News of the Week public image carried by chemicals and the chemical industry/' he said in his recent Priestley Medal address. Pimentel advocated greater participation by chemists in the public policy process and increased efforts at upgrading the presentation of chemistry as part of the education of nonscientists. Born in Rolinda, Calif., Pimentel received a B.A. degree in chemistry from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1943. A two-year stint in the Navy took him to preradar school at Princeton University and the nuclear physics section of the Office of Naval Research. He resumed his studies in 1946 at Berkeley, where he received a Ph.D. degree in chemistry in 1949. He remained at Berkeley throughout his distinguished career. Rudy Baum
Arson suspected at small chemical facility An investigation of arson and a subsequent investigation into the possible illegal storage of a considerable quantity of phosgene are now under way at a small custom chemical synthesizer in Bethany, Conn. According to Connecticut State Police, firefighters received a report of smoke pouring from a building owned by Carbolabs Inc. at 3:47 AM on June 19. As many as 200 nearby residents were evacuated and 15 people, mostly firefighters, were treated for respiratory complaints at nearby Yale-New Haven Hospital. Investigators discovered an unexploded Molotov cocktail on the ground outside the building a few hours after the fire was put out. At press time, no suspects for setting the fire had been named nor had any motive been established. Carbolabs is particularly known for handling reactions involving phosgene for a number of pharmaceutical clients, who may use the compounds to make certain classes of drugs, such as sulfonylurea drugs for the treatment of diabetes. Repeated attempts by C&EN to contact Carbolabs for comments on the fire were unsuccessful. According to Don Burton, chief 6
June 26. 1989 C&EN
inspector for the Oil and Chemical Spill Unit of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), the fire did not affect cylinders of phosgene at the Carbolabs facility, but bottled acetylene and lab chemicals were involved in the fire. Chlorine also stored on the premises did not leak or react in the incident. The fire was restricted to the company's lab and part of an office, he says. The fire was extinguished at 6:15 AM and two flareups shortly afterward were bought under control quickly. Burton attributes the flareups to water-reactive materials stored in a refrigerator in the lab. Though phosgene was not involved in the fire, its presence at Carbolabs has caused considerable concern at Connecticut's DEP. Phosgene is an agent best known as a war gas and was used as such in World War I. Two days after the fire, DEP announced it was referring Carbolabs to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for violating Title III, the community rightto-know section of the Superfund Amendments & Reauthorization Act of 1986. Says DEP deputy commissioner John W. Anderson: "The violation involved failure to report the storage of phosgene gas in quantities greater than 10 lb." More than 500 lb of phosgene were found at the Bethany facility. Though the DEP's SARA Title III coordinator Sue Vaughn says that the local fire department had been informed of chemicals at the site, Carbolabs had failed to inform the state as Title III requires. Marc Reisch
NIH mulls blueprint for genome project How best to encourage cooperation among scientists working on mapping or sequencing particular chromosomes, without overmanagement, was one among several topics discussed at last week's meeting of the program advisory committee on the human genome project in Bethesda, Md. The committee's consensus was that dividing up the project by assigning responsibility for individ-
ual chromosomes or chromosome fragments to different research groups would not be advisable at this stage because of the need for more preliminary work. A meeting attendee, Charles R. Cantor, chairman of the department of genetics and development at Columbia University, seems to echo the views of a number of committee members when he characterizes the project as having three phases: competition, coalescence, and completion. The current phase, competition, "makes sense as long as the technology is evolving as fast as it is," he says. The coalescence phase is "beginning to happen in a few regions of the genome, where there are lots of groups that are realizing that they have to work with each other in order to make further progress." Finally, he says, "I think when it's time to get coverage or completion, that it has to be managed, it has to be directed in some way, and I think chromosomes are the natural way to do it." The committee advises the Nc tional Institutes of Health on a. aspects of the human genome pre ject—an international program t characterize the human genome an the genomes of selected mode organisms—and is helping to de velop a national plan to be submit ted to Congress in early 1990. The ultimate success of the project will depend on coordination among genome researchers in the U.S. and other countries, including Canada, the U.K., France, Japan, and the Soviet Union. A group called the Human Genome Organization has been formed to facilitate coordination of the research internationally. The NIH committee favors the establishment of 10 or more large U.S. centers for genome research, because small labs are not deemed sufficient to achieve program goals. In addition, James B. Watson, NIH associate director for human genome research, emphasizes the need to reduce costs of sequencing, currently about $5.00 per base pair. "To bring the program in at cost," he says, "we are really going to have to get the cost down to 50 cents a base pair. So we have a factor of 10 to be achieved if we are to be successful." St u Borman
