 
                          THE SCIENTIST
 
VOLUME 7, No:2                              January 25, 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.                         
================================================================
 
     *** THE NEXT ISSUE OF THE SCIENTIST WILL APPEAR ON ***
     ***                FEBRUARY 8, 1993                ***
 
 
 
 
THE SCIENTIST 
CONTENTS  PAGE
(Page numbers correspond to printed edition of THE SCIENTIST)
 
 
 
 
CONTENTS
(Page 3 of newspaper)
 
                              NEWS
 
SO FAR, SO GOOD: The hopes of leading researchers, science policy 
specialists,   and  scientific  association  officials   for   an 
energetic, activist approach to science issues by President  Bill 
Clinton's  new administration have been buoyed by early  advisory 
personnel decisions and the perceived positive influence of  Vice 
President Al Gore  
(Page 1 of newspaper)
 
PRELIMINARY  THUMBS-UP:  Many science policy observers  laud  the 
selection  of  Office  of  Technology  Assessment  director  John 
Gibbons  as the new presidential science adviser and head of  the 
Office  of  Science and Technology Policy,  although  others  are 
reserving judgment  
(Page 1 of newspaper)
 
STARTING  EARLY: As the new year commences, the battle  lines  of 
the  forces  of animal rights activists and  pro-animal  research 
groups  are increasingly being drawn in the nation's  classrooms, 
with  both  camps  preparing  educational  and  public  relations 
materials  
(Page 1 of newspaper)
 
A  SHRINKING PROBLEM: A recent study finding a significant  drop-
off in the number of undergraduate science, math, and engineering 
students  between freshman and senior years has implications  for 
science and society in general  
(Page 1 of newspaper)
 
CLEANUP  COMPLICATIONS:  As the Department of  Energy  begins  an 
estimated   30-year  effort  to  clean  up  the  nuclear   wastes 
contaminating  the  land  beneath  its  major  weapons  research, 
production,  and  test  sites, a new report  indicates  that  the 
agency  may have trouble finding scientists in  some  specialties 
for the first phase of the cleanup  
(Page 3 of newspaper)
 
 
 
                             OPINION
 
FIGURES  DON'T LIE, BUT...: While statistical analysis can  be  a 
useful insight into the forces that affect science and scientific 
careers,  it can be misleading and, in any case, is not the  true 
measure  of scientific productivity, creativity, or  achievement, 
says Emory University physics professor Sidney Perkowitz  
(Page 11 of newspaper)
 
COMMENTARY: Contrary to some pessimistic assessments, new federal 
legislation  to combat attacks on research labs by animal  rights 
activists  does have teeth. But perhaps its greatest strength  is 
that the bill's consideration and passage are a strong indication 
that  Congress  recognizes the value of animal  research  and  is 
ready  to get tough with animal rights terrorists,  says  Barbara 
Rich,  executive vice president of the National  Association  for 
Biomedical Research  
(Page 12 of newspaper)
 
 
                            RESEARCH
 
SOUTHWARD  MIGRATION: Whether Canadian science is falling  victim 
to global recessionary woes or a lack of commitment to science by 
the government, as some researchers believe, the resultant 
deficiency in support is perpetuating a decades-old brain drain 
of researchers from Canada to the United States, scientists say  
(Page 14 of newspaper)
 
HOT PAPERS: A biochemist discusses his computer program to 
produce detailed and schematic plots of protein structures  
(Page 16 of newspaper)
 
 
 
                       TOOLS & TECHNOLOGY
 
MICROSCOPIC IMPROVEMENTS: New lasers, an expanded array of 
fluorescent dyes, and better image collection and analysis are 
combining to broaden the powers of confocal microscopy  
(Page 17 of newspaper)
 
                           PROFESSION
 
ONE-ON-ONE APPROACH: Posters provide scientists with an efficient 
and effective way to inform colleagues of their research. In 
addition, say veteran poster presenters, they can open doors to 
professional, postdoc, and graduate school opportunities  
(Page 20 of newspaper)
 
MODEST PROGRESS: Spurred by continued hiring by pharmaceutical 
companies, as well as efforts by industry and academia to keep 
pace with inflation, median starting salaries for most new 
chemistry graduates rose slightly last year, according to a 
recent survey by the American Chemical Society  
(Page 21 of newspaper)
 
CHARLES E. BRANCH, an Auburn University physiology professor, has 
received the second annual Russell and Burch Award from the 
Humane Society of the United States  
(Page 22 of newspaper)
 
 
                           SHORT TAKES
 
NOTEBOOK  
(Page 4 of newspaper)
 
 
CARTOON  
(Page 4 of newspaper)
 
LETTERS  
(Page 12 of newspaper)
 
CROSSWORD  
(Page 13 of newspaper)
 
OBITUARIES  
(Page 22 of newspaper)
 
MICROSCOPY DIRECTORY  
(Page 30 of newspaper)
 
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #2, January 25, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
 
                     ======================
 
 
Opponents Set 1993 Tactics For Animal Rights Showdown
 
Organizations supporting and opposing use of lab animals will 
(Page 1 of newspaper)
 
BY RON KAUFMAN
 
As a new year dawns, the fierce duel over whether animals should 
be used for laboratory experiments and medical education enters a 
new phase. Both camps--on one side, groups that defend animal 
rights; on the other, those who want to uphold the use of animals 
in biomedical researchsay they will intensify the fight for the 
allegiance of future generations by targeting the nation's 
elementary and high school classrooms.
 
Organizations dedicated to both causes plan to advance their 
particular viewpoints in the new year by creating and 
distributing to American schoolchildren materials ranging from 
simple coloring books to complex curriculum supplements.
 
Both factions in this ideological battle over the use of animals 
are well funded and show long-term commitment to their respective 
causes. Raw statistics indicate that the army of animal 
protection groups has larger battalions of contributing members 
and deeper funding coffers. However, these numbers can be 
deceptive. Animal protection organizations are generally 
supported by private individuals, giving the groups an impressive 
number of backers; whereas many of the sizable biomedical 
research groups have close ties to industry, giving them a lower 
number of benefactors, but more stable and wealthy funding 
sources.
 
 
The Strategies
Organized animal protection agencies have been around for more 
than 100 years. The American Society for the Prevention of 
Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) and the American Anti-Vivisection 
Society (AAVS), for example, were founded in 1866 and 1883, 
respectively. Today, around 10 million Americans are connected 
with more than 400 animal protection groups.
 
However, the highly visible activism that has evolved during the 
past decade has resulted from the emergence of such high-profile 
associations as the 400,000-member People for the Ethical 
Treatment of Animals (PETA), the vocal In Defense of Animals 
(IDA), and the militant Animal Liberation Front (ALF) in the 
early 1980s. And there is no sign that the proliferation of these 
activist groups is going to abate: The Pittsburgh-based 
Mobilization for Animals, for example, has been around for eight 
years; this year it plans to start five new chapters scattered 
throughout Pennsylvania.
 
"A group like mine is a mini, local PETA," says Mobilization for 
Animals director Joe Taksel, whose organization currently boasts 
1,600 supporters. "We are an all-volunteer organization and have 
a prime directive that we are activists first."
 
1993, but also to bring their message into the classrooms. "This 
year we're going to work with the educational system," says PETA 
spokesman Steven Simmons. "Getting into the schools and making 
young people a real target for our message is becoming an 
increasing goal of ours."
 
PETA, whose annual budget is around $8.5 million, plans to double 
its expenditures on classroom educational efforts to more than $1 
million in 1993.
 
Meanwhile, groups defending the use of 17 million to 22 million 
animals annually in biomedical research have their own history 
and goals.
 
"Our first formal committee against the animal rights movement 
was in 1884," says Roy Schwarz, vice president for science and 
education of the American Medical Association in Chicago, the 
largest private organization in the United States that promotes 
animal research. "We fought them again at the turn of the 
century, again in the '20s, again in the '40s, again in the '60s, 
and now in the '80s we started to fight them again. It's a 
movement that never dies. In 30 years, they will probably come 
back and we'll fight them again."
 
New, aggressive groups, such as Americans for Medical Progress 
(AMP) and a 40,000-member, Washington, D.C.-based lobbying 
organization called Putting People First, have arrived in the 
last few years to aid the pro-animal research campaign. Last 
year, the U.S. Public Health Service's National Institute of 
Mental Health (NIMH) joined the fray.
 
Some biomedical research groups have strong corporate ties. For 
example, the former chairman of the board for the National 
Association for Biomedical Research (NABR), founded in 1979 under 
the name Research Animal Alliance, is the vice president for 
external affairs at the Sandoz Corp., a pharmaceutical 
manufacturer based in East Hanover, N.J. The newly established 
AMP was incorporated by four employees of the $850 million U.S. 
Surgical Corp. in Norwalk, Conn.
 
"Now, the scientific community is frightened by the animal 
rightists," says Mary Brennan, vice president of the 2,000-member 
Foundation for Biomedical Research (FBR), the largest national 
group whose primary mission is to defend animal research. 
"Biomedical scientists are starting to realize they have to get 
involved in this debate. The sleeping giant is finally waking 
up."
 
Some of these groups also plan to expand. The Lansing, Mich.-
based Incurably Ill for Animal Research (iiFAR), for example, 
hopes to add between five and 10 new chapters this year.
 
Among animal rights groups, at least two claim a principally 
scientific membership: the Physicians Committee for Responsible 
and the Medical Research Modernization Committee (MRMC) in New 
York, including 1,200 scientists of various disciplines. PCRM 
runs newspaper ads and television commercials, while MRMC 
publishes an annual monograph about animal research issues 
exclusively for physicians and researchers.
 
 
Battlefields
According to a Gallup Youth Survey, the animal rights activists 
may already have an advantage in the classroom. The poll, 
published in November 1991, found that two out of three teenagers 
say they support the movement.
 
"Kids seem to have a natural sensitivity to animals and the 
environment," says Susan Roy, spokes- woman for the San Rafael, 
Calif.-based IDA. Her 50,000-member animal rights organization 
has 10 full-time staff members, including one who concentrates 
only on educational issues. Similarly, AAVS, based in Jenkintown, 
Pa., has an annual budget of nearly $900,000 and a full-time 
staffer who goes from school to school giving lectures and 
distributing buttons and brochures promoting the replacement of 
laboratory animals with computer simulations and in vitro 
experiments.
 
The Washington, D.C.-based Humane Society of the United States 
(HSUS) has taken its focus on education a step further. The group 
says it is concerned not with "animal rights" but instead with 
"animal welfare," and has established a satellite in East Haddam, 
Conn., called the National Association for Humane and 
Environmental Education (NAHEE).
 
Acting as HSUS's youth education division, NAHEE does not send 
any of its 14 full-time employees into classrooms, but develops 
materials for students and teachers addressing the welfare and 
protection of animals. NAHEE, along with the Center for Respect 
of Life and Environment, HSUS's higher education division, 
receives about $650,000 of HSUS's total $19 million annual 
budget. In the new year, one of NAHEE's plans is to publish a 
"Student Action Guide," which will give interested students step-
by-step instructions on how to start their own after-school 
environmental or animal rights club.
 
In addition, HSUS, with a full-time staff of 160, plans to 
continue its fight to strengthen the U.S. Department of 
Agriculture's administration of the Animal Welfare Act as well as 
continue its Russell and Burch award program to support the 
development of animal research alternatives (see People, page 
22).
 
Last July, the 400,000-member ASPCA created the Lasker Center for 
Humane Alternatives to the Use of Animals in Research, Education, 
and Testing. Center director Amelia Tarzi says that in 1993, the 
new division will primarily fill student information requests in 
a purely informative manner. "We don't want to indoctrinate a 
them a general sense of respect for all living beings."
 
Like animal welfare groups, a large part of the scientific com-
munity's involvement will also be directed at students. "More 
scientists are becoming aware of how the animal rights groups 
have infiltrated the school system," says Patrick Cleveland, 
president of the Coalition for Animals and Animal Research 
(CFAAR) in San Diego. "It's difficult to get a scientist away 
from his lab and go to a school to talk to fourth- and fifth-
graders. But I think more will become involved in the coming 
year."
 
Since its inception in 1986, CFAAR has expanded to 40 chapters 
nationwide. Most of the chapters are based on college campuses, 
made up entirely of part-time volunteers, and have annual budgets 
of between $10,000 and $20,000. Grass-roots efforts such as CFAAR 
and iiFAR are often reactive rather than activist, tending to 
<M>express themselves primarily by monitoring the activities of 
animal rights groups and issuing newsletters.
 
"Unfortunately, we don't have the money or resources that animal 
rights groups do to advertise our cause or Jane Fonda to speak 
out on our behalf," says Buel D. Rodgers, a biology graduate 
student and member of the University of California, Berkeley, 
chapter of CFAAR.
 
Some other pro-animal research bodies for example, the 
Massachusetts Society for Medical Research (MSMR) in Walthamare 
moving forward in the development of educational supplements. The 
group, with a $200,000 annual budget and three full-time staff 
members, has written a 250-page curriculum for secondary school 
science teachers called "People and Animals: United for Health." 
It features 159 slides, a teacher discussion guide, and a time 
line poster.
 
In 1993, MSMR plans to develop a newsletter called "Science Beat" 
to raise awareness among teens about biomedical research; an 
"Animal Health Calendar" for grades K-6; and a booklet about the 
history of biomedical research for grades 2-6.
 
"Teachers say animal use is a hot topic in the classroom," says 
Karen Hoffman, executive director of the North Carolina 
Association for Biomedical Research (NCABR), based in Raleigh. 
Along with distributing brochures, NCABR puts out a coloring book 
called The Lucky Puppy, the story of a sick dog that regains its 
health by taking medicines first tested in lab rats. NCABRwhich 
was started three years ago by a conglomeration of 13 
organizations, including major biomedical research companies and 
state universitieshas an annual budget of $225,000. Young 
children can also follow The Adventures of Larry the Lab Mouse, a 
coloring book designed by the 2,500-member iiFAR.
 
 
New Year's Resolutions
its sister organization, NABR, along with Putting People 
Firsthave aggressive plans for the new year:
 
Putting People First, with a $225,000 annual budget, plans to 
develop its own K-12 curriculum in 1993 that will cover the 
history of the relationship of humans, animals, and biomedical 
research. FBR and NABR, with a combined annual budget of about 
$1.6 million, are concerned with education, as well: FBR intends 
to educate students, teachers, and the general public about the 
value of animal research, while NABR will concentrate on 
educating legislators.
 
"With the 103rd Congress, we will have a real all-out education 
effort to introduce ourselves and our point of view to the new 
members of Congress," says Barbara Rich, executive vice president 
of NABR.
 
In stressing the urgency of the NABR mission, Rich says: "In 
1993, we are going to campaign hard against groups that oppose 
animal research We need to find ways to educate at the grass-
roots level ... because right now, the animal rights groups are 
outspending us by at least a factor of 10."
 
The one-year-old AMP in Arlington, Va., plans to recruit college 
students to form campus groups called "Students for Medical 
Progress" and to publish a weekly newspaper cartoon strip called 
"Heroes of Medicine," featuring animal-using researchers like 
Ivan Pavlov.
 
The U.S. government is by no means removed from the animal rights 
debate: In July 1991, NIMH hired University of Pennsylvania 
veterinary school professor Adrian Morrison as the first director 
of the Office of Animal Research Issues. Since then, pamphlets 
and posters have been flowing out of the agency.
 
"The Public Health Service is concerned about protecting and 
advancing the health of the nation. Anything that in our view 
works against that is something we have to educate people about," 
says Morrison, who in January 1990 had his office at Penn trashed 
by activists claiming to be from ALF.
 
The six brochures and one poster published by his office at NIMH, 
at a combined cost of around $181,000, address the possible 
questions of elementary and high school students and teachers. 
Morrison says the pamphlets are a direct retaliation for what he 
calls the "misinformation" provided to classrooms by animal 
rights groups.
 
"Animal rightists misrepresent the status of research in the 
United States and get a lot of compassionate people to send in 
money," he says. "They've now collected millionsmy hat is off to 
their cleverness. But now they are attacking at all levels, on 
fur and education, so we must respond."
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #2, January 25, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                =================================
 
 
 
Study Sees Alarming Science Undergrad Dropout Rate
 
Four-year investigation identifies precollege preparation, 
teaching styles, and peer influence as significant factors
 
(Page 1 of newspaper)
 
 
BY FRANKLIN HOKE
 
An extensive new study finds that the number of undergraduates in 
science, math, and engineering (SME) majors drops 40 percent 
between freshman and senior years. The losses vary substantially 
by field: In the physical sciences the decline is 20 percent, 
while in the biological sciences--the field with the most 
dramatic losses--the figure is 50 percent. The study also seeks 
to identify some of the larger factors that lead students to 
choose SME majors and to eventually succeed in these fields.
 
Prepared by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) of the 
University of California, Los Angeles, the study has implications 
for science teaching at all levels, according to scientists and 
educators. But, they say, the study also suggests a potential 
problem for science generally. The proportion of science-literate 
citizens in society may shrink in the future, they say, perhaps 
translating into reduced understanding of and support for science 
among the voting public.
 
"The overall decline in interest in science is much higher than 
it is in other fields," says Eric Dey, associate director of 
HERI.
 
Investigators Alexander Astin and Helen Astin, director and 
associate director of HERI, respectively, followed approximately 
25,000 students at 177 institutions through their four-year 
undergraduate careers. Faculty surveys and case studies augment 
their research, which was funded by the National Science 
Foundation.
 
One important factor affecting college science careers is the 
quality of precollege SME preparation: The better-prepared 
students entering their undergraduate years tend to choose and 
persist in SME majors in greater proportions, according to the 
study. But emerging as significant, too, are a complex of 
interacting environmental factors at undergraduate institutions, 
including peer- group influences and the hierarchical teaching 
practices favored in science.
 
better at the college level does not surprise long-time observers 
in science education.
 
"It's very tough for a kid who comes to us [at the college level] 
without the math and science background, both," says Paul 
Saltman, a professor of biology at the University of California, 
San Diego. Saltman organized the Science Institute for Elementary 
Teachers with National Science Foundation funding to bring area 
teachers to UC-San Diego for training. Recently, he expanded the 
program to include junior high and high school teachers. He was 
also a co-organizer of the First Gordon Conference on Teaching 
Science, held in 1992 in Ventura, Calif. "So, it's quite correct 
that the real issue is what's happening in the elementary and 
secondary schools."
 
Sheila Tobias, a political scientist at UC-San Diego and veteran 
science education analyst (Revitalizing Undergraduate Science, 
Tucson, Ariz., Research Corporation, 1992; "Science Education 
Reform: What's Wrong With the Process?", Change, 24[3]:13-19, 
1992), thinks that focusing blame for the failure of 
undergraduate scientists on their pre- college academic 
preparation could have a detrimental effect on college teaching.
 
"The danger of that finding, politically, is that it gets the 
universities and colleges off the hook," says Tobias. "It tells 
us something that I'd just as soon the faculties didn't know, 
because it feeds into their prejudice that there's no way [for 
teachers] to compensate, in college, a student who was badly 
prepared. I can't challenge the finding--they've done their 
research--but I find it not very helpful politically."
 
The study also found that students' choices of SME majors, their 
success with those majors, and their eventual career selections 
all depended heavily on peer influences.
 
"Basically, the greater proportion of a student's peers who are 
majoring in a particular SME field, the greater the likelihood 
that the student will end up choosing a career in the same 
field," the study report concludes.
 
Again, science educators say they are familiar with this dynamic 
in student populations.
 
"If it's not fashionable to do science, kids won't do science," 
says Saltman. "And if it's not fashionable for girls to do 
science, girls won't do science. That's peer pressure."
 
Saltman says that the answer to this problem lies in being able 
to create a "critical mass" of good science teachers and good 
science students on a given campus, so that the students feel an 
integral part of the program and the institution.
 
One peer-related finding from the study that may confound 
educators concerns the students' overall academic environment. 
who perform better on such measures as the Graduate Record 
Examination (GRE), but these same programs seem to discourage 
students from choosing and persisting in SME majors.
 
"If you're interested in promoting [student] competency," Dey 
says, "one of the things that really works is having a very 
competitive environment. But these are the same environmental 
characteristics which tend to drive people out of the sciences, 
because the things that maintain students' interests are a lot of 
positive student-student interaction and a lot of close work 
between students and faculty. These are at odds with each other."
 
On the other hand, competition need not work against peer 
closeness in science, says Leon Lederman, director emeritus of 
the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), Batavia, 
Ill., and winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in physics. Lederman 
started the Teachers Academy for Math and Science in Chicago to 
help train local teachers.
 
"A competitive environment is not contradictory to positive 
student-student, student-faculty interactions," Lederman says. 
"What better way is there to show the affection you have for your 
friend but by beating them in an exam? I think you'd like to try 
for both."
 
He adds: "In any case, you're always competing in some way--with 
yourself, with the world, with your parents--so competition is 
always an important drive."
 
A third factor identified by the study as affecting students' 
choices of and success in SME majors is the hierarchical, or 
authoritarian, style of most science teaching--basically, use of 
the lecture format. This is contrasted with the more discussion-
oriented, participatory classroom styles of nonscience fields. 
 
Here, science educators say, science is at an inherent 
disadvantage due to the nature of scientific knowledge itself. 
"Science may seem more hierarchical [than other subjects]," says 
Saltman, "because it is so much more structured in the way it is 
done and the way the material is organized, with one concept 
related to another."
 
This structure tends to affect the form of science teaching, says 
Lederman.
 
"In science, the professor thinks he or she is the fount of all 
knowledge--and, in some sense, they are," he says. "Most people I 
know would certainly invite questions--those having to do with 
whether the previous sentence was clear or not--but discussion 
just isn't part of transmitting science information."
 
 Tobias notes that the science teaching community is, in fact, 
trying to integrate more discussion into its methods. "But it 
isn't that easy to take the model of an English literature course 
intrinsically different about the subject matter."
 
Overall, science educators are worried that the decline in 
undergraduate scientists may have implications for society and 
for science's position in society.
 
"If we were teaching the nature of science better at the 
precollege level," says Eugenie Scott, executive director of the 
National Center for Science Education, Berkeley, Calif., "we 
would be increasing the number of students who would, perhaps, go 
into science careers. But we would also be performing a great 
service for the average American who is not going to go into 
science but who still needs to understand more science than he 
does now, in order to make decisions as a voting American about 
issues that are directly relevant to science and technology."
 
Saltman agrees. "I'm a Jeffersonian," he says. "You can't have a 
democratic society without educated people who vote, who have 
that science and technology background upon which to predicate 
decisions. It's essential."
 
The study report, "Undergraduate Science Education: The Impact of 
Different College Environments on the Educational Pipeline in the 
Sciences," will be available from HERI in early 1993.
 
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #2, January 25, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
 
Science Policy Watchers Hail New President's Early Moves
 
Clinton's choice of Gibbons as science adviser and Gore's 
anticipated activist role bode well for consideration of research 
issues, they contend
(Page 1 of newspaper)
 
 
BY BARTON REPPERT
 
Leading researchers as well as science policy specialists and 
association officials are hopeful, of course, that President Bill 
Clinton's administration will pursue an energetic, activist 
approach in tackling major science and technology issues. And, 
these observers generally agree, the Clinton years in this regard 
are off to a good start.
 
In interviews with The Scientist, several science and technology 
policy-watchers have, for example, praised Clinton's early 
appointment of John H. Gibbons to be White House science and 
technology adviser, as well as director of the Office of Science 
director of the congressional Office of Technology Assessment, is 
known around Washington as a soft-spoken but effective and 
politically savvy "facilitator," well accustomed to navigating 
Washington's turbulent policy cross-currents (see accompanying 
story).
 
"We're very enthusiastic about [Gibbons], because he knows 
Congress, he knows Washington, he knows the issues," says John 
Holmfeld, executive director of the Council of Scientific Society 
Presidents (CSSP), an umbrella group of the top officials from 58 
scientific societies with a combined membership of 1.5 million. 
"Also, he can work well with [Vice President Al] Gore. All of 
those things add up to a big plus." 
 
At the same time, the council does have some reservations. At a 
CSSP meeting about two weeks before Gibbons's appointment was 
announced, several scientific society officials voiced concern 
about whether applied research and technology may take precedence 
over science in the new administration. According to one 
participant in the December 8 session in Washington, D.C., 
Richard E. Bradshaw--who had served as a science and technology 
issues coordinator for the Clinton campaign, and gave a 
presentation to the CSSP group--"made a statement to the effect 
that technology might well supersede science policy in certain 
cases."
 
In response, CSSP sent to Bradshaw--to be conveyed to the Clinton 
transition team--a letter stressing that "basic scientific 
research is fundamental to technology development and long-term 
economic success.... Long-range research, by its nature, is 
unpredictable. We do not know which or how many of the basic 
research projects conducted will lead to the major innovation 
that can create entire new industries. But, we know that some 
will."
 
The CSSP letter sets forth a number of recommendations, 
including: emphasizing investigator-initiated research, fostering 
multidisciplinary and international science, providing incentives 
for industry to conduct more long-range research and to 
strengthen links to universities, evaluating and redefining the 
missions and operations of the federal laboratories, and 
convening a "White House Conference on Science and Technology 
Policy" early in the new administration.
 
More optimistic observers point to Clinton's announced intention 
to delegate to Gore--who gained substantial experience with 
research-related issues as a senator and, before that, as a 
representative--broad responsibility for shaping and overseeing 
federal science and technology policies and programs.
 
"I think certainly Gore himself is very, very comfortable with 
the world of science," says Jerold L. Roschwalb, director of 
federal relations for the Washington-based National Association 
of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges. "He's very 
people in the world of politics, he's rare."
 
Another Washington-based science and technology policy watcher, 
Daniel F. Burton Jr., executive vice president of the Council on 
Competitiveness, says of the new administration that currently 
"there are a couple of things that we know--and a lot of things 
that we don't know.
 
"What we know is that Al Gore is going to play a major role. We 
know that Clinton has stated that he wants to move hard on 
technology infrastructure for the 21st century, set up a 
manufacturing extension service, rebalance defense and nondefense 
R&D, and create an investment climate which is much more 
conducive to investment in technology and R&D."
 
But, Burton adds: "The issue is how he's going to move forward 
with those--how he's going to implement them."
 
The competitiveness council--a privately funded organization 
separate from the White House Council on Competitiveness, which 
in the Bush administration was chaired by former Vice President 
Dan Quayle--during last year's presidential campaign provided 
recommendations that were worked into Clinton/Gore position 
papers.
 
The new administration is also expected to benefit from the 
advice of dozens of the nation's most prominent researchers--
constituting a 67-member National Council of Scientists and 
Engineers for Clinton/Gore that was formed in October, during the 
election campaign. The panel includes 12 Nobel Prize winners; two 
former presidential science advisers; and 49 members of the 
National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, or 
Institute of Medicine.
 
The council's chairman, Marvin L. Goldberger--former president of 
the California Institute of Technology and director of the 
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.--says that after 
the election the panel became an advisory group to the 
transition.
 
"We have been talking--variously ... on behalf of the council and 
some of us as individuals--in connection with appointments" to 
science and technology positions within the administration, says 
Goldberger, now a physics professor at the University of 
California, Los Angeles. But he declines to provide any details 
on such discussions regarding prospective can- didates and 
particular appointments.
 
A member of the council, Cornell University physicist Kurt 
Gottfried, says of the Clinton science team: "They are clearly a 
vigorous and impressive bunch of people. I have seen Gore in 
action, and he is extremely knowledgeable and impressive.... I 
think they're going to bring in a lot of very able young people."
 
council, Arno A. Penzias, vice president of research at AT&T Bell 
Laboratories, Murray Hill, N.J., says that "everybody wants to 
give the new administration advice, I'm sure. Who knows what 
they're going to listen to? Basically, I think by and large they 
are very much open to new inputs and new approaches."
 
Noting that he has known Gore for a number of years, Penzias says 
the new administration is "clearly identified with the technology 
issues and willing--in fact, eager--to grapple with the new 
realities, scientific as well as technological."
 
Science policy specialists disagree about the effect Gore's 
responsibilities as the White House's science and technology czar 
will have on the  role of Gibbons as White House science adviser, 
as well as on the operations of OSTP.
 
William G. Wells Jr., an associate professor of management 
science at George Washington University's School of Business and 
Public Management, notes that "it's a very delicate relationship 
that needs to be worked out."
 
A congressional aide tracking science policy developments, who 
asks not to be identified, says he believes that "Gore will be 
the de facto science adviser. ... It's going to be the same joke 
as during the [former White House chief of staff and former New 
Hampshire Gov. John] Sununu years. `Does the president have a 
science adviser?' `Well, yes--he has an office in the West Wing, 
not in the Old Executive Office Building, and they call him 
governor.' "
 
Irwin Pikus, director of the science and technology program at 
the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International 
Studies, says: "I don't think OSTP will go away. I think it will 
no longer pretend to be in a leadership role. The vice president 
is going to be in the leadership role on technology ... and OSTP 
will be an institution that functions at the behest of the vice 
president."
 
Pointing to high-performance computing and other science and 
technology initiatives involving several departments and 
agencies, Pikus says he believes that "interagency coordination 
is going to be the watchword for the future."
 
Pikus explains: "Is the vice president able to run that kind of 
coordination better than a science adviser to the president? In 
the case of Gore and Clinton, I think the answer is probably yes. 
Gore has the capacity, the intellectual capability, the interest, 
and the position to make that kind of thing happen more 
effectively than a presidential science adviser, who in the past 
has always been sort of an outsider to the circle--an adjunct to 
the White House staff." 
 
However, Burton of the Countil of Competitiveness contends that 
Gore's clout on science and technology issues may lead to 
 
"For the first time, the science adviser is going to have a 
pretty powerful ally in the White House," Burton says.
 
"I think that that, in fact, could set the stage for a much 
stronger performance in policy issues on  science and 
technology."
 
Wells agrees: "Some people have suggested that means a very 
subordinate,   junior position [for the science adviser]. I don't 
necessarily see it that way.... I think it's kind of elevating 
science and technology to have a vice president with that 
charter.... We'll have to see how it happens in practice--but 
that would be my hope, anyway, and expectation," he says.
 
Bradshaw, the Clinton campaign science and technology issues 
coordinator, is senior vice president of North Atlantic Research, 
a Washington consulting firm, and an adjunct professor of 
international science and technology at George Mason University 
in Fairfax, Va. He joined with Wells in preparing a report 
offering science and technology recommendations to the transition 
team.
 
The Wells-Bradshaw report, issued in November, notes that "a 
strong focus on science and technology-related issues will be 
central to the success of the Clinton/Gore economic recovery 
plan. This policy focus should be reflected in presidential 
statements, in the activities of the transition process, and, 
subsequently, in the administration."
 
It says that a "critical component" of the new administration's 
approach will be "an activist, catalytic federal role in 
encouraging industrially relevant research, cooperative industry-
government technology development, and new technology integration 
in the manufacturing and service sectors."
 
In position papers released last September, Clinton indicated 
that he is interested in pursuing policy initiatives including: 
developing an advanced computer and telecommunications network; 
establishing a civilian version of the Defense Advanced Research 
Projects Agency (DARPA); shifting allocation of the $76 billion 
federal R&D budget to an approximately 50-50 balance between 
defense and civilian activities; achieving greater output of 
commercially useful technologies from the U.S.'s 726 federal 
laboratories; doubling the budget of the National Institute of 
Standards and Technology (NIST); and making the industrial R&D 
tax credit permanent (Barton Reppert, The Scientist, Oct. 26, 
1992, page 1).
 
When Clinton decides to move ahead with such initiatives, he is 
likely to develop a substantially cooperative relationship with 
the Democratic-controlled Congress--in contrast to the "gridlock" 
affecting relations between Capitol Hill and the Bush 
administration. Wells observes that Rep. George E. Brown Jr. (D-
Technology, "has publicly and privately said that he wants to 
work in every cooperative way that he can. And I think we're 
going to see a lot more willingness to accommodate and to adjust 
and to reach compromises."
 
According to Wells, the new administration also is expected to be 
able to work quite closely on science and technology issues with 
other key lawmakers, including Sen. Ernest F. Hollings (D-S.C.), 
chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and 
Transportation, and Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.Mex.), chairman of 
the Senate Armed Services Committee Subcommittee on Defense 
Industry and Technology.
 
While Gore generally gets high marks in the scientific community 
for his grasp of major science and technology issues, he also has 
come under some criticism, particularly on global warming and 
other worldwide ecology problems, the focus of his bestselling 
book, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (New 
York, Houghton Mifflin, 1992).
 
Fred Smith, president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a 
free-market policy group in Washington, argues that "Gore seems 
to believe that climate change is an organizing principle for the 
new world order--and anyone who dissents is an enemy of the 
people. And that is extremely dangerous politically. It is 
horrendous scientifically."
 
Smith, a former Environmental Protection Agency official, says 
this could result in a disturbing trend toward "Lysenkoism" in 
U.S. science: "If Gore becomes an environmental and science czar, 
then America enters an era of politically correct science, where 
science becomes increasingly the tool of the political powers and 
science is called in to provide rationales for politically 
predetermined activities."
 
In addition to developing new programs, Clinton's administration 
is likely to set a new tone regarding ethical issues in research, 
according to Marcel C. La-Follette, a science policy analyst with 
the Center for International Science and Technology Policy at 
George Washington University.
 
She forecasts that this ethical tone will be substantially 
different from the Bush administration's, in which on fetal 
tissue research and other questions "the discussion of ethical 
issues was more often governed by ideological knee-jerkedness" 
under pressure from conservatives and the religious right.
 
"I think we're going to certainly see the [Clinton] 
administration saying that for science, as for other things in 
American life, a sense of integrity is important; a sense of 
generosity and altruism, which may mean sacrifice on the part of 
proponents of some pet projects; and a sense of prudent 
spending," LaFollette says.
 
Barton Reppert is a freelance writer based in Gaithersburg, Md.
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #2, January 25, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
Clinton's Science Adviser Faces Array Of Challenges
(Page 1 of newspaper)
 
BY BARTON REPPERT
 
During 13 years as director of the Office of Technology 
Assessment, the job of John H. Gibbons--President Bill Clinton's 
choice as White House science adviser--was largely a balancing 
act. He had to provide Congress with independent, authoritative 
analysis of technical and scientific questions while treading 
gingerly amid divergent political views, bureaucratic turf 
battles, and special-interest "stakeholders."
 
Washington observers familiar with OTA's track record give 
Gibbons high marks for leading the agency through potential 
minefields--including nuclear power and other environmentally 
sensitive energy issues, Star Wars missile defense research, 
genetic engineering, electronic surveillance, and health care 
policy. In the face of controversy, OTA's role has been not to 
take sides, but instead to prepare comprehensive, dispassionate 
assessments of the available data, and then offer a balanced 
selection of possible policy options.
 
Characteristically, Gibbons's initial public remarks after being 
appointed by Clinton have also been carefully balanced.
 
"Our security and prosperity depend, as never before, on the 
sustained support of science and the thoughtful use of 
technology," Gibbons said at a December 24 news conference in 
Little Rock, Ark. "I stress both science and technology because 
they are so interdependent. They sustain each other; neither can 
advance without the help of the other."
 
In an apparent effort to assuage concerns of United States 
scientists that the new administration may focus heavily on 
technology-related issues, instead of fostering basic research, 
Gibbons declared: "We place very great weight on the intrinsic 
value of basic science, out of which has flowed extraordinary and 
often unanticipated benefits to society, including enormous 
enrichment of the human spirit."
 
Gibbons, 63, himself was trained as a physicist and did research 
at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee in nuclear 
geophysics--including experimental studies on the origins of the 
solar system's heavy elements--before serving in 1969-73 as 
director of Oak Ridge's environmental program. In 1973-74 he 
Conservation at the Federal Energy Administration, predecessor of 
the Department of Energy. From 1974 until his appointment to head 
OTA in 1979, Gibbons was a professor of physics and director of 
the Energy, Environment, and Resources Center at the University 
of Tennessee.
 
In his new position, Gibbons succeeds Allan Bromley, a Yale 
physics professor who was recruited by the Bush administration in 
1989. As with Bromley, Gibbons will be wearing two hats--as 
assistant to the president for science and technology as well as 
director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). 
The director's post requires Senate confirmation.
 
Regarding his new boss, Gibbons says that Clinton has "been 
involved, I believe, more substantively and personally in his 
choices than any prior president I know about."
 
As for Al Gore, Gibbons says he met with the vice president only 
briefly, after accepting Clinton's offer. But he notes that from 
years of dealing with various science and technology issues in 
Congress, he and Gore have developed "a very good relationship. I 
have a great respect for his many abilities and his commitments 
to a variety of issues."
 
Rep. George E. Brown (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Committee 
on Science, Space, and Technology, says, in a statement released 
by his committee office, that Clinton's choice of Gibbons "is an 
especially welcome move to Congress, which has had the benefit of 
Jack's good advice on science and technology for over a decade."
 
Brown says in the statement that as a specialist on environmental 
issues, Gibbons "knows the importance of environmental 
protection, and the increasingly important role that `green 
technology' will play in U.S. competitiveness." Also, he says, 
Gibbons's work at Oak Ridge "gives him a good insight into the 
future role of the national laboratories in the post-Cold War 
era."
 
Fred W. Weingarten, who worked under Gibbons at OTA for 10 years 
as a program manager for communications and information 
technology, says that "Jack is, in the very good sense of the 
word, a Washington science bureaucrat.... He knows how to serve 
the political process. And he's been exposed to--even though he's 
not an expert in--a wide range of policy areas."
 
Weingarten, who is currently executive director of the 
Washington-based Computer Research Association, a group 
representing primarily academic computer scientists, does 
anticipate some disappointment over the choice of Gibbons: "I 
would expect that there will be some carping ... that he does not 
have a reputation as a working, Nobel Prize-winning-type 
scientist, and is not very well known in the scientific community 
outside the [Washington] Beltway."
 
committee, says of Gibbons, "I think he's very capable." He adds, 
however, that Gibbons is "pretty heavily oriented in the 
direction that I'm not particularly in favor of--industrial 
policy. So I think the Clinton administration will get someone 
who is familiar with the various policy options and policy 
debates on industrial policy."
 
Walker and other Republican legislators, as well as several Bush 
administration officials, have criticized the idea of trying to 
implement  a national "industrial policy"--largely on the grounds 
that it would involve the government in "picking winners and 
losers" among U.S. companies and otherwise getting too closely 
involved in decisions that should be left to executives and 
managers in the private sector.
 
A number of Washington-based science policy specialists, 
officials of scientific societies, and representatives of public 
interest groups dealing with energy and environmental issues have 
been largely upbeat in reacting to the appointment.
 
Erich Bloch, a former director of the National Science Foundation 
who is currently a distinguished fellow at the privately funded 
Council on Competitiveness, notes that he and Gibbons "have 
worked very closely together. I think it's a very good choice. I 
think Jack knows the town, knows the government, knows Congress 
 
Jeremy J. Stone, president of the Federation of American 
Scientists (FAS), says he believes Clinton made a "superb" 
appointment in picking Gibbons. Stone observes that in 1990, FAS 
gave its annual public service award to Gibbons, citing him for 
serving as "the anchor of OTA in Washington's deep waters."
 
Robert Park, public affairs director for the American Physical 
Society and a professor of physics at the University of Maryland, 
College Park, comments that "I think it's a brilliant choice. 
Gibbons is a very bright guy."
 
Park says the Gibbons appointment marks a "transition" from the 
situation during previous administrations when frequently "the 
science adviser was sort of the nation's chief scientist--a 
distinguished scientist who is widely known for his scientific 
accomplishments ....
 
"This is clearly a change from that. And I think it was 
absolutely essential if they're going to make it work with Al 
Gore being some sort of science and technology czar. My concern 
from the beginning was: How could that possibly work? And they've 
got exactly the guy who can make it work. He's a politically 
savvy facilitator, who won't upstage the vice president."
 
Charles Chambers, executive director of the American Institute of 
Biological Sciences--a federation of 50 scientific societies, 
laboratories, and museums involved with biological research--says 
he views the choice of Gibbons as "in line with the pragmatic 
appointments.... It also showed a desire to really be effective 
on the Hill with science policy" in that Gibbons "is really well 
respected in terms of policy analysis."
 
Bill Magavern, director of Critical Mass Energy Project, a 
Washington-based group--part of Public Citizen, a public interest 
organization founded by Ralph Nader--that has been outspoken on 
safety, environmental, and other issues associated with nuclear 
power, calls the Gibbons appointment a "good choice."
 
"Gibbons has done a good job at OTA, and has helped to establish 
their credibility as an independent source on scientific and 
technical issues," Magavern says. "We haven't always agreed with 
them, but for the most part we respect their work."
 
Carol Werner, energy program director for the Environmental & 
Energy Institute, another public interest group based in 
Washington, says about Gibbons: "My organization has dealt with 
him for a number of years, and with his staff at OTA. I think 
that he's somebody who is very thoughtful, nonideological. And he 
approaches things with a lot of common sense."
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #2, January 25, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
DOE's Massive Cleanup May Suffer Scientist Shortage
(Page 3 of newspaper)
 
BY RENEE TWOMBLY
 
Once the United States' builders of sky-riding nuclear bombs, the 
Department of Energy is now looking back at Earth to clean up the 
mess  such  decades-long  efforts have  left.  Specifically,  the 
agency is beginning to address environmental problems in the land 
beneath its 12 major weapons research, production, and test sites 
and  related  facilities.  It is  a  huge  effort;  environmental 
management now commands the largest budget in the agency at  $5.5 
billion this year.
 
But  DOE  may have problems finding  the  upper-level  scientific 
expertise  to  begin what is predicted to be  a  30-year  cleanup 
effort.  A preliminary study of the staff DOE will need  for  the 
first  five-year phase of cleanup concluded that the agency  will 
be  well-supplied with most of the estimated 25,000  technicians, 
scientists,  and  other  workers it needs;  about  half  will  be 
existing  DOE  personnel who will be retrained.  But  the  report 
warns  that  the agency may find it hard to  fill  certain  niche 
scientific disciplines.
 
"The  scope of what we are trying to do is immense. It is  bigger 
than  the Manhattan Project by orders of magnitude," says Leo  P. 
waste management at DOE.
 
Among  the  staff  it needs in 53  scientific,  engineering,  and 
technical  occupations, DOE has requirements for some  high-level 
scientists  who  are, even now, in great  demand  elsewhere,  the 
report   states.  These  include  environmental  scientists   and 
engineers,  chemical  engineers,  hydrologists,  health   physics 
technicians,  and  industrial  hygienists--specialists  who  help 
determine the scientific parameters of toxic waste  contamination 
and removal. Although the number of scientists required in  these 
categories is small, the need is real, say the report's  authors. 
For   example,   although   DOE  may  need  only   one   or   two 
hydrogeologists  per  cleanup site, there are very  few  of  them 
available.
 
But  the report, "Environmental Restoration and Waste  Management 
Manpower  Needs Assessment: U.S. Department of Energy,"  prepared 
by Pacific Northwest Laboratory in Richland, Wash., and Oak Ridge 
Associated  Universities  in Tennessee, is not  making  estimates 
about the future beyond 1997. The agency is only just starting to 
assess  exactly what cleanup is required; how to do it will  come 
later.
 
The  real  question  to be addressed is "How  elegant  and  cost-
effective  can  we make the cleanup?" says one  of  the  report's 
authors,   Robert   Lewis  of   Pacific   Northwest   Laboratory. 
Specialized scientists and new technology will make a difference, 
he  says,  but those needs will not be known for  some  years  to 
come. 
 
The total cleanup is projected to last decades and cost more than 
$200  billion.  The effort took shape in early  1989  when  then-
Secretary  of Energy James B. Watkins promised Congress he  would 
soon deliver a comprehensive plan outlining specific actions  DOE 
intended to take over the next five years to fix problems started 
in  the 1940s by the Atomic Energy Commission. Later  that  year, 
DOE issued a preliminary five-year strategic plan, with a budget, 
which was approved by Congress.
 
The extent of the cleanup project is staggering. There are  3,700 
hazardous  waste  sites under DOE's jurisdiction; some  of  those 
sites  have been assessed for damage and cleanup, but  many  have 
not.  "I  estimate  the agency will need from  11,000  to  20,000 
additional employees," Duffy says.
 
That  means a 45 percent increase in the number of DOE  employees 
compared  with  the  1991 level, and an  agency  budget  that  is 
projected  to  rise  as  much as 87  percent,  according  to  DOE 
officials.
 
The majority of DOE's cleanup staff will remove nuclear and mixed 
waste  from the soil, and most of those workers will need only  a 
high  school  degree or community college training,  says  Duffy. 
Other scientists now in the agency can be retrained, he says.
For  example,  at the DOE Hanford site in  Richland,  Ron  Izatt, 
deputy  assistant  manager for Hanford's  environmental  program, 
does not anticipate shortages in staffing at any level to  assess 
contaminations  from  the  nine  reactors  that   were   used  to 
produce plutonium. Many of the site's 12,000 employees are  being 
retrained,  and  in  the  last  three  years,  almost  3,000  new 
employees have been addeed, Izatt says.
 
But  Lewis warns that there is uncertainty as to what the  future 
of the cleanup may hold: "There is a certain amount of bravado on 
the  part of DOE in saying they can proceed now  with  everything 
they need to do."
 
Lewis predicts, however, that the need for new scientists who can 
develop  and  implement new technologies will  likely  come  into 
sharper focus as the cleanup progresses.
 
In the meantime, says Lewis, DOE will probably be able to make do 
with  the  current  agreements it has between the  DOE  labs  and 
cleanup  sites and universities to provide the  niche  scientists 
most in demand.
 
Among  those  efforts is a program the Atomic  Energy  Commission 
began  30 years ago to find the scientists they needed then.  The 
Environmental Management Career Opportunities Research Experience 
(EMCORE) Program is run by Tom Skuiers for the Associated Western 
Universities  Inc., a consortium of 44 universities.  This  year, 
EMCORE will provide $8.3 million in scholarships and  fellowships 
for  1,152  participants, ranging from high school  to  doctoral-
level students.
 
"Environmental   management  is  the  crusade  of   the   younger 
generation.  The  increasing enrollment  is  phenomenal,  Skuiers 
says. "There is a shortage now, but there won't be in the future.
 
Peter Wierenga, head of the department of soil and water sciences 
at  the  University of Arizona, agrees that student  interest  is 
high,  but  he  also warns that graduates  from  Arizona's  newly 
expanded  environmental management curricula will have  many  job 
possibilities.  "Most major companies now have  an  environmental 
department  that  either  is doing some cleanup  or  is  advising 
company  directors how to run their operation so that they  don't 
have such problems, he says.
 
The  Massachusetts  Institute of Technology is  trying  to  gauge 
interest in environmental management and to respond  accordingly. 
Mujid  Kazimi, head of nuclear engineering at MIT and an  adviser 
to  DOE, says that his department is "focusing much more now  ... 
on environmental technology.
 
But  Kazimi also says that it is almost impossible to say if  DOE 
will experience a shortage: "It's simply a guessing game. It is a 
new  area that will be important to the national welfare, but  it 
is  hard to predict the need and difficult to know how  fast  the 
 
Renee Twombly is a freelance writer based in Durham, N.C.
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #2, January 25, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
                            NOTEBOOK
(Page 4 of newspaper)
 
Focus On Excellence
The 33 winners in the 11th annual Polaroid International Instant 
Photomicrography Competition were announced in early December. 
Prizes totaling $13,750 were awarded for images that best 
combined artistic beauty and useful scientific information. A 
panel of top microscopy experts selected the winners from nearly 
600 entries from Australia, Austria, Canada, England, Germany, 
Switzerland, Taiwan, and the United States. The winning image was 
a 400X magnification of the feathery structure of a male 
mosquito's antenna, taken by Gregory Paulson, a biology 
instructor at Washington State University. Shown here is a 40X 
electron micrograph of a freshwater crustacean, Daphnia, which 
won an honorable mention. The image was taken by Jurgen Berger, a 
technical assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental 
Biology, Tubingen, Germany.
 
 
Smaller Is Better
A survey conducted under the auspices of the Laboratory Safety 
Workshop at Curry College in Milton, Mass., recommends that 
academic institutions move aggressively to limit class size in 
laboratory courses. The workshop endorsed guidelines developed by 
the National Science Teachers Association recommending no more 
than 24 students per class and no more than the design capacity 
of the lab. The survey found that only Florida had enforceable 
legislation regarding lab class size. For more information, 
contact the Laboratory Safety Workshop, Curry College, Milton, 
Mass. 02186; (617) 333-0500.
 
 
Maybe They Should Count Sheep
Apparently, like humans, pigs are not always happy, even in slop. 
And it is the discovery of this similarity in the porcine 
physiological response to stress that has Iowa State University 
researchers in, uh, hog heaven. "Stress triggers a number of 
different biological, and behavioral, responses in both animals 
and humans...," says Iowa State animal scientist Eberhard von 
Borell. "Stress also inhibits the production of growth hormone, 
reduces food intake,... and initiates anxiety." A peptide, 
corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF), initiates and coordinates 
biological and behavioral responses to stress. The scientists 
believe that by correlating the bioactivity of CRF with the 
stress, they may be able to indirectly measure degrees of stress 
by manufacturing CRF. By doing so, they hope to find that point 
at which stress becomes detrimental to a pig's health, 
reproductive efficiency, or productive performance.
 
 
It Comes With The Territory
An article in the January/February issue of the New York Academy 
of Sciences publication The Sciences says that newly inaugurated 
President Bill Clinton may suffer such illnesses as chronic 
indigestion, paralyzing depression, anxiety, or heart disease 
caused by the stress that comes with the office. According to 
Robert E. Gilbert, a political science professor at Northeastern 
University in Boston, over the past 150 years, 19 of 23 
presidents who died of natural causes did so prematurely, many 
suffering from these "debilitating medical problems." Gilbert's 
solutions: close monitoring of the president by mental health 
specialists, downsizing staff and delegating his authority over 
the 400-plus White House personnel, and assigning the vice 
president more responsibility.
 
 
Aid For Women Geoscience Students
The Association for Women Geoscientists Foundation will award 
three Chrysalis Scholarships of $750 each on March 31. The awards 
will be given to master's or Ph.D. candidates in geoscience who 
have returned to school after an interruption in their education 
of one year or longer. The funds are intended to cover expenses 
associated with finishing one's thesis. To apply, write a letter 
stating your background, career goals, and objectives; describing 
how you will use the money; and explaining the length and nature 
of the interruption in your education. Two letters of reference 
are also required. Applications and letters of reference are due 
February 28. For more information, contact Chrysalis Scholarship, 
Association for Women Geoscientists Foundation, Macalester 
College Geology Department, 1600 Grand Ave., St. Paul, Minn. 
55105-1899; (612) 696-6448.
 
 
Cat Scanning
As many dog owners might already have suspected, the brains of 
domestic cats have regressed in size with evolution, according to 
a report by University of Tennessee neuroscientist Robert 
Williams and colleagues published in the January issue of the 
Society for Neuro-science's Journal of Neuroscience. The 
discovery strongly challenges accepted evolutionary theory, 
according to the authors. Comparing the house cat with the 
Spanish wildcat, a species that has remained largely unchanged 
over the past 20,000 years, Williams found that the wildcat's 
brain contains 40 percent to 50 percent more neurons, or nerve 
cells, in the part of the brain that transmits messages between 
the retina and cortex. The researchers say that up to seven out 
of 10 brain cells are killed in domestic cats before birth. The 
team also found that the skulls of house cats are nearly twice as 
 
 
The Mother Of U.S. Inventions
The Washington D.C.-based Intellectual Property Owners Inc., a 
nonprofit organization, is soliciting nominations for its 1993 
Inventor of the Year Award for the best invention of 1992. The 
competition is open to any inventor or team of inventors whose 
invention: is covered by a U.S. patent, was patented or became 
commercially available in 1992, and was made in the U.S. The 
nomination deadline is February 19. Nominations should be sent to 
Inventor of the Year Award, Intellectual Property Owners, 1255 
23rd St., N.W., Suite 850, Washington, D.C. 20037; (202) 466-
2396.
 
 
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #2, January 25, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
Generating Science: Productivity And Policy
(Page 11 of newspaper)
 
BY SIDNEY PERKOWITZ
 
No one wants to become just another statistic, scientists least 
of all. We cherish our individuality, our march to a drummer 
whose beat most people never hear. And isn't our profession built 
on the unquantifiable flash of creative insight? Because 
statistical analysis  concentrates only on average behavior, it 
is destined to miss outstanding individual achievement. Yet it is 
valuable to find the common threads that define our own special 
herd. What kind of analysis would help scientists understand 
themselves? One approach is to consider how we do science as we 
age.
 
From children of the Great Depression to baby boomers, age and 
the common experiences that define a generation are deeply 
important. The shared events that form a scientific generation, 
such as the one that developed the atomic bomb, could equally 
well set the trajectory of a research career. The fact that some 
career elements are beyond any individual's control may be hard 
for self-motivated research types to accept, but is important for 
our profession to know.
 
These thoughts came as I read Striking the Mother Lode in 
Science: The Importance of Age, Place, and Time (New York, Oxford 
University Press, 1992) a new book by Paula Stephan, a labor 
economist at Georgia State University, and Sharon Levin, an 
applied microeconomist at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. 
The book pulls together data about scientists, the science they 
make, and when in their careers they make it. It analyzes the 
demographic term for those who simultaneously experience a 
crucial life stage). As most scientists would, the book defines 
the crucial event that begins a scientific career as the earning 
of a doctorate. The era in which a doctorate is earned, the 
authors propose, may play a crucial role in shaping a scientific 
career.
 
Insights from the book and from a conversation I had with Stephan 
throw light on my own scientific track. Because the authors trace 
the past effect of funding policy in the United States on how we 
do science today, examining these statistics may help the U.S. 
government fund research more effectively in the future.
 
Unlike other studies that examine selected high-achieving groups, 
such as Nobel laureates, Mother Lode looks at across-the-board 
data. It uses the "largest and most comprehensive longitudinal 
study of [Ph.D.] scientists in the United States," the Survey of 
Doctorate Recipients gathered by the National Research Council. 
Armed with this, and with the Science Citation Index (SCI) from 
the Philadelphia-based Institute for Scientific Information 
(ISI), the authors correlate productivity with age and cohort. As 
in many such studies, it is at the intersection of the 
quantitative and the qualitative that questions arise. The data 
set is large, the statistical analysis sophisticated--but how to 
define productivity? Stephan and Levin take an imperfect but 
defendable path, likely the only possible one: They count journal 
articles reported in SCI, the listing of research papers and 
their citations issued by ISI. To correct for coauthorship, they 
award each author a proportional piece of the article; to assess 
quality, they use the SCI impact factor, which ranks each journal 
by how often its publications are cited.
 
Even corrected for authorship and journal (and the corrections 
carry their own share of troubling questions), a count of 
articles does not capture the complex nuances of how scientists 
produce science. As Stephan and Levin themselves recognize, mere 
counting lets slip through that stroke of understanding, the 
single idea that can change a science. Nevertheless, the study 
addresses what research in the aggregate is meant to do: produce 
new knowledge stored in verifiable form for later use by science 
and by society. In this sense, the book is a valid analysis of 
the most important endeavor of science as a profession. It weighs 
the research product.
 
The measures may be imperfect, but the data are seductive. I 
couldn't resist comparing my publication record to the quoted 
results. (Few scientists could resist.) In my category, academic 
physicists, the average researcher turns out about two 
publications per two-year period, over careers spanning more than 
30 years. The rates are different for earth scientists, 
biochemists, and physiologists, but not vastly so.
 
More important yet is the finding in Mother Lode that the 
productivity of the average scientist decreases with age, in 
In some specialties, the decline occurs over a whole career; in 
others, it follows a rising period, so there is a productivity 
peak. The book spells out the details, but the important thing is 
that it happens so widely. Given that scientists as a group are 
aging (in 1973, 25 percent of us were under 35 years old; today, 
only 10 percent are), the serious implication is that the 
profession is less productive than it once was, and will produce 
even less as its average age increases. (I emphasize again that 
"productivity" here means only the count of journal articles; the 
authors use no other measures of scientific achievement.)
 
Is the decay in productivity an inevitable result of aging? Is it 
influenced by cohort effects, the special features that come from 
earning one's degree at some particular time? Some answers may 
come from the overlay of personal experience onto the statistics. 
This is why I want to talk about my own career, which has been 
heavily influenced by issues raised in the book.
 
I belong to the very special generation in American science that 
was affected by the startling launch of the Soviet Sputnik 
satellite in 1957, when I was a college sophomore. The launch was 
not what turned me toward science, which I had chosen much 
earlier. But as the U.S. worked to match the Soviet triumph, the 
resulting public approval of science, the federal support for 
academic research and its personnel (growing at nearly 20 percent 
a year in inflation-adjusted dollars, notes Mother Lode), the 
prospect of a choice of jobs--all these kept me steadily on 
course to my doctorate in condensed-matter physics.
 
After taking my degree in 1967, I turned to industrial research. 
But I had picked a company in which I could not do challenging 
research. It was when I looked for an academic job in 1968-69 
that serious shock set in. Along with other Ph.D.'s driving cabs 
and waiting tables, I discovered that growth had ceased. The 
system wasn't following through on the promise it had held out. 
Fortunately, after much worry and effort, I found an academic 
position that has turned out well, at least as defined by Mother 
Lode. My productivity is more than four times the mean for my 
category, and is still rising.
 
One moral of my story is that statistics do not describe the 
individual. Despite my start from a cohort that was set up by the 
promise of massive funding and was brought down when that funding 
contracted, my tale ends happily. But not entirely; there has 
been a price, consistent with conclusions in Mother Lode. The 
price is not a loss of the researchers' motivations. Based on 
studies cited in the book, these motivations are "ribbon," the 
search for recognition; "gold," the desire for money; and 
"puzzle," the ineffable pleasure of the scientific chase. Each 
still spurs me. What has changed is my tolerance for what must be 
done to seek ribbon, gold, puzzle--the incessant rattling of the 
tin cup needed to maintain a research effort. It is not that 
funding should be noncompetitive; it is that the search for 
dollars was already hard when I began, and has now become so 
This has a lot to do with the period in which I got my Ph.D. I 
have long realized that colleagues five to 15 years older are the 
last group with some assurance of years of steady support from a 
single agency; my generation found money only with unending 
effort that rarely guaranteed continuity of research and 
researchers for more than a year or two at a time.
 
This unstable way of life has, finally, created an air of anxiety 
that erodes the dignity and self-respect of scientists. For 
senior people like me, the anxiety is about keeping our self- 
determination, a large part of what brought us into science--
extremely important, but probably no longer career-threatening. 
For graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, it is a far 
deeper angst about even being allowed into the profession, to 
begin one's own quest for ribbon, gold, puzzle. A few young 
scientists will do very well, but any older mentor must weigh 
what it means to send yet more bodies into the competitive 
scrimmage. When I hear that scientists in their mid-30s are 
beginning their third postdoctoral appointments, still not 
independent researchers; when I see that academic openings elicit 
applications by the hundreds, I can only feel that something is 
deeply wrong, which diminishes the pleasures of research and the 
value of science for all of us.
 
Are there any answers for American science? I asked Stephan what 
she would recommend if President Clinton were to call. The 
response came in a heartbeat: Find a way to give science funding 
a moderate but known rate of increase, year in and year out, 
rather than a Sputnik era-like 20 percent increase one year, 
followed by a 5 percent drop the next. Only this, she feels, 
would give scientists the "research horizon" necessary for good 
work. What "moderate" means is open to debate, and any policy 
that could be distorted to seem like a science "entitlement" 
would be vulnerable political game; but as a survivor of one boom 
and bust cycle, the basic idea makes good sense to me.
 
Are there answers for individual scientists in these hard times? 
An insight from Mother Lode may help. It is the observation that 
scientists, especially physicists like me, are highly fearful 
that their research skills will become obsolete. (So strong is 
the reaction that the book pointedly iterates the obvious, that 
its analysis points out no particular person's obsolescence.) 
Reading this, I examined my own fears. As for my own 
obsolescence, save your condolences: Without eternally rattling 
the tin cup (but with the occasional discreet shake), I'm finding 
ways to do more of what I want, a reclaiming of my independence 
leading to new productivity. Other scientists can do this, too, 
by overcoming false fears of obsolescence engendered by our 
competitive ways.
 
In fact, what are truly obsolete and need overhauling are those 
attitudes in the system that have ignored reality, most 
especially those of our hide-bound, turf-defending professional 
societies, and those found in the federal apparatus for science 
Those should change, to determine what mix of kinds and amounts 
of science is truly needed, and to provide steady support for it. 
It is up to the individual scientists to turn the support into 
scientific achievement. This can come from funded research, yes, 
but also from dedicated teaching, enlightened administration, 
commitment to a true national science policy. The more we 
scientists find creative routes to career fulfillment through 
work of high quality, the more the professional societies, 
universities, corporations, and funding agencies must respond. 
With our own efforts, support from our profession, and a new 
administration in Washington, we can hope--along with the authors 
of Mother Lode--that future cohorts will see wiser support of 
science.
 
 
Sidney Perkowitz is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Physics 
at Emory University, Atlanta. He recently spent a year at the 
Southeastern Universities Research Association in Washington, 
D.C., observing how science policy is made.
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #2, January 25, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
 
                           COMMENTARY
(Page 12 of newspaper)
 
by Barbara Rich
 
New Federal Legislation Can Be Effective In Fighting Terrorism Of 
Animal Rights Extremists
 
The frustration and fears of researchers whose labs and work have 
been destroyed by the Animal Liberation Front--along with those 
who, though yet unharmed, must work in continual dread of 
violence at the hands of animal rights extremists--are completely 
understandable. At the least, these researchers can take some 
comfort in new federal legislation.
 
A recent article in The Scientist headlined "Scientists Doubtful 
About New Law Aiming To Protect Animal Research Facilities" (Ron 
Kaufman, Oct. 26, 1992, page 1) may have conveyed the inaccurate 
notion that the Animal Enterprise Protection Act of 1992 is 
toothless. However, the legislation--sponsored by Sen. Howell T. 
Heflin (D-Ala.) and Rep. Charles Stenholm (D-Texas) and signed 
into law in August--is very strong indeed.
 
Unfortunately, the new research facility protection law cannot 
rectify the injustice suffered by past victims. It is also true 
that the worst animal rights zealots will not be deterred by this 
or any law. Such disregard has already been flaunted by those 
damage at Utah State University last fall. As The Scientist's 
article correctly points out, this kind of action was illegal 
before passage of the Heflin/Stenholm bill.
 
Yet, despite existing federal and state laws, the criminal 
activity aimed at animal research facilities during the last 
decade had escalated in severity and frequency. Vandalism turned 
into arson, then more damaging arson. So far, thank God, the car 
bombings that have occurred repeatedly in England have happened 
just once in the United States. No one was hurt, and the 
individual who planted the bomb was caught and convicted.
 
This case was the rare exception, though. Illegal acts by animal 
rights activists, however, were being committed in the U.S. with 
virtual impunity. In view of the interstate nature of the crimes, 
local investigations were halfhearted and largely unproductive, 
and few arrests were made. Clearly, existing federal and state 
laws were not working. State and local law enforcement did not 
understand the pattern of these crimes, there was little 
cooperation across state lines, and a centralized source of 
information about prior incidents was unavailable. Federal 
authorities were slow to get involved, if they did so at all.
 
It is no coincidence that these crimes started to receive more 
serious attention after the Senate passed Heflin's original bill 
in 1989 and the House barely missed taking action a year later. 
Anyone who thinks the subsequent formation of a federal law 
enforcement agency task force and the convening of three federal 
grand juries to pursue animal extremist crimes in Michigan, 
Oregon, and Washington are unrelated to this show of 
congressional interest does not know how the political system 
works. The  Scientist reported the tougher stance, but failed to 
make the connection. Whether federal law enforcement officials 
took action in anticipation of Congress's giving them a specific 
mandate or in hope of avoiding one does not matter; the result 
was the same. The visibility of the problem and the priority for 
its solution were raised. All the better that the new law finally 
was approved by the subsequent Congress in 1992.
 
The significance of the scientific community's success in 
accomplishing its objective cannot be overstated. Champions in 
Congress, willing to take the unpopular stand of saying "no" to 
the animal rights movement, were identified. For more than four 
years, individual scientists and the national organizations that 
represent them focused an enormous amount of effort--writing 
thousands of letters, making hundreds of visits, and giving 
first-hand testimony to members of Congress. An effective 
coalition of hundreds of organizations was built, including 
agriculture interest groups, voluntary health agencies like the 
American Heart and Diabetes associations, and other consumer 
advocates.
 
In the process of working for the Heflin/Stenholm bills, 
scientists were able to better educate Congress about the impact 
research. When you stop to think that no less than 6,000 bills 
are introduced each session, but scarcely more than 500 are 
passed, enacting this law was an impressive--next to impossible--
victory. Never mind that we made it through that well-known 
legislative burial ground, the House Judiciary Committee. That 
was just part of the fun.
 
Clearly, Congress believed it was meaningful to underscore the 
fact that animal rights terrorism will not be tolerated. Since 
1988, 30 state legislatures have also agreed that stronger, 
specific laws were warranted to protect research facilities. My 
organization, the National Association for Biomedical Research 
(NABR), is very proud to have led the legislative effort and 
grateful to everyone who got involved.
 
Without question, the ideological tyranny, as well as the 
terrorism, of animal extremists is antithetical to science. More 
scientists absolutely must get involved in counteracting the 
animal rights philosophy. But that will not happen if those who 
do make the effort are not given the credit they deserve. As for 
the idea that the proponents of animal research--and the law they 
helped pass--are impotent: 'Tain't so.
 
 
Barbara Rich is executive vice president of NABR, an animal 
research advocacy organization headquartered in Washington, D.C.
 
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #2, January 25, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
 
 
                ================================
 
 
                             LETTERS
(Page 12 of newspaper)
Genetic Counseling
 
We wish to clarify several points raised in Ricki Lewis's article 
on the profession of genetic counseling (The Scientist, Aug. 31, 
1992, page 1).
 
Clinical genetics has always represented a prototype of the team 
approach to health care delivery. Providers come from a variety 
of training backgrounds, including physicians with fellowship 
training in genetics, Ph.D.'s in human genetics, and master's-
prepared genetic counselors.
 
The field of genetic counseling as a recognized subspecialty is, 
and has been since its inception in 1969, practiced primarily (88 
percent of the practitioners) by master's-prepared individuals 
(see the "Professional Status Survey" conducted by the National 
"Report of the 1989 Asilomar Meeting on Education in Genetic 
Counseling," American Journal of Human Genetics, 46:1223-30, 
1990).
 
The American Board of Medical Genetics (ABMG), currently the 
certifying and accrediting body for all providers of genetic 
care, is considering restructuring, and an amendment to the 
bylaws is now before all ABMG diplomates. ABMG established and 
worked closely with an advisory body of ABMG genetic counselor 
diplomates throughout this process. Should ABMG restructure, the 
certification of professionals and the accreditation of training 
programs for all practitioners will continue.
 
In addition to the challenging role of providing patient 
counseling, education, and referral, genetic counselors are 
involved in a multiplicity of activities that draw upon their 
knowledge base in human genetics and their communication skills. 
These include presentations to public and professional audiences 
(including medical students, residents, and physicians), 
participation on ethics committees, administration of public 
health genetic and newborn screening programs, management and 
service roles within biotechnology companies, presentations at 
national research and clinical meetings, participation on federal 
advisory committees, grant acquisition, research, publication, 
and private practice. The profession continues to experience an 
active and growing employment market.
 
The National Society of Genetic Counselors (NSGC), the 
professional organization for this field, will gladly provide 
information about this challenging, exciting, and rapidly growing 
specialty. Please contact Bea Leopold, Executive Director, NSGC, 
233 Canterbury Dr., Wallingford, Pa. 19086.
 
 
DIANE L. BAKER
Past President, National Society
of Genetic Counselors
Board Member, American Board of Medical Genetics
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor
 
BETH FINE
Past President, National Society of Genetic Counselors
Board Member-Elect, American Board of Medical Genetics
Northwestern University
Evanston, Ill.
 
 
 
 
WHERE TO WRITE:
 
Letters to the Editor
THE SCIENTIST
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.
 
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #2, January 25, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
Underfunded Canadian Scientists Migrating Southward
(Page 14 of newspaper)
 
BY VALERIE DROGUS
 
For years, Canadian researchers have struggled with the problems 
of insufficient funding and inadequate career opportunities--
situations that have been responsible for a pronounced brain 
drain of promising young graduates to the United States. Partial 
relief was supposed to come in the form of a 4 percent-per-year 
hike in federal science funds, slated to take effect this year 
and carry on for two more years. But owing to Canada's serious 
budget shortfall, that relief will not be forthcoming.
 
Canada's major funding agencies, the Medical Research Council 
(MRC) and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council 
(NSERC), will instead have to make do with grant funds frozen at 
last year's level and a 5 percent decrease in administrative 
budgets over the next two years. And Canadian scientists say that 
the southward migration of talent will continue unabated.
 
MRC and NSERC provide funding for universities and research 
laboratories, roughly equivalent to the roles played by the 
National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation in 
the U.S. A third agency, the National Research Council, funds and 
operates 16 research facilities across Canada and faces similar 
cutbacks.
 
"They're now separating the cream from the cream," says MRC 
spokesman Neal Morris, adding that, as it is, only one of every 
five applications for research grants deemed worthy by an MRC 
peer-review system can be funded. U.S. researchers fare a bit 
better at NIH, where about 25 percent of grant applications that 
pass peer review muster are funded, according to an NIH 
spokesman.
 
Whether Canada's scientific sector woes are due more to the 
global economic slowdown or to a lack of commitment to basic 
is a matter of perspective.
 
Since the 1960s, Canada has allowed basic funding for scientific 
research to "fall away," says John Polanyi, a professor of 
chemistry at the University of Toronto and one of Canada's two 
Nobelists, having taken the prize for chemistry in 1986. (The 
other, Gerhard Herzberg, received the chemistry prize in 1971.)
 
Despite a 1987 report by the Prime Minister's own advisory group, 
the National Advisory Board on Science and Technology, urging 
Canada to double its university science funding, Polanyi says, 
the level of support for individual Canadian university 
scientists is half or less than that received by U.S. scientists.
 
"That makes Canada seem not too serious about science," he says.
 
Symptomatic of the govern-ment's lack of commitment, say some 
scientists, was the abolishment this spring of the Science 
Council of Canada, an independent body charged with evaluating 
the nation's scientific policy. Only the National Advisory Board, 
whose staff works closely with government officials, remains to 
mark the nation's scientific path.
 
Other Canadian scientists quantify their criticism differently. 
"Overall funding in terms of the gross national product is 
relatively low," says Scott Tremaine, director of the prestigious 
Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA), located 
at the University of Toronto.
 
In fact, Canada devotes only 1.4 percent of its gross national 
product to science, putting it among the lowest scientific 
spenders in the developed world. By comparison, 2.7 percent of 
the U.S. GNP goes for scientific research, and roughly the same 
amount in Germany.
 
But those figures are misleading, says Paul LaFleche, executive 
assistant and senior policy adviser to the science minister. 
Canadian government funding of basic research compares well to 
spending in Europe and the United States, but falls behind in 
defense and industry research spending, LaFleche says.
 
Federal science and technology expenditures have consistently 
outpaced the consumer price index since the Mulroney government 
took control in 1984, implying that funding for science has not 
only outstripped inflation but also increased in real dollars, 
LaFleche notes. It has also increased as a percentage of the 
federal budget, from 10 percent in 1984 to 11.5 percent today.
 
"We have tried to ensure that the base of the university research 
community is well supported. Since 1984 we've had a very 
difficult budget period. The one thing that wasn't cut was 
university research grant money," he says.
 
As for the impending federal budget freeze, science has actually 
percent immediate cut, says LaFleche.
 
 
The Brain Drain
How the government crunches its numbers is of less concern to the 
individual Canadian scientist than how readily jobs and research 
funds are available, however. Researchers say it's no secret that 
the underfunding of Canadian science has contributed to the 
southward flow of major talent that's existed since the time of 
Alexander Graham Bell, who himself came to the U.S. to do 
research. And they say the current situation doesn't appear 
likely to stem the flood.
 
A major reason for that phenomenon today is simple demographics. 
Many scientific positions in Canada were created in the 1960s at 
a boom time of easy money and are still occupied by now-senior 
staff who will not retire for another 10 to 15 years, and that 
leaves little maneuvering room for younger Canadian scientists 
within their own country, many researchers say.
 
Government programs have attempted to alleviate that problem by 
stepping up money for postdoctoral research grants, but results 
have been flawed, scientists say. First, NSERC has put a cap on 
postdoctoral fellowships of $27,500 (Canadian dollars), hardly 
enough to pay the rent in Toronto or Montreal and 30 percent to 
40 percent below comparable U.S. salaries. 
 
"It certainly does cause us difficulty in attracting people we 
would prefer to have, and we have made this point to NSERC," says 
Tre-maine, who left the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to 
join CITA as director shortly after it was founded nearly a 
decade ago. CITA has since gained worldwide prominence in the 
field of theoretical astrophysics.
 
Those scientists who do choose to take advantage of expanded 
postdoctoral opportunities in Canada may have little choice but 
to leave when it comes time to seek a tenure-track position.
 
Entry-level faculty jobs in medical research pay poorly in Canada 
and heap "totally unrealistic" demands on the researcher, but 
nonetheless attract up to 200 applications anyway, says Norbert 
Kartner, a postdoctoral fellow at the Hospital for Sick Children 
in Toronto.
 
Kartner, who received his Ph.D. in 1988 from the Ontario Cancer 
Institute at the University of Toronto, has been working in the 
hot-topic area of cystic fibrosis. He is the coauthor of a recent 
highly cited paper with CF gene codiscoverer John Riordan, in 
whose lab he works (Hot Papers, The Scientist, Oct. 12, 1992, 
page 18). However, finding a permanent position is another 
matter, Kartner says.
 
"I've been looking for a job in both Canada and the U.S. for 
about six months. I don't want to go to the U.S., but the 
 
But a more fundamental reason young Canadian scientists may 
choose to seek career paths outside their own country is a 
perception that scientific opportunities and acclaim are limited 
north of the border.
 
"There is a tendency for the best graduate students to be creamed 
off by institutions in the United States. They know their chances 
are better there," Polanyi says.
 
Gerald Quinlan, a theoretical astronomer, says that when it came 
time to choose a graduate institution, both he and his friends 
who were serious about science considered that American schools 
have a better reputation than Canadian schools. Quinlan, a 
Montreal native, went south to Cornell University for his Ph.D. 
and returned to Canada as a postdoc at CITA. But he now holds a 
second postdoc at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
 
"I would like to go back to Canada, but I would be going back 
mainly because that's where my family is, despite the better 
research opportunities south of the border," says Quinlan.
 
Many researchers say the opportunities to do "big science" are 
limited in Canada. It's difficult for a small country to put up 
the capital expenditures for a big project, as exemplified in the 
recent waffling on Canada's share of the funds for the Gemini 
project, a telescope being developed with joint funding from the 
U.S. and Britain.
 
But many Canadian scientists don't decry the lack of "big 
science" funds, pointing out that splitting up the pot is more in 
keeping with Canadian egalitarian, socialist ideals and may 
provide more individuals the liberty to do their own research.
 
"NSERC's No. 1 priority is individual research and, for somebody 
like a theorist, you may be better off in Canada," says Tremaine. 
"If for your own individual research you have relatively modest 
needs, a larger fraction of the pie is left over for smaller 
projects."
 
NSERC officials recently criticized the Mulroney government when 
it chose to fund a $236 million particle physics project, known 
as KAON, at the University of British Columbia. They noted that 
KAON will provide jobs for about 200 physicists, while NSERC 
funds 100 times that number of scientists with roughly double the 
budget of KAON.
 
Many Canadian scientists apparently are willing to sacrifice 
larger research budgets for the comforts of living at home, where 
crime rates are lower, the air is cleaner, and a national health-
care network provides a safety net for all.
 
"Overall, Canadians would rather be in Canada because they prefer 
the social climate," says Kartner.
And, as Polanyi puts it, "they trim their sails to suit the 
winds. They will not undertake problems that are too costly."
 
With the current budgetary crisis, the Canadian government may 
not seem like the most promising avenue to alleviate the 
country's need for scientific funds. Yet the very problems 
inherent in the Canadian economy and demographics--small supplies 
of money and a far-flung population--helped create what may be 
its most innovative solution to the funding crunch, the Network 
of Centres of Excellence.
 
Through the granting agencies, the federal government has 
committed $240 million to a national research and development 
effort that draws many of the country's top scientists into 15 
networks to pursue leading-edge research in areas that, it is 
hoped, will bring economic benefits to Canada.
 
 
"With the facilities I've been able to get access to via the 
network, I've been able to get good stuff done," says Chris 
Kenyon, a postdoc at the Respiratory Health Centre of Excellence, 
in Montreal.
 
Kenyon, a British citizen and recent graduate from the University 
of Cambridge, pursues both basic and applied research in three-
dimensional imaging of moving cells.
 
While he's pleased with his postdoctoral situation, Kenyon says, 
he hasn't yet had to hit the job market for a permanent spot and 
doesn't know how he'll fare at that level. 
 
Provincial governments also play their part in the funding 
equation. In Alberta, a $300 million Heritage Fund has been 
endowed for biomedical research, says D. Lorne Tyrrell, chairman 
of the department of medical microbiology and infectious diseases 
at the University of Alberta. 
 
Even more significant, however, is funding from private industry. 
Tyrrell and two colleagues, John Elliott and Lung Chang, received 
a $15 million grant to be used over 10 years for antiviral drug 
research from Glaxo Canada Inc., based in Mississauga, Ontario.
 
Industry funding does lean toward applied research, but Tyrrell 
doesn't believe that compromises Canadian science.
 
"I think cooperation between industry and the university is 
necessary to remain competitive," he says, noting that the 
practice is already a trend in Japan and Western Europe.
 
What Canada really lacks is a major private source of funding to 
take the pressure off of government agencies, says medical 
geneticist Louis Siminovitch, director of the Samuel Lunenfeld 
Research Institute at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Toronto. Without such 
funds, it may be difficult for Canada to retain its top-notch 
 
"What drives a science is your very best people," says 
Siminovitch. "What's happened in Canada is that some of the very 
best people have left."
 
 
Valerie Drogus is a freelance writer based in Santa Cruz, Calif.
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #2, January 25, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
                           HOT PAPERS
 
(Page 16 of newspaper)
 
CELL BIOLOGY
 
S. Bagchi, R. Weinmann, P. Raychaudhuri, "The retinoblastoma 
protein copurifies with E2F-I, an E1A-regulated inhibitor of the 
transcription factor E2F," Cell, 65:1063-72, 1991.
 
Srilata Bagchi (University of Illinois at Chicago): "The loss of 
retinoblastoma tumor suppressor gene function has been associated 
with the etiology of various types of tumors. The product of this 
tumor suppressor gene, a 105-kilodalton polypeptide called pRB, 
is a cell cycle regulator. The pRB polypeptide inhibits cell 
proliferation by arresting cells at the G1 phase of the cell 
cycle. Cells committed for division inactivate pRB by 
phosphorylation at the G1/S boundary of the cell cycle. The pRB 
polypeptide is also a major target of several DNA virus 
oncoproteins (adenovirus E1A, SV40 T antigen, and papillomavirus 
E7). These viral proteins bind and inactivate pRB. This 
inactivation of pRB function strongly correlates with the 
oncogenic properties of these viral proteins.
 
"Our paper and those of others (L.R. Bandara, et al., Nature, 
351:494-7, 1991; S. Chellappan, et al., Cell, 65:1053-61, 1991; 
and T. Chittenden, et al., Cell, 65:1073-82, 1991) provided 
insight into the normal cellular function of pRB. We were 
studying regulation of a transcription factor, E2F (a study that 
was initiated in Joe Nevins's lab at Duke University). This 
factor is involved in the expression of the adenovirus E2 gene as 
well as several cellular genes and is activated by the DNA virus 
oncoproteins. We, as well as others, found that pRB interacted 
with E2F and inhibited the activity of this transcription factor.
 
"The pRB/E2F interaction has significant impact on our 
understanding of the biochemical function of pRB. E2F is believed 
to be involved in the expression of several cellular genes that 
are involved in cell proliferation, including c-myc, n-myc, and 
dhfr. A consequence of pRB-inhibition of the E2F activity would 
depend on E2F. This reduced expression of the cell-proliferation 
genes can potentially account for the growth suppression function 
of pRB.
 
"We also learned about the biochemical function of the DNA virus 
oncoproteins. The viral oncopro-teins can disrupt pRB/E2F 
interaction by taking away pRB from a pRB/E2F complex. The net 
effect of the dissociation of pRB/E2F complex is activation of 
E2F. Activation of E2F would have a stimulatory effect on many of 
the proliferation-associated genes that might eventually result 
in uncontrolled proliferation or immortalization of cells."
 
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #2, January 25, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
 
MOLECULAR BIOLOGY
 
P.J. Kraulis, "MOLSCRIPT: a program to produce both detailed  and 
schematic  plots  of  protein  structures,"  Journal  of  Applied 
Crystallography, 24:946-950, 1991.
 
Per Kraulis (University of Cambridge, UK): "When publishing a 
three-dimensional protein structure determined by X-ray 
crystallography or nuclear magnetic resonance, there is a need to 
show overviews of the structure, as well as detailed close-ups of 
regions of interest, such as binding sites. There was a lack of 
good, easy-to-use software to prepare such plots, so I decided to 
write such a program, called MolScript. It was my intention from 
the start to make the program readily available to the academic 
community.
 
"I decided to use PostScript (from Adobe Systems Inc., Mountain 
View, Calif.) as output format, since most labs have access to 
laser printers that can handle PostScript. Luckily, this choice 
also simplified a number of technical problems in the 
programming. The program reads an input file that describes what 
to plot and how. The user can mix different kinds of 
representations (such as ball-and-stick together with alpha-
helices and beta-strands), and it is possible to fine-tune a plot 
in a large number of ways. Through the use of different gray 
scale or colors for different parts, it is possible to make a 
complex picture intelligible.
 
"Judging from the number of labs that now have MolScript, and the 
number of publications that contain plots made by the program, it 
is clear that there was a widespread need for it. Hopefully, its 
use will make the information in protein structures more 
accessible to biochemists and molecular biologists as well as a 
wider audience."
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #2, January 25, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY
 
Editor's Note: On Nov. 18, 1992, AT&T Bell Laboratories physicist 
Michael Schluter passed away. He provided the following 
information to The Scientist just prior to his death at age 47.
 
M. Schluter, M. Lannoo, M. Needels, G.A. Baraff, D. Tom nek, 
"Electron-phonon coupling and superconductivity in alkali-
intercalated C60 solid," Physical Review Letters, 68:526-9, 1992.
 
Michael Schluter (AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, N.J.): 
"The electronic structure of fcc (face-centered cubic) alkali 
intercalated A3C60 (where A = K, Rb or Cs) is studied using the 
density functional (LDA) approach and a semi-empirical tight 
binding scheme fit to the results. The picture that emerges is 
one of tightly bound C60 molecules, weakly held together by 
narrow, almost dispersionless bands. These bands are part of a 
manifold, derived from a 1 = 5 set of states. The vibrational 
states of A3C60 are studied in a variety of models, reaching from 
simple Keating-type and bond charge-type to frozen phonon LDA-
type descriptions. From this, a consistent picture of vibronic 
states emerges, in accordance with a variety of experiments such 
as Raman and infrared and neutron scattering.
 
"The interactions between electrons and phonons are calculated 
and found to be dominated by particular on-ball Jahn-Teller-type 
vibrations. We propose that the superconductivity found in A3C60 
materials arises from these interactions, optimally enhanced by 
the unique molecular nature of these materials. In particular, a 
real-space `factorization' of two different energy scales 
determines the coupling constant l = NV. The electron scattering 
V is dominated by the large intra-ball p-electron energy scale 
via the coupling to the Jahn-Teller-type modes. The density of 
states N, on the other hand, is controlled by the weak inter-ball 
hopping energy scale. This factorization leads to a number of 
remarkable consequences, such as the scaling of Tc with pressure 
or lattice spacing, a vanishing alkali isotope effect, a strong 
carbon isotope effect, strong changes with intercalation in Raman 
and Neutron spectra, and a simple phase diagram. The qualitative 
difference between fullerite and intercalated graphite, with much 
lower Tc values, can be explained on simple geometric grounds. 
Finally, the general picture can be used as a basis for 
speculations about new, potentially high Tc molecular 
superconductors."
 
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #2, January 25, 1993)
                ================================
 
 
 
Confocal Microscopy: Viewing Cells As `Wild Animals'
(Page 17 of newspaper)
 
BY FRANKLIN HOKE
 
Recent improvements to the laser-scanning confocal microscope are 
enhancing the instrument's already impressive capabilities to 
create sharply defined biological images, researchers say. 
Advanced techniques, new lasers with added spectral lines, a 
wider array of sensitive fluorescent dyes, and better image 
collection and analysis are combining to broaden the powers of 
these sophisticated instruments.
 
Especially for scientists who image living cells--neurobiologists 
investigating the actions of neurons, for example--these advances 
dramatically extend the confocal microscope's usefulness, which 
has grown steadily since the introduction of the device into labs 
in the mid-1980s. 
 
"Confocal microscopy is certainly the best way we've got of 
imaging living cells at the limits of optical resolution today," 
says Stephen J. Smith, a neurobiologist at the Stanford 
University School of Medicine.
 
According to Smith, the confocal microscope is at its best in 
imaging living cells when used to look into a "thick, rather 
turbid" specimen, like brain tissue.
 
"Brain tissue is translucent," Smith says. "So, once it gets more 
than a few cell layers thick, you can't see through it. Light 
goes through it, but it's diffused. That's the kind of situation 
where the confocal microscope comes into its own."
 
The unique advantage of the confocal microscope is its ability to 
reject this out-of-focus light, or flare, from areas within the 
specimen other than in the plane of focus. To do this, the 
microscope first focuses an illuminating cone of laser light 
through a stack of lenses to a point at a predetermined depth 
within the specimen. This point is then system- atically scanned 
back and forth under computer control. In this way, the entire 
plane of focus is illuminated, but sequentially, point by point, 
rather than simultaneously, as with an ordinary microscope. 
 
The imaging light returning from the specimen, through the same 
lenses and scanners as before, is separated from the illumination 
light by a beam splitter. It then passes through a pinhole 
aperture, called a spatial filter. It is this spatial filter that 
defines the confocal microscope. The filter has the effect of 
screening out light from all but the focal point. The remaining, 
in-focus light is registered with a photomultiplier tube and, 
and precise two-dimensional image, called an optical slice or 
section. Multiple sections can be used to build three-dimensional 
images, even three-dimensional moving images.
 
"The trick is to get rid of all the illumination in the sample 
except right at the little point of focus, get rid of the double 
cone of light above and below," explains Watt W. Webb, a 
biological physicist and a professor of applied physics at 
Cornell University. "That's what the aperture does."
 
Most commonly, confocal microscopes are used with fluorescent 
dyes. When attached to monoclonal antibodies, these dyes have the 
great advantage of being able to label specific molecules for 
imaging. When thick specimens are stained and viewed with 
ordinary microscopes, fluorescent light from the out-of-focus 
planes can obscure the image. The confocal microscope, viewing 
the same specimen, is able to eliminate this out-of-focus light 
to produce sharp images.
 
The confocal microscope's ability to clearly image living cells, 
in tissue or in culture, will become increasingly important in 
the near future, according to James B. Pawley, a professor of 
zoology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and editor of a 
standard reference work in the field (<MI>Handbook of Biological 
Confocal Microscopy, New York, Plenum Publishing Corp., 1990). 
 
"The most rapidly developing area is going to be living-cell 
confocal microscopy," Pawley says. "That's the wave of the 
future. Of course, it's difficult, because you have to worry 
about keeping the light dose to an absolute minimum so the cell 
is not upset."
 
Stephen W. Paddock, a cell biologist also at the University of 
Wisconsin, Madison, makes the same point: "The problem with 
imaging living cells is that they are very light-sensitive."
 
 
Avoiding Light Damage
Important to the confocal microscope's capabilities is its use of 
a laser light source to brilliantly illuminate the specimen. 
While there are many advantages to using such a bright light 
source, researchers find they must take steps to avoid the injury 
to cells that can result. 
 
"Lasers are just so convenient," says Pawley, "because they are 
so intense. But one of the problems in the early days of confocal 
microscopy was that people would turn up the knobs to get a 
picture quickly, and then they'd look and say, `It bleached so 
fast!' "
 
Cornell's Webb and graduate student David Sandison have worked 
out a number of tactics that obviate the problem of delivering 
too much light to living cells under study. Webb explains that 
the final image obtained from a confocal microscope is sharper 
potentially damaging light must then be used to produce an image. 
 
"If you make the pinhole spatial filter small enough with 
confocal microscopy, you improve the resolution of the 
microscope, even in the plane of focus," Webb says. "But that's 
not a good idea if you're looking at a biological specimen, 
because it uses so much light that you overilluminate the 
specimen. And that's where the damage comes from."
 
People have been tempted to take advantage of the theoretical 
improvement in resolution of confocal microscopy compared to 
full-field microscopy, Webb says, by using more intense light and 
a smaller aperture. In doing fluorescence microscopy, which is 
what most of the living cell work is, Webb says, this is the 
wrong direction to go.
 
"Instead, you just open your pinhole a little bit, and take 
advantage of the removal of flare," he says. "You still come out 
ahead."
 
A degree of judgment is called for, in other words. The 
relationship between these two--the size of the aperture opening 
and the amount of light used--must be optimized to view living 
cells. Webb says his group has worked out these relationships in 
"sickening mathematical detail," and that there needn't be 
excessive damage to the specimen.
 
 
New Lasers, New Dyes
The overall amount of light used to illuminate a cell is only one 
way to consider the light energy reaching the cell. Another is to 
realize that the lasers used in confocal microscopy emit light in 
different, specific wavelengths, each with its own energy level.
 
A laser commonly used in commercial confocal microscopes, for 
example, is the argon laser, which emits two major spectral 
lines, at wavelengths of 488 nanometers (blue) and 514 nm 
(green). Developers of fluorescent dyes--or reporter molecules--
look for those that are easily excited by these wavelengths and 
will therefore provide the most information.
 
Recently, confocal microscopes based on a krypton-argon laser 
that emits three lines, at 488 nm (blue), 568 nm (yellow), and 
647 nm (red), have been introduced. The three spectral lines 
offer a different set of wavelengths for developers of 
fluorescent dyes to work with, as well as the opportunity to 
image three separately tagged molecules at once.
 
In addition, the longer-wavelength red line is less damaging to 
cells under study, according to Paddock. "If you use a shorter 
wavelength, which has more energy," he says, "it tends to kind of 
fry the cells more quickly than using a longer wavelength."
 
Paddock, with colleague Steve Stricker at the University of New 
to image the fertilization process within sea urchin and starfish 
eggs.
 
"It's long been known that during fertilization, there's a wave 
of free calcium that passes across the egg," Paddock says. "Using 
confocal microscopy, you can actually image the wave passing 
across the egg. We found that the maternal nucleus lights up, as 
well, which you can only see using confocal microscopy."
 
Roger Tsien, a20professor of pharmacology and chemistry at the 
University of California, San Diego, is well known for having 
constructed a number of fluorescent reporter molecules sensitive 
to, among other substances, calcium and cyclic AMP. In addition, 
he more recently has developed techniques to produce images much 
faster than is possible using commercially available systems.
 
"The commercial systems typically produce images at about one or 
two per second, which is too slow to work on many phenomena in 
living cells," Tsien says.
 
Tsien says his group has been able to build a confocal microscope 
capable of video-rate imaging--30 frames a second--with full 
laser scanning.
 
"In the calcium area, we've been looking mainly at excitable 
cells," he says, "things like heart muscle or neurons, which have 
fast calcium spikes or calcium waves passing through them. In the 
cyclic AMP area, we've been looking at the famous model of 
invertebrate plasticity, the sea slug. This is a long-established 
model, involving neurotransmitters raising cyclic AMP, which 
affects synapses for other neurons. We've been looking at how the 
cyclic AMP changes, which is visible now, for the first time, 
directly."
 
 
`Wild Animals'
Tsien believes that the ability of confocal microscopy to create 
images of living cells showing cellular activities, using dyes 
and video techniques such as those he and his group have 
developed, will lead to important changes in cellular research.
 
Traditional biochemistry, he says, involves "grinding up a couple 
million cells and running them out on a gel, or doing PCR 
[polymerase chain reaction] on a whole population," which is 
useful for ascertaining certain general attributes of that 
population, but obscures the activities of individual cells.
 
"When you can see their individual biochemical signals," he says, 
"you find that different cells are often very individualistic, 
almost like wild animals, or people.
 
"Even different parts of the cell have different biochemistry. 
The cell is not just a featureless bag. It knows which direction 
it's headed, so its front and its back have to be different, 
 
Tsien adds: "Overall, that's where all this live cell work is 
needed."
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #2, January 25, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
MAJOR SUPPLIERS
(Page 18 of newspaper)
 
According  to  the scientists interviewed for this  article,  the 
following companies are among those manufacturing  laser-scanning 
confocal  microscopes, fluorescent dyes, and/or  image-collection 
and analysis equipment and software:
 
Bio-Rad Microscience Division
19 Blackstone St.
Cambridge, Mass. 02139
(800) 444-1422
Fax: (617) 864-9328
 
Leica Inc.
111 Deer Lake Rd.
Deerfield, Ill. 60015
(800) 248-0123
Fax: (708) 405-0147
 
Meridian Instruments Inc.
2310 Science Pkwy.
Okemos, Mich. 48864
(800) 247-8084
Fax: (517) 349-5967
 
Molecular Probes Inc.
4849 Pitchford Ave.
Eugene, Ore. 97402
(503) 465-8300
Fax: (503) 344-6504
 
Molecular Dynamics Inc.
880 E. Arques Ave.
Sunnyvale, Calif. 94086
(800) 333-5703
Fax: (408) 773-8343
 
Nikon Inc.
1300 Walt Whitman Rd.
Melville, N.Y. 11747
(516) 547-8570
Fax: (516) 547-0307
 
2551 W. Beltline Hwy.
Middleton, Wis. 53562
(608) 831-3883
Fax: (608) 836-7224
 
Olympus Corp.
4 Nevada Dr.
Lake Success, N.Y. 11042
(800) 446-5767
 
Carl Zeiss Inc.
One Zeiss Dr.
Thornwood, N.Y. 10594
(800) 233-2343
Fax: (914) 681-7446
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #2, January 25, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
Poster Sessions Can Lead To Networking Opportunities
(Page 20 of newspaper)
 
BY ROBERT FINN
 
Poster sessions are becoming an increasingly popular way of 
enlarging the number of presentations without expanding the 
duration of scientific meetings. Posters require more preparatory 
work than is involved in a brief talk. But, say those familiar 
with the format, posters provide an efficient and effective way 
for scientists to inform others of their research and a chance to 
have personal contact with the leaders in their field. In 
addition, they say, posters can open doors to job, postdoc, and 
graduate school opportunities.
 
Dara Norman, for example, was able to parlay a poster session 
into an informal interview for admission to grad school. After 
finishing her undergraduate degree at the Massachusetts Institute 
of Technology, Norman had been working at the National 
Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goddard Space Flight 
Center for three years, but she desperately wanted to go to grad 
school in the department of astronomy at the University of 
Washington in Seattle. She knew it wouldn't be easy to get in. 
According to Bruce Margon, the chairman of that department, 
"Typically we receive 200 applications for four or five slots, so 
no matter how strong one's academic credentials, there's a 
certain element of a lottery."
 
Norman was scheduled to give a poster presentation at the 1992 
meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), and she 
figured that, because astronomy professors from Washington were 
likely to be at the meeting, this was her best shot at 
graduate application in the fall of 1991, the meeting was in 
early January, and the admissions committee wouldn't be making up 
its mind until sometime in February.
 
Because of her situation, she approached the poster presentation 
as if it were a job interview. "In the poster sessions, only 
people who are really interested come up to your poster," Norman 
says. "And if they're the people who are interested in what 
you're doing, they're the people who are likely to give you a job 
or get you into graduate school."
 
Margon was one of the interested parties. Margon and Norman, as 
it happened, had observed the same active galaxy with NASA's 
Hubble Space Telescope, but with different instruments--Margon's 
group used the Faint Object Spectrograph, and Norman's team at 
Goddard used the High-Resolution Spectrograph. So the noted 
astronomer and the prospective student had a lot to talk about.
 
As Margon puts it, "I was certainly very impressed with her when 
I met her there, because she turns out to be an exceptionally 
articulate and thoughtful and interesting person, which is 
something that really can't come across in the paper application. 
I was able to tell my admissions committee that this is someone 
who looks good on paper and was clearly even better in person."
 
It is this opportunity for personal interaction that is one of 
the major benefits of poster sessions, scientists say. "Had it 
been an oral paper, there are a huge number of parallel sessions, 
so the probability of my ever having been there would be really 
small," says Margon, "whereas the poster papers are up for an 
entire day, so the probability of collision is much larger."
 
This story, whose happy ending finds Dara Norman pleasantly 
ensconced in UW's graduate program, illustrates several of the 
many advantages of poster sessions. Because oral presentations at 
scientific meetings have the weight of hundreds of years of 
tradition behind them, many scientists once regarded poster 
sessions to be a second-class stepchild, a far less prestigious 
way of presenting research results. But poster sessions are 
becoming an increasingly accepted and even preferred forum at 
scientific meetings.
 
According to AAS officials, for example, the alternative to a 
poster presentation at meetings of the society is a mere five-
minute talk. Moreover, at an oral presentation, a speaker must 
rush to present even the bare bones of his or her results, in 
rooms so darkened for the slides that the speakers often cannot 
even be seen clearly by the audience and have little chance to 
engage interested people in discussion or to make a favorable 
impression.
 
The possibility that a paper will be presented as a poster 
increases year by year at most scientific meetings, as the number 
of abstracts submitted grows without concomitant increases in the 
to Kevin Furlong, a professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania 
State University and program chairman for the American 
Geophysical Union (AGU) national meeting, about 35 percent of the 
4,700 papers at the December 1992 AGU meeting were presented as 
posters, and that number goes up by about 5 percent each year.
 
Of 1,945 papers presented by the American Physiological Society, 
a constituent of the Federation of American Societies for 
Experimental Biology, at the April 1992 FASEB meeting, 1,204 were 
given as posters, 107 as poster discussions (a hybrid form of 
poster session), and only 634 as oral presentations. But those 
who like posters must love the Society for Neuroscience's annual 
meeting. Out of a total of 9,361 papers at the society's October 
1992 meeting, 8,066 were posters--fully 86 percent.
 
Experienced poster presenters warn that creating an effective 
poster requires much more than just slapping a copy of an 
abstract and a few illustrations onto a piece of corkboard. 
Compared with short slide presentations, posters tend to require 
a greater degree of preparation, not only in terms of the 
physical display, but also in terms of one's understanding of the 
material. As Furlong notes, "At a poster presentation the 
questions become in-depth fairly quickly. People have more time 
to think about the questions, and they can  follow up on them. A 
person should be very careful in a poster presentation not to 
have anything on there they don't fully understand."
 
Ernie Nordeen, an associate professor of psychology at the 
University of Rochester and a veteran of many poster sessions, 
echoes this sentiment, but notes that a certain degree of 
ignorance can be more forgivable at a poster session than in an 
oral presentation. "Probably more so than in a talk, you may have 
people looking at your data from a completely different 
perspective than you're used to. I think you have to be prepared 
for almost anything and also prepared to be entirely up front 
about not knowing and wanting to learn about the questioner's 
perspective. In a poster session it's perfectly reasonable to 
say, `I don't know the answer to that question. What do you 
think?' There's less pressure on a poster presenter to have a pat 
answer."
 
Steve Maran, an astronomer at Goddard, recommends practicing a 
poster session much as one would practice an oral presentation. 
"No matter how smart you think you are, no matter how good a job 
you think you've done, you need to present your poster to 
colleagues and let them give you their suggestions.  Make it up 
well in advance of the meeting, post it up on the wall outside 
your office, and take a look at it pretending to stroll by at a 
distance of several feet. See if it looks like something you'd 
like to have a look at. Unlike oral presentations, where you're 
trapped in a room, with poster presentations you walk right by, 
looking for a better poster."
 
Daniel Gardner, a professor of physiology and biophysics at 
a professor of physiology and biophysics at the New York 
University School of Medicine, have given a great deal of thought 
about the most effective way to present information on a poster. 
The Gardners wrote the Society for Neuroscience's "Suggestions 
for Preparing Effective Posters," a feature in the preliminary 
program for the society's annual meeting each year since 1989.
 
Says Daniel Gardner, "Good poster design tries to maximize the 
ability of the presenter to get the information to the largest 
number of people, and also maximizes the ability of the meeting 
attender to get as much as possible from a poster and to see as 
many posters as possible. If it takes 30 minutes to work your way 
through a poster, then an advantage of the poster is lost. So the 
goal is to design a poster that has perhaps 30 minutes' worth of 
information if every word is read carefully and every figure is 
analyzed thoughtfully, but it should also be designed so that 
someone whose interests are more peripheral can get a take-home 
message in 10 minutes."
 
Virtually all scientific societies require that the top of a 
poster contain a banner printed with type at least an inch high 
(or 72 points, the unit of measure used in determining height of 
type) stating the title of the study and the names and 
affiliations of the authors. This can be generated by most full-
featured word-processing programs using laser printers. The 
individual sheets of laser paper can be taped together and used 
as is, or they can be taken to a continuous photocopy machine, 
available in many print shops, which can produce strips of paper 
six inches wide and four feet long.
 
The Gardners strongly recommend that the poster be bracketed by 
an introduction at the beginning and some clear conclusions at 
the end. Daniel Gardner notes that this introduction must be 
quite distinct from the abstract, which is designed to serve as a 
distillation of the entire paper. "The introduction has to 
explain what you're doing, why you did it, and what the state of 
the art was before you began your work." As for the conclusions, 
"Many people look at the conclusions first to see if they want to 
devote time to the paper. They should be in large enough type to 
be read by people six or seven feet away."
 
The Gardners recommend that the sequence of illustrations in a 
poster be made explicit and obvious, with the use of numerals at 
least an inch (72 points) in height. And the information should 
be arranged in columns running down a poster, rather than in rows 
running across it. Notes Daniel Gardner, "If there's a cluster of 
people around, it's much easier to get an unobstructed view of a 
vertical column than of the top or the middle or the bottom of a 
poster." He also advocates the use of different-colored 
backgrounds to distinguish separate experiments or regions of the 
poster.
 
Each figure and table, say the Gardners, should have a headline 
in large type describing its essential point. And the text below 
mere figure legend. Rather, it should be the same sort of 
commentary that would appear in the "Results and Discussion" 
sections of a published paper.
 
Some poster makers are beginning to use desktop publishing 
packages to design their entire poster as a single unit. The 
resulting computer file can be put on a disk and taken to a 
specialty print shop with a large-format color printer. In this 
way the entire poster can be prepared as a single large sheet of 
paper, which is easy to roll up and transport, and very easy to 
post.
 
Many scientists prefer to peruse posters while the authors are 
not there, and some meetings accommodate this desire by having 
the posters up for a full day, with the authors present for half 
a day or less. For this reason, posters should be designed to be 
self-explanatory. Despite this, says Nordeen, one should not load 
down the poster with a great deal of methodological detail. 
Anyone interested in that much information can question the 
presenter directly.
 
But, says Nordeen, "I have the impression that most people 
looking at a poster want an invitation to be led through it. They 
want to have some dialogue. I think it's the presenter's 
responsibility to ask someone who's reading the poster, `Would 
you like me to walk you through this?' More often than not 
they'll say yes. That accomplishes two things. First of all, it 
takes the burden off the reader, and, second, it forces an 
introduction that might not otherwise be made." Furlong, however, 
notes that while "you're a salesman at a poster session,... I 
think it's inappropriate to strong-arm people into it."
 
Although Dara Norman dressed for her poster presentation as  if  
it were a job interview, at many scientific meetings dress is 
informal. As Furlong says, "You'd probably look out of place in a 
three-piece suit at an AGU meeting, but by the same token you 
want to stand out." If a group of people are standing around a 
poster, Furlong notes, a passerby would probably figure that the 
one dressed slightly more formally than the others is the 
poster's presenter.
 
Finally, those who have narrowly averted disaster advise poster 
presenters to take Murphy's Law into account. For example, many 
presenters have learned that it's a good idea to bring one's own 
supply of push pins, even when the meeting organizers say that 
these will be provided; push pins tend to become scarce toward 
the end of a meeting. And the true student of Murphy's Law will 
want to make up two copies of everything in the poster, sending 
one set ahead in the mail or with a friend, and carrying the 
other on the airplane. That way, if one copy gets lost or 
damaged, the presenter isn't faced with the embarrassment of 
standing in front of a blank corkboard.
 
 
Calif.
 
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #2, January 25, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
 
Study: Industry Demand For Chemists Rising
(Page 21 of newspaper)
 
BY EDWARD R. SILVERMAN
 
The  median  starting salaries for most new  chemistry  graduates 
rose slightly last year, according to a survey recently conducted 
by the American Chemical Society.
 
Although the pay increases were modest, they were prompted by 
continued hiring by pharmaceutical companies, as well as efforts 
by industry and academia to keep pace with inflation, according 
to several recruiting experts.
 
Bachelor's graduates received a median salary of $24,000, a 4.3 
percent increase over the 1991 level. Joan Burrelli, senior 
research analyst with ACS in Washington, D.C., says that 1992 was 
the first time in three years that starting pay rose above 
$23,000. Median starting salaries for master's graduates eroded 
slightly, to $31,500, a 1.6 percent drop from the 1991 figure. 
However, Burrelli notes that the number of master's graduates 
hired was rather small, suggesting that salaries actually were 
flat.
 
Ph.D. graduates received $47,500, a 3.3 percent increase in 
median starting pay, a boost driven by pharmaceutical companies 
that are hiring chemists to fill a steady stream of research-
related positions.
 
"Overall, demand is picking up," says Burrelli, adding that the 
percentage of people with five or more job offers rose and that 
unemployment for newly graduated chemists dropped, encouraging 
signs after a few years of stagnation.
 
For bachelor's grads, unemployment was 10 percent, down from last 
year's 14 percent. Sixty-five percent of all bachelor's grads 
found employment, up from 62 percent. Among master's grads, 
unemployment fell 1 percent, to 6 percent.
 
compiled its results by mailing surveys last summer to new 
chemistry graduates. Approximately 3,000 graduates responded, 
including 2,100 bachelor's grads, 350 master's grads, and 550 
Ph.D.'s, Burrelli says.
 
for new chemistry grads remained soft in many areas and that the 
slight increase in median pay probably reflected raises given to 
match inflation of about 3 percent.
 
"The percentage here means nothing--2 to 4 percent gains really 
isn't a lot of noise," says chemistry professor Edward Kostiner 
of the University of Connecticut in Storrs. "There's nothing 
dramatic happening right now."
 
Experts say the recession squelched much hiring in the chemical 
and oil industries and squeezed budgets at most universities, 
particularly those financed by government. "A lot of corporations 
are sitting on the sidelines and not recruiting this year," says 
Ted Logan, manager of technical recruiting for the Procter & 
Gamble Co. in Cincinnati. "I think everybody's waiting for the 
economy to turn around." 
 
One of the marked exceptions, though, has been the pharmaceutical 
industry, which recruiters say was responsible for a great many 
of the job offers made to new graduates recently. Ph.D.'s with 
expertise in bioanalytical chemistry or synthetic organic 
chemistry, in particular, fared well.
 
"Ph.D. hiring is mainly in the pharmaceutical area," says ACS's 
Burrelli. "The recession has hit oil and chemical companies, but 
the pharmaceutical industry has been somewhat recession-proof. 
Sales are up, so they're starting to hire."
 
These companies have also provided fertile opportunity for new 
bachelor's grads. Overall, the median starting salary for 
bachelor's graduates in industry was $25,000, up 2 percent from 
the 1991 level. Master's graduates received $35,000, a 4.5 
percent gain. Ph.D.'s received $50,600, a 5.4 percent increase.
 
There is underemployment among chemists, however. Burrelli says 
it appears that many bachelor's grads may have accepted lower-
paying jobs as technicians, rather than as higher-paid staff 
scientists, a recruiting strategy that some companies use to save 
money. It also suggests that a larger number of better-paying 
jobs wasn't available.
 
"My feeling is that much of the hiring went on at smaller 
companies offering technician jobs," says James Burke, manager of 
research recruiting and university relations at Rohm and Haas Co. 
in Spring House, Pa. "Jobs are no longer chasing  people; people 
are chasing jobs."
 
"The fact that we're in a global recession with a lot of 
political instability makes companies want to proceed 
cautiously," he says, con- tending that "economic regulation also 
has a price tag that defers growth.... In general, I know of 
several companies that made cutbacks in the number of hires. We 
did, too."
 
appears to have limited opportunities for chemists. With the 
large number of Ph.D. graduates in recent years, many schools 
have their pick from among those grads with at least some 
postdoctorate experience.
 
"The market was tighter last year than the year before," says 
Kostiner. "We're drowning in applications."
 
And many positions are left vacant as schools look to freeze or 
cut costs. "Many are downsizing," Kostiner says. "Others are 
reassessing faculty size and enrollment levels, often meaning 
there are fewer positions."
 
Nonetheless, these experts say that there is room for optimism, 
particularly for new chemists seeking work in industry, if the 
economy picks up. "It's definitely not that people aren't getting 
jobs," says Burrelli. "It's just taking longer to find them, and 
they may have less choice."
 
Rohm and Haas' Burke says that 1993 "should be better than 1992, 
but not by much." Still, he adds, "there are no grounds for 
despair... but kids will have to work hard."
 
 
Edward R. Silverman is a freelance writer based in Hoboken, N.J.
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #2, January 25, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
 
TIPS FOR EFFECTIVE POSTER PRESENTATIONS
(Page 21 of newspaper)
 
Through the process of trial and error, scientific societies  and 
veteran  poster presenters have come up with the following  rules 
of thumb for effective poster presentations.
 
1. Prepare a banner in very large type containing a descriptive 
   title, the authors, and their affiliations. This banner should be 
situated high up on the poster so it can be seen above people's 
heads from a distance of 15 to 20 feet.
 
2. Bracket the poster with an introduction at the beginning and a 
   list of conclusions at the end. Remember that many people will 
read only these two parts of your poster.
 
3. Make the flow of information in a poster explicit with the use 
   of inch-high numerals. The flow of information should be 
organized in columns running down the poster, not in rows running 
across it.
 
   will be communicated even if you are not there. But don't load 
it down with large amounts of methodological detail or lists of 
references. Curious observers can ask you about these things 
directly.
 
5. Each illustration should have a prominent headline containing 
its take-home message in just a few words. The text below the 
illustrations should be in smaller type and should contain far 
more information than the typical figure legend. Only the most 
interested readers will spend time with this text.
 
6. Prepare a presentation of no more than five minutes 
   (preferably two to four minutes) to walk interested parties 
quickly through your poster.
 
7. Make the poster well in advance and practice it with your 
   colleagues, much as you would practice an oral presentation. 
 
8. Taking into account Mur-phy's Law, bring extra push pins (not 
   thumbtacks) with you to the meeting. And consider making up two 
complete copies of the poster. Mail one copy ahead or send it 
with a friend.
 
9. At the poster session, let people peruse your poster for 30 
   seconds or a minute before approaching them to ask if you may 
lead them through it. But don't be shy about introducing 
yourself, since the opportunity to meet people is one of the 
major advantages of poster sessions.
 
10. If you have a preprint of a article already prepared, 
    consider having a supply ready at the poster session to hand 
out to people who are especially interested. If not, take down 
names and addresses and offer to send the preprint when it is 
ready.
 
--R.F.
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #2, January 25, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
 
                             PEOPLE
(Page 22 of newspaper)
 
Physicist To Move From Syracuse
To Penn State To Head New Center
 
Abhay Ashtekar, a theoretical physicist and currently a professor 
at Syracuse University, has been appointed as the first holder of 
the Eberly Family Chair in Physics at Pennsylvania State 
University. Ashtekar intends to use the chair's $1 million 
endowment as start-up funding to organize a Center for 
position in August.
 
The center will be located in the Davey Lab on the University 
Park, Pa., campus with Ashtekar as its first director. He says an 
important component of the center will be a strong 
interdisciplinary approach to research in theoretical physics.
 
"Theoretical research has now become advanced enough so that a 
physicist needs advanced techniques from mathematicians and 
astronomers and vice versa," he says. "We will be breaking all 
barriers between disciplines."
 
In its initial stages, Ashtekar says, the center will be staffed 
primarily by members of the physics department. However, he says, 
as the center becomes more established, numerous members from 
both the mathematics and astronomy departments will be invited to 
become involved. At present, the center is slated to accommodate 
two full professors, two assistant professors, and 10 
postdoctoral researchers.
 
"My ideology for the center has three prongs," Ashtekar explains. 
"First, it should be very strong in basic research. Second, this 
research should then contribute to teaching postgraduate 
students. Graduate students should be trained so that they are on 
the cutting edge of the field by the time they leave.
 
"And, third, I would like the center to become a way of 
popularizing science. While most of us are experts in theoretical 
physics, math, or astronomy, I would like us to go around and 
give lectures to young kids in schools and get them interested in 
science."
 
Ashtekar says he believes science education in the United States 
is in dire straits and hopes that the center's personnel, even in 
a small way, can bring some enthusiasm to children interested in 
science.
 
"I'm not saying these things will be new to Penn State, but I 
think this will be a substantial addition to the things that they 
are already doing," he says.
 
Ashtekar received a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics 
from the University of Bombay, India, in 1969 and a Ph.D. in 
physics from the University of Chicago in 1974. He specializes in 
general relativity and quantum gravity and is the author or 
coauthor of more than 94 research papers. The most recent 
appeared in Classical and Quantum Gravity (A. Ashtekar, et al., 
"A loop representation for the quantum Maxwell field," 9[5]:1121-
50, 1992).
 
--Ron Kaufman
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #2, January 25, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
 
 
Auburn Physiologist Wins HSUS Award
For Development Of An Animal Alternative
(Page 22 of newspaper)
 
Charles E. Branch, a professor of physiology at Auburn 
University, has received the second annual Russell and Burch 
Award from the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). The 
award, which includes a trophy and a $5,000 cash prize, is 
granted by HSUS in recognition of a scientist who has made 
significant contributions to the advancement of alternatives to 
the use of animals in research, testing, or education.
 
The award is named for William Russell and Rex Burch, two British 
scientists who, in 1959, first published Principles of Humane 
Experimental Technique (special edition, Universities Federation 
for Animal Welfare, Herts, England, 1992), a book that introduced 
the now-popular "three Rs" of establishing alternatives to animal 
testing: reduction, refinement, and replacement.
 
Branch created an interactive videodisc program to teach medical 
and veterinary students about cardiovascular physiology. 
"Traditionally," he says, "the students do these laboratories 
with live animals. So what we're trying to see is: Can they get 
similar benefits by doing the laboratory sitting at a computer 
instead of using another animal?"
 
The video shows a dissection of a dog that students watch instead 
of cutting into their own hounds. The program simulates 
laboratory exercises in catheterization of the left and right 
heart, autonomic control of the circulation, fibrillation and 
defibrillation, positive pressure ventilation, and euthanasia. 
The emphasis is on physiology and not surgery.
 
Branch's program requires an IBM-compatible computer with a 
split-screen monitor that is connected to a videodisc player. The 
set-up allows students to not simply watch the animated video of 
a physiological procedure, but make decisions and react to data 
displayed by the computer (C.E. Branch, et al., "Interactive 
videodisc simulated physiology laboratories," Computers in Life 
Science Education, 6[11]:81-8, 1989).
 
"For example, the students do not just see what the heart looks 
like during fibrillation," he says. "They also view chart 
recordings showing blood pressure and electrocardiograms."
 
To date, Branch says, 50 copies of the program have been sold and 
at least 30 are in schools. Many schools are investigating to see 
if the program could be applicable in the future to simulate 
actual surgery. "We will have to see if using it for surgery is 
practical," he says. "There is still no way with a video that you 
can do everything that a real experiment can do. You can't touch 
it and feel it and all that. So we'll see what the future holds."
According to Branch, students using the videodisc program 
required approximately 30 percent less time to achieve the same 
level of knowledge retention and performance level as students in 
traditional laboratories.
 
Branch received his bachelor's degree in 1964 in mechanical 
engineering and his Ph.D. in physiology in 1974 from Auburn. He 
is the founder of CONVINCE, a consortium of all 30 veterinary 
medical schools in North America that supports training workshops 
in interactive media alternatives to using live animals and funds 
grants for work related to animal alternatives.
 
--Ron Kaufman
 
 
 
(The Scientist, Vol:7, #2, January 25, 1993)
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)
                ================================
 
 
                           OBITUARIES
(Page 22 of newspaper)
Johannes Holtfreter, an embryologist at the University of 
Rochester and a pioneer in the study of embryonic cell growth, 
died November 13 in Rochester, N.Y. He was 91 years old. 
Holtfreter developed techniques to grow embryonic cells and 
tissues outside of an animal ("Differentiation of striated muscle 
cells in vitro," American Zoology, 5:719, 1965). Holtfreter 
joined the faculty in the department of zoology at Rochester in 
1946. He retired in 1969.
 
 
Helene W. Toolan, a cancer researcher who helped identify the 
relationship between viruses and human cancer cells, died 
November 29 in Bennington, Vt. She was 80 years old. Toolan was 
on the staff of the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research 
in New York from 1950 to 1964. In 1955, she received the Sloan 
Award for her work in transplanting human tumors and tissues into 
laboratory animals.
 
In 1964, Toolan became director of the Putnam Memorial Institute 
for Medical Research in Bennington. She became director, emerita, 
in 1978. In 1987, the institute was renamed the Helene W. Toolan 
Institute for Medical Research.
 
 
A. Gardner Fox, a researcher focusing on radar, microwaves, and 
laser beam devices, died November 24 in Harmony, Pa. He was 80 
years old. Fox worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories for 41 years 
and developed electronic mechanisms that were used in both 
telephone and airplane communications.
 
 
(Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)


