WHAT'S NEW Friday, July 16, 2004

WHAT'S NEW   Robert L. Park   Friday, 16 Jul 04   Washington, DC

Paul Gresser contributed to this week's issue of What's New.

1. ETHICS: NEW CHOLESTEROL GUIDELINES DELIGHT THE DRUG COMPANIES. 
A government report released on Tuesday called for drastically 
lowering LDL cholesterol levels of millions of high-risk heart
patients.  So low in fact that the only way to get there is with
the help of statin drugs.  On Thursday, Newsday reported that six
of the nine panelists who produced the report had received grants
or consulting fees from big drug companies that produce statins.  
That's probably inevitable, but financial disclosure statements
were not included.  Just last week, we reported that researchers
at NIH are failing to disclose links to pharmaceutical companies.

2. HUBBLE: SCIENCE PANEL BEGS NASA TO SPARE THE LIFE OF HUBBLE.
In a report this week, a National Academy of Sciences panel urged
NASA to grant Hubble a reprieve.  The popular telescope has many
years of productive life ahead, provided batteries and gyroscopes
are replaced.  Sean O'Keefe argued a shuttle mission to Hubble
would be too risky, but later agreed that robots can do the job
(WN 4 Jun 04).  The NAS panel scoffed, citing the irreducible
complexity of robots.  At What's New, we calculated that
replacing bean-counting bureaucrats with robots would eliminate
the federal deficit by the end of the week.

3. GRADUATE STUDENTS: PERMISSION TO FORM LABOR UNIONS IS DENIED.
The National Labor Relations Board ruled that the relationship
between graduate students and universities is primarily for
educational purposes.  Therefore, graduate students at private
universities have no right to union recognition.  This was the
right thing to do.  Unions typically negotiate job security and
wage levels.  Standardized wages might be a boon to twelfth-year
students of 13th century Turkish ballet, but they would certainly
hurt physics students.  The harm that a diminished supply of
graduate students could do to a research university far outweighs
the benefits of job security.  The last thing a student needs is
a permanent career doing graduate work.

4. NUCLEAR SECRETS: IF WE CAN'T FIND THEM, THE ENEMY CAN'T EITHER
It's time again for the high-flying, death-defying, magically
vanishing hard drives of Los Alamos! This week two data storage
devices went AWOL from their nuclear weapons laboratory.  A
spokesman declined to state what exactly was gone, but suggested
it was "a serious situation."  All classified research has been
halted while the search continues.  This is just the latest in
the lab's long history of losing sensitive data, and the third
such incident this year.  Sometimes as an encore, fraud
investigators make the Los Alamos director disappear (WN 3 Jan
03), along with everything in his desk.  

THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND.  
Opinions are the author's and not necessarily shared by the
University of Maryland, but they should be.
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Archives of What's New can be found at http://www.aps.org/WN
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