Foreign scientists beware: You will get an unwanted glimpse at the much-decried U.S. science crisis when you apply for a visa. Alex Palazzo, a cell biologist at Harvard who writes The Daily Transcript, says uninformed U.S. consular officers have denied visa-renewal requests from foreign biologists who said they worked on "natural killer cells" (as in HIV research) and "nuclear-cell-transfer technology" (used in stem-cell work). Makes you wonder whether our country is similarly being protected against zoologists who study "killer whales" and radiologists working on "nuclear magnetic resonance," otherwise known as MRI.

If the current visa safeguards had been in place in the 1970s, they might have kept out a young radiologist named Elias Zerhouni, who was then working on nuclear MRI's. He is now, of course, head of the National Institutes of Health. The ironic point is that foreign scientists enhance America's work force and raise the national level of scientific literacy. But only if they can get in.