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Labour unions and the chemical industry have locked the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration in a dispute over translating carcinogenicity data into appropriate regulatory controls. David Dickson reports
In a unique experiment in cooperation with private industry, writes David Dickson, the US government and leading oil companies are about to announce plans for sharing the costs of a 10-year research programme to investigate the Earth's continent margins
A MAJOR report on biotechnology in Britain — not yet published but made available to Nature — calls for a rapid increase in investment to build a competitive industry. It says the “customer-contractor” principle should be scrapped for biotechnology, where the border-lines between basic and applied research are grey. The report is a first draft — though unlikely to be substantially altered — from a seven-man working party set up early last year under Dr Alfred Spinks, a former research director of Imperial Chemical Industries. Robert Walgate reviews its hard-hitting and interventionist recommendations.
The brain drain of scientists from the poorer countries of the Middle East has switched from the industrialised West to the oil-rich countries of the region. And some countries are running successful schemes to attract expatriate scientists back. Ziauddin Sardar reports
François Jacob wants industry's money for fundamental biology — but not its control. A Nobel laureate for his work on the lac operon (he shared the prize with Jaques Monod), he is head of the cellular genetics unit in the department of molecular biology, Institut Pasteur in Paris. He spoke with Robert Walgate
