Friday, 9 August 1991 Washington, DC
1. FY 92 ENERGY AND WATER APPROPRIATIONS BILL PASSED BY
CONGRESS.
Congress left town last week to escape the August
steam bath, but not before the two houses resolved their
differences over the FY 92 energy bill. There were winners and
losers: the SSC will get $484M, $50M less than the Administration
requested, while Basic Energy Sciences gets $765M, $50M more than
the request. Fusion gets the full $337M requested. Fermilab's
injector upgrade gets only $15M, but it seemed at one point that
it might not get even that. CEBAF will get $41.8M, $10M more
than the request, but the request was $20M less than expected
(WN 8 Feb 91).
Geothermal and Solar energy also get more than the
Administration asked for. In keeping with tradition, $100M was
set aside for science pork. So what got whacked? The DOE share
of Bush's Moon/Mars initiative.
2. SPENDING CAPS FAILED TO CURB APPETITES OF CONFEREES FOR
PORK!
In what has become a ritual pig-out, the House/Senate conferees
divvied up $100M in university science earmarks. Bennett Johnston
of Louisiana, who headed the Senate conferees, got $10M for an
Institute of Micromanufacturing at Louisiana Tech and $6M for a
Biomedical Research Institute at LSU. Tom Bevill of Alabama, who
led the House panel, got a $10M Materials Research Building and a
$2M Global Change Center for the Univ. of Alabama, plus $1.6M for
an Electronics Research Center at a state college in Eufala. And
Mark Hatfield, ranking minority on the Senate panel, got $10M for
ambulatory research at Oregon Health Sciences Univ. and $4.8M for
a Cancer Center at the Univ. of South Carolina, which gave his
son a full scholarship (WN 8 Mar 91).
Ranking minority on the House side, John Myers of Indiana, got
$10M for a Cancer Center at the University of Indiana. Lesser
members got lesser amounts.
3. REPORT ON POTENTIAL CARCINOGENICITY OF ELECTROMAGNETIC
FIELDS
is seriously flawed according to a review panel. The
public first became aware of the draft EPA report when Dan Rather
leaked it on CBS News in May of 1990. The draft identified 60
Hertz magnetic fields as a "probable" cause of cancer. "Probable"
was changed to "possible" in a later version. That might seem to
put magnetic fields in the same risk category as artichokes, but
it still went too far for Allan Bromley, who insisted on an
outside scientific review of the draft report. Since Dan Rather
is unlikely to leak the review panel's conclusion, we decided to
leak it ourselves in the interest of balance. The review panel
accepts the possibility that non-mutating agents can affect the
incidence of cancer, but notes that there is no clear evidence
that fields below 20 gauss affect biological systems. The panel
emphasizes the absence of a plausible mechanism and the failure
to determine a dose-response relationship (more does not seem to
be worse--a classic symptom of pathological science). The review
panel concludes that the EPA draft report should be re-written
and then re-reviewed. To add to the confusion, Science magazine
last week leaked another EPA draft report that outlines an
EMF/cancer research strategy.
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