News of the Week whether electronic communication systems can be developed and used to prepare NSF research proposals. Each of the two principal universities will be working with other universities and institutions, some 50 altogether, exchanging scientific information. "We'd like to get lots of people at these institutions exchanging electronic mail and preparing collaborative papers and NSF proposals electronically during the first phase of the project/' says James Morris, director of Carnegie-Mellon's Information Technology Center and principal investigator for that university's part of the project. At the University of Michigan the project director is Daniel Atkins, associate dean of the college of engineering and professor of electrical engineering and computer science. A second important part of the first phase is to develop a common document interchange standard that
will allow users of different computerized text preparation systems to exchange information with one another. Several computer software systems are now available that can prepare both text and the other types of information that scientific information exchange requires, such as equations and chemical formulas, Morris explains. It is sometimes possible to exchange text between different software systems, but nontextual information is almost impossible to communicate. During its first three years, the project will try to develop materials needed to exchange such information among Carnegie-Mellon's system, the University of Michigan's, and at least one commercial system. Once such communication has been demonstrated, it is hoped that the producers of other commercial systems will decide to cooperate in making their systems able to interact with this prototype. D
House committee seeks better job-illness data Compared w i t h the system for reporting and monitoring infectious diseases, the national surveillance of occupational diseases is nonexistent. As many as 400,000 occupational illnesses occur annually in the U.S., but there is no way to monitor them systematically. These are the findings of a new report from the House Committee on Government Operations, which has been critical of the Administration's efforts to cut back occupational health monitoring activities. Most occupational health data are collected by the National Institute for Occupational Safety & Health and the National Center for Health Statistics. According to the committee report, budget cuts have significantly decreased the resources available to monitor occupational health problems in the midst of growing calls from industrial health professionals for more diligence. NIOSH's staff has been cut from 1019 in fiscal 1980 to 806 in 1986. The report cites a lengthy example of the problems NIOSH faces in doing occupational health studies. NIOSH has been trying to begin a study of the alleged health effects 6
November 3, 1986 C&EN
of video display terminals. It has been attempting since 1984 to get a protocol approved by the Office of Management & Budget, which has some authority under the Paperwork Reduction Act to check agencies' efforts to collect information. OMB has consistently asked NIOSH to cut back the size of its questionnaire because of what it deems are unnecessary questions. Other health professionals, including some at the Office of Technology Assessment, believe those questions are important to the viability of the study. The report recommends that a program requiring full reporting of occupational illnesses in all 50 states be initiated and that occupational questions be included on existing national health surveys of maternal and infant health and nutrition. The report also states that NIOSH and NCHS should include parental occupational data on infant birth and death certificates. Furthermore, it recommends, with a separate opposing opinion from a majority of Republican members of the committee, that OMB's review of NIOSH studies be restricted to questions of cost and not of scientific merit. D
Tumor necrosis factor has antiviral activity Like interferon before it, tumor necrosis factor (TNF) appears to have antiviral as well as anticancer activity. Two papers in the current issue of the British journal Nature [323, 816 and 819 (1986)] report independent findings in West Germany and the U.S. that TNF has pronounced and broad-ranging antiviral activity. Both interferon and TNF are soluble messenger proteins produced by cells of the immune system to elicit responses in other cells. Both are produced naturally in mammals in response to bacterial infections. Interferon was discovered as a natural antiviral agent and has since been shown to be able to kill certain types of cancer cells selectively. TNF, on the other hand, was first identified in 1975 because of its tumor-cell-killing ability. The current work was conducted by J. Mestan of the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg along with collaborators there, at the University of Ulm, and at BASF in Ludwigshafen; and by Grace H. W. Wong and David V. Goeddel of Genentech Inc. in South San Francisco. Both groups were trying to determine whether TNF's anticancer effect might be an indirect one caused by that substance's inducing the production of interferon. Instead they find that the factor acts mainly on its own, not only in killing cancer cells but against viruses. Wong and Goeddel find, in addition, that TNF works synergistically with several forms of interferon. It is particularly effective when paired with 7-interferon. "So far, every virus we've looked at has been inhibited by the combination, ,/ Goeddel told the International Congress of Immunology in Toronto last month. The researchers have examined the combination against both RNA and DNA viruses. The mechanism of action of TNF against viruses is not known. It appears to have two effects: It imparts protection against viral infection to certain cell lines, presumably by interfering with an early step in viral infection, and it selectively kills cells that have been infected with virus. D
