piner@pur-phy.UUCP (Richard Piner) (11/15/85)
Posted: Mon Sep 16, 1985 10:35 AM EDT Msg: XGIF-2070-3637
From: RPARK
To: WHATSNEW
CC: RPark
Subj: What's New
WHAT'S NEW, Friday, September 13, 1985 Washington, D.C.
1. A PETITION ON BEHALF OF ANDREI SAKHAROV and his wife
Yelena Bonner was delivered to the Soviet Embassy on Tuesday
by the Human Rights Committee of the National Academy of
Sciences. The petition appealed to the Soviet authorities to
release the Sakharovs from exile "on humanitarian grounds in
the interest of relations between our two countries and to
foster scientific cooperation." Joint symposia with the
Soviet Academy of Sciences were suspended in 1980 by the NAS
following the exile of Sakharov to Gorky. Negotiations to
renew exchanges, begun early this year, have not yet reached
a successful conclusion. Many US scientists object to
efforts to restart exchanges while Sakharov and others
continue to be oppressed. They find themselves in uneasy
company with Pentagon hawks who oppose all scientific
exchanges and cooperation with the Soviet Union on less
humanitarian grounds.
2. PAUL J. FLORY, Nobel laureate in chemistry and a former
member of the Human Rights Committee of the NAS, died of a
heart attack on Monday. He once offered himself as a hostage
to the Soviet government if they would allow Yelena Bonner to
travel to the west for medical treatment.
3. THE NSF ENGINEERING INITIATIVE is contained in an
amendment to the NSF Authorization Act for FY 86 which has
passed the House and is currently pending in the Senate. The
amendment explicitly authorizes NSF to support fundamental
engineering research, and would alter the Organic Act
establishing the NSF to read "science and engineering"
everywhere is now reads "science," except in the title. It
is at best a legal nicety since engineering is the major
growth area in an NSF budget that remains frozen at $1.5
billion. The issue of which Senate committee should have
jurisdiction over the NSF, however, continues to be
unresolved (What's New, May 17) and it seems likely that this
year, as in every year since 1981, there will be no formal
authorization for the NSF, once again frustrating attempts to
sanctify what has been going on for years.
4. TO KEEP THE NSF BUDGET IN PERSPECTIVE, it might be noted
that if the cigarette tax reduction takes place as scheduled
on October 1, the annual loss in revenue ($1.7 billion) will
exceed the entire authorization for the NSF for FY 86. The
DIVAD anti-aircraft system development, abandoned by the
Pentagon when it failed its qualifying exams, consumed
$2 billion.
Robert L. Park
American Physical Society THAT'S ALL 9/13/85