From owner-biophysics@net.bio.net Fri Oct 27 22:00:00 1995 Path: biosci!biosci!not-for-mail From: "Jonathan King" Newsgroups: bionet.prof-society.biophysics Subject: National Labs budget Date: 28 Oct 1995 10:37:00 -0700 Organization: BIOSCI International Newsgroups for Molecular Biology Lines: 33 Sender: biohelp@net.bio.net Approved: bphyssoc-moderator@net.bio.net Distribution: world Message-ID: <199510272022.PAA04783@biosci.cbs.umn.edu> Reply-To: jaking@mit.edu NNTP-Posting-Host: net.bio.net Dear Colleagues: Together with Elaine Gallin and Charles Cantor, I will be representing the Biophysical Society at the FASEB Consensus Conference (Oct 30,31) on Federal Research Funding for Biomedical Research and Related Life Sciences for FY97. The Consensus conference is an effort to develop a common position for the 40,000+ FASEB members in the budget battle. The conference operates through subcommittees focusing in on federal funding agencies, and I'm on the DOE committee. Biophysicists have a particular interest in the maintenance of the DOE funded national laboratory facilities for structure analysis, data gathering, interpretation and dissemination. There have been a variety of proposals to downsize or dissassemble these facilities, including irreplaceable resources such as Brookhaven or Argonne. If any of you have cogent 1-3 paragraph arguments in support of DOE funded programs of importance to the Biophysics community, I would appreciate receiving them in the next two days (sorry about that). Or if you have a strong position on facilities that can be downsized with minimal loss to the research community. My own position is that this is a period in which we should be expanding the national laboratories which include a biomedical research mission, by transferring funds from the enormous budgets of the nuclear weapons labs. Unfortunately the political climate does not yet allow us to critique the large military component of the DOE budget; we are limited to scrambling for crumbs from the civilian portion. Hopefully this will change in the next (FY98) round of the federal budget debate. Jonathan King **PLEASE SEND ALL CORRESPONDENCE TO THE FOLLOWING EMAIL ADDRESS: jaking@mit.edu .