Welcome to the ASB Newsletter #21

AUSTRALIAN SOCIETY FOR BIOPHYSICS

WELCOME to the January edition of the ASB email newsletter.

Please visit our NEW WWW site and send me your comments. The address is:
http://www.anatomy.su.oz.au/ASB/

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NEWS ITEMS

(1) report from the outgoing ASB President
(2) ASB News: (a) clarification of the rules for eligibility for the ABS
prizes; (b) teaching resources from the US Biophysics Society
(3) Update on the AAS National Committee for Biophysics proposal for a
National Summer Vacation Scholarship.
(4) Sir Gustav Nossal speaks on Government policies
(5) FASTS Top 10 Issues in Australian Science
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(1) report from the outgoing ASB President

At the 1997 Annual meeting in Melbourne I officially ended my two-year term
as President. It has been a busy two years and I am delighted to hand over
to the more youthful and energetic Glenn King who will assume the
Presidency when he returns from study leave in Connecticut next month. I
have been keeping the seat warm for him since October.

Rather than make a lengthy report, I have decided to make a few "bullet"
points of what I consider to be the high-lights of the past two years:
* Initiation of these electronic Newsletters has improved communication
within the Society, and the communication has been two way.
* Initiation of the ASB website. This has recently been revamped under the
direction of the incoming President, Glenn King. The new site is managed by
Pierre Moens. If ASB members would like to have the ASB website linked
their websites please contact him (pierre@anatomy.usyd.edu.au)
* The ASB had its representative (CdR) elected to the Council of the
International Union for Pure & Applied Biophysics (IUPAB)
* A joint meeting with US and Japanese Biophysical Societies was held in
Maui, Hawaii. The Australian government (DIST) funded the attendance of
five Australian biophysicists
* Initiation of a National Summer Vacation Scholarship scheme to introduce
our brightest science students  to our best research laboratories. The
pilot scheme should commence in the summer of 1999 (see Item 2 below)

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(2) Clarification of the ASB rules for eligibility of candidates for the
ASB student prizes.

The ASB executive agreed that a student MUST BE A FINANCIAL MEMBER of the
society to be eligible for the poster prize at our annual conferences.
Supervisors will be responsible for making this clear to their students who
intend to present at future meetings. The rules governing the Young
Biophysicist award are available on the ASB website. The most important
condition is that applicants must be financial members for at least 12
months standing.
 

New teaching resources from the US Biophysics Society

You may be interested in new resources for teaching biophysics that are
being provided through the Biophysical Society-sponsored On-Line Biophysics
Textbook. The Textbook may be reached through the Society Home page URL

http://www.faseb.org/biophys/society/biohome.htm
or directly
http://biosci.cbs.umn.edu/biophys/OLTB/Textbook.html

All of the teaching articles which have been published in Biophysical
Journal are now available on the Web. Titles and authors are:

* Teaching Molecular Biophysics at the Graduate Level
       Norma Allewell and Victor Bloomfield
* Graduate Training in Cellular Biophysics
       Thomas D. Pollard
* Teaching Electron Diffraction and Imaging of Macromolecules
       Wah Chiu, Michael F. Schmid, and B.V. Venkataram Prasad
* Teaching High-Resolution Nuclear Magnetic Resonance to Graduate
  Students in Biophysics
       Laura Lerner and David A. Horita
* Teaching Active Transport At the Turn of the Twenty-First Century:
  Recent Discoveries and Conceptual Changes
       Giuseppe Inesi
* Teaching Medical Physics to General Audiences
       Suzanne Amador
* Approaches to Teaching Fluorescence Spectroscopy
       Catherine Royer
* XRayView: A Teaching Aid for X-Ray Crystallography
       George N. Phillips, Jr.
* Teaching Computer Interfacing with Virtual Instruments in an
  Object-Oriented Language
       Miriam Gulotta
* Calculation of Biochemical Net Reactions and Pathways by Using Matrix
  Operations
       Robert A. Alberty
* Teaching Light Scattering Spectroscopy: The Dimension and Shape of
  Tobacco Mosaic Virus
       Nuno C. Santos and Miguel A.R.B. Castanho
* Do's and Don'ts of Poster Presentation
       Stephen Block

We also have a few sections of chapters written specially for various
volumes of the On-Line textbook: * Intermolecular forces
  Electrodynamic (van der Waals) forces       Adrian Parsegian
* Thermodynamics  Thermodynamics and Statistical Thermodynamics
Victor Bloomfield
* Nucleic Acids  DNA condensation  (This is also linked to the
Supramolecular Assemblies volume.)       Victor Bloomfield

These articles and sections are in the form of pdf files which may be down
loaded and viewed using the free Adobe Acrobat Reader. You may print them
and  distribute them to your students.

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(3) Update on the National Committee for Biophysics

Mobilising Young Scientists

The training of talented young biophysicists is an essential part of an
overall innovation strategy for biophysics.  Like every other scientific
discipline, a national basic research strategy must be in place and it must
be combined with the appropriate training facilities for our young
scientists.

Australia borrowed much of its research culture from the UK rather than the
USA.  A consequence is that our young scientists do not have a culture of
moving away from their home city after graduating from school or moving
away from their university after obtaining a bachelor degree in science.
This lack of mobility can hamper, and certainly does not foster, contact
between our best young scientists and our best research institutions.

The Australian Academy of Science (AAS), through its National Committee for
Biophysics has initiated a new scheme designed to overcome this immobility.
It aims to provide opportunities for our most talented honours level
science students to gain invaluable research experience over an eight week
period during the summer vacation. In this respect the scheme resembles the
US National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates
program.

A pilot scheme will be initiated in the summer of 1999 involving The
University of Sydney, The University of Queensland, The Australian National
University, and The University of Melbourne. Projects in biophysics and
other disciplines will be described on the AAS website which will outline
research proposals to be investigated over an eight-week period. We expect
to receive 20-25 projects from each university.

Students will log on to this site, select and personally rank 2-3 projects,
and deposit their academic records. The universities will review and rank
the applicants to their institutions and the AAS will approve a number of
applications at each university, depending on the available funding.

Each Summer Scholar will be paid $2500, significantly more than standard
summer vacation scholarship stipends. They will be jointly funded by the
Australian Research Council and by the host institution on a 50:50 basis.
Additional funding to cover travel and accommodation costs will be met by
the ARC while the universities will meet research costs. In this pilot
scheme about 20 scholarships will be awarded.

Ultimately, when this pilot scheme becomes available to all research
organisations in Australia, we expect it to allow about 100 of the best
Australian students to gain experience with the best research institutions.
The provision of mobility for our best research students and the
competition between the nation's research training facilities should
promote better training programs in biophysics and other disciplines.

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(4) Sir Gustav Nossal speaks on Government policies

December 1997: The Australian Academy of Science WELCOMES GOVERNMENT'S MOVE
TOWARDS INDUSTRY INNOVATION POLICIES, BUT WARNS OF THE NEED TO MAINTAIN THE
SCIENCE BASE

The President of the Australian Academy of Science, Sir Gustav Nossal,
welcomed the Industry Statement's approach to economic development. He
said: "In a harsh competitive world, schemes to support industry R&D are
one of the few World Trade Organisation approved tools left to improve
economic performance.

We welcome the overall strategy.  Government should have longer-term plans
for developing the industries that will provide wealth and jobs for our
future.

The Government has acknowledged that industry will under-invest in R&D
unless governments intervene. The Academy would have preferred a return to
the 150%  R&D tax concession rather than directing its dollars towards the
R&D START program.  The 150% tax had the benefit of simplicity and avoided
the higher costs associated with discretionary grants scheme. The
effectiveness of the changes to the START scheme will depend on how it is
administered. However, the prospect of an effective concession of up to
200% for some smaller companies is welcomed, as is the larger total sum for
START overall.

We are pleased that the statement acknowledges the importance of
international activities and we urge Government not to make any changes to
programs that will affect the momentum of existing collaborations
adversely. There are powerful benefits to Australia from international
collaboration in S&T due to the international nature of scientific
discovery.  Informal networks make a strong contribution to this and
individuals are the key resource.

Knowledge-dependent industries need access to science and technology inputs
both from local sources and overseas.  The Cooperative Research Centre
(CRC) Program is a successful means of building such linkages and
increasingly these Centres are looking to overseas opportunities for
cooperation. Australian companies find the good perception overseas of
Australia's scientific capability helps validate their high-tech products
in overseas markets. We note that the review of the CRCs under way may
recommend structural changes to the program. The CRCs have built a momentum
of cultural change in research and industry that must not be slowed or
halted.  The CRC program has achieved some notable successes. The Academy
recommends that the Government maintain a commitment  to continuation of
the CRC program, noting that the program provides the flexibility to
terminate some Centres and to form new ones based on performance as well as
changing priorities.

There are some worries from our reading of the report and we await the
details.  We are concerned that the aim to mesh research goals with
industry needs may have the effect of cutting funding for basic research.
Maintaining the science base is of the utmost importance.

The Academy has been a strong supporter of the Industry Department's
International Science and Technology Program which has been vital to the
research efforts of the scientific community as there are very few avenues
other than this program to support international research collaboration. We
are concerned that the proposed refocussing to immediate industry needs may
exclude Australian researchers a seat at the table in many small to medium
scale science and technology initiatives.   There is a danger in failing to
distinguish basic and strategic research from application.

The cultivation of talented young people is an essential part of any
strategy for innovation.  Basic and strategic research are the training
grounds for such people. We are pleased to see 50 new Post graduate Awards
in industry".
 

Contacts:
Sir Gustav Nossal: 03 9344 6946 (Dept. Pathology, Uni. of Melbourne), 03
9853 8256 (home)

Professor John White: 02 6249 3578 (Australian National University), 02
6248 6836 (home)

Trish Nicholls   02 6247 3966 (Australian Academy of Science Secretariat)

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(5) FASTS Top 10 Issues in Australian Science

FASTS TOP TEN POLICIES for 1998
In November I attended the FASTS Council meeting and made submissions
(indicated with an "*") from the Society based on responses to earlier
Newsletters.

*1.  CRISIS IN SCIENCE IN THE UNIVERSITIES
FASTS urges the Government to resolve the funding crisis in the
universities. Otherwise science departments will be closed in a haphazard
manner by universities forced into excessive cost-cutting measures. If
Government is unwilling to meet the true cost of maintaining science in all
universities, then it should assist regions to coordinate scientific
teaching and research.

2. A NATIONAL VISION FOR AUSTRALIA
FASTS urges the Government to determine a national vision for Australia,
and to establish what science and technology is needed to support that
future. This process may lead to "picking winners" - strategic investments
to exploit strengths or remedy deficiencies in the economy's scientific and
technological base.

*3. BOOST INDUSTRY R&D
Industry investment in R&D is way behind that of comparable countries, with
Australia ranking 19th out of 24 OECD and Asian nations. FASTS urges the
Government to boost this investment in R&D by increasing the tax concession
for business expenditure on R&D and allowing patent costs to be counted as
R&D expenditure.

4. RAW DEAL FOR KIDS
Schools need an injection of younger and better-qualified teachers of
science and maths. The Government should offer incentives like a "HECS
holiday" (deferral of HECS payments) and higher salaries to teachers with
higher qualifications, to encourage the best people to take up the teaching
of science and maths.

5. GETTING RESEARCH TO MARKET
The CRC Program turns good science ideas into industrial reality, by
bringing researchers and industry together to work on solutions. It is also
training a new generation of young scientists for jobs in industry, and
strengthening the weak links between science and industry. FASTS urges the
Government to continue the CRC Program.

6. SCIENCE AWARENESS
S&T create wealth-generating industries and solve environmental problems,
but the benefits are not fully appreciated. The Prime Minister should take
a lead in selling the benefits by promoting science festivals, science
education and careers, and media coverage of science and technology.

7. VENTURE CAPITAL
Industry needs encouragement to invest in high-risk, high-tech projects
with high potential returns. Government's current contribution is a drop in
the ocean, and FASTS calls for a boost through imaginative schemes such as
tax deductibility for R&D investment income, extending the Factor f Scheme
to other industries, and making better use of Government purchasing.

*8. JOBS FOR YOUNG RESEARCH SCIENTISTS
Job insecurity, lack of career paths and low salaries are driving good
young scientists away from jobs in research. Australia is in danger of
losing a generation of scientists. FASTS urges industry, the Government and
the universities to work together to solve this waste of talent.

9. "BIG TICKET" SCIENCE
FASTS urges the Government to establish a rolling fund to provide for "big
ticket" science, such as access to international telescopes and research
ships to investigate the ocean's wealth.

*10. HOW LOW CAN WE GO?
Only 19 per cent of the scientists who applied for Australian Research
Council grants in 1997 were successful. ARC grants support basic science,
which are today's ideas and tomorrow's money-making innovations. FASTS
urges an immediate boost to ARC and National Health and Medical Research
Council funding.

If you wish to contact FASTS directly address your comments to Mr Toss
Gascoigne, Executive Director, Federation of Australian Scientific and
Technological Societies (FASTS)
PO Box 218 ,DEAKIN WEST ACT 2601
Phone: 02 - 6257 2891 (work); 02 - 6249 7400 (home)
Fax: 02 - 6257 2897; Mobile: 0411-704 409
Email: fasts@anu.edu.au;
Web address:http://www.usyd.edu.au/su/fasts/