🚀 go-pugleaf

Date: Fri, 21 Aug 92 12:41:13 PDT
To: ichihara@rikvax.riken.go.jp
From: "Janice Smith" <VP.APS@STANFORD.BITNET>
Subject: What's New for August 21, 1992

WHAT'S NEW, Friday, 21 August 1992                 Washington, DC

1. NSF PROPOSES REQUIREMENTS FOR CONFLICT OF INTEREST DISCLOSURE.
The proposal, published in the 16 July 92 Federal Register, would
require grantee institutions to maintain "an appropriate written
and enforced policy on conflict of interest."  Each proposal to
NSF would have to include a list of significant financial ties
between the investigators (or family or business associates) and
parties that might have a financial stake in the outcome of the
research.  Why now?  I mean, besides the fact that this is the
season when most faculty take their vacations.  The short answer
is John Dingell (D-MI), the chairman of the House Investigations
Subcommittee that uncovered research fraud in the Baltimore case
and overhead abuses at Stanford.  Dingell's investigators are now
looking into whether faculty at major universities have diverted
federal research funds into support for commercial enterprises.
The deadline for comments on the proposed changes is 14 Sept 92.

2. IRONICALLY, THE SCIENCE BOARD WANTS STRONGER INDUSTRIAL TIES.
The problem of conflict of interest mushroomed following adoption
of legislation in 1980 allowing universities to hold the patents
to technologies resulting from government-funded research.  The
intent was to accelerate applications of basic research. The next
step, of course, is to do applied research in the first place--
and that is just what the National Science Board recommends for
NSF in a report released last week.  The NSB plan has already had
an impact; it was incorporated into the report language of the
Senate VA/HUD/IA appropriations bill (WN 7 Aug 92), which will be
taken up by the full Senate as soon as it returns in September.
Meanwhile, NSB has established a Special Commission on the Future
of the National Science Foundation that seems to be charged with
figuring out how to make the Foundation a handmaiden of industry.
The Endless Frontier, Vannevar Bush's visionary 1945 study, con-
tains a warning by a committee that included I.I. Rabi, professor
physics at Columbia, Oliver Buckley, President of Bell Labs, and
Edwin Land, President of Polaroid: "Under pressure for immediate
results, and unless deliberate policies are set up to guard
against it, applied research invariably drives out pure."

3. BUT NASA IS PREPARING TO ANSWER "A BASIC BIOLOGICAL QUESTION."
Thirty people have worked for over 8 years getting ready for this
Spacelab mission, which will cost about $1B. Biologists the world
over are tingling with anticipation as they await results of the
early September mission to find out "if gravity is essential to
the normal fertilization of frog eggs and the early development
of frogs."  Although frog eggs have been studied in space before,
this will be the first time they have been fertilized in space.
The mission will also test the effectiveness of "autogenic feed-
back training" on space sickness.  The tadpole experiment is a
worthy successor to last year's jellyfish mission, in which 4,238
jellyfish were photographed swimming in zero gravity.  It was
reported that the jellyfish seemed confused.  So who isn't?

Robert L. Park  (202) 662-8700     The American Physical Society

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