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.



Bob Park can be reached via email at whatsnew@bobpark.org
THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND
Opinions are the author's and are not necessarily shared by the University, but they should be.