ACS NEWS ACS Board acts on image, public relations issues The meeting of the ACS Board of Di rectors in Washington, D.C., last week was a quiet affair. Unlike some other June meetings in recent years, it was not a retreat devoted to one dominant issue. However, the gathering could initiate considerable change in ACS's public relations and government rela tions activities. On recommendation of its Commit tee on Public Affairs & Public Rela tions, the board voted to establish a Task Force on Public Image. It will be charged with tackling what the com mittee perceives as a lack of both a clear and compelling vision and a coor dinated strategic plan for ACS's public image and relations building. The task force will present an interim report and proposed budget at the board's Decem ber meeting. On a related public image issue, board members heard an update of
ACS's renewed efforts to work with Smithsonian Institution staff to negoti ate changes in the ACS-financed "Sci ence in American Life" exhibit at the National Museum of American Histo ry. The exhibit has been criticized by some scientists for showing too many of the warts and too few of the benefits of science. ACS Board Chairman Paul H. L. Walter and other ACS officials had frank discussions with I. Michael Heyman, head of the Smithsonian, and Spencer R. Crew, director of the Na tional Museum of American History. Both ACS and the museum have estab lished task forces to work together, and the Smithsonian is planning to poll vis itors to the exhibit. However, it is ap parent the prognosis for easy progress is poor. Walter told the ACS Board that he has been very firm with the Smith sonian in expecting to see some for-
ward motion by August. He remains "skeptically optimistic." In other actions, the board: • Voted a grant of $10,000 to the National Research Council's Board on Chemical Sciences & Technology to fi nance completion of a study of the handling and disposal of laboratory chemicals. • Heard that ACS Executive Direc tor John Κ Crum has directed that ACS primary and secondary publications adopt the names recommended for ele ments 104 through 109 by the society's Committee on Nomenclature. Such names include seaborgium for element 106. [The International Union of Pure & Applied Chemistry is reconsidering the controversial slate of names it recently proposed.] • Heard of continuing efforts to en hance the involvement of industrial mem bers in ACS activities. These include a va riety of targeted activities at the national meeting in Chicago in August. Michael Heylin
PEOPLE j Deaths JERRY R. ALLISON, 50, vice president, analytical R&D, Pharmaceutical Research Institute, Bristol-Myers Squibb, died of gastric cancer May 7. Allison was responsi ble for directing the company's worldwide analytical R&D for the discovery, devel opment, and regis tration of new phar maceutical agents following the 1989 merger of BristolMyers and Squibb Pharmaceutical. He had been promoted to vice president in 1993 from executive director, a title he held from 1989. Allison worked for Bristol-Myers Squibb—in its various forms—for 18 years. He joined Mead Johnson & Co., which was then a wholly owned subsidiary of BristolMyers, in 1977 as a senior scientist and was promoted the following year to manager of methods development, pharmaceutical quality control. In 1986, Allison was named director of analytical research, Pharmaceuti cal R&D Division. He received a B.S. degree in chemistry from Bethany College, Bethany, W.Va., and was class valedictorian, in 1967. Alli son's graduate work in chemistry at Pur-
due University was interrupted when he was drafted during the Vietnam War. He earned an M.S. degree from Purdue in 1969, then served as a forensic chemist in the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Lab in Fort Gordon, Ga., and Frankfurt, Ger many. Allison returned to Purdue in 1971 and completed a Ph.D. degree in organic chemistry in 1974. He was an assistant pro fessor of chemistry at Lafayette College, Easton, Pa., for the following three years. Allison served on the U.S. Pharmacopeia Committee of Revision since 1985. He had been chairman of the Subcommittee CH4 and a member of the Drug Standards Divi sion Executive Committee from 1990 until he resigned in March. He was a member of the American Association of Pharmaceuti cal Scientists and the Pharmaceutical Man ufacturers Association. He is survived by his wife, Carole Allison, his mother, two sisters and two brothers, and three chil dren. Joined ACS in 1971. CHRISTIAN BOEMER ANFINSEN, 79, Johns Hopkins University biochemist and winner of the 1972 Nobel Prize in Chemis try, died May 14 of a heart attack. Anfinsen won the Nobel Prize while chief of the laboratory of chemical biology at what is now the National Institute of Arthritis, Me tabolism & Digestive Diseases. He shared the prize with Rockefeller University's Stanford Moore and William H. Stein.
They were honored for their clarification of the relationship between the struc tural properties of proteins and their biological functions. Specifically, Anfinsen helped to discover how the protein en zyme ribonuclease folds to obtain the characteristic three-dimensional structure that determines its function. Anfinsen received a B.A. degree in 1938 from Swarthmore College and an M.S. degree in organic chemistry in 1939 from the University of Pennsylvania. In 1943, he received a Ph.D. degree from Harvard Medical School, where he was an instructor and assistant professor of biological chemistry from 1943 to 1950. Anfinsen joined the National Institutes of Health in 1950 in the National Heart Institute. From 1963 to 1981, he was chief of the Laboratory of Chemical Biology at the National Institute of Arthritis & Met abolic Diseases. In recent years, Anfinsen had been involved with the study of bac teria found in vents along the edges of the tectonic plates in the Mediterranean and Pacific Ocean floors. He believed that these bacteria, which are capable of living at very high temperatures, could prove JUNE 12, 1995 C&EN
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