Organization: Penn State University
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 1992 15:59:24 EDT
From: <WTU@psuvm.psu.edu>
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: "What's New" Aug-21-1992

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	From att!Forsythe.Stanford.EDU!VP.APS Fri Aug 21 15:49:17 1992
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	From: "Janice Smith" <VP.APS@Forsythe.Stanford.EDU>
	Subject: What's New for August 21, 1992
	Status: R

	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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