Nautilus

From Nature News (Nature 460, 163; 8 July 2009):
A former University of Tennessee professor has been sentenced to four years in prison for sharing sensitive technologies with his Chinese and Iranian graduate students.
J. Reece Roth, an emeritus professor of electrical engineering, was sentenced on 1 July by a Tennessee district court for violating the Arms Export Control Act. He had been developing ways to reduce the drag on unmanned planes, and employed two research assistants without obtaining the required licence (see Nature 442, 232–233; 2006). Roth plans to appeal the verdict.
In a separate case, a Chinese-born scientist who has lived in the United States for 23 years is suing the US government for rights violations for expelling him last year from the NASA Ames Research Center, California.
Haiping Su, a US citizen who received his doctorate in 1991 from Kansas State University in Manhattan, alleged in a case filed on 24 June in a San Jose federal court that a 2007 security badge-issuing process led to his illegal ousting.
Su was working on airborne systems for imaging forests. His attorneys say he had no involvement with classified material.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 15, 2009
Categories: Biosecurity, Data availability, Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

The US State Department promises to accelerate the visa process for foreign graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, a promise welcomed by Nature Structural & Molecular Biology in its July Editorial (16, 677; 2009). The Editorial decries the occasions when researchers have been severely delayed in trying to obtain or renew visas, leaving some stranded and others unable to travel to the United States for work or to attend scientific meetings.
The US State Department is now streamlining its procedures, aiming (eventually) to deal with routine requests within 2 weeks, an improvement on the current reported 4 months' average delay for applicants from China, for example. The Editorial concludes: "We must continue to attract and retain the best and the brightest from all over the world if we are going to retain America's global competitiveness, and reducing visa-processing delays is definitely a step in the right direction. If we don't, America's loss will be the rest of the world's gain."

Nature Structural & Molecular Biology journal home page.
Nature Structural & Molecular Biology guide to authors.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 09, 2009
Categories: Biosecurity, Careers, Communication, Conferences, Public and media | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation is the first publicly funded UK centre dedicated to synthetic biology – the science of designing and building biological components that can perform useful functions, such as producing drugs or biofuels, according to an online Nature news story (published 12 May; doi:10.1038/news.2009.464).
From the news story: "One of the centre's senior staff is sociologist Nikolas Rose, director of the BIOS Research Centre for the study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society at the London School of Economics. Rose says he aims to make public engagement a key priority for the centre, to avoid a repeat of the public outcry that genetically engineered foods provoked across Europe. "The usual position of the social scientists it to be right downstream, this is a rare opportunity to work right at the beginning," says Rose.
Rose's team will train graduate students and staff to consider the social and ethical implications of their research. He says the centre will also work with government and industry to develop a suitable framework to regulate the products of synthetic biology, and to make intellectual-property claims.
"If the Imperial centre works, it's going to be setting the standard for this," says Pam Silver, a synthetic-biology researcher at Harvard University. Silver is in the process of setting up a synthetic-biology centre at Harvard University, but "so far there's been no real discussion of social scientists' role", she says.
The need for researchers to consider the societal and ethical dimensions of their work in synthetic biology was a key recommendation of a report published by the UK's Royal Academy of Engineering on 6 May. Richard Kitney, a bioengineer at Imperial, who chaired the working group behind the report, is co-director of the new centre, along with Paul Freemont, from Imperial's molecular biosciences division."

Nature journals' author polices on bioethics.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on May 14, 2009
Categories: Biosecurity, Ethics, Public and media | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Editorial in the December issue of Nature Nanotechnology , A little knowledge (Nature Nanotechnology 2, 731; 2007) acknowledges that communicating the risks and benefits associated with nanotechnology to the general public is more complex than researchers might have expected. According to surveys, one of which is published in the same issue of the journal, the public is not interested in the possible risks of the technology (despite Michael Crichton's best efforts).
In their report, Scientists worry about some risks more than the public (Nature Nanotechnology 2, 732 - 734; 2007), Dietram A. Scheufele et al. compare two recent US surveys among nanoscientists and the general public, concluding that "in general, nanoscientists are more optimistic than the public about the potential benefits of nanotechnology. However, for some issues related to the environmental and long-term health impacts of nanotechnology, nanoscientists were significantly more concerned than the public."
One interesting conclusion of the research is that industry and academic scientists are among the very few groups the public trusts the most for information about nanotechnology — greater than government bodies, regulatory agencies and news media. The authors write: "Nanotechnology may, therefore, be one of the first emerging technologies where academia and business have the ability to reach out directly to a public who trusts the information they provide. Ironically, nanotechnology may also be the first emerging technology for which scientists may have to explain to that public why they should be more rather than less concerned about some potential risks."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 07, 2007
Categories: Biosecurity, Ethics | Permalink | Comments (0)

A young Russian biologist taking samples to a collaborative institute in France has been accused of attempting to smuggle bioweapons by Russia’s federal security service, the FSB. He has been interrogated repeatedly by FSB agents and prevented from leaving the country. His job also now looks uncertain.
In an exclusive Nature news story (Nature 449, 122-123; 2007), the details of his predicament are revealed and experts explain why the accusations are absurd. The case detailed in Nature illustrates a worrying resurgence in Russian scientists being accused of wrong-doing. Read the full story here, which is free access for one week (13-20 September 2007).
The Nature journals' policies and advice to authors and referees on biosecurity and bioterrorism can be found on our free-access author and referees' website.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on September 13, 2007
Categories: Biosecurity | Permalink | Comments (0)