News of the Week President Reagan and Congressional leaders and to address a rally in New York City. After a long struggle, including hunger strikes by Sakharov, Bonner was permitted by Soviet officials to visit Italy and the U.S. late last year for medical treatment. Now recovering from heart bypass surgery, she plans to return in a couple of weeks to the U.S.S.R. There she faces with "considerable fear and anxiety" internal exile again with her husband in Gorki, cut off from the outside world. Bonner described at AAAS a Soviet "disinformation campaign" to hide the illness and mistreatment of Sakharov, including forced feeding and possible use of psychotropic drugs. She showed film clips of Sakharov in Gorki taken without his knowledge and then doctored for foreign viewers. Bonner urged U.S. scientists to protest publicly the plight of Sakharov and other Soviet dissidents. Only the spotlight of publicity guarantees the efficacy of protests, she explains. Private discussions and letters to the Soviets "go directly to the garbage can." Protests should demand that western journalists and physicians be allowed to visit Sakharov, and that he be permitted to return to Moscow and resume his scientific work. Protests should focus first of all on celebration of his 65th birthday, on May 21, as "a day dedicated to defense of peace and human rights." D
World's environment, resources charted In table and text, two nongovernment organizations for the first time have charted both statistically and analytically the world's environment and its resources. The 350-page volume, "World Resources 1986," is the first of what the World Resources Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based policy research group, and the International Institute for Environment & Development, a global organization concerned with sustainable development, say will be an annual report. It lays out what is known about the 6
May 5, 1986C&EN
Chemists elected to National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences, at its 123rd annual meeting in Washington, D.C., last week, elected 59 new members. Those elected bring total NAS membership to 1477. Among the newly elected members, chemists and those in chemically related areas include: John Carbon, professor of biochemistry, department of biological science, University of California, Santa Barbara. Michael J. Chamberlin, professor of biochemistry, University of California, Berkeley. Samuel Danishefsky, professor of chemistry, Yale University. Peter B. Dervan, professor of chemistry, California Institute of Technology. Ira Herskowitz, professor and vice chairman, department of biochemistry and biophysics, school of medicine, University of California, San Francisco. Yuet Wai Kan, professor, departments of medicine, laboratory medicine, and biochemistry and biophys-
relationships between people and their environment, and the institutional-policy changes that occur to alleviate problems. What the volume demonstrates is that what is known, even in some fundamentally essential areas like groundwater quality, is precious little. Jessica T. Mathews, vice president of World Resources Institute and the report's project director, hopes the glaring blank spaces will prod nations to gather key data. "By highlighting these gaps, we expect that, over time, [the report] will make a real difference." The report could begin to make a difference immediately. It offers for the first time, Mathews says, "comparable data on key environmental indicators for most of the countries in the world." In addition, thousands of issues are treated in the report, but six main themes permeate it. They are: the environment and human health, which focuses on nutrition, drinkable water, and sanitation; the atmosphere as a shared resource, which discusses the greenhouse effect and stratospheric ozone depletion; trop-
ics, University of California, San Francisco. Seymour Kaufman, chief, laboratory of neurochemistry, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, Md. Robert L. Letsinger, professor of chemistry, Northwestern University. Philip W. Majerus, professor of medicine and biochemistry, Washington University school of medicine. Josef Michl, professor of chemistry, University of Utah. C. Bradley Moore, professor of chemistry, University of California, Berkeley. Clarence A. Ryan Jr., professor of chemistry, Washington State University. James C. Wang, professor, department of biochemistry and microbiology, Harvard University. In addition, 15 scientists were elected as foreign associates, including Hans Leo Kornberg, Sir William Dunn Professor of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge, U.K.; and Viktor Mutt, professor of biochemistry, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm.
ical deforestation; soil degradation; population explosion; and the problems of Africa, whose brittle environment is strained by resource mismanagement and population growth. One part of the report is devoted entirely to the rapid and massive death of forests in Europe, especially in West Germany. Nearly 7 million hectares of forests in 15 European countries have been affected by an array of as yet unexplainable symptoms. New data suggest that a similar phenomenon is affecting high-elevation forests in N o r t h America. Six hypotheses for the destruction have been put forward, but no scientific consensus exists on the triggering agents. Former president of the World Bank, Robert S. McNamara, says the reliable, up-to-date, and usable information in the report should "influence the effectiveness of the $40 billion spent annually on development assistance, and the rate and sustainability of economic growth in the industrial countries." "World Resources 1986" is published by Basic Books, New York City; and sells for $16.95. D
