"S. 1305 is not dead." Although, he says, "I have no great answer to what's going to keep it alive. We have made no deci­sion yet as to how the senator is going to approach the hearing with Frist."

The factor really complicating the R&D budget is the $217 billion highway construction bill, a piece of legislation passed by the House and Senate earlier this month. The House bill, for instance, would increase highway funding almost $30 billion above the caps set by Domen-ici's committee. "The question," says one source, "is whether Congress is going to pay for [highway funding] out of manda­tory or discretionary funding. If it's dis­cretionary funding, S. 1305 really is dead."

The dim prospects for S. 1305 were only highlighted earlier this month when Rep. George E. Brown Jr. (D-Calif.), rank­ing minority member of the House Sci­ence Committee, released his own as­sessment of Domenici's budget resolu­tion, saying it would actually amount to a cumulative cut of $37 billion below the amounts needed to double the R&D bud­get. Adopting the resolution, according to Brown, would actually lower total ci­vilian R&D spending (including that for the National Institutes of Health) from nearly $36 billion in fiscal 1998 to about $34.4 billion in fiscal 2003.

Reflecting this gloomy outlook is the coalition of more than 100 scientific and engineering societies that gathered on Capitol Hill last October to celebrate Gramm and Domenici's announcement that they were sponsoring S. 1305. Now many coalition members are talking not in terms of the bill as law, but as setting forth a basic principle as a worthy goal.

Wil Lepkowski

MIT's Langer wins Lemelson Prize Robert S. Langer, Germeshausen Professor of Chemical & Biomedical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was awarded the 1998 Lemelson-MIT Prize in ceremonies last week in New York City. The $500,000 prize is the larg­est single cash award for American inven­tion and innovation.

A pioneer in biomedical engineer­ing, Langer specializes in controlled drug delivery and tissue engineering. At 49 years of age, he is a member of all three U.S. National Academies: Science, Engineering, and the Institute of Medi-

Langer: improving people's lives

cine. Langer is named as an inventor on 320 patents

Langer says it gives him great satisfac­tion to know that the research his lab has done—which includes drug delivery sys­tems for treating brain cancer—has led to improvements in people's lives. Lan­ger describes his overall approach as: "De­cide what you want in a biomaterial from an engineering, biological, and chemical standpoint, then synthesize it."

One problem Langer tackled involved uneven decomposition of plastic resins that resulted in bursts of drugs instead of slow, steady release. He solved that prob­lem by using a copolyanhydride of 1,3-bis(4-carboxyphenoxy)propane and se-bacic acid. Shapes molded from that res­in hydrolyze uniformly from the surface. Rhone-Poulenc Rorer markets a commer­cial product, Gliadel, that uses the resin. The small plastic wafers impregnated with the anticancer drug carmustine are used to treat a type of brain cancer. After removing a brain tumor, the surgeon fills the resulting cavity with Gliadel wafers. The patient can resume normal life while the wafers slowly release the drug.

Other dosage forms that Langer de­signed are Lupron Depot, marketed by TAP Pharmaceuticals to treat endometri­osis, and Zoladex, marketed by Zeneca Pharmaceuticals for endometriosis and breast and prostate cancer.

In tissue engineering, Langer's aim is to provide materials for tissue replace­ment surgery that are essentially the pa­tient's own. His approach is to make a physical scaffold, using a mesh of biode­gradable resin. He puts this into a culture medium with bone, cartilage, skin, or

nerve cells. The cells multiply and colo­nize the mesh, which meanwhile hydro-lyzes away.

Langer is the first chemical engineer and the first MIT scientist to receive the prize, which was established in 1995 by the late inventor Jerome H. Lemelson.

At the same ceremony where Langer received his award, electrical engineer Ja­cob Rabinow, 88, retired from the Na­tional Institute of Standards & Technolo­gy, received a Lemelson-MIT Lifetime Achievement Award. An inventor since the age of eight, Rabinow holds 229 pat­ents for a wide array of military, industri­al, computer, and electronics inventions, including the automatic letter sorting ma­chine used by the U.S. Postal Service and the first flexible computer disk.

Stephen Stinson

EPA's goal: One air rule for organic chemical industry

The Environmental Protection Agency is poised to propose a new type of rule governing air pollution control by the synthetic organic chemical industry. The rule, which has just been sent to the Of­fice of Management & Budget for a man­datory 60-day review, aims to establish a model for regulatory consolidation that can be applied to other industry sectors and then, perhaps, extended to water and waste requirements.

The consolidated air Rile is one of the agency's more aggressive reinvention projects. "In it, 16 different air emission Riles have been incorporated into a single rule containing all applicable emission lim­itations, monitoring, record keeping, and reporting requirements," explains Jack Ed-wardson, associate director of the emissions standards division of EPA's Office of Air Quality Standards & Planning. Among the combined Riles are New Source Perfor­mance Standards and National Emissions Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants.

"The idea is to reduce the burden of dealing with so many Riles and to try to make them more understandable and user-friendly for industry and eventually for the states," Edwardson says. In the long Rin, the consolidated Rile is expected not only to reduce compliance costs for organic chemical manufacturers, but also to re­duce implementation and enforcement costs of regulatory agencies and improve compliance.

APRIL 20, 1998 C&EN 13