CMA meeting hears of three new initiatives The booming chemical economy made for a happy troupe of executives attending the Chemical Manufacturers Association annual meeting earlier this month at White Sulphur Springs, W.Va. Unlike past years, this year's meeting was almost totally upbeat, with talk about rising demand—both domestic and export—tight markets, and vastly improved and still rising profit margins. Upbeat as the business climate was, however, chemical safety and the public's negative perception of the chemical industry remained serious items of concern. Addressing such concerns, Harold A. Sorgenti, outgoing chairman of the board of CMA and president and chief executive officer of Arco Chemical Co., announced three new initiatives that the organization will undertake. The first of these will be aimed at chemical transportation. CMA is working to develop a code of practice to guide CMA members in the use and selection of motor carriers. According to Sorgenti, "Building on the success of CAER (the Community Awareness & Emergency Response program), we plan to involve transportation firms in the program as well as to refine and improve identification of products involved in transportation accidents." Sorgenti stopped short of saying that CMA would develop a certification protocol for truckers, but he said the aim of the program is to weed out the unsafe operators. Robert C. Forney, executive vice president of Du Pont and the new CMA chairman, said that Du Pont and most major chemical firms identify acceptable trucking firms for their own use, but the new initiative will attempt to do this for the industry. Sorgenti also said that CMA will work with trucking associations to develop safety training programs. The second initiative is the development of "a sound scientific basis for assessing health effects of chemicals on humans," Sorgenti
said. To that end, CMA's health effects committee has recommended that the association join the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology (CUT) to establish an Epidemiology Resource & Information Center (ERIC) to encourage and undertake human health studies within the industry. Sorgenti said that ERIC would develop industrywide research standards to ensure that data are com.parable. And it will create an inventory of major epidemiological resources within the industry on a worldwide basis. ERIC could thus give assistance and consultation on human health studies to members as well as to health care providers,
legislators, the public, and the media. The third initiative, involving "responsible care," will take the best examples of responsible performance in the industry and set that as a standard. Sorgenti said that "responsible care defines a set of principles and practices and will require that CMA members contribute to forming them and abiding by them." The program, he said, will deal with management practices and codes of conduct, not specific quantities or numbers. He said that a series of meetings will be held in July to develop a strategy to implement this effort. William Storck, New York
NIH's problems aired at public meeting The National Institutes of Health's intramural research program is prestigious, successful, cost-effective, and important to the nation's well-being. But to remain so, quite a few problems need to be solved. That was the general tone of comments offered at the first and only public meeting of the Institute of Medicine's Committee To Study Strategies To Strengthen the Scientific Excellence of the NIH Intramural Research Program. The meeting was held last week in Washington, D.C. The 15-member committee, formed in early May at the request of the Office of Management & Budget and the Department of Health & Human Services, is chaired by Princeton University p r e s i d e n t Harold T. Shapiro. NIH's problems, as identified at the meeting, seem to stem from its character as a federal agency. It is subject to salary caps and personnel ceilings. Its research campus can't compete with those of the top biomedical research universities because money to renovate its infrastructure hasn't been available in recent years, a period characterized by tight federal budgets. The question is whether these limitations are affecting NIH's ability to retain distinguished senior scientists and attract talented young scientists. At the meeting, some attendees maintained that NIH could no longer compete in the marketplace for
younger researchers and was having particular trouble retaining midlevel research scientists. Others said they found no evidence of armies of people leaving NIH, or reported that attempts to attract NIH personnel to other institutions had often been rebuffed. However, nearly everyone agreed that NIH could use more money and that the NIH director needs more authority and flexibility in running the institutes. Committee member John T. Dunlop, Lamont University Professor Emeritus at Harvard, suggested that to get a handle on the personnel question, the committee staff should look into the total picture of manpower flow at NIH since 1970. Dunlop wants to know who has left, where they have gone, and, conversely, who has joined NIH and from where. Another committee member, Benno C. Schmidt, managing partner of J. H. Whitney & Co., commented that the solution to NIH's financial problems might involve ingenious methods for getting private funding for its research programs, perhaps in the form of endowed chairs or professorships. He also thinks the institutes ought to be able to get a return on NIH discoveries that are adopted by pharmaceutical companies and others. The committee's report on strategies for NIH's future is to be completed by Oct. 31. Janice Long, Washington June 20, 1988 C&EN
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