piner@pur-phy.UUCP (Richard Piner) (11/15/85)
Posted: Fri Oct 18, 1985 3:40 PM EDT Msg: YGIF-2094-3642
From: RPARK
To: WHATSNEW
CC: Rpark
Subj: What's New
WHAT'S NEW, Friday, October 18, 1985 Washington, D.C.
1. ETHICS AND VALUES IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY (EVIST) will
continue to be supported by the NSF. Erich Bloch had dropped
EVIST from his FY 86 budget request, but Congress has
directed the Foundation to make $1 million available for the
program. The National Endowment for the Humanities, which
was the only other federal agency funding ethics programs, no
longer provides support in this area.
2. RESEARCH ON STARS WARS is scorned by more than half of
the faculty in the nation's top 14 physics departments and
the number is rapidly growing according to the Committee for
a Sane Nuclear Policy. These scientists signed a pledge
neither to accept SDI support nor work on projects funded by
SDI. At a press conference in Washington yesterday, Philip
Anderson, of Princeton, one of ten Nobel Laureates who signed
the statement, declared that "This is not so much a petition
as it is a boycott." Another Princeton Nobelist who took the
pledge is Val Fitch, President-elect of the APS. The
Innovative Science and Tehnology Office of the Strategic
Defense Initiative Organization, however, declares that it
finds plenty of takers for SDI funding. Jim Ionson, the
Director of IST, has been quoted as saying that two
second-rate scientists are as good as one first-rate.
The organized opposition to SDI was prompted by an
SDI/ISTO "white paper" dated March 1985 that attempts to
provide scientists with a description of the nature of the
technical programs that ISTO is seeking to support. In a
preface to the white paper signed by Ionson, it is asserted
that "the response from the academic, business, and
government laboratory communities [to SDI] was immediate and
overwhelming as everyone attempted to find out as much as
possible about the nature of the technical program, and how
they could become involved in the research projects of this
new office."
3. INDIRECT COST RATES FOR FY 86 WILL BE FROZEN at the FY 85
rate if the Senate has its way on the NIH Appropriations
Bill. The indirect cost rate is the negotiated figure that
determines the overhead paid on a federal grant. An
estimated $30 million will be lost by institutions that have
negotiated a higher rate for FY 86. The big losers will be
La Jolla, Berkeley, Washington and MIT. Not everyone sees
this as bad news. Indeed, few issues so sharply divide
university researchers from university administrators.
Researchers tend to view overhead as a ripoff of funds that
should go to research while administrators argue the
necessity of recovering all the costs involved in research.
Robert L. Park
American Physical Society THAT'S ALL 10/18/85