National Research Council initiative

THE MATERIALS SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING STUDY of the National Research Council was initiated by a letter from U.S. Representative Don Fuqua (who was at the time Chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee) to the presidents of two academies of science and engineering. Fuqua asked about the definition of materials science and about its priorities. After deliberations and several meetings, the academies approached Merton Flemings and me in 1988 to chair a study that would involve scientists from the universities, industry, and Government laboratories. 

The National Research Council of Canada has undertaken a project, in collaboration with Bedford Institute of Oceanography of the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans, to address the need for a seawater certified reference material for micronutrients with the initial objective being the preparation of a material with certified values for nitrate, phosphate, and dissolved silica. 

Acknowledgments This work has been supported by the National Research Council Canada Genomic and Health Initiative. 

Project-research, a method of organizing research by stipulation of projects and allocation of these to individuals or teams of scientists in separate laboratories, was developed in the United States during World War I in research on chemical warfare. This research was initially conducted largely by academic chemists as volunteers and later by them in the Research Division of the Chemical Warfare Service of the U. S. Army. Many of the leading American chemists in the 1920s shared the common experience of research on chemical warfare. The model of project-research was tried by the leaders of the division of chemistry and chemical technology of the National Research Council in order to allocate specific research problems and foster cooperative research after the war. 

I thank Keith U. Ingold for having introduced me to this subject. When I arrived in Ottawa at the National Research Council of Canada in 1979 for three years postdoctoral work with him, very little was known on the reactivity of silyl radicals. At that time, several papers dealing with kinetics of silyl radicals were published, which allowed the reactivity of silyl radical to be translated into a quantitative base. Special thanks go to David Griller for his collaboration on the initial work on hydrogen donor abilities of silicon hydrides during the late 1980s. 

By April 1915, Germany introduced gas warfare. In 1917, the Secretary of the Interior charged the Bureau of Mines with working on gas problems, and the Bureau engaged the Chemistry Committee of the National Research Council (NRC) to help initiate the work. The NRC Committee along with others in academe and the chemical industry constituted what ultimately became the Chemical Warfare Service of the U.S. Army. The gases and protective equipment were produced at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland and New York City, respectively (Skolnik Reese, 1976). 

Danilo Corradini is research director at the Institute of Chemical Methodologies of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) and a member of the General Scientific Advisory Board of CNR. His involvement in separation science started in 1976 with his research work on chromatography and electrophoresis for his PhD studies in chemistry, which was carried out at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, under the direction of Michael Lederer, founder and first editor of the Journal of Chromatography. In 1983-1984, he worked with Csaba Horvath, the pioneer of HPLC, at the Department of Chemical Engineering at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, where he initiated his first investigations on the HPLC of proteins and peptides, which he continued at the Institute of Chromatography of CNR after he returned to Italy. 

The health effects associated with radon, as well as sources and mitigation measures, are discussed in detail in several National Research Council reports (1988, 1991), in the book edited by Nazaroff and Nero (1988), and in the International Commission on Radiological Protection Report (1994). Initial risk assessments were based on data from underground miners who were exposed to relatively high levels of radon and its progeny. However, there has been considerable controversy over the extrapolation to lower levels in homes [e.g., see summaries by Nazaroff and Teichman (1990) and Peto and Darby (1994)]. 

This report on the management of these secondary wastes was initiated by the National Research Council (NRC) at the request of the CMA, the agency managing the disposal of chemical weapons. The statement of task for the Committee on Review of Chemical Agent Secondary Waste Disposal and Regulatory Requirements is as follows ... 

We sincerely thank the Steacie Institute for Molecular Sciences (SIMS), the National Research Council of Canada s Genomics and Health Initiative (NRCC-GHI), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and the National Cancer Institute of Canada (NCIC) for their continued support of this research. Our thanks to several former and current group members and collaborators for their numerous highly valuable contributions made to the work discussed in this chapter. 

In the Se-deficient areas of China, Finland, and New Zealand, the Keshan disease occurs because of a low Se intake from local food. To correct soil Se deficiency in Finland, the government initiated a national program to amend agricultural soils with Se to elevate the Se content in agricultural products. As a result, the daily dietary Se intake of residents in Finland increased from approximately 30 ag (a low value as compared to the recommended US National Research Council value of 55 J,g) to 80 4g. Therefore, seleniferous soils considered as potentially Se-contaminated sites... 

A major contribntion in initial method development for the LC-MS analysis of marine biotoxins was made by (Juilham and coworkers at the Institute for Marine Biosciences of the National Research Council of Canada. Quilliam [114] reviewed the early development in this field. Initially, the attention was focussed on three... 

Yet, beginning in the 1960s at the Canadian National Research Council (NRC), the group initiated by Davidson and extended by Ripmeester has made the best modem measurements in hydrate science, with particular emphasis on nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, neutron diffraction, calorimetry, and molecular modeling. An abbreviated overview of the major advances in hydrate science at NRC is presented in Table 2. 

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