From the 30 July issue of Science magazine, p. 651. The W. M. Keck Foundation, best known for funding giant telescopes that help scientists peer into the distant universe, has decided to invest $110 million to help life on Earth. Yesterday the foundation announced its second-largest grant ever to bolster the University of Southern California's (USC's) medical school and to advance the field of ne...
Reprinted with permission of Science News, 25 June 2004 For years, the biomedical community has worried about the graying of the average investigator supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). A National Academy of Sciences (NAS) panel tackling this stubborn problem has revived an old idea: a special grant tailored to young researchers with bright ideas but little or no preliminary dat...
BACK TO THE FEATURE INDEX Watching the men at work on the freezing, rain-whipped deck below, the scientists gathered at the back of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) ship RRS James Clark Ross yell "Yes!" and "Great!" If they were Americans, they'd be exchanging high-fives. We've pulled up another nice, long core of gooey, gray mud from the antarctic sea floor--a relief after our first couple of ...
Ecologists on a Mission to Save the World A New Breed of Scientist-Advocate Emerges At Home on the Range A Reluctant Warrior Citizen-Scientist Guru She made Newsweek's 1997 "Century Club" of 100 people to watch in the new millennium. She has to her credit five papers that have appeared in Science and Nature. At 35, Gretchen Daily has already made a name for herself as a leading voice in ecology--...
Reposted with permission from Science Magazine , Volume 303, Number 5657, Issue of 23 Jan 2004, p. 451. When Congress ordered a report on racial and socioeconomic disparities in the health of U.S. citizens, it wasn't expecting a smiley face. But that is what it got, according to Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA), who last week accused the Bush Administration of whitewashing federal researchers' ...
The president's 2006 budget request last week contained dismal news for biomedical researchers--a mere 0.7% raise, to $28.8 billion, for the National Institutes of Health (NIH). And the fine print was just as bad: Success rates for grant applications are projected to be 22% this year, down from 30% in 2003. That slump, along with an 8% drop in the number of new grants (see table, below), confirms...
Ecologists on a Mission to Save the World A New Breed of Scientist-Advocate Emerges Role Model for Ecology's Generation X A Reluctant Warrior At Home On the Range Stephen H. Schneider is the quintessential media-savvy scientist-advocate. Since the early 1970s, this climatologist and science popularizer has been a fixture on TV news shows, on Capitol Hill, and on White House panels, where he weigh...
Ecologists on a Mission to Save the World A New Breed of Scientist-Advocate Emerges Role Model for Ecology's Generation X Citizen-Scientist Guru At Home on the Range Gene Likens never intended to let himself get drawn into the maelstrom of environmental politics. But that was before his low-key style of activism earned him a sterling reputation both as a researcher and as an advocate for bringing...
A New Breed of Scientist-Advocate Emerges Role Model for Ecology's Generation X A Reluctant Warrior Citizen-Scientist Guru At Home on the Range Anger wells up whenever Les Watling recalls the cruise that helped transform the reclusive scientist into a vocal champion of biodiversity. It was August 1993, and Watling was revisiting a spot in the Gulf of Maine where, a few years earlier, he had stumb...
