberal arts colleges would join me in 
thanking you for an insightful article on the pleasures and 
occasional pains of doing science in a smaller college (Linda 
Marsa, The Scientist, Nov. 23, 1992, page 21). But the headline 
you chose, "Doing Science Off The Beaten Path At Liberal Arts 
Schools," undercuts the message of the article. "Off the beaten 
path" suggests that our institutions are all in academic 
Nowheresville. How about "Science In Liberal Arts Colleges--The 
Path Less Traveled By"? That would make all the difference.
 
BRUCE PARTRIDGE
Provost
Haverford College
Haverford, Pa.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
A Caricature?
(Page 12 of newspaper)
 
Patrick H. Cleveland (The Scientist, Nov. 23, 1992, page 12) 
laments growing antipathy toward animal experimentation, but he 
gives the animal protection movement too much credit. The 
movement is highly fractionated, wastes much of its resources on 
mass mailings, and commits only a small fraction of its resources 
to animal research campaigns.
 
In fact, much opposition to animal research is scientific. I 
doubt I shock many readers of The Scientist when I suggest that 
many, if not most, animal experimentation projects are poorly 
conceived. Because animal experiments cannot disprove hypotheses 
about human anatomy, physiology, or pathology, they do not 
constitute human medical research in the strictest Popperian 
sense. Most nonscientists are unfamiliar with Karl Popper, a 
20th-century philosopher of science, but many can recognize that 
"animal models" are often poor analogs to human conditions.
 
Cleveland denounces animal rights, but he does not offer a 
cohesive alternative ethic. Do we have the right to submit 
innocent, sentient creatures to pain and/or suffering for 
supposed human benefit? Many people are concluding that animal 
research rests on an ethic of "the ends justify the means," which 
they find unacceptable. I suggest that the notion of a wealthy 
and violent animal rights movement is a caricature created by 
animal research defenders as a straw man to avoid legitimate 
scientific and ethical concerns about animal experimentation.
 
STEPHEN R. KAUFMAN
Medical Research Modernization Committee
Cleveland
 
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #3, February 8, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
 
 
WHERE TO WRITE:
Letters to the Editor
The Scientist
3501 Market Street
Philadelphia,  PA 19104
Fax:(215)387-7542
Bitnet: garfield@aurora.cis.upenn.edu
 
 
The Scientist welcomes letters from its readers.  Only signed 
letters  will  be considered for publication.  Please  include  
a daytime telephone number for verification purposes.
 
                ================================
 
 
 
At The Interface Of Biology And Chemical Engineering
(Page 15 of newspaper)
 
BY SCOTT VEGGEBERG
 
Chemical engineers and biologists say that collaborations between 
their disparate disciplines are beginning to bear some valuable 
fruit, not just in the applied field of biotechnology, but also 
in understanding basic cellular mechanisms. Yet those who are 
currently working at this cross-disciplinary interface say the 
challenge today is to get these two scientific cultures to 
interact.
 
One way to bridge such a gulf is to have a meeting and invite 
interested members from each discipline to attend--which is 
exactly what has recently happened. "Research Opportunities in 
Biomolecular Engineering: The Interface Between Chemical 
Engineering and Biology" was convened in Washington, D.C., on 
December 7-8, under the auspices of the National Institute of 
General Medical Sciences (NIGMS). Says George Georgiou, a 
chemical engineer at the University of Texas, Austin, who co-
chaired the meeting: "The idea of the meeting, in my mind, was to 
make more people aware of the interface that already exists and 
attract them to work at that interface and to build momentum for 
federal support of this work."
 
Georgiou, for instance, has crossed the disciplinary barrier to 
collaborate with UT microbiologist Charles Earhart as well as 
fellow chemical engineer Joseph Francisco. Together they have 
produced Escherichia coli bacteria that instead of excreting 
proteins--as is the usual case in the biotech industry--anchor 
important enzymes, such as cellulases, to their surface (J.A. 
Francis-co, et al., Bio/Technology, in press).
 
At the December meeting, Georgiou attempted to define 
"biomolecular engineering," the new term that's been coined to 
describe the emerging body of work coming from the interface of 
biologists and chemical engineers. "It may be argued that 
biomolecular engineering is applied biology or, more precisely, 
applied molecular biology to distinguish it from areas of applied 
research related to organismic biology," he told the attendees. 
"Yet, this definition is inadequate and self-limiting. It is best 
to think of biomolecular engineering as an area of scientific 
endeavor which is characterized by the following elements: 
emphasis on the analysis of model systems of obvious significance 
to medicine and biotechnology; the synthesis of information and 
research approaches from disciplines such as cellular physiology, 
genetics, physical biochemistry, and chemical engineering; and 
the translation of biological information into a quantitative 
framework." 
 
The translation of the biological into the numerical seems to be 
the most valuable element of this interface of fields, according 
to many researchers who attended the meeting.
 
"Chemical engineers all have a certain quantitative bent that 
exists in their training that doesn't exist in the training of 
biologists," says Jonathan King, a highly regarded molecular 
biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who works 
closely with chemical engineers.
 
About seven years ago, he says, he was looking at problems 
associated with protein aggregation. The biotechnology industry 
was just beginning to scale up production of its products but was 
encountering problems of proteins that have the intended amino 
acid sequence but don't fold up properly and hence aren't 
bioactive. King says he found few biologists or biochemists who 
were interested in or capable of working on these "scrambled egg" 
messes of misfolded proteins. 
 
"Initially, we were only able to talk to chemical engineers," he 
says. "They're used to dealing with polymers, and the problems 
you get when you scale up [production] are their stock and 
trade."  He found it was a mind-set problem that hindered his 
interactions with biologists on this problem.
 
"Biologists want to win Nobel Prizes and chemical engineers want 
to build factories. They have very different standards of 
achievement," he says.
 
Douglas A. Lauffenburger, a chemical engineer at the University 
of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, chaired a session on cell and 
tissue engineering at the December meeting. He is excited by the 
possibilities the melding of these two disciplines can engender. 
"An engineer is taught over and over again to think 
quantitatively and in terms of dynamics and kinetics, while a 
biologist is taught how to think descriptively. It's incredibly 
complementary. The best work in biomolecular engineering is going 
to be done at the interface and by two people, instead of one."
 
But bringing these two scientific cultures together is a 
continuing challenge, says King. MIT's Biotechnology Process 
Engineering Center, funded by the National Science Foundation, 
has helped biologists and engineers coalesce.
 
Janet Westpheling, a microbial physiologist at the University of 
Georgia in Athens, says the best physiologists are among chemical 
engineers because "they're interested in directing carbon flow 
from one metabolic pathway to another." 
 
She explains: "It's better for me to make contact with a chemical 
engineer who knows what he's doing than trying to be a mediocre 
chemical engineer. But biologists are going to have to make an 
effort to learn the language of chemical engineering." Before 
trying to make contacts, she recommends reading the highly cited 
textbook Biochemical Engineering Fundamentals (New York, McGraw-
Hill Publishing Co., 1986), written by California Institute of 
Technology chemical engineer James E. Bailey.
 
One problem that Westpheling and others note is that making 
contacts is difficult because chemical engineers and biologists 
rarely attend each other's meetings and don't publish in or read 
the same journals. That's why the NIGMS biomolecular engineering 
meeting was so useful, they say. It was a gathering place for 
biologists and chemical engineers--basic researchers as well as 
industry-based scientists.
 
Lauffenburger says these cross-cultural conclaves are vital as 
ways of getting in touch with other researchers interested at 
working at the interface of disciplines. In fact, it was a 
workshop four years ago that sparked what has turned out to be 
quite a valuable collaboration. He says the organizers of the 
"Workshop on Mechanisms of Protein Trafficking," held at the 
University of California, Davis, in March 1988, "went out of 
their way to bring a diverse group together."
 
At Davis, he met cell biologist Steven Wiley from the University 
of Utah Medical Center in Salt Lake City. Each man was quite 
familiar with the other's work, but they had never met or talked. 
Wiley says he is best known for a paper in Cell that laid out a 
quantitative model for how the epidermal growth factor receptor 
works (H.S. Wiley, et al., Cell, 25:433-40, 1981). A more 
detailed paper appeared the next year in the Journal of 
Biological Chemistry, and has been his most popular work, 
garnering 180 citations as of mid-1992, and reaching its peak at 
30 citations in 1990 (H.S. Wiley, et al., JBC, 257:4222, 1982).
 
To develop this model, he took what was then known about the 
molecular "parts" of the EGF receptor and the rates at which they 
functioned, and he then built a mathematical model that could 
predict how the cell would respond if certain parameters were 
changed, such as concentration of hormone or number of surface 
receptors. While this paper garnered a lot of attention when it 
was published, as time rolled on and research progressed on EGF 
receptors, more "parts" had to be added to the model. That's 
where his mathematical abilities ran out. And that's also when a 
lot of biologists became increasingly skeptical of the value of 
this mathematical modeling approach to receptor study.
 
 
Kindred Souls
"Then I met Doug Lauffenburger, and suddenly I had a kindred 
soul," he says. Together they've been able to advance this 
modeling approach to understanding the basic science of receptor 
function (H.S. Wiley, et al., JBC, 266:11083-94, 1991).
 
"What I'm trying to add," says Lauffenburger, "is a quantitative 
understanding of rates and magnitudes of signals. Most people in 
the field are trying to identify components. Identifying 
components is critical but insufficient for understanding the 
signal because they depend on magnitudes."
 
One use for the model has been to guide their thinking on how an 
excessive number of receptors leads to a transformation into a 
cancerous cell. What apparently is happening is these receptors 
choke the system that recycles them, shutting down the regulatory 
pathway, thus leaving the cells out of control, not overcon-
trolled as might be expected.
 
Wiley says his newest biomolecular engineering project is to 
attempt to develop an "autonomous bioreactor system." Under a 
grant from NSF's biotechnology program, he is working on a system 
of cell cultures that would not only produce valuable proteins--
but also supply its own growth regulators, obviating the need to 
supply complex and costly serums containing these factors.
 
A project intended to bring about increased interest in work at 
the interface of disciplines is a book coming out this spring by 
Lauffenburger and coauthor Jennifer J. Linderman, also a UI 
chemical engineer.
 
In the forthcoming Receptors--Models for Binding, Trafficking, 
and Signalling (New York, Oxford University Press) they write: 
"We intend this book to build a bridge between cell biologists 
and engineers over the ground that can be called quantitative 
cell biology or cellular bioengineering. Our aim is to com- 
municate how insights can be gained into the relationship between 
receptor/ligand molecular properties and the cell functions they 
govern, by a judicious combination of cell biology 
experimentation and quantitative engineering models."
 
The bulk of funding for studies in biomolecular engineering has 
traditionally come from NSF, with additional money available from 
the Whitaker Foundation, which now has an office in Washington, 
D.C. (Scott Veggeberg, The Scientist, March 30, 1992, page 21), 
as well as from the biotechnology industry, says Michael Shuler, 
a chemical engineer at Cornell University. The National 
Institutes of Health has provided some funding in support of 
biologist-engineer collaborations through its Interdisciplinary 
Biotechnology Training Grant Program. But otherwise, grant review 
committees have apparently been prejudiced against anyone with a 
chemical engineering title, Shuler says.
 
"Funding committees don't real-ly seem to understand the purpose 
of what's being done," he says, noting, however, that the 
December conference has probably been helpful in breaking down 
this bias.
 
"There were probably people at NIH who had certain questions 
about the quality of science in this community, and where the 
interface may be," he says. "And I think they came away from this 
conference feeling the quality of science was very good." He says 
while contacts were made and grant officials--he hopes--were 
convinced of the value of the biology-chemical engineering 
interface, it will be a couple of years before it's known how 
effective the conference really was in terms of increased 
research opportunities. More funding will be critical not only 
because of the explosion of intellectual interest in these 
studies but also to take advantage of the field's benefits to 
U.S. competitiveness in the biotechnology sector.
 
While NIH may try to implement more programs to encourage 
research at the interface, there's more than life scientist 
snobbery that's blocking chemical engineers' access to funding, 
says Marvin Cassman, deputy director of NIGMS. Chemical engineers 
need to examine their own biases, he says.
 
"If you're going to do well in the NIH peer review and funding 
decisions, you need to submit proposals that are hypothesis-
driven. This is not the way an engineer approaches a research 
problem," Cassman says. "Also, it's not that there are specific 
barriers to getting funding at NIH, but it's a mind-set that 
chemical engineers may not think of NIH." They instead go to NSF 
first rather than trying to successfully negotiate the NIH 
landscape, he says.
 
 
 
Training Biologist-Engineers
In addition to increased funding opportunities, engineers must be 
trained differently, says Jim Swartz, group leader for bacterial 
fermentation development at Genentech Inc. of South San 
Francisco, Calif. He was part of a committee, including such 
widely respected chemical engineers as MIT's Danny Wang and 
Harvard University's George Whitesides, that produced Putting 
Biotechnology to Work: Bioprocess Engineering  (Washington, D.C., 
National  Academy of Sciences, 1992).
 
In this report, they call for a new paradigm for training the 
next generation of biologically grounded engineers.
 
"It is important that the bioproc-ess engineers' training in the 
next decade have a strong background in biochemistry, molecular 
biology, cell biology, and genetics. That will facilitate useful 
communication of bioprocess engineers with the bench scientists 
who are at the initial discovery stage of biological product 
research and development," according to the report.
 
"To implement this type of research, cultural changes in the 
engineering and scientific communities will be required. For 
example, a doctoral candidate in chemical engineering is often 
viewed as performing research as a single investigator when, in 
fact, input from multiple disciplines is essential."
 
In Swartz's mind the ball is now clearly in the NIH court for 
advancing work at the interface. "I think NIH is an excellent 
place to foster this research."
 
NIGMS's Cassman says his first order of business is to get the 
summary papers from the December meeting out in published form, 
sometime this spring.
 
From there it will be  up to other officials at his and other 
institutes whether they catch the cross-disciplinary fever and 
move ahead with funding new research and training initiatives.
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #3, February 8, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
                            RESEARCH
 
ASTROPHYSICS
(Page 16 of newspaper)
 
A.I. Abazov, O.L. Anosov, E.L. Faizov, V.N. Gavrin, et al., 
"Search for neutrinos from the sun using the reaction 71Ga(ne,e-
)71Ge," Physical Review Letters, 67:3332-35, 1991.
 
R.T. Kouzes (Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratories, Richland, 
Wash.): "The fusion mechanism that drives the stellar furnace was 
long thought to be well understood. Sophisticated computer models 
have been developed to describe this process, and experimental 
tests of the model for our sun have been carried out for more 
than 20 years. The `solar neutrino problem'--the deficiency in 
the experimentally measured flux of neutrinos produced in the 
fusion process at the center of the sun compared to model 
calculations-- has cast some doubt on our understanding of 
stellar energy generation, weak interaction physics, or both.
 
"The Soviet American Gallium Experiment (SAGE), a solar neutrino 
detector collaboration between the Russian Academy of Sciences 
and United States institutions led by Los Alamos National 
Laboratory, is located in the Caucasus mountains of southern 
Russia and has been operational for more than two years. This 
gallium-based detector, unlike earlier experiments, is sensitive 
to the low-energy neutrinos produced by the proton-proton fusion 
process in the sun's core, a flux closely tied to the observed 
luminosity of the sun. The experimental measurements to date have 
shown an apparent deficiency in the low-energy solar neutrino 
flux, a result also found by a similar European detector 
(GALLEX). Both SAGE and GALLEX indicate that the number of 
neutrinos observed experimentally is less than expected from the 
standard computer models.
 
"These initial experimental results, if verified by several more 
years of observation and direct neutrino calibrations of the 
experiments, require a substantial change either in the physics 
of neutrinos or in our understanding of the stellar energy 
generation process. One solution to the solar neutrino problem 
that is of great interest to physicists is the possibility that 
we are observing oscillations of neutrinos from one type to 
another. This elegant solution requires that at least one 
neutrino type have a non-zero mass and that this mass be close to 
the mass of another neutrino type. Under certain reasonable 
stellar conditions, the electron-type neutrinos emitted in the 
stellar fusion process could resonantly oscillate into another 
neutrino type and, as a result, pass through our terrestrial 
detectors unobserved. Detectors now under construction, such as 
the one being built at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, may 
provide the definitive data to determine whether the solar 
neutrino problem is due to faulty astrophysics or new particle 
physics."
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #3, February 8, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
OPTICS
(Page 16 of newspaper)
 
U. Keller, G.W. tHooft, W.H. Knox, J.E. Cunningham,  "Femtosecond 
pulses  from a continuously self-starting  passively  mode-locked 
Ti:sapphire laser," Optics Letters, 16:1022-24, 1991.
 
Ursula Keller (AT&T Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, N.J.): "Until the 
late 1980s, advances in ultrashort pulse generation were 
dominated by dye lasers. These ultrafast laser systems with pulse 
duration shorter than 100 femtoseconds are relatively large, are 
maintenance-intensive, and require a laboratory environment with 
a skilled technician or scientist to operate. An all-solid-state 
laser technology could provide a compact, reliable, push-button 
type of a laser. The development of diode-pumped solid-state 
lasers addressed these issues; however, for ultrashort solid-
state lasers, a broad gain bandwidth was required.
 
"Renewed research efforts in tunable solid-state lasers produced 
the first demonstration of the Ti:sapphire laser and, more 
recently, diode-pumped laser materials such as Cr:LiSAF. The 
development of such laser materials was crucial in the current 
rapid developments in femto-second pulse generation.
 
"One key issue for solid-state lasers is the mode-locking 
mechanism, which produces ultrashort pulses. Because diode-pumped 
solid-state lasers typically have about a 1,000 times smaller 
gain cross section than dye lasers, the traditional femtosecond 
mode-locking techniques developed for dye lasers did not work. 
However, within a very short time since 1988, the pulse duration 
of mode-locked Ti:sapphire lasers moved from picosecond pulses to 
15 femtoseconds because of a strong worldwide research effort. 
During this time many new mode-locking techniques have been 
introduced.
 
"For many of these new mode-locking techniques, self-starting is 
a serious problem. The mode-locking was typically started by 
increasing temporarily the noise of the laser, which produced a 
sufficiently strong noise spike to initiate passive mode-locking. 
Techniques such as banging or misaligning the laser, moving an 
end mirror, or an acousto-optic modulator have been used. 
However, for applications beyond the scientific market, 
reliability and low cost are the main issues. We concentrated on 
an all-solid-state passive continuous starting mechanism for 
which we initially used semiconductor saturable absorbers inside 
a coupled cavity. However, an intracavity mode- locking technique 
is more desirable because it does not require active 
stabilization and the overall cavity design becomes more compact 
leading to increased mechanical stability. The coupled-cavity 
result mo- tivated the invention of a new compact, (about 400 
microns thick) semiconductor saturable absorber device, an 
antiresonant Fabry-Perot saturable absorber (A-FPSA), which is 
the first passive intracavity mode-locker that both starts and 
sustains stable mode-locking of diode-pumped solid-state lasers 
(U. Keller, et al., Optics Letters, 17:505-7, 1992). Bandgap 
engineering of semiconductors allows custom-designed 
nonlinearities and extension of this technique to other laser 
materials and wavelengths. We expect the robust nature of an all-
solid-state ultrafast laser system will allow for many new 
applications outside the laboratory and by researchers who do not 
wish to become laser experts."
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #3, February 8, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
CELL BIOLOGY
(Page 16 of newspaper)
 
C.C.  Thompson, T.A. Brown, S.L. McKnight, "Convergence  of  Ets- 
and Notch-related structural motifs in a heteromeric DNA  binding 
complex," Science, 253:762, 1991.
 
Catherine C. Thompson (Carnegie Institution of Washington, 
Baltimore): "Our analysis of GABP, the heteromeric DNA binding 
protein, revealed the functional properties of a structural motif 
found in a diverse array of proteins. One of the subunits of 
GABP, GABPa, is a member of the ETS family of DNA binding 
proteins. Although the other subunit, GABPb, does not bind to DNA 
by itself, it forms a complex with GABPa in which it stabilizes 
the binding of GABPa to DNA. We found that four imperfect tandem 
repeats of a 33-amino-acid motif at the amino terminus of GABPb 
mediate interaction with GABPa. This motif, the cdc10/SW16 or 
ankyrin repeat, had previously been identified in a variety of 
interesting proteins.
 
"Surprisingly, the proteins in which repeats had been identified 
seemed to lack a common function or even subcellular location. 
For example, repeats are found in transmembrane (Notch, Lin-12, 
and Glp-1), cytoplasmic (ankyrin, NFk p105, IkB), nuclear (SW14, 
SW16, GABPb), and secreted (a-latrotoxin) proteins. Proteins with 
this motif had been identified in diverse species including fruit 
flies, nematodes, yeast, and man, indicating that the motif is 
evolutionarily conserved. Until now, the function of the repeats 
had remained obscure.
 
"The importance of our results was to demonstrate a distinct 
biochemical role for the repeats--as modules that form specific 
dimerization interfaces. Direct evidence for participation of the 
repeats in protein:protein recognition has been obtained for 
GABP, ankyrin, and most recently, IkB and related proteins (G.F. 
Wulczyn, et al., Nature, 358:597-9, 1992; J.-I. Inoue, 
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 89:4333-7, 1992; 
S. Kidd, et al., Cell, 71:623-35, 1992). In all cases, it is 
likely that the function of the repeats will be to mediate 
specific, inter- or intra-molecular protein:protein 
interactions."
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #3, February 8, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
                       TOOLS & TECHNOLOGY
 
 
Molecular Biology Reagent Kits Simplify Lab Procedures
(Page 19 of newspaper)
 
BY RICKI LEWIS
 
Flip through the pages of the major science journals, and you'll 
find ads for kits that enable a researcher to do nearly anything 
imaginable--detection or purification, for example--to nucleic 
acids, chromosomes, and proteins. Such ads are starting to 
trickle into the medical journals, also, as physicians begin to 
replace or supplement traditional microbiology-based tests with 
DNA probes or monoclonal antibody kits to diagnose infections.
 
With labs in the biotechnology industry and the universities 
busier than ever and researchers in the Human Genome Project and 
elsewhere generating a constant stream of new material for kit 
development, the future market for molecular biology kits looks 
substantial.
 
A reagent kit, also often called a "system," consists of the 
chemicals needed to perform a given laboratory procedure, 
packaged with directions on their use. The catalog from Bio-Rad 
Laboratories in Richmond, Calif., provides a somewhat sweeping 
definition of such kits as "systems that enable scientists to 
recognize and decipher the multiple chemical patterns which are 
the clues to understanding life, human health, and materials 
science."
 
 
What's In A Reagent Kit?
"A reagent kit is an assembly of all components, optimized and 
pretested, so they give good results without the user needing to 
do a lot of work beforehand," says Gary A. Dahl, president of 
Epicentre Technologies of Madison, Wis.
 
"The idea is to produce something that will help researchers do 
the simple things so they can get on with the experiments, which 
is what they are supposed to be doing," adds Jim Gautsch, vice 
president of kit development at BIO 101 Inc. of Vista, Calif.
 
Most kit producers also offer flexibility.
 
"All of our products are sold in kit forms, and you can buy the 
reagents separately, but that is more expensive," says Annette 
Short, customer service representative at Gaithersburg, Md.-based 
Oncor Inc. Oncor calls itself a "molecular pathology" company 
specializing in using DNA probes to highlight chromosome 
abnormalities behind inherited disorders and cancer. "We try to 
offer laboratories the ability to customize particular needs, not 
forcing them into a kit," Short says.
 
In molecular biology, the number of procedures actually covered 
by the many reagent kits available is not as daunting as the 
bulging catalogs might suggest.
 
Despite the large number of molecular reagent kits on the market, 
the procedures they facilitate--and the molecules they target--
are comparatively few. The job of choosing an appropriate kit is 
simplified by first identifying the task to be performed and then 
matching it with the molecule involved.
 
The most common molecules, of course, are DNA, RNA, and proteins. 
And the most common procedures are detection, extraction, 
isolation, purification, synthesis, sequencing, labeling, 
modification, or mutagenizing.
 
A typical reagent kit includes enzymes, controls, buffers, 
labeling reagents, possibly DNA probes or antibodies, and the 
all-important protocol. Very helpful are the newsletters 
published by reagent kit manufacturers, in which users describe 
applications of the products. For example, Cleveland-based U.S. 
Biochemical Corp.'s  "Editorial Comments," Oncor's "The Molecular 
Cytogenetics Newsletter," and La Jolla, Calif.-based Strategene 
Corp.'s "Strategies in Molecular Biology" provide helpful hints 
and new applications.
 
The challenge in the reagent kit business is to stay at the 
cutting edge of research and be among the first to recognize when 
a new approach both fills a niche and can save a scientist time 
if its components are prepackaged together. One way that a 
company can do this is to tap into the experiences of its staff, 
says BIO 101's Gautsch.
 
"I came from the Scripps Clinic [of La Jolla, Calif.], where I 
spent a lot of time in the lab making basic materials so I could 
go on [with research]," Gautsch says. "Our kits allow you to do 
procedures that [otherwise would] slow you down, that often are 
stumbling blocks."
 
He cites as an example Geneclean, a kit that removes impurities 
and inhibitors (such as organic solvents, unreacted nucleotides, 
and salts and proteins) from agarose gels, ensuring that results 
on subsequent experiments are reliable.
 
 
Kit Genesis
New kit ideas can come from a variety of sources.
"We have a scientific advisory board of people in the field 
either working on projects or keeping their eyes open to what's 
coming up," says David Bruning, genetics marketing manager at 
Oncor. "We also have scientists in house who scour papers [in the 
literature]. We get feedback from going to meetings, information 
from customers, and from customer service reps."
 
Many considerations enter into deciding which new DNA probes to 
commercialize as a kit. Would research labs actually use a new 
probe kit, or are they already using their own versions? How many 
people have a disorder caused by the gene detectable with a new 
DNA probe? Would physicians ultimately use the new DNA probe kit 
to diagnose the associated illness, or do diagnostic kits using 
other technologies already exist? Are other companies close to 
developing a kit using the particular probe?
 
Knowledge about the disease in question is important, too.
 
"Sometimes a disease is not well enough characterized to judge if 
a specific probe is useful," says Bruning. He cites, for example, 
the phenomenon of genetic heterogeneity, in which a set of 
symptoms is caused by more than one gene. A diagnostic test based 
on a DNA probe to one gene will yield a false negative result for 
patients whose problem is caused by another gene.
 
Assembling a kit that not many others have thought of is one 
approach at Epicentre Technologies. This firm set its sights on 
kits based on the ligase chain reaction (LCR, also known as 
ligation amplification). LCR is an alternative gene amplification 
technology based on the ability of ligase to knit together pieces 
of a gene. It has diagnostic uses--if a gene from an infectious 
microbe or virus is present in a patient's sample, the ligase 
will join the pieces, which are then detected.
 
"Our Ampligase kit contains everything necessary for ligation 
amplification, with the customer's own target-specific set of 
four oligo-deoxynucleotides," says Dahl. The kit includes 
buffers, ligase, and a positive control template.
 
Another strategy in reagent kit development is to troubleshoot, 
identifying a problem and solving it. Dahl describes a problem in 
sequencing DNA that is avoided with Epicentre Technologies' 
Sequi-Therm cycle sequencing kit. 
 
"DNA fragments with regions rich in the DNA bases C and G tend to 
be lost, so if you read down the four lanes of a [sequencing] 
gel, you miss certain areas of the sequence," he says. This is 
more than just a minor annoyance, because GC-rich areas are often 
present very near to genes that encode protein, and are also the 
parts of genes that most frequently mutate, causing disease.
 
 
Carving A Niche
Oncor Inc. is focusing on a fusion of technologies--DNA probes 
with cytogenetics (identifying chromosomal variants that cause 
illness). This technology is called "FISH," for fluorescence in 
situ hybridization, or chromosome painting, and was pioneered at 
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, Calif.
 
In FISH, a labeled piece of DNA, the probe, binds to its 
complementary sequence on a chromosome. This is much more 
specific than classical chromosome staining, in which dyes are 
used to stain chromosomes in characteristic patterns reflecting 
more generalized features, such as GC- vs. AT-rich areas.
 
FISH is very useful in distinguishing among some blood cell 
cancers, which are often associated with chromosomal 
rearrangements. A definitive diagnosis is crucial to determining 
prognosis and course of treatment. This diagnosis is possible by 
deciphering the associated chromosomal anomaly.
 
A classic example is chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), which is 
nearly always associated with a chromosome translocation that 
places the tip of one chromosome, number 9, onto chromosome 22 
(chromosomes are numbered in size order). This so-called 
Philadelphia chromosome, named for the city where it was 
discovered in 1960, juxtaposes the Abelson (or ABL) oncogene on 
chromosome 9 against a region of chromosome 22 called the 
breakpoint cluster region, or BCR. When the two genes are 
opposed, a single "fusion" protein is manufactured under their 
direction. This protein somehow lifts cell cycle control to cause 
cancer.
 
Oncor's BCR/ABL Translocation DNA Probe highlights the ABL gene 
with yellow-green fluorescein and BCR with red rhodamine. If a 
patient with unexplained fatigue and bruising and a leukemic 
white blood cell count has the red and green flash next to one 
another in a chromosome preparation, the telltale Philadelphia 
chromosome is there, and the diagnosis is CML. 
 
"We also have a Translocation 15/17 Probe for acute promyelocytic 
leukemia, neuroblastoma, and her 2 neu, which is an oncogene 
associated with breast cancer," says Bruning.
 
Oncor's Chromosome In Situ System for Dual Color Detection 
includes reagents to block repetitive DNA so that the probes home 
in on the single copy genes of interest; reagents for 
hybridization, detection, and signal amplification; and the 
probe. The dual color technology is licensed from Indianapolis-
based Boehringer Mannheim Corp.
 
Perhaps most exciting is the use of Oncor's probe kits to solve 
chromosomal mysteries. Vicki E. Powers and Huntington F. Willard 
of the department of genetics at Stanford University used the 
probe kits to identify isochromosomes more definitively than is 
possible with traditional staining. Isochromosomes have identical 
arms because during cell division, the duplicated chromosome 
split along the wrong plane. The result is double doses of some 
genes and the absence of others--an unhealthy imbalance of 
genetic material. "The information obtained [from using the 
probes] both aids diagnosis and provides fundamental information 
on the nature of human chromosome abnormalities," they reported 
in the company's newsletter.
 
Another chromosomal mystery is being solved by David F. Callen of 
the department of cytogenetics and molecular genetics at Adelaide 
Children's Hospital in Australia. He is using Oncor's DNA probe 
kits to determine the chromosomal origins of ring chromosomes. 
These tiny rings of genetic material are sometimes present in 
cells of patients with unrecognized syndromes. Being able to tell 
which chromosome gave rise to the ring can aid diagnosis.
 
While Oncor reaches both the research and clinical marketplace, 
other firms specialize in molecular biology reagent kits for the 
health care industry. Here, too, innovation, convenience, and 
time-saving are the goals.
 
For example, there is the PACE 2-Direct Probe Assay for Chlamydia 
trachomatis and Neisseria gonorrhoeae, offered by San Diego-based 
Gen-Probe. A dual test is useful because a patient who has one of 
these sexually transmitted diseases has up to a 50 percent chance 
of having the other. The kit includes the probes, an activator, a 
separation reagent, probe diluent, positive control, negative 
reference, and a wash solution, sufficient for 100 specimens. A 
single test uses one urogenital swab and replaces standard 
microbiology culturing. Such kits serve a need because physicians 
do not have the time or training to develop DNA probes.
 
 
A Crustacean Simulation
The quintessential molecular biology kit is one that provides a 
test that cannot be done--at least not easily--otherwise. This is 
so for the Limulus amebocyte lysate (LAL) test, a standard method 
for detecting bacterial endotoxin in drugs or on medical devices 
such as syringes. Endotoxin causes septic shock, which can result 
in death.
 
The LAL test borrows the distinctive response of the horseshoe 
crab (Limulus) to encountering endotoxin--its coppery blue blood 
gels. This reaction was discovered in 1956 by Frederick Bang at 
the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, who, with 
colleague Jack Levin, isolated the amebocytes responsible for the 
reaction, and re-created the clotting in vitro. The LAL test 
rapidly replaced injecting rabbits with contaminated drugs and 
looking for a response of fever, indicating the presence of 
endotoxin.
 
Today, companies that market the LAL test usually get freeze-
dried crab blood from Associates of Cape Cod Inc., Falmouth, 
Mass. Here, during summers, college students "bleed" horseshoe 
crabs that hang upside down, the animals' blood collecting in 
jugs below them. (Only 30 percent of each crab's blood is taken, 
and the crabs are returned, apparently unscathed, to the sea.)
 
Because most manufacturers of medical devices can't simply pluck 
a horseshoe crab from a nearby shore and watch its blood clot 
into blue gelatin, companies such as Bio-Whittaker Inc. of 
Walkersville, Md., provide LAL kits. 
 
"Our product is derived from the amebocyte," says product manager 
Maribeth Donovan. "We lyse the cell, and all the components of 
the blood coagulation system are there. The LAL test consists of 
lysates of the blood cells. You mix a sample with LAL, and if it 
gels, it means endotoxin is in the sample." 
 
More informative is the company's "chromogenic" version of the 
LAL test. 
 
"Instead of the flipped tube having solid on top, it turns 
yellow," says Donovan. "We can quantitate the amount of endotoxin 
in the sample by the intensity of the yellow compared to a 
standard curve."
 
 
Ricki Lewis is a freelance science writer based in Scotia, N.Y. 
She is the author of a biology textbook and has just completed a 
human genetics text.
 
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #3, February 8, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
 
LEADING REAGENT KIT MANUFACTURERS
Companies discussed in the accompanying article:
(Page 19 of newspaper)
 
 
Bio-Rad Laboratories
2000 Alfred Nobel Dr.
Hercules, Calif.  94547
(800) 4 - BIORAD
Fax: (800) 879-2289
 
Products: Call for catalog
 
BIO 101 Inc.
1060 Joshua Way
Vista, Calif. 92083
(800) 424-6101
Fax: (619) 598-0116
 
Products:
phage DNA isolation 
yeast transformation 
Geneclean DNA purification 
Mermaid oligomer purification
RNaid RNA purification 
Circleprep plasmid preparation 
G nome DNA isolation, for genomic DNA
 
BioWhittaker Inc.
8830 Biggs Ford Rd.
Walkersville, Md. 21793-0127
(800) 638-8174
Fax: (301) 845-8291
Products:
Limulus Amebocyte Lysate
Gel-Clot LAL
Chromogenic LAL
 
Epicentre Technologies
1202 Ann St.
Madison, Wis. 53713
(800) 284-8474
Fax: (608) 251-3199
 
Products:
Ampligase thermostable DNA ligase 
SequiTherm cycle sequencing
AmpliScribe transcription 
 
Oncor Inc.
209 Perry Pkwy.
Gaithersburg, Md. 20877
(800) 77-ONCOR
Fax: (301) 926-6129
 
Products:
Oncor probes
Chromosome in situ hybridization systems
Probe tech systems for DNA analysis
RNA/DNA in situ reagent 
 
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #3, February 8, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
                           PROFESSION
 
Judging Interpersonal Skills Is Key To Hiring In Industry
(Page 21 of newspaper)
 
BY LISA J. BAIN
 
About  five  or 10 years ago, good  scientific  credentials  were 
enough  to land a job in industry, human resources  experts  say. 
But  hiring managers report that times have changed.  In  today's 
high-technology  companies,  teamwork is the  key  to  developing 
technological products and bringing them to market, they say. And 
effective  teamwork  requires  the ability  to  communicate  both 
vertically and horizontally through an organization. As a result, 
interpersonal  skills  are  almost  as  important  as   technical 
competence.  Assessing these skills, however, can  be  difficult, 
and requires managers to look beyond the obvious.
 
Kirby Vosburgh knows this well. Vosburgh, manager of the  Applied 
Physics   Laboratory  at  the  General  Electric   Research   and 
Development  Center  in  Schenectady, N.Y.,  recently  hired  two 
scientists  to fill out a new research group doing advanced  work 
in  lighting systems. The people he hired "are both really  sharp 
but  very different," he says. "One is a retro-'70s hippie  type. 
The  other looks like he came out of business school.  What  they 
share  is  they are both excellent scientists. They have  a  good 
natural   understanding   of   their   field,   they   are   good 
communicators, and can do [the science] well."
 
Vosburgh  interviewed 40 scientists before settling on these  two 
disparate  characters.  Although  the  interviewing  process  was 
lengthy--including  a  seminar  conducted  by  each   candidate--
Vosburgh   says  that  after  20  years  with  GE  and  lots   of 
interviewing  experience,  he  knows about  15  minutes  into  an 
interview whether a candidate is the right person for the job.
 
Other  scientist/managers interviewed for this article  say  much 
the same thing--that intuition plays an important role in  making 
hiring decisions. But human resources professionals urge caution. 
"People often make decisions on their gut feelings, and that  can 
be a costly mistake," says Melanie Graper, director of  worldwide 
R&D   employment  for  SmithKline  Beecham   Pharmaceuticals   in 
Philadelphia.
 
Adds  Paul Connolly, president of Performance Programs,  a  human 
resources   consulting  firm  in  Rowatan,   Conn.,   "Typically, 
scientist-types  tend  to overhire on  technical  competence  and 
underhire on personal characteristics. They tend to  overestimate 
the   importance   of   technical  knowledge   to   overall   job 
performance."  As a result, in many companies, scientists  screen 
candidates   for   technical  competence  and   human   resources 
professionals  screen for personal characteristics such as  self-
motivation and initiative. But Connolly says that scientists  can 
be trained to do this "personality" interviewing as well.
 
"We call it behavior-based interviewing," he says. "It says  that 
the  past is the best predictor of the future." For  example,  an 
interviewer might ask questions about problems the candidate  ran 
into during his or her research, and how the applicant went about 
solving  the  problems. The answer should  help  the  interviewer 
discern some of the most important qualities he or she is looking 
for:  not  only  technical  competence,  but  also  adaptability, 
flexibility, independence, and tenacity.
 
Andrew Nichols, a research fellow in cardiovascular  pharmacology 
at  SmithKline Beecham, recently went through a training  program 
for  interviewers and found it "most useful. It  highlighted  how 
you  can  make mistakes if you don't do a careful  job."  Nichols 
recently   finished  interviewing  for  a  Ph.D.-level   research 
scientist.  Through the training program, he realized  he  wasn't 
asking  specific enough questions. "I was asking vague  questions 
and  getting vague answers that were open to  interpretation  and 
making assumptions," he says.
 
As  further  evidence of the dangers of  deficient  interviewing, 
Nichols  recalls  a hiring decision made several years  ago  that 
proved to be a mistake: "We hired him very quickly,  concentrated 
on  technical abilities, and didn't look into how good he was  at 
working with people. And he wasn't good at working with people."
 
Indeed,   interpersonal  skills  should  be  emphasized   in   an 
interview, scientist/managers say. "In an industrial concern, the 
ability to work well in a team and to share credit is  absolutely 
critical," says Michael Montague, director of research operations 
for  St.  Louis-based  Monsanto Co. There  are  people  who  seem 
spectacular  but don't adapt well to an  industrial  environment, 
Montague  says:  "Some  people are much  better  off  working  as 
individuals in academia."
 
Kirby Vosburgh says that in a company such as GE, teamwork  takes 
on an added dimension. "We're very diverse, with a broad span  of 
technologies.  A  successful  person may have  to  hold  together 
scientists  from  five  or six disciplines."  For  example,  GE's 
recent  development of a magnetic resonance  microscope  required 
expertise in several fields, including magnetic resonance imaging 
and high-temperature superconducting probes.
 
"We  like people with broad interests," says Vosburgh. "A lot  of 
the  commercial  applications  come  at  the  boundaries  between 
technologies. People have to be interested in communicating  with 
people who wouldn't normally be seen as collaborators."
 
Of course, technical competence is a major factor in hiring.  But 
many  scientist/managers  say  that  specific  skills  are   less 
important  than  a  candidate's ability to adapt  and  learn.  In 
biochemistry,  enzymology, or protein purification, for  example, 
the  information  and  skills  are  readily  transferable,   says 
Monsanto's Mon-tague.
 
 
Finding The Best Fit
Identifying the candidate who best fits the job profile takes 
time. Many employers start by placing ads in major publications. 
Others send recruiters out to interview candidates on college 
campuses. Still others rely on word of mouth.
 
Technical people usually scrutinize the candidates' curriculum 
vitae. Montague says that experts in an applicant's particular 
field of science, from both inside and outside the company, may 
be called upon to evaluate the quality of the work, whether the 
research addressed good questions, and the sophistication of the 
scientific approach.
 
"We're looking for evidence of the potential to be an independent 
investigator," says SmithKline Beecham's Nichols. Publications 
are important--how many, in what journals, and how many with 
first authorship. "We expect to see an average of at least three 
publications per year for an entry-level Ph.D. We also look to 
see whether they've gained independent funding. That's an 
indicator of how good they are." Nichols says the publication 
expectation is not a strict one. "If they have worked in a field 
that's technically very difficult or if they've had experience 
that we would really like to have, we might consider them even if 
their c.v. looks weak. For example, in vivo experiments can take 
much longer, and we would look at them slightly differently. But 
when [candidates] don't have many publications, we want to know 
why."
 
Because of the importance placed on independent research 
experience, postdoctoral fellows are often the preferred 
candidates. But some people move about within the industry. At 
GE, says Kirby Vosburgh, "we apply the professional [yardstick] 
that's appropriate--publications if the person comes from 
academia and patents if he comes from industry."
 
For lower-level scientists--technicians and B.S./M.S.-level 
junior researchers, the balance shifts somewhat, with more 
importance placed on technical skills and less on independent 
research. But even at this level, says Nichols, "someone who has 
initiative and independence makes life much easier."
 
Once the field of candidates has been narrowed, the long 
interviewing process begins. "During the interview, we try to see 
whether our hunches are correct," says Nichols. Among other 
things, the interviewers will try to determine how much of a 
research project the candidate actually conducted himself or 
herself. Particularly when the person comes from a large lab, 
this may be difficult to ascertain.
 
Many interviews may be scheduled, often with scientists from 
different areas. At SmithKline Beecham, the typical Ph.D.-level 
candidate will have eight to 10 interviews, says Graper. In 
addition, some less formal interactions, such as lunch meetings 
with peers, may be scheduled. This benefits both the employer and 
the candidate.
 
"When a person comes in for an interview, they're interviewing us 
too," says Monsanto's Montague. "The chemistry has to be right." 
Adds another scientist/manager, speaking on condition of 
anonymity, "It can make or break your lab. A small lab can be 
destroyed by a personality problem."
 
Managers say they commonly ask candidates to describe examples of 
things that went wrong in their research and about bad 
interactions they've had with other scientists. Nichols says it's 
a "sign of integrity" when a person can admit to things he or she 
couldn't do. Further, Nichols notes that people who say they have 
not had bad interactions are probably not being honest; and if 
they say they've had lots of bad interactions, they're probably 
difficult to work with.
 
There are other qualities that are being assessed during the 
interviews. For Ph.D.-level scientists, leadership potential is 
important. "Is there an indication that the person provides 
seminal ideas for others?" asks Montague. Self-confidence is 
another important quality, as are closure skills--the ability to 
see a project through to completion.
 
As part of the interviewing process, candidates are often asked 
to present seminars to groups of scientists at the company. This 
is where they can really be grilled. "We ask very aggressive 
questions to see how they respond and to see if they can get 
along with people," says Nichols.
 
The third phase of the evaluation process involves reference 
checking. Nichols says that at SmithKline Beecham, letters are 
written to all people named on a candidate's reference list 
asking for comments about the applicant's technical abilities, 
initiative, interpersonal skills, motivations, and strong and 
weak points. "If something comes up in the reference that we 
didn't pick up in the interview, we'd want to explore that 
further," says Nichols.
 
Connolly says that human resources professionals are less likely 
than scientist/managers to step into legal problems when asking 
questions that pertain to personal circumstances. "You have to 
show that your question is job-related. You have to tell them 
about the job's expectations." For example, if a job requires 
extensive traveling, asking candidates if they are able to travel 
is all right; but asking what they'll do with their children if 
they have to travel is "clearly out of bounds."
 
Connolly says that hiring scientists is not much different from 
hiring other types of professionals, nor is there much difference 
among scientific disciplines. "The content of the answers might 
shift, depending on the discipline, but the approach is basically 
the same." In all cases, he says, the standard interviewing 
advice is identical. There are three factors to consider, he 
says: " `Can do'--that's technical; `Will do'--that's 
motivational; and `Fit'--that's cultural."
 
Adds GE's Vosburgh: "Some people like industry, but they don't 
like big bureaucracies. And they may have difficulty adjusting to 
different motivations for doing industrial research. The work is 
the same, but the motivation is different--product, not 
publication."
 
 
Lisa J. Bain is a freelance science writer based in Philadelphia.
 
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #3, February 8, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
                           PROFESSION
 
Association Provides Seed Grants For Clinical Chemists
(Page 22 of newspaper)
 
BY JAMES M. WEIL
 
Clinical  chemists relate the chemical composition of tissue  and 
body  fluids  to  different illnesses--a  critical  step  in  the 
diagnosis   and   treatment  of  diseases.  For  them,   as   for 
investigators  in most other fields today, transforming  an  idea 
into reality requires extensive funding.
 
Sylvia Daunert, an assistant research professor at the University 
of Kentucky, is conducting research involving time-resolved 
fluorescence, creating more selective and sensitive assays for 
biomolecules and other biological compounds by using complexes of 
certain elements, such as europium, with fluorescent compounds. 
These complexes will fluoresce longer than compounds in existing 
biological and clinical samples and will bind either with 
antibodies or with the biomolecule being studied. This causes the 
fluorescent properties of the compound to be delayed, hence the 
name "time-resolved fluorescence."
 
Daunert was one of two recipients of $5,000 grants awarded last 
year by the Van Slyke Society, the philanthropic branch of the 
40-year-old American Association for Clinical Chemistry (AACC), 
based in Washington, D.C. Despite its name, AACC includes members 
from countries outside the United States; the association 
currently has more than 10,000 members worldwide.
 
Daunert says that without such funding, ideas such as hers would 
never come to fruition: "Five thousand dollars is not a lot of 
money, but it's enough seed money to allow testing of a principle 
and to collect enough data to apply for bigger grants." Daunert 
says that most of her Van Slyke money will be used to purchase 
chemicals and supplies.
 
Founded in 1988, the Van Slyke Society aims to "... promote, 
encourage, and stimulate the study and application of clinical 
chemistry," according to the society's mission statement.
 
The society awards two $5,000 grants per year, as well as six 
educational grants of $1,250 each to support undergraduate summer 
intern- ships for students interested in clinical chemistry 
careers.
 
The other $5,000 grant recipient in 1992, Theodore K. 
Christopoulos, an assistant professor of clinical chemistry at 
the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada, is conducting 
studies on a new amplification system for immunoassays and 
nucleic acid hybridization assays.
 
Christopoulos proposes to increase the sensitivity of these 
assays by taking an antibody to a substance, such as thyrotropin, 
and attaching it to a gene that produces a CAT enzyme. The CAT 
enzyme acts as a reporter by taking on a color that corresponds 
with the substance being studied. Instead of producing only one 
molecule of the enzyme, the gene would produce thousands more. 
These molecules would be used to catalyze the breakdown of the 
substrate, and the rate at which they did so would be a measure 
of how much thyrotropin was in the blood sample.
 
This system would be useful for diagnosing and monitoring thyroid 
diseases. Also, the system would be used to detect and quantify 
leukemia-specific mRNA sequences for diagnosing and monitoring 
chronic myeloid and acute lymphocytic leukemias. Christopoulos 
came upon the idea while working as a research fellow at Toronto 
Western Hospital and applied for the Van Slyke grant just before 
accepting his position at the University of Windsor.
 
"The money helped me more than I could believe," says 
Christopoulos. "I needed money to set up my new lab right from 
the beginning. The money helped me to buy the reagents and 
supplies needed to get started."
 
Research most likely to be considered for funding are studies 
that focus on new ways to determine chemicals in the body and new 
ways to use such information, says Harry Pardue, chairman of the 
Van Slyke Research Grants Committee and a professor of chemistry 
at Purdue University.
 
"We look for proposals with the potential for transportability 
from the research lab to the practicing clinical lab," says 
Pardue.
 
Other factors considered are the project's scope, originality, 
significance to the science, and soundness of research plan, as 
well as how achievable the proposed project is. A lower priority 
is given to requests for money to be used for salaries or general 
operating expenses.
 
Pardue says that 20 percent to 40 percent of the half-dozen or so 
proposals the committee receives per year are funded. The 
proposals are reviewed by a six-member committee, consisting 
entirely of working clinical chemists.
 
The grant funding cycle begins in June and ends in May the 
following year. The application deadline is March 15, and the 
project start date should be no later than June 1 the same year. 
Grants are awarded by June 1 and formally announced in July. 
Grants are not renewable.
 
For more information, call Christopher Hoelzel, director of 
marketing and publications at AACC, (800) 892-1400 or (202) 857-
0717, or write: Grant Request, 2029 K St., N.W., Seventh Floor, 
Washington, D.C. 20006.
 
James M. Weil is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia.
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #3, February 8, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
                             PEOPLE
 
MIT   Meteorologist  Is  Named  First  Winner  Of  New   American 
Geophysical Union  Medal
(Page 23 of newspaper)
 
Edward Lorenz, a professor, emeritus, in the department of earth, 
atmospheric,   and  planetary  sciences  at   the   Massachusetts 
Institute  of Technology, has been named the first  recipient  of 
the Roger Revelle Medal, presented by the Washington,  D.C.-based 
American  Geophysical Union (AGU). Lorenz received the  award  at 
the fall meeting of AGU in San Francisco on December 9.
 
Named for oceanographer Roger Revelle, who died in July 1991, the 
award  honors individuals who have contributed  to  understanding 
the  processes involved in the Earth's atmosphere, including  its 
dynamics, chemistry, and radiation.
 
Revelle--former   director   of  the   Scripps   Institution   of 
Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., now a part of the University of 
California,  San  Diego--was best known as a  co-founder  of  the 
theory  of  plate tectonics, which states that  the  ocean  floor 
moves  because  of  an  upward flow  of  heat  from  the  Earth's 
interior.
 
Honoree Lorenz's work focuses primarily on chaos theory as a  way 
of explaining atmospheric science.
 
"In modern terminology, chaos has been used to colloquially  mean 
something  that  is  not  random  but  still  looks  random,"  he 
explains. "Chaos is something that is determined by precise  laws 
yet behaves rather unpredictably in any one case."
 
As  a  meteorologist, Lorenz has applied this idea to  the  ever-
changing  weather patterns in order to establish some  method  of 
pre- dictability. "The theory of chaos is a lot like the weather. 
There  are precise laws determining the weather but  still,  it's 
very difficult to forecast it very far in advance," he says.
 
Ironically,  says  Lorenz,  in order for  chaos  theory  to  work 
correctly,  a number of intricate laws must be followed.  In  the 
early  1970s he wrote a paper examining the hypothesis that  "the 
flap  of a butterfly's wings in Brazil can set off a  tornado  in 
Texas."  The paper was presented at the  AAAS Convention  of  the 
Global  Atmospheric Research Program at MIT, Dec. 29, 1972.  "The 
idea  was  that some very minor,  small,  undetectable  influence 
could  lead  to  something quite detectable  after  a  sufficient 
amount  of time," Lorenz says. "This illustrates  the  difference 
between  what  we  think the weather is and what  it  really  is, 
because we can't observe it precisely."
 
Lorenz  received  his  bachelor's  degree  in  mathematics   from 
Dartmouth  College in 1938 and his Sc.D. in meteorology from  MIT 
in 1948, and has taught at MIT ever since.
 
In 1983, he and a colleague, Henry Stommel, received the Crafoord 
Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. An  explanation 
of his work appears in the academy's journal, Tellus (E.  Lorenz, 
"Irregularity: a fundamental property of the atmosphere," 36A:98-
110, 1984).
 
--Ron Kaufman
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #3, February 8, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
 
 
General  Electric Company Taps Imaging Specialist To Head R&D  At 
Its Schenectady Facility
(Page 23 of Newspaper)
 
 
Lewis S. Edelheit, formerly the manager of the Electronic Systems 
Research  Center  at  General Electric Co.,  has  been  appointed 
senior  vice president for corporate research and development  at 
the  GE Research and Development Center in Schenectady,  N.Y.  He 
began his new job on November 2.
 
The  longtime GE employee--he first joined the GE R&D  center  in 
1969, after receiving his Ph.D. in physics from the University of 
Illinois  in  Urbana--specializes in the development  of  medical 
imaging scanners.
 
The  Schenectady  center is one of 26 R&D facilities  run  by  GE 
around  the  United  States.  In 1991, GE  was  issued  973  U.S. 
patents;  of them, the R&D center accounted for 313. GE  products 
based  on  inventions  from the  center  include  the  "fan-beam" 
computed  tomography scanner, synthetic industrial diamonds,  and 
Lexan polycarbonate resin.
 
Edelheit  says  that having a vision for the future  as  well  as 
quick   decision-making   are   perhaps   the   most    essential 
characteristics of a successful R&D director. "What I see as  the 
key  part  of my job is getting the right people working  on  the 
right  projects  every day," he says. "We've got to  balance  off 
high-risk and low-risk projects; balance off near-term and short-
term  projects;  and balance off going for singles and  taking  a 
swing at a home run. I think we live in a world where things move 
so  quickly that time ends up being the most important factor  in 
success."
 
Edelheit   hopes  to  create  better  pathways   for   exchanging 
information among corporate entities. "I'm going to be worrying a 
lot  about breaking down the boundaries between the research  lab 
and the businesses; the marketing, engineering, and manufacturing 
departments; and the customer," he says. "We've got to work  very 
hard to break down the walls and boundaries between organizations 
in order to move more quickly."
 
Edelheit  received his bachelor's degree in  engineering  physics 
from Illinois in 1964. He then worked at the R&D center, where he 
was the project manager overseeing GE's first computed tomography 
scanner,  and  at the company's medical imaging R&D  facility  in 
Milwaukee.  In  1986, he left GE to become president and  CEO  of 
Quantum Medical Systems, a small start-up medical imaging company 
that was eventually bought by Siemens Allis Inc. in Cherry  Hill, 
N.J.  He  returned to GE in 1991 as manager of the  R&D  center's 
Electronic Systems Research Center.
 
--Ron Kaufman
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #3, February 8, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
                          PEOPLE BRIEFS
 
(Page 23 of Newspaper)
 
Roberto J. Poljak, a professor and head of the structural 
immunology laboratory at the Pasteur Institute in Paris since 
1981, has taken a position as director of the Center for Advanced 
Research in Biotechnology (CARB) in Rockville, Md. Established in 
1984, CARB is a research institute founded by the University of 
Maryland's Biotechnology Institute and the National Institute of 
Standards and Technology.
 
Poljak is known for developing the first three-dimensional models 
of key antibodies and antigens (A.G. Amit, et al.,  "Three-
dimensional structure of an antigen-antibody complex at 2.8 A 
resolution," Science, 233:747-53, 1986). Born and educated in 
Argentina, he came to the United States in 1958 as a postdoc at 
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1962 to 1981 he 
was a biophysics professor at Johns Hopkins University School of 
Medicine.
 
 
Arthur W. Nienhuis has been appointed director of St. Jude 
Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn. Scientists at the 
30-year-old St. Jude perform research in pediatric cancer, sickle 
cell disease, and opportunistic infections associated with AIDS. 
Nienhuis, formerly chief of the Clinical Hematology Branch at the 
National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National 
Institutes of Health, will assume his duties on April 1. At St. 
Jude he will be continuing his genetic research as well as 
investigations in hematology, the study of blood diseases. 
Nienhuis received his M.D. from the University of California 
Medical School at Los Angeles in 1968.
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #3, February 8, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
                             PEOPLE
 
MIT   Meteorologist  Is  Named  First  Winner  Of  New   American 
Geophysical Union  Medal
(Page 23 of newspaper)
 
Edward Lorenz, a professor, emeritus, in the department of earth, 
atmospheric,   and  planetary  sciences  at   the   Massachusetts 
Institute  of Technology, has been named the first  recipient  of 
the Roger Revelle Medal, presented by the Washington,  D.C.-based 
American  Geophysical Union (AGU). Lorenz received the  award  at 
the fall meeting of AGU in San Francisco on December 9.
 
Named for oceanographer Roger Revelle, who died in July 1991, the 
award  honors individuals who have contributed  to  understanding 
the  processes involved in the Earth's atmosphere, including  its 
dynamics, chemistry, and radiation.
 
Revelle--former   director   of  the   Scripps   Institution   of 
Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., now a part of the University of 
California,  San  Diego--was best known as a  co-founder  of  the 
theory  of  plate tectonics, which states that  the  ocean  floor 
moves  because  of  an  upward flow  of  heat  from  the  Earth's 
interior.
 
Honoree Lorenz's work focuses primarily on chaos theory as a  way 
of explaining atmospheric science.
 
"In modern terminology, chaos has been used to colloquially  mean 
something  that  is  not  random  but  still  looks  random,"  he 
explains. "Chaos is something that is determined by precise  laws 
yet behaves rather unpredictably in any one case."
 
As  a  meteorologist, Lorenz has applied this idea to  the  ever-
changing  weather patterns in order to establish some  method  of 
pre- dictability. "The theory of chaos is a lot like the weather. 
There  are precise laws determining the weather but  still,  it's 
very difficult to forecast it very far in advance," he says.
 
Ironically,  says  Lorenz,  in order for  chaos  theory  to  work 
correctly,  a number of intricate laws must be followed.  In  the 
early  1970s he wrote a paper examining the hypothesis that  "the 
flap  of a butterfly's wings in Brazil can set off a  tornado  in 
Texas."  The paper was presented at the  AAAS Convention  of  the 
Global  Atmospheric Research Program at MIT, Dec. 29, 1972.  "The 
idea  was  that some very minor,  small,  undetectable  influence 
could  lead  to  something quite detectable  after  a  sufficient 
amount  of time," Lorenz says. "This illustrates  the  difference 
between  what  we  think the weather is and what  it  really  is, 
because we can't observe it precisely."
 
Lorenz  received  his  bachelor's  degree  in  mathematics   from 
Dartmouth  College in 1938 and his Sc.D. in meteorology from  MIT 
in 1948, and has taught at MIT ever since.
 
In 1983, he and a colleague, Henry Stommel, received the Crafoord 
Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. An  explanation 
of his work appears in the academy's journal, Tellus (E.  Lorenz, 
"Irregularity: a fundamental property of the atmosphere," 36A:98-
110, 1984).
 
--Ron Kaufman
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #3, February 8, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)

