Research Federal Aid

Stanford University President Donald Kennedy, buffeted by months of high-profile controversies--especially the university's spending of federal research money--announced his resignation Monday. Kennedy's decision to step down in August, 1992, was detailed in a letter to Stanford's Board of Trustees. "At present we are talking too much about our problems and too little about our opportunities," Kennedy said in the letter.

The National Institutes of Health have canceled next week's inaugural meeting of a committee that was to review the first applications from scientists seeking federal funds for human embryonic cell research. It did so, agency officials said, after officials at the Department of Health and Human Services told them to cancel the meeting.

Little Lanxide Corp. was barely a spot on the map of the vast chemical and materials industry dominated by the likes of Dow and Du Pont until, less than a year after its birth in 1983, Lanxide was tapped on the shoulder by an obscure Pentagon agency. Getting anointed with a mere $1 million from the government gave Lanxide the credibility it needed to attract $250 million more from private investors and big corporate partners, including its Delaware neighbor Du Pont Co.

Congress loves to throw money at research on all manner of things--from breast cancer to alternative fuels to swine breeding. But when nosy scholars start poking into politics, lawmakers can get pretty touchy. That's one lesson learned the hard way recently by two political scientists who won a federal grant to study why a lot of qualified people decide not to run for Congress.

State health officials said Thursday that $341,000 the federal government recently allocated for a worker health study at Rockwell International's Santa Susana Field Laboratory west of Chatsworth is insufficient to do the long-awaited report.

California universities will host three of 11 new Science and Technology Centers, whose creation was announced Monday by the National Science Foundation, and will participate in a fourth. UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara and Caltech will receive a total of $6.975 million for first-year funding of the new centers, which are designed to promote basic research on complex problems that are of large scale and long duration, and that require special facilities or collaborative relationships.

The National Science Foundation is being pressured by California congressmen to continue funding a scientific research well near the San Andreas Fault, but the push to keep the project going is beginning to rankle some officials in Washington and even has the key scientists a little apprehensive.

A presidential commission charged with finding a way for the United States to beat Japan in capturing a large share of the lucrative market for superconductor technology has recommended a radically new approach to promoting and funding high-technology research. The commission's key recommendation is the formation of a half-dozen consortiums, each made up of several private companies, a government research laboratory and a university laboratory.

The House voted overwhelmingly to spend $14 million to help small towns reduce levels of cancer-causing radium in their drinking water supplies. The plan was approved as an amendment to a bill appropriating $492 million over three years for research into ground water contamination. House members voted 399 to 15 in favor of the research bill after agreeing unanimously to the radium-assistance amendment sponsored by Rep. Dennis J. Hastert (R-Ill.).

Harvard Medical School said Tuesday that it is withdrawing about $500,000 in costs mistakenly billed to the federal government as research-related expenses. Harvard acted in response to a widening congressional investigation of billing practices for federally funded research at the nation's elite universities. The inquiry started at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.

Aerospace Corp., created by the federal government as a nonprofit defense research lab during the Cold War, will transform itself into a for-profit corporation by merging with Science Applications International Corp. in a deal worth more than $200 million, the two firms said Tuesday.

Although the subject has received scant attention amid the Republican drive to slash government spending, proposed cuts in funding for the nation's scientific community would cut deeply into important research at universities and laboratories, scientists say. Under a plan now making its way through the House, funds for environment and energy research, commercial technologies and other endeavors would be cut by as much as 33%, or $5.

Want to know about the latest scientific findings on such issues as global warming, weather forecasting or gene research? You can find several federal agencies involved in each of those disciplines, all seemingly searching for the same answers to the same questions. And that, according to the new congressional leadership in Washington, means that money can be saved by eliminating duplication in federal research. Rep. Robert Walker (R-Pa.

As Congress concluded closed-door negotiations over the federal budget late last year, Sen. Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii) took advantage of arcane congressional rules to add $10 million to the bottom line for a center in Honolulu to increase public scientific literacy. Inouye was not the only one taking such action.

In a victory for President Bush and the scientific community, the Senate Monday voted to reverse a House decision to kill the superconducting super collider and approved $550 million to continue work on the giant atom smasher now under construction in Texas. The approval came in a two-step process that reflected strong lobbying by the Bush Administration and by leading U.S.

There's a room in the back of First Technology Safety System's assembly plant that looks a lot like a torture chamber. Inside, the company's auto crash test dummies are strapped into pendulum-like contraptions and left to the not-so-tender mercies of First Technology employees, whose job it is to drop their vinyl-skinned heads onto a metal plate, crush their stomachs with rigid steel cylinders and send 50-pound weights hurtling into their chests.

Congress loves to throw money at research on all manner of things--from breast cancer to alternative fuels to swine breeding. But when nosy scholars start poking into politics, lawmakers can get pretty touchy. That's one lesson learned the hard way recently by two political scientists who won a federal grant to study why a lot of qualified people decide not to run for Congress.

In a victory for President Bush and the scientific community, the Senate Monday voted to reverse a House decision to kill the superconducting super collider and approved $550 million to continue work on the giant atom smasher now under construction in Texas. The approval came in a two-step process that reflected strong lobbying by the Bush Administration and by leading U.S.

The federal government is investigating new allegations that Stanford University overbilled taxpayers as much as $480 million for research in the 1980s, more than twice previous estimates. "There have been some new questions brought up, which we're looking into, but nothing has been resolved yet," Norm Hanson, spokesman for the Office of Naval Research, said Friday. "This is all part of the review process."

The University of California charged the federal government for entertainment, flowers and chartered airplane travel as part of reimbursement for research costs, an internal UC audit has found. To preclude such questionable billings in the future, officials said UC is changing its accounting procedures. The overall value of such possibly controversial UC billings is not known because the review examined only a random sample, UC auditors stated.