White House Makes Appointments; Gibbons Resigns

President Clinton recently announced his intention to nominate candidates for the posts of director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and director of the National Science Foundation.
Neal F. Lane, director of the National Science Foundation, is Clinton's nominee for the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Lane was a professor of physics at Rice University in Houston and director of the foundation's Division of Physics.
The White House's candidate for director of the National Science Foundation is Rita R. Colwell, president of the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute and a professor of microbiology at the College Park university. She has been a member of the National Science Board and is past president of the American Society for Microbiology.
John H. Gibbons, who had served as assistant to the President for science and technology for the past five years, resigned last month. Gibbons had spearheaded measures to ensure the reliability and safety of the US' nuclear stockpiles without nuclear testing and initiatives to manufacture low-emission cars, and had built bipartisan coalitions to research divisive scientific issues such as human cloning.