Biomedical Research

A Nobel Prize-winning microbiologist at UC San Francisco, Dr. Harold E. Varmus, is expected to be named the new director of the National Institutes of Health, Clinton Administration sources said Wednesday. Officially, Varmus and one other candidate are undergoing final vetting for the position, but sources in Washington said that Varmus has been offered the job and has accepted. Varmus was the co-winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology with Dr. J.

Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep! Jack fell down and broke his crown! Hickory, dickory, dock, the mouse ran up the clock! Goodness gracious! Will Cockburn, presented with these three famous nursery rhyme lines, find some Israeli conspiracy behind them? SOL C. ROSENBLATT Seal Beach

Recently, more than 50 health organizations joined together to issue a statement to all Americans. Representing victims of cancer, diabetes, arthritis, narcolepsy, blindness, cerebral palsy, cystic fibrosis, heart disease, epilepsy, mental illness, kidney disease, Parkinson's disease, and other afflictions, these groups said: "The abandonment of animal research would be an abrogation of our primary responsibility to try to save human lives. "Should animal research be lost to the scientific community, the victims would not be the scientists.

UC Irvine has taken the first steps toward creating a large, private, biomedical business complex on the west end of the campus, which officials say would bolster Orange County's economy as well as the university's reputation in medical research. Calling it the "project of the turn of the century for UCI," Chancellor Jack W. Peltason told a committee of the UC Board of Regents on Thursday that the 124-acre proposed development would include a maximum of 1.

The grueling propaganda war over the use of animals in biomedical research has shifted to an improbable battleground--the august pages of the 224-year-old Encyclopaedia Britannica and, specifically, the latest entry under the heading "Dogs." There, buried in the usual boilerplate--descendant of wolves, impressive olfaction, et cetera--the Britannica's anointed dog expert has seen fit to include what biomedical researchers, in high dudgeon, describe as a little antivivisection agitprop.

It is known in some circles as Sick Kids' Day, a kind of Capitol Hill casting call for diseases and one of the most remarkable rituals in the annual scramble for a piece of the $8.2-billion U. S. biomedical research funding pie. Sick Kids' Day is actually three or four days in spring, when advocates for hundreds of conditions from AIDS to SIDS parade before congressional committees and plead their cases for more federally funded research into their disease.

Nayereh Tohidi, a psychology professor at Santa Monica College, will be returning to her roots Tuesday when she leaves for Azerbaijan State University in the Soviet Union. The Fulbright Scholar will serve as a guest lecturer at the university for the 1991-92 school year. "I will be lecturing on psychology of gender, which is very new in the Soviet Union," she said. The fact that she will be in a Muslim society with a circumscribed role for women does give her pause.

The animal-rights debate has pounced on "Quantum Leap." Or is it vice versa? NBC's bold, provocative series is being pressured to alter a planned episode for fall in which hero Sam Beckett zooms back to the 1970s, where he inhabits the body of a research chimpanzee set to die or suffer severe injuries in a crash-impact test.