Friday, 22 Apr 94 Washington, DC
1. "SPECIAL TASKS": STALIN ERA ASSASSIN RESUMES HIS FORMER TRADE.
Pavel Sudoplatov, an admitted assassin and spymaster, has rescued
himself from obscurity and poverty by publishing his memoirs. By
far the most sensational chapter of "Special Tasks" asserts
without documentation that Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, George Gamow, J.
Robert Oppenheimer and Leo Szilard were engaged in passing atomic
secrets to Russian agents. None of them are around to answer the
allegations, but three Manhattan Project physicists who are still
around fired off an indignant letter to The McNeil-Lehrer News
Hour protesting its uncritical coverage of the story; Hans Bethe,
Robert Wilson and Victor Weisskopf expressed their amazement that
McNeil-Lehrer would broadcast such shattering claims without any
effort to check the facts. "As a result, you helped a criminal,
who has mounted a highly skilled effort to make himself rich, to
slander some of the greatest scientists of this century."
2. NSF IS ASKED TO SURVEY THE QUALITY OF UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION.
In the NSF Authorization Bill
(WN 15 Apr 94), the House Science,
Space and Technology Committee revealed a touch of skepticism
concerning the commitment of research universities to undergraduate
education. The bill calls for the top 100 research schools
to supply NSF with such information as: a description of teacher
training programs for teaching assistants, the relative weight of
teaching and research in promotion and tenure, the use of Federal
funds to gain release from classroom teaching, and the percentage
of faculty with grant support who teach no undergraduate courses.
3. ANTI-EARMARKING AMENDMENT WILL BE INTRODUCED IN FLOOR DEBATE.
A third of the members of the SS&T Committee took the unusual
step of attaching an "Additional View" to the Report of the NSF
Authorization Bill. They deplore the Committee's failure to pass
the Boehlert amendment, which would bar institutions that accept
earmarks from receiving NSF funds
(WN 8 Apr 94), and promise to
revisit the issue when the bill comes to the floor of the House.
4. ENERGY LABS BILL DROPS CONSOLIDATION AND CONVERSION LANGUAGE.
An amended version of a bill to clarify post-Cold War missions of
DOE labs would continue weapons research at the three big nuclear
weapons labs. Los Alamos, Livermore and Sandia would also share
responsibility for environmental research and for energy-related
research, including fundamental science. The substitute measure
was introduced by Marilyn Lloyd (D-TN), the chair of the Energy
Subcommittee. An anti-pork provision in the bill would require
specific authorization for all new non-military projects. Harris
Fawell (R-IL), the ranking Republican on the Energy Subcommittee,
objected to the revised bill, contending the broad mission of the
major labs will doom single-purpose labs such as the Princeton
Plasma Physics Lab. Meanwhile, an outside review panel, chaired
by Robert Galvin, is assessing the future of the labs for DOE.
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