Innovation in san francisco

In San Francisco 2 weeks ago, AAAS and Science sponsored a new meeting, Science Innovation '92. The unusual gathering focused not on research results but on new techniques and instruments, particularly for biomedical science. As seen in the stories below, some of the most eye-catching innovations emerged at the intersection of physics and biology.     

AAAS Meeting Draws a Crowd

The annual meeting of the AAAS, held in San Francisco on 14 to 19 January, attracted the largest turnout for several years. More than 6000 are estimated to have attended. The meeting, which was held in conjunction with the winter meeting of the American Physical Society and the annual meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers, was reminiscent in some respects of the big AAAS annual gatherings of the late 1960s and early 1970s-even down to the presence of demonstrators, this year from the animal rights movement. Some highlights of the more than 250 sessions:     

AAAS in Mexico: Inter-American Goodwill but Little Press Coverage

This summer, in cooperation with the Mexican government's National Council of Science and Technology, the AAAS marked its 125th anniversary with a special meeting in Mexico City, the association's first in Latin America. For the occasion, News and Comment asked Edward Edelson, a science writer for the New York Daily News who has covered previous AAAS meetings, to review the Mexico City gathering from a reporter's point of view. A second article by Robert Gillette of the News and Comment staff will elaborate on the objectives of the meeting and on the difficulties of organizing a major international conference.     

Corrections and clarifications

In Elizabeth Culotta's article "Entrepreneurs say: "It's better to be the boss" (Special Section, Women in Science '93, 16 Apr., p. 406), Henry Etzkowitz was incorrectly described as a sociologist "at Rutgers University." Dr. Etzkowitz is at the State University of New York at Purchase.     

Cohen-Boyer patent to be issued soon

The U.S. Patent Office is expected to approve shortly a genetic engineering claim filed in 1978 by Stanley Cohen of Stanford University and Herbert Boyer of the University of California at San Francisco. The application, regarded as a test case by the biotechnology community, was preliminarily rejected in 1982 when the Patent Office raised questions about the inventorship status of a third researcher, and about the completeness of the information disclosed in the claim. Just how these questions were resolved will be made public when the patent is formally issued and the universities open their correspondence files.     

Amersham Pharmacia Biotech & Science Prize. Transposition and evolution of antigen-specific immunity

Alka Agrawal grew up in Farmington Hills, near Detroit, Michigan, and earned her bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the University of Michigan. Dr. Agrawal entered the pharmacology graduate school program at Yale University and began working in the laboratory of David Schatz, investigating the role of DNA repair proteins in V(D)J recombination. The development of an in vitro V(D)J cleavage system in the laboratory changed her focus and she began studying the cleavage mechanism as part of her doctoral research. Exposure to science policy at the National Academy of Sciences, and to science journalism through the AAAS Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellows Program, prompted Dr. Agrawal to pursue a career in science writing.     

Corrections and clarifications

In the letter of 23 October by Charles A. Gardner (p. 530), Dr. Gardner's address was incorrectly given as the Subcommittee on Human Resources and Intergovernmental Relations of the House Committee on Government Operations. Dr. Gardner was a AAAS Congressional Science Fellow assigned to that subcommittee through August 1992, but the views expressed in his letter were his own and not those of the subcommittee.     

Updating and correction

The current editions of two books edited by William T. Golden, Science Advice to the President and Science and Technology Advice to the President, Congress, and Judiciary, published this year by AAAS Press, are now being distributed by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, NJ 08903, at the prices $22.95 and $27.95 (paper), respectively, and are no longer available from AAAS. A related work, Golden's 1991 compilation Worldwide Science and Technology Advice to the Highest Levels of Government, originally published by Pergamon Press, is also being distributed by Transaction Publishers, at $25.95. For more information about the books see Science 1 July, p. 127. In the review of K. S. Thorne's Black Holes and Time Warps (13 May, p. 999-1000), the captions and illustrations on p. 1000 were mismatched. The correct order of the captions is (i) "A heavy rock..."; (ii) "Cosmic radio waves..."; and (iii) "The trajectories in space...."     

Scientific fraud probed at AAAS meeting

Fraud in science was the topic of a panel discussion at the 1985 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Participants identified competitive pressures in universities for promotion and financial rewards in the form of research grants as encouraging fraudulent practices. An excessive emphasis in some laboratories on publication was also held responsible for fraud or other misconduct that increases a scientist's list of citations. Among the suggestions put forward for solving the problem were more careful screening of applicants for research positions, stricter laboratory supervision, longer-term federal grants, and limitations on the number of his or her papers that a researcher is allowed to cite in grant applications.     

News of Science

In the "Preliminary announcement of the seventh New York AAAS meeting," 25 May issue, page 949, the name "Society of Vertebrate Zoology" was mistakenly given as one of the cosponsors of the symposium on "Biotic communities in the past and today." The correct name of the society referred to is Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.     

Cohen-Boyer patent finally issued

On 28 August 1984, the Patent Office finally approved a second Cohen-Boyer patent which covers hybrid bacterial plasmids. This patent, together with an earlier one covering methods, provides the University of California, San Francisco, and Stanford University with proprietary control over the basic techniques and tools used in gene splicing. The Patent Office rejected a claim by an alleged third co-inventor because of doubts about whether information in the patent application would enable the plasmids to be duplicated. The universities accepted the patent's restriction to bacterial plasmids and will pursue a separate application for yeast plasmids.     

Geophysics: ancient air, ozone, and faults

Researchers who gathered in San Francisco in December at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union heard the usual variety of talks treating everything from Earth's core to the tenuous wisps of solar particles far beyond Pluto. Earthquakes, the local California variety in particular, figured prominently, as did the currently popular subjects of ancient air trapped in amber and the deepening Antarctic ozone hole.     

Book reviews

Paul Thompson is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Agricultural Economics at Texas A&M University. He is currently conducting research under a grant from the National Science Foundation, Ethics and Value Studies program on the role of ethics and values in the planning of agricultural research activities, and completing a textbook entitledEthics, Public Policy and Agiculture with Eileen Olsen VanRavenswaay and Robert Matthews slated for publication by Macmillan in 1990.     

Microbiology. Fighting bacterial fire with bacterial fire

Work presented last week at the annual meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology in San Francisco suggests that applying a harmless bacterium or its products to surgical wounds may thwart infections by the dangerous pathogen Staphylococcus aureus, a major cause of hospital-acquired infections. Although physicians have previously pitted one bacterium against another to prevent infections of the intestinal and genitourinary tracts, this is the first attempt to use a friendly microbe to prevent infection of surgical wounds, say experts. The findings also point to a possible mechanism for this "bacterial interference." They suggest that a protein secreted by the harmless bacterium prevents the pathogen from getting a foothold in injured tissue.     

研究生创新能力培养途径与方法探讨

创新能力的培养是研究生教育的灵魂。为了提高研究生的创新能力,在研究生教育中应加强学校学科建设和导师队伍建设,激发和强化研究生的创新意识,提高创新教育的环境条件水准。河北农业大学根据自身情况,通过设立创新基金激发了研究生的创新能力;通过课程设置、教学方式和教学环节的改革,构建了研究生具有创新能力的知识体系;通过开设《创新学》课程和设立创新实践基地,培养和提高了研究生创新的思维方式和技术。     

Geophysics from triton to the deep blue sea: new quake forecast: north by northwest

Geophysics is closing out the 1980s with a bang. October's Loma Prieta earthquake grabbed the spotlight at this month's American Geophysical Union's annual fall meeting in, of all places, San Francisco; the quake also closed down one of the official hotels, depriving hundreds of the 4500 attendees of rooms. Other hot topics of the late 1980s-Voyager's tour of the outer solar system and the greenhouse effect-got their share of attention as well.     

Catastrophes of every ilk at the geophysics fest

At the annual meeting of the American Geophysics Union (AGU) in San Francisco on 7-11 December, catastrophes came in all sizes. On the molecular level, atmospheric chemists had news about the manmade compounds destroying the ozone shield-and for once the news was good. More earthshaking were signs of long-distance connections among earthquakes. And from farther afield came reports of odd-shaped debris from mini-planet collisions.     

Geologists Get Together to Dissect Earth's Thin Skin

At the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Boston during late October, Earth's crust came in for close scrutiny. One surprise was its age: Chemical and isotopic evidence suggested the crust formed soon after the planet did. Participants also discussed features of today's crust, including a horizontal slice beneath San Francisco and the possibility that a particular kind of crustal stretching, long envisioned, may not actually take place.     

Ancient and modern, rock and fluid meet in san francisco

With 6000 attendees and 4700 presentations, the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco last month was the biggest yet. And that made room for even more diversity than usual. Only the AGU could accommodate news of asteroid impacts and extinctions one-third of a billion years ago and a progress report on the first direct measurements of centimeter-scale ocean mixing, an ongoing study in the Atlantic.