Michael Hagmann is European correspondent for Science magazine.A version of this article appears in the 26 May issue of Science. The scientific establishment got a royal roasting last Wednesday as Prince Charles decried society's overdependence on science and technology. He predicted "potentially disastrous ... consequences" if today's science is allowed to go unchecked and "the spiritual dimensi...
Next year British universities go under the microscope for the fifth Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), an attempt to help the government invest wisely in academic infrastructure. And even some of its most persistent critics acknowledge that the RAE, which has drawn international attention, has overcome a rocky start and is working increasingly well. "Each successive RAE is moving closer to the ...
CAMBRIDGE, U.K.-- On Monday, Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown announced that the British government would invest more than $100 million over the next 5 years to help jump-start a broad new research and education alliance between the University of Cambridge here and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The institute will make use of existin...
The report, * presented to EU research commissioner Philippe Busquin this week, is one of the outcomes of a conference on women in science held in April 1998. In the wake of the meeting, then-research commissioner Edith Cresson asked Mary Osborn, a cell biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany, to assemble a group of experts and look in detail at the s...
Like many top Spanish scientists in recent years, Miguel Beato coped with his country's prolonged science funding funk by working abroad. "I'd given up ever going back to Spain," he says. But now that Barcelona is building a $55 million biomedical research park and planning a biocenter at the University of Barcelona, Beato, a cell biologist at the University of Marburg in Germany, is contemplatin...
