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.



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.