The Great Beyond

Posted for Meredith Wadman

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is once again under fire for lax oversight of conflicts of interest among the extramural researchers it supports.

A November 18 report by the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services, the NIH’s parent agency, recommends that the agency significantly tighten its policing of conflicts. NIH is the world’s largest biomedical research funder, and it channels 80% of its $31 billion budget to extramural grants.

The inspector general reached his conclusions by examining the financial conflict documentation from 41 extramural institutions for the government’s 2006 fiscal year. Current regulations require grantee institutions to “reduce, manage or eliminate” conflicts reported by their researchers that could reasonably be affected by their NIH-funded work.

The inspector found that, among the documentation for 184 conflicts involving 165 researchers, only six researchers’ conflicts were eliminated by their universities. The lion’s share, totalling 136, were “managed”. Grantee institutions “rarely” reduce or eliminate conflicts, the report concluded.

Among the report’s recommendations: that universities collect financial interest data in specific dollar amounts and not in ranges such as “$10,000-$50,000”. It also recommends that NIH require researchers to report to their institutions all their financial interests and not just those that they judge could reasonably be affected by their NIH-supported research.

“Full and complete disclosure ensures that the determination of whether a significant financial interest relates to the research rests with the grantee institution and not with the researcher,” the report argues.

Specific dollar amounts would certainly shed more light on the equity holdings of researchers. These were found by the inspector to be the most common financial interest, with 111 of the researchers reporting equity holdings, and six of these holding more than $100,000.

NIH is in the process of rewriting its conflict of interest reporting requirements; it is expected to issue new regulations by year’s end (see: Researcher payment reporting under scrutiny).

The report follows a similar briefing from the inspector general in January 2008 (see: NIH in the dark over conflicts of interest). Investigations by Senator Charles Grassley have pointed out several cases of underreporting of six-figure amounts by NIH-funded researchers (see: Money in biomedicine: The senator's sleuth).

Sally Rockey, acting deputy director of the office of extramural research at NIH, said in a statement that, "NIH has demonstrated its commitment to oversight activities and continues to make them an agency priority." She added that the inspector's recommendations "will be considered by the NIH along with public comments ... as it formulates a new regulation that will facilitate effective compliance."

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 20, 2009
Categories: Health and medicine, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Can ordinary citizens help policymakers solve the most pressing problems of our time? That's what elections are supposed to be for - but when they fail, it might be worth trying something like ExpertLabs, a new effort launched today to tap into collective public expertise to better inform policymaking.

ExpertLabs is a new initiative of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and headed up by blogger Anil Dash. Other high-level names have joined up: $500,000 in seed funding comes from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has signed up to the concept.

It's surely a worthwhile experiment, but the question is what will actually result from it. Other efforts to increase webbiness and transparency in the Obama administration have suffered glitches, from a White House press site that took a while to get its press releases up on time to an OSTP blog that promised dialogue but ended up with the usual handful of rambling public comments rather than any sort of interactive and stimulating conversation.

Stay tuned to see if ExpertLabs delivers on its arm-waving promises of today.

Posted by Alex Witze on November 18, 2009
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Boosters of US research are trumpeting what they call the job-saving investments in science brought about by the US economic stimulus package, passed by Congress in February to the tune of $787 billion.

In Washington on Tuesday, the usual political luminaries in the Democratic party -- including House speaker Nancy Pelosi -- trotted out statistics on the more than $21 billion in science and technology funding in the stimulus package. Rush Holt, a physicist and Congressman from New Jersey, noted that universities and research laboratories in his state received more than $60 million. The group rolled out a website, called ScienceWorksForUS, that is meant to "tell the stories of the research and the researchers contributing to America's recovery".

But it's a one-sided message to say the least. Over at Science's policy blog, Jeff Mervis points out that no Republicans were invited to the Capitol Hill rally. And there's growing criticism of the numbers that Democratic leaders in both Congress and the Obama administration have been using to justify their claims of job creation through stimulus money (Washington Post).

For a breakdown of where in science all that money is going, see our graphic from last month.

Posted by Alex Witze on November 18, 2009
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Over 60 of the world’s leading agricultural scientists have issued a statement warning that December’s negotiations on climate change in Copenhagen must not ignore agriculture and the need for crop adaptation to ensure the world’s future food supplies.

The statement says, “The negative impact of climate change on agriculture, and thus on the production of food, could well place at risk all other efforts to mitigate and adapt to new climate conditions.”

The scientists say that farmers will encounter problems they have never before encountered, including higher than average temperatures, and shorter growing seasons. There is no single characteristic that will ensure crops will retain, or increase their productivity in new climates. Efforts to adapt will be required crop by crop. But crop diversity, which holds the key to future adaptation, is being lost.

“We urge countries at the Copenhagen conference to give due attention to crop diversity conservation and use as an essential element of the commitments they will make for climate change adaptation,” the statement says.

Continue reading "Climate change agreement must not ignore agriculture " »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on November 18, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Policy, Road to Copenhagen | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The rector of Imperial College London, one of the UK’s leading research universities, has resigned. Roy Anderson will end his time in charge of Imperial on the last day of the year and returns to his role as chair of infectious disease epidemiology at Imperial’s Faculty of Medicine.

“I have decided to step down as rector as I want to return to my primary concern, which is my deep and abiding research interest into global health,” says Anderson. “All my working life I have been, and I remain today, a research scientist and a teacher with a very strong interest in the global problem of infectious diseases and their control.”

Keith O’Nions, who is currently Director of Imperial’s Institute for Security Science and Technology, will become acting rector in January and continue until a permanent replacement for Anderson can be found.

Both the Times and the Financial Times highlight the relatively short tenure of Anderson, who spent only 18 months in charge of Imperial. The papers also highlight the fact that Imperial has lost money coming from the government’s Research Assessment Exercise – a key source of funding for English universities.

The FT says:

Defenders of Sir Roy can argue that the failure to persuade government to let the top research universities maintain their previous funding dominance lay with several vice-chancellors, not merely Sir Roy.

Moreover, some insiders have praised his attempts continue the internationalisation of Imperial. … But Sir Roy’s short tenure makes it difficult exclusively to credit him – or pin the blame on him – for this and other long-term trends at the university.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 17, 2009
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A UN summit on food security opens today in Rome, Italy, where world leaders are gathering to discuss how to feed the world’s billion hungry people.

Ban Ki-moon, UN secretary general, called for nations to agree a single global vision to address the problem, which he said must recognise the links between food and climate security.

"There can be no food security without climate security," he said.

“By 2050 our planet may be the home of 9.1 billion people... by 2050 we know we will need to grow 70 percent more food, yet weather is becoming more extreme and more unpredictable," he added.

Anti-poverty campaigners lamented the absence of leaders from the world’s riches countries at the summit.

“Sixty leaders are coming from around the world to this important UN summit, but where are the leaders from all the G8 countries?" asked ActionAid. "This doesn’t signal they are serious about finding global solutions to hunger," said Francisco Sarmento, ActionAid’s food rights coordinator.

At a pre-summit meeting yesterday, scientists from a leading Brazilian university agreed to work with the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation to help build agricultural development programmes in Latin American and African countries. Under a Memorandum of Understanding, Brazil’s Universidade Federal de Viçosa (UFV), which specialises in food and agricultural studies and research, will also open its doors to students from developing countries.

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on November 16, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The American Physical Society (APS) has overwhelmingly rejected a petition by a group of physicists asking the organization to reverse its position on climate change.

The petition was signed by 160 physicists including Nobel laureate Ivar Giaever. If you don't feel like reading the thing, it essentially says that there has been a lot of natural variation in climate change over the past centuries, and that natural variation can explain the recent rise in global temperatures. The statement also points out what it calls the "beneficial effects of increased levels of carbon dioxide for both plants and animals."

The group has been bullish on the hopes of changing the APS's minds. They even wrote us a letter in July, noting that they had prompted an APS review of its climate change position. "We hope it will lead to meaningful change," they said in the letter.

But no such luck. The society review, lead by nuclear physicist Daniel Kleppner from MIT, recommended that no changes be made, and on 10 November, the council accepted their recommendation.

As interesting as the petition is, there's an equally fascinating analysis of the signers that's doing the rounds. John Mashey, a computer scientist and APS member, has done a thorough analysis of who was involved. It's not the easiest to read, but it starts getting interesting around section 4 or 5. Mashey breaks down the signers by age, political contributions and geographic area. He also does some network analysis to show who was involved with the petition at different stages.

He finds that the signers tend to be predominately older and big contributors to the Republican and Libertarian parties. More interestingly the supporters seem to be centered around the Northeast, particularly Princeton University's department. Again, not surprising considering that one of the main organizersis Will Happer, a well-respected Princeton physicist and long-time climate change sceptic who, in 1993, was pushed out of his position at the Department of Energy after rowing with then vice president Al Gore over the significance of the ozone hole (see our rival for a little background).

The petition wasn't a total flop, the APS says its Panel on Public Affairs should "examine the statement for possible improvements in clarity and tone." Happer called the decision a "big victory" for the petitioners.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on November 12, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Physics & Mathematics, Policy | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

The American Medical Association has adopted a new policy that calls for the US government to review its ban on medical marijuana, the physician's group announced Tuesday.

The most well-established clinical application for marijuana istreatment of nausea, vomiting and unintended weight loss, particularly when these conditions accompany chemotherapy. Other studies have shown that marijuana may be effective in treating migraines, MS, PMS, ADHD and dozens of other conditions.

Medical marijuana is already legal in 13 states — with a 14th possibly on the horizon — but is illegal at the federal level. The US government currently classifies marijuana, along with heroin, PCP and many others as a Schedule 1 Drug — its strictest category, professedly reserved for drugs with a high tendency for abuse and no accepted medical use.

Now, the AMA thinks the latter incrimination deserves a new look. Although they noted that the new policy "should not be viewed as an endorsement of state-based medical cannabis programs, the legalization of marijuana, or that scientific evidence on the therapeutic use of cannabis meets the current standards for a prescription drug product", the AMA is promoting clinical research, cannabis-based medicine development and alternative delivery methods, such as vaporizers.

The move comes just weeks after the Obama administration announced it would not arrest medical marijuana users and providers who follow state laws.

Image: medical marijuana dispensary in California by Neeta Lind, via Flickr

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 11, 2009
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Over at the New York Times is an interesting story about solar panels and the European Parliament. I kid you not.

The story tells us about some proposals, proposed by the Swedish EU presidency government in the summer, that would see solar panel manufacturers subject to European hazardous waste legislation, that previously they were exempt from.

The problem is cadmium, a toxic metal that is used to make some photovoltaic cells.

The NYT story also mentions a mysterious European Parliament committee that is “expected in coming days to propose a way of keeping pressure on solar companies to come up with alternatives to cadmium telluride.”

This is interesting news indeed, and Greentech Media has picked up on it, although details are still sparse about the committee and its proposals. But the message seems to be that First Solar, seen as a success in the solar arena, will be in serious trouble if cadmium is banned in Europe.

I remember a while ago talking to quantum dot manufacturers Nanoco, spun out of Manchester University, who are trying to turn away from cadmium – but there the question is one of knowing the markets: in Japan, where quantum dots are likely to be used for TV screens and other display applications, cadmium is a big no-no. Mining in Japan led to long term cadmium release into water causing itai-itai disease, symptoms of which include brittle bones.

So, while a cadmium ban may be bad for solar panel makers in Europe, this might signal a need for electronics manufacturers world wide to try and turn away from making products that contain these toxic elements in the first place.

Image: Getty

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on November 11, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Neat technologies, Policy | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The DNA of those arrested (in England and Wales) but not convicted of any crime, will remain on a police database for up to six years, the UK government will announce today.

The policy is a partial climb-down from an earlier Home Office proposal that information on innocent people might in some cases be retained for up to 12 years. But it still clashes with a European Court of Human Rights ruling last year, that holding onto the DNA data of innocent people is in breach of human rights.

The Times says the latest Home Office figures show there are 5,910,172 DNA profiles on the database, which is the largest of its kind in the world.

Continue reading "UK to store innocents’ details on DNA database for six years" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on November 11, 2009
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Three more government science advisors in the UK have quit in protest at the treatment of David Nutt.

Nutt was sacked by Home Secretary Alan Johnson after huge media interest in his comments on the relative harms of legal and illegal drugs, made in scientific journals and lectures. Shortly after the sacking two members of the 31-member Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), which Nutt chaired until his sacking, quit.

Yesterday’s resignations came directly after a meeting between Johnson and the remaining members of the council. The Home Office initially seemed to claim the meeting had been a success, saying it was “very constructive” and that Johnson had “emphasised the value he placed on ACMD’s advice, the important contribution the ACMD had made to government drug’s [sic] policy in the past and how he expected it to continue do so [sic] in the future”.

However, it quickly emerged that three council members were joining the exodus. If the resignations weren’t enough of a problem for the Home Secretary – who has already taken some heavy criticism from inside his own party and from outside – the handling of them has also been far from smooth.

One of those who quit, former president of the Royal Society of Chemistry Simon Campbell, appeared on BBC radio this morning to berate Johnson

“Yesterday Alan Johnson talked about building a level of trust between the Council and the Home Office, and my resignation was apparently announced by the Home Office while I was on a train home from London. I sent a formal letter to the Home Secretary late last night but I’m dismayed that my resignation was on BBC News as soon I got home,” he said on the Today Programme.

“I’m very concerned about what the Home Secretary believes is a level of trust.”

The other two resignations were from Ian Ragan and John Marsden.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 11, 2009
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Following up on some initial results released last month, the International Energy Agency released 700 pages of statistical goodness on global energy markets and greenhouse gas emissions on Tuesday.

Perhaps the most significant numbers in the World Energy Outlook, at least in terms of the current policy and the international climate negotiations, pertain to China. Indeed, the IEA suggests that if China actually follows through on all of the goals and targets it has announced (for renewables, nuclear power, energy efficiency and the like), it alone could account for 25 percent of the reductions that the world needs to make by 2020 in order to remain on track for limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius. Put another way, China would be doing more to address global than either the United States or Europe.

These are remarkable statistics, and they should get some attention when climate negotiators meet in Copenhagen next month. China represents the fastest growing source of emissions, and everybody wants to see them put some kind of numbers on the table, along with existing commitments. Those who look at the issue tend to come up with big numbers (see here and here). That said, the IEA's analysis would be the most significant to date, and will likely serve as a baseline for assessments of what China is doing from here on out. Who knows, perhaps China will be inspired to come up with its own numbers.

Continue reading "IEA: something for everybody in the 2009 outlook" »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on November 10, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Energy, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Labour government hit the airwaves today to push its plans for new energy production, and in particular nuclear power. Ed Miliband, the Secretary of Energy and Climate Change, was on just about every show imaginable this morning with a single message: It's time to fast-track new nuclear plants in England.

This afternoon, the government announced that 10 of 11 perspective sites would be eligible for new construction. By my count, all but two of the sites (Braystones and Kirkstanton) already host nuclear power plants. At present around nuclear contributes about 15% of the UK's total electricity needs. The government hopes that the new reactors can contribute a quarter of the UK's power by 2025.

The Times mentions another part of the government's plan: a deep geological repository for high level nuclear waste. According to the story, the repository could cost £18 billion, but there aren't a lot of details beyond that. Even the 306-page draft nuclear national policy statement doesn't say much, aside from the fact that such a facility should be built.

Responding to a question in the House of Commons, Miliband admitted that "deep geological storage is a long way off." Still, he said, several communities in West Cumbria have come forward. I wonder who that would be.

Criticism of the nuclear scheme was loud and (in characteristic British political fashion) insubstantial. Greg Clark the conservative shadow energy secretary decried the plan as not coming soon enough, while the Liberal Democrats said more money should be spent on renewables. Maybe it's my American ignorance, but I failed to see any serious opposition to the proposed new policy.

It wasn't all nuclear news, the government also released policy plans for renewables, coal and natural gas, all of which you can read here.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on November 09, 2009
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Update:

In December this year, parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will descend on Copenhagen to wrangle over the details of a new global climate deal — a potential successor to the Kyoto Protocol. See Nature’s Road to Copenhagen special for more coverage.

International delegates to the Montreal Protocol wrapped up their meeting in Port Ghalib, Egypt, over the weekend without taking formal action to curb hydrofluorocarbons, modern refrigerants that are also poised to become a major contributor to global warming.

Some 41 countries joined in a declaration in support of regulating HFCs as greenhouse gases under the Montreal Protocol (not under the Kyoto Protocol, as indicated in an initial post; that is of course where they currently reside). This according to the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development and the Environmental Investigation Agency. This is in addition to support in North America and Europe as well as Micronesia and Mauritius, which have led the proposal.

Ozone-friendly HFCs represent the culmination of the Montreal Protocol's original mission; regulating them as greenhouse gases would require an amendment expanding the protocol's regulatory umbrella. In Egypt, Montreal delegates called on a technical committee to analyze alternatives to the chemicals in advance of a potential decision next year. For background, see our previous coverage here and here.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on November 09, 2009
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It would be unfair to accuse Congress of laziness -- there have been these things called the healthcare and climate/energy bills -- but it's been over a month into the 2010 fiscal year, and Congress still hasn't appropriated money for most science agencies. Thursday night, the Senate passed its version of the Commerce, Justice, Science, or CJS bill -- which contains funding for agencies like NSF and NASA. It now will sent to conference to iron out differences with the previously passed House version, a process that could easily take a month or more.

But if the Senate bill reflects the latest wisdom of the doyens of the Hill (if wisdom is what it is), then science is sitting pretty well. NASA would receive the full $18.7 billion that the Obama administration asked for. Interestingly, language accompanying the bill expresses concern that the International Lunar Network -- a planned system of lunar seismic detectors -- was tied to the human space programme rather than being a justifiable science mission in its own right. The Senate gave it $21 million for continued development.

The NSF would get $6.9 billion, just $130 million below the administration's request. However, the report language expresses concern about workplace environment -- no doubt tied to the porn scandal early this year. But it also questions the NSF's practice of rotating scientists in to the agency on short term appointments. The Senate bill acknowledges that this practice keeps NSF program managers fresh, but says it "creates gaps in management oversight". I wonder how scientists will feel if funding decisions were managed by career civil servants stuck in Washington rather than by their own.

Posted by Eric Hand on November 06, 2009
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Lord Drayson, the UK science minister, has thrown his weight behind a set of demands from the government’s independent advisors which were drawn up in the wake of the controversial sacking of drugs advisor David Nutt.

In an interview with Nature, Drayson also admitted there were concerns among government advisors that pre-date ‘Nutt-gate’. He said at recent meetings “a number of leading scientific advisors across different fields ... expressed to me some underlying concerns”.

“Not a huge concern, bubbling, but it was not just about advice relating to drugs classification,” says Drayson. “What’s happened over the last few days is that sort of bubbling concern has turned into very serious concern because of the events that have taken place.”

Drayson also confirmed the veracity of an email leaked to the Sun newspaper, in which he apparently said he was “pretty appalled” and that the Home Secretary’s decision to sack Nutt was “a big mistake” (see: Cracks show in government over Nutt-gate).

“I can confirm that was an email that I wrote and it reflects how I felt at that point,” he told Nature today. “I learnt about it through a Google Alert, which is not a great way to learn about it.”

An inquiry into the leak – which Drayson says “absolutely was not leaked from my end” – is now underway.

However, Drayson insists that good can still come of the whole affair. He says he backs a set of Principles for the Treatment of Independent Scientific Advice, drawn up by other advisors and leading scientists (see: Home Secretary under fire over ‘Nutt-gate’).

“What I want to do is to be in a position to be able to come out and reassure the scientific community which I know has been very seriously concerned about all this, that the government takes the independence of scientific advice very seriously indeed,” he says.

“I think the principles which were set out yesterday, did provide a very good framework, a starting point, to allow us to confirm these things. I think they reflect a number of things which were in the code of conduct. What I want to do now is … come up with a way of implementing these principles.”

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 06, 2009
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The US Congress is finally taking on the controversial idea of geoengineering — large-scale, deliberate manipulation of the climate system to counteract climate change.

The concept has slowly been creeping into public awareness, including a casual — and much overblown — mention by Obama's science advisor John Holdren in his first interview with the Associated Press.

Yesterday the House committee on science and technology heard testimony from five scientists, including big-name geoengineering proponents people who have called for government support of geoengineering research, including Lee Lane, codirector of the American Enterprise Institute's geoengineering project, Ken Caldeira of Stanford University and John Shepherd of the University of Southampton. Shepherd recently chaired a Royal Society working group, which also included Caldeira and which released a report on geoengineering in September.

In his opening statement, committee chair Bart Gordon emphasized that there are many uncertainties about geoengineering, including the potential for catastrophic side-effects. But, he said, “the climate is changing”, so “we should accept the possibility that certain climate engineering proposals may merit consideration”.

Gordon announced that this hearing would be the first of three or four hearings to explore geoengineering over the next eight months, and that the committee planned to work with the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee. The chairman of the Commons committee will testify before the House committee this spring, Gordon said.

Continue reading "Geoengineering in the House" »

Posted by Lizzie Buchen on November 06, 2009
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The science advisor fired by the UK government last week has penned an editorial explaining his actions.

David Nutt, until Friday the chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), was fired after widespread media attention focused on his comments on the relative risks of legal and illegal substances (see links below).

In a guest editorial in this week’s New Scientist, Nutt says that the UK government is both ignoring its own advisors and “falling out of step” with an international trend towards more liberal drug policies. He writes:

The message for the British government is a simple one: don’t exclude rational argument in order to exploit a visceral public response. Politicians have to win the hearts and minds of their electorate. If your policy is informed by an underlying moral imperative, be open about what that is, and don’t try to disguise it with a veneer of pseudo-science. We ignore scientific evidence at our peril.

Nature has also produced an editorial on Nutt-gate this week. It reads, in part:

Scientific advisers who publicly attack decisions they consider to be less than ideal, and in so doing provide ammunition for political opponents of those decisions, are entering dangerous territory.

Nonetheless, in this case, the position of the Labour government and of the leading opposition party, the Conservatives, which vigorously supported Nutt’s sacking, has no merit at all. It deals a significant blow both to the chances of an informed and reasoned debate over illegal drugs, and to the parties’ own scientific credibility.

Previous Nutt News
Cracks show in government over Nutt-gate – 03 November 2009
Sacked science adviser speaks out - 2 November 2009
Government sacks independent drugs advisor - 30 October 2009
UK government vs its own drugs advisor, Part II - 29 October 2009
Ecstasy advice is a bitter pill - 12 February 2009
Love drug gets politicians fighting - 09 February 2009

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 04, 2009
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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has announced three eminent scientists as the nation's first Science Envoys to the Muslim world. The move is the first concrete indication that the administration is following through on its promise to help ramp up science and technology in Muslim-majority countries (Press Release).

Barack Obama first announced the plan during his June speech at Cairo University, where he pledged to “open centers of scientific excellence in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and appoint new Science Envoys to collaborate on programs that develop new sources of energy, create green jobs, digitize records, clean water, and grow new crops launch a new fund to support technological development in Muslim-majority countries” (New York Times). Two months later at the inaugural meeting of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, science czar John Holdren mentioned that the administration had organized a task force to lead the initiative.

The three envoys, announced yesterday at Clinton's speech in Marrakesh, Morocco:
• Bruce Alberts, a biochemist at University of California, San Francisco who served two terms as president of the National Academy of Sciences and is editor-in-chief of Science
• Dr. Elias Zerhouni, who was director of the National Institutes of Health from 2002 to 2008 and serves on the board of trustees for King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia
• Ahmed Zewail, an Egypt-born Nobel laureate at Cal Tech who also serves on PCAST

From the Nature archives:
Nature special on Islam and Science
Arab science: Blooms in the desert

Posted by Lizzie Buchen on November 04, 2009
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Nature reporter Jeff Tollefson is at the climate negotiations in Barcelona. This is his first blog post from the pre-Copenhagen meeting, cross posted from In the Field.

I arrived at the United Nations climate conference today - late, on the second day, after a red-eye flight over the Atlantic and an all-too-brief nap at the hotel – and encountered drama much sooner than expected. I registered, oriented myself at the conference centre, gathered the requisite daily briefing documents and then found a bathroom to deploy a newly purchased toothbrush.

It was there, after bumping into a colleague, that I learned the African Group had announced at the opening session on Monday that it would boycott the Kyoto Protocol talks until developed countries get serious about their climate commitments.

Continue reading "Barcelona climate: A rough start, tinged with hope" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 04, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Policy, Road to Copenhagen | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The UK government has today published its much publicised framework (see right) on the future of the nation’s universities. It is yet another clearly defined policy for UK universities, and not contradictory at all…

The government wants to prioritise degree courses in science and engineering subjects because of the high level skills they provide students entering the workforce. To do so, it will ramp up competition between universities for public funds for teaching, with the “winners” being those universities that can best provide students with skills that enhance the UK’s competitive advantage. “To allow funds to be diverted to courses that meet strategic skills needs they will be diverted away from institutions whose courses fail to meet high standards of quality or outcome,” it says. The Higher Education Funding Council for England will launch a consultation on how this should be done. Ok so far, although, it’s not yet clear how much money will be diverted and from where.

Continue reading "Mixed messages " »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on November 03, 2009
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The fallout from the UK Home Secretary’s sacking of an independent drugs advisor continues.

Yesterday Alan Johnson appeared in parliament to defend his sacking of David Nutt, who chaired the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. Johnson stressed that he does not see this as an issue about the government’s approach to scientific advice, but about the particulars of Nutt’s case.

“I asked Professor Nutt to resign as my principal drugs adviser, not because of the work of the council but because of his failure to recognise that, as chair of ACMD, his role is to advise rather than to criticise Government policy on drugs,” he told Parliament. “…There is no doubt in my mind that the advice of independent scientific advisers is essential to substantial aspects of the government’s work.”

Johnson also admitted he did not consult the government’s chief scientific adviser John Beddington before sacking Nutt. Beddington told the BBC he agreed with Nutt that cannabis was less harmful than cigarettes and alcohol but wouldn’t say whether he agreed with the sacking.

Johnson may have a bigger problem though. According to the Sun, Science Minister Lord Drayson told the Prime Minister’s office the sacking was “a big mistake” and that he was “pretty appalled”.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has thrown his weight behind Johnson though, telling the Evening Standard “We’ll get tougher on drugs.”

Bizarrely, Brown went on to say, “On climate change, or health, for example, we take the best scientific advice possible. But in an area like drugs we have to look at it in the round.”

If you can work out what that means please let us know.

Previous Nutt News
Sacked science adviser speaks out - 2 November 2009
Government sacks independent drugs advisor - 30 October 2009
UK government vs its own drugs advisor, Part II - 29 October 2009
Ecstasy advice is a bitter pill - 12 February 2009
Love drug gets politicians fighting - 09 February 2009

Image: University of Bristol

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 03, 2009
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Here's the latest in a rash of scientific legal trouble: A University of Florida researcher and his wife have been arrested on charges of defrauding NASA, the Air Force and the US Navy out of millions.

Samim Anghaie, a professor and head of the University of Florida's Innovation Nuclear Space Power and Propulsion Institute, was indicted on 50 counts of wire fraud and 17 counts of money laundering, along with two charges of conspiracy. His wife, Sousan, was also charged with making false statements.

In February the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) raided Anghaie's offices at the University of Florida. They were reportedly looking for evidence that Anghaie had funneled money out of 13 grants totaling US$3.4 million.

According to this article in the Orlando Sentinel, the Anghanies now stand accused of creating fake employment records and depositing paychecks in their own back accounts and the accounts of their sons.

Meanwhile, the couple allegedly ripped off the work of graduate students and postdocs and passed it off as the research of their company, New Era Technology. They also are accused of using data from other laboratories, including one in Russia.

In other scientific lockdown news, lunar researcher Stewart Nozette is being held without bond on espionage charges. Nozette, a long-time NASA and Department of Energy consultant, was arrested in October after he allegedly gave secrets to an FBI agent posing as an Israeli spy.

This hasn't been Nozette's only trouble with the law. The Washington Post reports that he pleaded guilty in January to defrauding NASA and the Department of Defense out of $265,205 between 2000 and 2006. He reportedly used the money to pay off old debts and to cover costs for his swimming pool.

Nozette has pleaded not guilty to the latest charge of attempted espionage. According to the AP the Justice Department could seek the death penalty in the case.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on November 02, 2009
Categories: Policy, Space and astronomy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

President Obama has lifted a ban on HIV positive individuals entering the United States.

“If we want to be a global leader in combating HIV-AIDS, we need to act like it,” said Obama on Friday. “That’s why on Monday my administration will publish a final rule that eliminates the travel ban.”

That rule was published today in the Federal Register. It states:

While HIV infection is a serious health condition, it is not a communicable disease that is a significant public health risk for introduction, transmission, and spread to the U.S. population through casual contact. As a result of this final rule, aliens will no longer be inadmissible into the United States based solely on the ground they are infected with HIV, and they will not be required to undergo HIV testing as part of the required medical examination for US immigration.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged other nations which impose travel restrictions on those with HIV to follow America’s lead. According to the UN over 50 countries impose travel restrictions of some kind on HIV positive individuals.

“Placing travel restrictions on people living with HIV has no public health justification. It is also a violation of human rights,” says Michel Sidibé, executive director of UNAIDS. “We hope that other countries that still have travel restrictions will remove them at the earliest.”

The US rule change comes into force 4 January, 2010.

“Today a discriminatory travel and immigration ban has gone the way of the dinosaur and we’re glad it’s finally extinct. It sure took too long to get here,” said Senator John Kerry on Friday.

Image: Obama on Friday / White House

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 02, 2009
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The UK government has told its independent advisor on drug abuse to resign after he again called for a more scientific approach to drugs.

David Nutt, until now chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), delivered a lecture at King’s College London in July, an edited version of which was published earlier this week reiterating his views on the relative safety of different drugs [Corrected 02/11]. We noted at the time that he “looks set for another row with politicians who continue to ignore researchers’ advice over illegal substances”.

In his lecture he said, “Using the [Misuse of Drugs] Act in a political way to give messages other than those relating to relative harms undermines the Act and does great damage to the educational message. We also have to fully endorse harm reduction approaches at all levels and especially stop the artificial separation of alcohol and tobacco as ‘non-drugs’.” (PDF.)

Nutt had earlier riled a previous home secretary, Jacqui Smith, with his comments regarding the dangers of MDMA (‘ecstasy’), comparing the risks of the drug to horse-riding and calling for a wider debate on society’s approach to risk.

Today Alan Johnson, the current UK Home Secretary, told Nutt to resign.

“In a letter he [Johnson] expressed surprise and disappointment over Professor Nutt's comments which damage efforts to give the public clear messages about the dangers of drugs,” said a Home Office spokesperson. “As chair of the council his actions undermine its role and scientific independence. … [T]he clear role of the chair of the ACMD is to provide independent scientific advice and not to lobby for changes in policy.”

However the sacking of Nutt has already generated a furious response from other UK politicians.

Evan Harris, a Liberal Democrat MP and member of Parliament’s Science and Technology Select Committee, said, “The political sacking of a distinguished scientist, who is the chair of an independent scientific advisory committee, for the ‘crime’ of having different views than the Secretary of State is an enormous blow to the credibility of the Government’s approach to scientific evidence.”

Harris cites a recent response from the government to a committee inquiry on evidence based policy which stated:

The Government agrees that the independence of science advisers is critical. It was precisely for this reason that the GCSA [Government Chief Scientific Adviser] wrote to then-Home Secretary Jacqui Smith to express concern over her criticism, in Parliament, of Professor Nutt (Chairman of ACMD) with regard to an article he published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Phil Willis, the chairman of the Science and Technology committee, said, “As Chair of the Science and Technology committee I am writing immediately to the Home Secretary to ask for clarification as to why the distinguished scientist David Nutt has been removed of duties as Chair of Advisory Council on Misuse of Drugs at a time when independent scientific advice to government is essential. It is disturbing if an independent scientist should be removed for reporting sound scientific advice.”

UPDATE - Read Nature's interview with Nutt here: Sacked science adviser speaks out
Richard Garside, director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies where Nutt gave his lecture in July, has written to the Home Secretary. His letter, distributed by the Science Media Centre, is copied below.

Image: University of Bristol

Continue reading "Government sacks independent drugs advisor" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 30, 2009
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The conventional wisdom these days is that governments should put more money into science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education. But a new study suggests that better education does not more scientists make.

The research was led by B. Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown University in Washington, DC and Harold Salzmann of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. It analyzed several longitudinal data sets to determine how many students were staying in STEM fields between secondary school, college and their careers.

Generally, it's thought that poor incentives have caused many students to leave these fields in recent years, but Lowell et al. found quite the opposite. The number of secondary school students who went on to study STEM fields was relatively unchanged between 1972-1977 and 2000-2005. And students who stayed in STEM fields in college were actually more likely to go on to careers in research in the 1997-2000 time frame than they were in 1977-1980.

But it wasn't all good news. The study found that the most talented STEM students were actually less likely to stay in science throughout their career.

The study's conclusion? Just because you put more money into educating science students doesn't mean you'll end up with more scientists. In fact forces in the job market might be more important. The authors cite anecdotal evidence that suggests many top science students are being lured into other more lucrative careers. The inference here, I suppose, is that governments should think about incentives for retaining working scientists, in addition to worrying about getting young people into STEM fields.

The study's evidence is interesting though not definitive. Nevertheless, it's an intriguing counterpoint to the chorus calling for ever more education in the sciences. There's a raging discussion about it all over on Slashdot.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on October 29, 2009
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Earlier this month it looked like the UK government had abandoned plans to keep the DNA of innocent people on its massive police database.

The European Court of Human Rights has already said that data on innocent people should not be retained. Now, however, leaked emails indicate that the government will try to keep hold of their DNA for six years, says the Daily Mail. The previously abandoned position of the government was to keep DNA of innocents for 12 years (see: UK won't be able to store DNA data – 20 October, 2009).

It was also reported today that the profiles of 5.5 million people – over 10% of the population of England and Wales – are now on the database (Daily Telegraph). In addition, over 90,000 innocent people have had their DNA added to the database since that European Court ruling that this shouldn’t be happening (Guardian).

The UK government’s approach seems to be catching on too: the University of Akron in the US is now apparently requiring job applicants to be willing to supply a DNA sample (Inside Higher Ed).

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 29, 2009
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The head of the UK government’s independent drug advice group looks set for another row with politicians who continue to ignore researchers’ advice over illegal substances.

Earlier this year the UK’s Home Secretary launched an attack on David Nutt, chairman of the government’s own Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs and a respected academic.

Nutt’s crime, in the eyes of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and other politicians, was to write an article in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. His article called for a wider debate on the risks of drugs and, in passing, compared the risks of MDMA (‘ecstasy’) to horse riding. (See: Ecstasy advice is a bitter pill.)

Credit to the man though, he has stuck to his guns and come back with another reasoned critique, delivered as a lecture at King’s College London. In it he reiterates his call for improving public understanding of the actual risks of drugs and again recommends a more logical classification of these.

Continue reading "UK government vs its own drugs advisor, Part II" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 29, 2009
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Posted for Rex Dalton

A US project to more precisely chart geological time scales is releasing a new initiative to educate students on deep time in order to challenge religious groups who argue life was divinely made about 10,000 years ago.

Earthtime’s program – downloadable at earth-time.org and available in DVD and CD format – explains the ages back billions of years. It includes teaching methods in math and physics to explain how researchers date sediments through atomic decay.

Sam Bowring, a geochronologist from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston and an Earthtime leader, described the educational drive last week to the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America.

“I will never forget Kirk Johnson of the Denver Museum of Science and Technology leaning into the camera, saying: ‘Go home and tell your parents the world is 4.567 billion years old’,” says Bowring.

In Denver, Colorado, and Boston, Massachusetts, Earthtime scientists have provided educational material to a total of hundreds of students and teachers. Denver scientists also conduct dialogues with students over district video networks.

In a planned next grant from the US National Science Foundation that previously has funded Earthtime with $1 million, scientists hope to expand the educational outreach.

One major Earthtime science project is to precisely date the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary about 65 million years ago, when most life forms were wiped out by a worldwide catastrophic event. Bowring, Johnson and other researchers are using sediments of the K-T boundary debris outside Denver for the more exact date.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 29, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

Women scientists who applied for a new high-risk research award from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) had a lower funding success rate than their male counterparts.

The NIH last month announced the winners of more than 100 new awards totalling US$348 million over five years for outside-the-box biomedical research. The grants came in three flavours: Pioneer awards for innovative researchers at any career stage, New Innovator Awards for up-and-coming investigators, and a new category rolled out for the first time: Transformative R01 (T-R01) Awards for bold and uncertain projects.

As Nature reported last month, more than a third of Pioneer and New Innovator awards went to women, but female researchers made up only around 15% of T-R01 awardees. The question at the time was: How did this compare to the gender ratios of the applicants?

Nature has now learned the answer. According to data newly obtained from the NIH under a freedom of information request, 32% of Pioneer Award applicants and 40% of New Innovator Award applicants who listed their gender were women — on par with the gender ratios of the awardees, which were 34.5% and 39% female, respectively, for the two individual-based awards.

Women applicants fared worse, however, for the T-R01 competition, where 21% of grant hopefuls who listed their gender said they were women, yet only 9 of 59, or 15%, of the awardees were women. This difference, though not statistically significant according to Nature's chi-square test statistical analysis (Χ² = 0.99, p = 0.32), does not help realize the NIH's vision of developing "opportunities and programs to support recruitment, retention, re-entry, and advancement of girls and women in biomedical careers".

The NIH is now requesting applications for the 2010 T-R01s.

Image: NIH

Posted by Elie Dolgin on October 29, 2009
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Posted on behalf of Rex Dalton

A delegation of US scientists met with Cuban counterparts in Havana this week to open a broad dialogue on new era of scientific exchange.

The group visit was initiated by the Environmental Defense Fund in Washington, DC, which has special permits from the US government for interactions with Cuba. Scientists from Mexico, a long-time intermediary on US-Cuba relations, also participated.

About 30 US scientists and environmental officials held talks with the Cubans on 26-27 October in advance of an international meeting on ocean science issues. This week’s conference includes the 13th Latin American Congress on Marine Sciences – where human impact on coastal zones, biodiversity and weather hazards will be among topics discussed.

"This is a logical, low-risk area in which to begin discussions with Cuba. It is without question in our mutual interest to share science and ideas on our shared resources like the Gulf of Mexico," Environmental Defense Fund senior attorney Dan Whittle told Reuters.

Under the administration of President Barack Obama, there has been considerable thawing in relations between the two nations (Nature). Travel restrictions are being relaxed, and there is substantial movement toward breaking the long-standing US trade embargo with Cuba.

Other non-governmental organizations also are seeking to take advantage of the new political climate to try to increase scientific exchange. The New America Foundation and the American Association for Advancement of Science, both of Washington, DC, are organizing scientific exchange visits, with one expected in near future.

Posted by Alex Witze on October 28, 2009
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Immediate action should be taken to prevent plutonium leaks following a potential future earthquake at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US, Energy Secretary Steven Chu was warned this week.

The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board says an earthquake could trigger a fire inside high-risk gloveboxes where work on plutonium takes place. Los Alamos sits on a fault line, so an earthquake would not be unexpected.

The consequences of an earthquake-induced fire in the lab’s plutonium facility exceed the Department of Energy’s guidelines by over two orders of magnitude, says the board.

“The board believes this situation warrants immediate attention and action,” states a letter to Chu dated 26 October (pdf).

According to the Project on Government Oversight, the energy department has been trying to delay the board’s report in order to deal with the problem before it became public. It claims that a glovebox fire could cause the public to be exposed to 100 times the recommended safe level of plutonium.

In a statement to AP and the LA Times, the lab said it was already taking action to improve fire safety at the Technical Area-55 facility.

“Protecting the health and safety of our employees, the public and the environment while conducting operations all across the laboratory, particularly at the plutonium facility, TA-55, is our primary concern,” it says.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 28, 2009
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Months after the House of Representatives passed its historic global warming legislation, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is finally poised to begin moving its own bill. But first, three days of non-stop testimony from dozens of experts representing the Obama administration, academics, environmental groups and business representatives.

Today was reserved for Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat who partnered up with California Democrat and committee chairwoman Barbara Boxer, to write the bill, as well as a suite of administration officials led by Energy Secretary Steven Chu and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.

Despite a steady stream of testimony underscoring the many benefits that could flow from 900-plus page bill, the debate seems to be stuck on basic questions about whether protecting the climate by deploying clean energy will bankrupt the nation. As the New York Times points out, even Democrats who come from energy producing states have reservations.

Chu tried to address the question by pointing out that China "has already made its choice" and is now spending $9 billion per month on clean energy. He went on to talk about how the United States has lost its lead in clean energy manufacturing and must now make up for lost time if it wants to remain competitive.

"When the starting gun sounded on the clean energy race, the United States stumbled," he said in his written testimony, available here. "But I remain confident that we can make up the ground."

Continue reading "US Senate begins climate proceedings " »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on October 27, 2009
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Basic research at the US Department of Homeland Security has come a long way since 2002, but disturbing flaws still exist, according to testimony at a House of Representatives hearing today.

The DHS's science and technology directorate, charged with developing gadgets for detecting explosives, dangerous persons, and chemical and biological weapons, has not performed a comprehensive risk assessment of threats, criticized David Wu, who chairs the subcommittee overseeing the directorate for the House Committee on Science and Technology, in his opening statement. As a result, it lacks a proper foundation for determining research priorities.

This is an "area of great concern that has yet to be addressed by the directorate", despite repeated requests by the subcommittee, Wu said.

But Wu also commended the S&T directorate on its progress. The directorate got off to a rocky start, and has been moving in the right direction — recently allocating 20% of its budget to basic research, for example.

Continue reading "Security science still struggling" »

Posted by Lizzie Buchen on October 27, 2009
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Direct-to-consumer genetic testing can count one more consumer — the director of the US National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins.

Collins announced today at a personalized medicine colloquium in Washington DC that he spat into a set of tubes and sent off his genetic material under a pseudonym to three of the leading personal genetic testing companies. He said that all the companies provided highly accurate genotyping, but with substantial differences in the information that was revealed and the interpretations provided — similar to the conclusions reached by Collins's former human genome sequencing rival, Craig Venter, in a recent opinion article in Nature.

On a more personal level, Collins discovered that he carries two copies of the most common risk factor of type II diabetes. Collins, whose laboratory investigates the underlying genetic basis of adult-onset diabetes, said he was "surprised" by these findings since his family has no history of the disease. Upon learning the test results, Collins got off his Harley-Davidson and instigated a regular exercise regime. The svelter NIH director said he has now lost 20 pounds.

Official NIH photos from before and after Collins became director. Check out those gaunt cheeks!

Posted by Elie Dolgin on October 26, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine, Policy | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

There could not have been a more receptive audience for US President Barack Obama than the one that filled MIT’s 1100-seat Kresge auditorium to capacity today. Obama’s 19- minute speech about clean energy was filled with words that would make any American engineer or scientist’s heart -- a Democratic heart, at least -- swell with pride. He spoke of how America has always been a leader in innovation and discovery and how he believes the country’s innovators will once again forge ahead to build a new energy economy.

“From China to India, from Japan to Germany, nations everywhere are racing to develop new ways to produce and use energy. The nation that wins this competition will be the nation that leads the world economy. I’m convinced of that. And I want America to be that nation."

Continue reading "Obama’s energy speech at MIT—low in substance, high in inspiration" »

Posted by Corie Lok on October 23, 2009
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Half-a-dozen British Nobel Prize-winners have added their signatures to a petition protesting a proposal to assess basic science in part by its 'economic and social impact'.

The Research Excellence Framework, or REF, will be an important cog in the machine that doles out money to universities. The Higher Education Funding Council for England will use it to help determine which campuses receive around £2 billion a year in quality-related research funding from 2013.

Under a proposed set of changes to the REF, the council will begin basing 25% of their assessment on the research's 'economic and social impact'.

Those words undoubtedly ring true with the UK's Treasury, which is seeking some economic payback from its generous investment in research over the past decade. But it has rubbed the Nobelists the wrong way. "The REF proposals are founded on a lack of understanding of how knowledge advances," says the petition, which is on the University and College Union website.

This year's Chemistry Nobel prizewinner Venki Ramakrishnan is among the signatories. You hear his view in his own words by watching the Nature Video at the right (comments at 5:15).

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on October 22, 2009
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In what is being described as a ‘U-Turn’, the UK’s Home Office has dropped its plans to store information of innocent people on its national DNA database.

After a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights last year saying that the UK could not hold onto DNA data of innocent people. The Home Office’s response was that it would only hold onto the information for a limited time, possibly of up to 12 years.

But that decision has now been scrapped and a new version of the Policing and Crime Bill will no longer contain these proposals.

Alex Jeffreys, inventor of DNA fingerprinting has been vocal about his concerns surrounding storing people’s genetic information. But some observers are hinting that this saga is not over yet, Jeffreys may still have reason to worry. Writing on the Guardian’s website, columnist Henry Porter suggests that the bill, including the provision for storing DNA data, will return in a future parliamentary session.

But for now human rights activists are claiming victory. Liberty, a human rights organisation, says that the retreat is “sensible and tactical”. “Stockpiling the intimate details of millions of innocents is bad enough without ducking public and parliamentary scrutiny by sneaking regulations in by the back door,” says Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty.

Image: Getty

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on October 20, 2009
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Journal publishers stand accused of using open access to line their coffers this week.

The UK’s leading medical research charity has told publishers they should deal with concerns that they are taking money to make articles open access without reducing their subscription fees. In effect the allegation is publishers are having their cake and eating it and then eating someone else’s cake too.

“We would like to see a commitment from publishers to show the uptake of their open access option and to adjust their subscription rates to reflect increases in income from open access fees,” says Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust.

“Some publishers, for example Oxford University Press, have already done this and we would like to see all publishers behave the same way.”

So how big a problem is this ‘double dipping’? Is it even a problem?

Continue reading "Open access: are publishers ‘double dipping’?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 20, 2009
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posted on behalf of Geoff Brumfiel

A prominent scientist who led a mission to find water on the Moon has been arrested on charges of espionage by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Stewart Nozette, a 52-year-old former government physicist, allegedly tried to sell details of US missile detection satellites in exchange for cash. Nozette's worked for pretty much every military shop in the US government including the Air Force's Phillips Laboratory, the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Naval Research Laboratory, and the Defense Advanced Research Project's Administration (DARPA). He also served on president George H. W. Bush's space council and worked with NASA.

He's well known in scientific circles for conceiving the 1994 Clementine mission, which used a military test satellite to discover some of the first traces of water on the Moon's South Pole. More recently, he has been a co-investigator on Chandrayaan-1, the Indian Moon mission, and on an instrument aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

This isn't the first time Nozette has been in trouble with the government. According to press reports, a small non-profit Nozette ran came under investigation by NASA in 2006 for misusing funds to pay for utilities, three mortgages and use of the La Jolla Tennis Club.

This time the charges are more serious. According to a 16th October affidavit signed by FBI agent Leslie Martell, Nozette was contacted last month by an undercover officer posing as an agent working for the Israeli Intelligence Agency, Mossad. According to transcripts reprinted in the affidavit, Nozette agreed to accept money in exchange for his past access to top secret documents.

Work for Israel was nothing new for Nozette, the affidavit says that between 1998 and 2008, an Israeli aerospace company "wholly owned by the Government of the State of Israel" paid Nozette some $225,000. "I thought I was working for you already," Nozette told the agent in a transcript reproduced in the affidavit. "I mean that's what I always thought, the [foreign company] was just a front."

In September and October, Nozette allegedly provided details of a "prototype overhead collection system" to the FBI agent in exchange for cash payments of $2,000 and $9,000 dollars. He will appear later today in United States District court for the District of Columbia to face a single charge of attempted espionage.

UPDATE - read the full story here: Moon scientist arrested on spy charges

NASA

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 20, 2009
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The editorial board of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) decided last week to publish two papers linked to academy member Lynn Margulis, a cell biologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. PNAS editor-in-chief Randy Schekman had written Margulis over "apparent selective communication of reviews" of a controversial paper by non-academy member Donald Williamson, a retired zoologist from the University of Liverpool, UK.

Williamson's paper, which was 'communicated' by Margulis under the soon-to-be-defunct 'Track I' submission route that allows academy members to handle the peer review process for their colleagues, was published online in August, but was held up from print publication last month following a report in Scientific American that cited Margulis as saying that she obtained "6 or 7" reviews before receiving the "2 or 3" positive ones that recommended acceptance. The publication of a second paper, co-authored by Margulis, was also suspended because of the controversy (see 'Row at US journal widens').

Both papers will now move forward, says PNAS managing editor Daniel Salsbury. Williamson's paper, however, will be accompanied by a letter to the editor from Gonzalo Giribet, an invertebrate zoologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Williamson's hypothesis that caterpillars arose from an accidental mating between butterflies and velvet worms "is the most stupid thing that has ever been proposed," Giribet told Nature. "It's like if I said that humans had sex with fish and then you get whales. It's nonsense. It's a non-scientific hypothesis."

Williamson, who is writing a response that will be published alongside Giribet's commentary, says that Giribet's letter "missed the point" of the study by focusing on the evolutionary relationship between insects and velvet worms, rather than the possibility of hybridization. Giribet counters that he was short on space, owing to PNAS's limit of 250 words and five references, and so he concentrated on only one of many criticisms.

The fate of a third paper, also communicated by Margulis, which was challenged by an anonymous PNAS editorial board member following acceptance by three anonymous reviewers, remains up in the air. The study's author, John Hall, a computational biologist based in New York City who is an adjunct professor in the same department as Margulis, says he is currently preparing a response to the board member's concerns about his methods used to compare gene sequences. Salsbury declined to comment on the status of Hall's paper.

Image: Velvet worm from Wikimedia Commons

Posted by Elie Dolgin on October 19, 2009
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The UK must grow GM crops to avoid food shortages in the future, a report from the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of sciences, is expected to say (Telegraph).

The study was commission in July 2008 in response to a prediction from the United Nations that world food production would need to double by 2050 to sustain a global population expected to reach nine billion.

Previous plans to grow GM crops commercially in the UK were withdrawn at the beginning of the decade after protests from green groups and consumers’ rejection of the technology.

The Telegraph says that the report, which is due to be published this week, examines several options to increase crops yields in the UK and around the world, including growing GM crops.

A source told the Sunday Telegraph, “The report will say the right GM crops should be used in the future to alleviate food shortages. This study is going to move the debate forward. The government will have to take notice of this.”

But opponents of GM crops told the Telegraph, “There is no scientific evidence that GM produces huge yields.”

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on October 19, 2009
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Research ministers from across Europe spent the last day and a half discussing how best to organise themselves so they can have more effective discussions. While this may seem like procrastination, it’s actually no small task when you are trying to forge out a path that is agreeable to 27 countries and the European Commission.

One of the main talked about issues was how to reform the scientific and technical research committee (CREST), a body through which member states advise the Europe Commission in its development of research policy proposals. Currently, a member of the Commission chairs the group. But the member states would like to be in the drivering seat so that they can take more ownership over the direction that EU research policy develops. After some wrangling with the Commission, a compromise was settled upon where both the Commission and the member states would chair the body. The research ministers were sanguine that their attempt at simplifying and giving more direction to their discussions would not in fact make things more complicated.

Continue reading "Talking shop" »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on October 16, 2009
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I was at the newly formed House of Commons Science and Technology Committee meeting yesterday for the inaugural hearing. It was a pretty wide-ranging discussion, and I have to admit that my eyes started to glaze over a bit as they sometimes do at these hearings.

But then I heard the letters S-T-F-C and my ears perked up. STFC stands for Science and Technologies Facilities Council, which is the UK's main funder for particle physics and astronomy. The STFC also administers some of the most important user facilities in Europe, such as the Diamond light source and the ISIS neutron source, both at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire.

It was the MP from Oxfordshire, Evan Harris, who was asking some tough questions about the STFC's funding situation to Paul Drayson, the minister of state for science and innovation. Harris wanted to know why Diamond and ISIS were cutting back their operating times this year.

"The issue relating to STFC is a difficult one," Drayson told him. One issue Harris quickly focused on was the exchange rate. The weakness of the pound against the euro means that STFC basically has to pay more for physicists to participate in the Large Hadron Collider and astronomers to use the giant telescopes of the European Southern Observatory.

But Drayson told the committee that the STFC had been compensated for the currency exchange rates for the past two years. "If it's not exchange rates that's causing the pressure, then it must be the flat cash allocation," Harris said. Drayson denied that too.

"Do you accept that there are pressures that are not fully met in the budget?" an obviously frustrated Harris asked Drayson.

"Um… no…," the minister replied.

So what is the problem?

"This particular research council has projects where the budgets of these projects are getting significantly over spent," Drayson finally said.

Drayson didn't elaborate further at the time, but I collared him after the meeting to ask which projects he meant. "The ITER project is putting huge pressure overall," he said.

ITER of course, is the massive fusion project in the south of France. By coincidence I just did a story about how the Europeans hope to pay for it. You can read it here (with a subscription).

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on October 15, 2009
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The French public prosecutor and the police's white collar crime squad have opened a preliminary investigation of 17 charities, including several medical research charities, and humanitarian ones, the newspaper Le Parisien revealed yesterday. Under the French judicial system this is an information gathering probe, and no formal investigation of the charities or any individuals has been made.

The medical charities include one working on diabetes, another on age-related macular degeneration, two on Alzheimer's disease, and two on cancer. A key question investigators will be addressing is what proportion of the millions of euros collected by the charities was spent on their stated charitable aims. Perhaps complicating the investigation, it's reported that several of the charities are French nodes of ones based in the United States, or of international networks.

The France charity scene was rocked in the 1990's by the discovery of a major financial fraud in the country's biggest medical charity, L'Association pour la Recherche contre le Cancer, which resulted in the late Jacques Crozemarie, it's president being sentenced in 2000 to four years imprisonment, along with paying heavy fines, and damages to the charity. Researchers associated with the charity, including beneficiaries of its research funding, came under fire at the time for having turned a blind eye to longstanding rumours of wrongdoing at the charity.

Posted by Declan Butler on October 15, 2009
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Plans for a new multi-million pound science park in the UK were unveiled earlier this week by the UK government, the Wellcome Trust and GlaxoSmithKline.

The park, which will be located at GSK’s existing site in Stevenage, could eventually serve as a base for 1,500 scientists working for early-stage biotech companies.

“It will leverage our existing strengths as a world leader in the sector, helping it to grow and reinforcing our international competitiveness,” said UK business secretary Lord Mandelson (press release). “And ultimately it will help us build towards a stronger UK economy coming out of the global downturn.”

Initial funding for the park comes from the government (£16.7m), The Wellcome Trust (£6m), the East of England Development Agency (£4m) and GSK (£11m). The Daily Telegraph says the park could eventually cost £170m.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 15, 2009
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Researchers have long noted that journals’ conflict-of-interest reporting requirements can be bewilderingly various, and commensurately confusing and time-consuming to comply with.

Thye need worry no more when they submit their manuscripts -- at least if they are submitting to the gang of 12 journals belonging to the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. In simultaneous editorials like this one in the New England Journal of Medicine, those journals are announcing their adoption of a new, uniform format for financial interest reporting by manuscript authors. You can take a look at the form they are requiring authors to complete here; and a sample of a form completed by Kermit the Frog (no kidding) is available here. It should be noted that Kermit, while required to describe qualitatively his financial ties, was not obliged to spell out the dollar amounts he collected.

The editors say that, for the next six months, the form will be in a beta-testing stage; they will meet again to tweak it according to comments they get from users between now and 10 April 2010.

Meantime, a new group of specialists have captured the limelight for the anemic rate at which they reported their conflicts at their 2008 annual meeting. This study, published last week in NEJM, reported that just 71.2% of speakers who received payments from five makers of total hip and knee prostheses in 2007 told their audience at the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons meeting that they had received those payments.

Posted by Alex Witze on October 13, 2009
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By Geoff Brumfiel and Declan Butler

The arrest by French police last Thursday of a particle physicist on allegations that he has links with Al Qaida has generated some potentially misleading statements and headlines.

Although French police have not officially released a name, the suspect is widely reported to be Adlène Hicheur, a 32-year-old physicist from the Swiss Federal Technical Institute de Lausanne (EPFL), who since 2003 had worked at LHC beauty (LHCb), one of four major particle experiments at CERN. According to French law Hicheur will be charged later today.

But wait? Did we hear the word "nuclear" and "al-Qaeda"? Cue the press. Coverage has been wide and varied, but for the best of the best, you have to the UK:

He's the “AL QAEDA-LINK NUCLEAR EXPERT,“ according to the Daily Express .

Well from what we can see, he appeared to specialize in the alignment of particle detectors and the complex theoretical physics surrounding the B-quark. That makes him kind of a subatomic expert, really.

The Daily Mail threw nuclear fusion into the mix, saying that “MI5 had been warned that the suspects are outstanding scientists who had been honing their techniques in nuclear fusion across the world.”

Again, we're a bit perplexed. Surely if al-Qaeda wanted to "hone their techniques" in nuclear fusion they could have sent their "nuclear expert" to ITER, the giant fusion experiment in the South of France.

But the prize goes to the Express, which boldly belted out the headline: AL-QAEDA SCIENTIST HELD AT NUCLEAR BASE

That makes CERN sound like some sort of criminal lair located beneath Antarctica (he wasn't arrested at CERN, by the way).

Honorable mention to the Daily Star for just running a picture of Tom Hanks and bigging up the Angels and Demons reference.

In a weird sort of way, that could be the most accurate angle on the story--LHCb is hoping to understand the imbalance between matter and antimatter in the Universe. But they're not, so far as we're aware, trying to use this knowledge to destroy the Vatican.

To be fair, a lot of the UK press didn't go quite so over the top. The Guardian and the Times had pretty reasonable coverage (although he was a physicist, not an engineer).

Credit: CERN

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on October 12, 2009
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Lidia Brito is set to be the new head of science policy at UNESCO, according to SciDevNet. Brito, Mozambique’s former science minister, will take up the post in December, it says.

“She is well known as a knowledgeable and passionate advocate for science-based development in poor countries,” Mohamed Hassan, executive director of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World, told the website. “We can think of no better person to build on UNESCO’s recent efforts to develop capacity in science policy in the developing world and especially in Africa.”

Brito follows Irina Bokova who was elected director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in September.

Both Bokova and Brito have a lot of work to do. As Nature noted in a 24 September editorial, little has changed since a damming 2007 report on the agency’s science portfolio which labelled it “fragmented, over-ambitious, unfocused” and lacking a clear vision.

As the editorial said:

The history and culture of UNESCO do not bode well for serious change. But business as usual is not an option if UNESCO is to have a scientific raison d'être.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 12, 2009
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Harvard University in the US has retained its title as the world’s top academic powerhouse for the sixth year running, in a ranking of the top 200 universities in the world. But in the Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings, published on 8 October, Yale University slipped to third place, being overtaken by the UK’s University of Cambridge.

The UK claimed four of the top six spots, with University College London moving up from 7th place in 2008 to 4th this year. The University of Oxford and Imperial College London jointly took fifth place. US universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in ninth place, fill the next ten places.

The best performing university outside the US and UK was the Australian National University, which dropped one place to 17th from last year.

Continue reading "US still dominates university rankings" »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on October 09, 2009
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Developing countries have more than doubled spending on science over a 5 year period, from US$134 billion in 2002 and to US$272 billion in 2007, new figures show.

The number of researchers in developing nations jumped from 1.8 million to 2.7 million over the same time period, according to data release from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) on 6 October. During the same period, the number of researchers in developed countries increased by only 8.6% to 4.4 million.

Continue reading "Science spending up in developing countries" »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on October 08, 2009
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Those from the most privileged backgrounds have come to dominate British science and will continue to do so, according to new report.

Researchers from the Sutton Trust, which campaigns for educational equality, analysed the school and university backgrounds of 1,700 fellows of the Royal Society and the British Academy. They found 42% of them were educated in private schools.

“This report is yet more evidence of the uneven life chances in Britain,” says Peter Lampl, chairman of the trust (press release). “Students from the independent sector, which educates just seven percent of children, are substantially more likely to reach the top of our most coveted professions and succeed in influential walks of life.”

A small number of elite individual schools are also overrepresented, with list of schools contributing the most fellows having the recognisable names of Eton, Winchester, and St Paul’s at the top. The report also found that of those educated in the UK, 68% of British Academy fellows and 47% of Royal Society fellows went of either Oxford or Cambridge university.

Continue reading "Privately educated dominate UK science" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 08, 2009
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The European Commission has proposed investing an additional €50 billion into a new research and development programme for low-carbon energy over the next decade, ramping up annual investments from the current €3 billion to €8 billion annually.

The proposal lays out funding goals in six sectors - wind, solar, nuclear, bio-energy, electricity grids and carbon capture and storage, while creating a new "Smart Cities Initiative" focusing on urban energy efficiency. Solar came out on top with €16 billion, followed by CCS at €13 billion. For a quick summary of investments, check Reuters.

The plan sounds good but is missing one thing: Money. The commission readily acknowledges that it can't foot the entire bill itself, meaning "public and private sectors at national and EU level" will need to step up to make it a reality. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal reports EU Commissioner Janez Potocnik saying that most of the money will need to come from the private sector.

Response to the plan has generally been positive, despite some questions about priorities. The European Wind Energy Association wonders why CCS and nuclear received more money than wind, which is ready to go. Along similar lines, the European Photovoltaic Industry Association suggests the commission would be wise to put more resources into clean energy deployment.

Policymakers, researchers and business representatives will discuss the proposal later this month at the European Energy Technology Summit in Stockholm.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on October 07, 2009
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The American scientific elite found itself in a rare place this afternoon: the White House.

Hours before a high-stakes meeting on the US stance in Afghanistan and Pakistan, President Barack Obama took a little break by handing out this year's crop of National Medals of Science and National Medals of Technology and Innovation. In a packed ceremony in the White House's East Room, with cabinet secretaries including Kathleen Sebelius (health), Steve Chu (energy), and Gary Locke (commerce) looking on, Obama seemed to enjoy riffing on the joys of science. (Plus an obligatory opening joke about how his daughter Sasha has a science fair coming up, "and I was thinking that you guys could give us a few tips".)

"We see the promise -- not just for our economy but for our health and well-being -- in the human capacity for creativity and ingenuity," he told the audience, which included presidential science advisor John Holdren and National Academy of Sciences president Ralph Cicerone. "And we are reminded of the power of free and open inquiry, which is not only at the heart of all of your work, but at the heart of this experiment we call America."

Two of the awardees shared what might even be interpreted as warm glances at each other before receiving their medals from Obama. Francis Collins and J. Craig Venter, once heads of the competing teams in the race to sequence the human genome, both now have identical gold medals on red, white and blue ribbons. Collins, of course, is the recently appointed director of the National Institutes of Health (see Nature Q&A with him here), an agency that marked a sad moment today with the news of the death of Ruth Kirschstein, who served as the first female head of an NIH institute when she assumed directorship of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences in 1974.

The other winners of this year's science medals are:

Berni Alder, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Joanna Fowler, Brookhaven National Laboratory
Elaine Fuchs, The Rockefeller University
James Gunn, Princeton University
Rudolf Kalman, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich
Michael Posner, University of Oregon
JoAnne Stubbe, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Next up on the Obama Science Fair Tour: a star party on the White House's south lawn tonight.

Image: Collins, seated at far left, while Venter waits to receive his medal

Posted by Alex Witze on October 07, 2009
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It is sometimes said in academic circles that you’re not a proper researcher until you’ve got your first rejection letter from Nature or Science. But does it really make sense to submit your paper to the most highly cited journals and work your way down?

Martin Heintzelman and Diego Nocetti, two economists at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, aimed to find out. Their latest paper in the B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy is entitled “Where Should we Submit our Manuscript?”

“The journal submission process is a controversial and stressful part of academia. There are many dimensions of uncertainty, and bad decisions could greatly delay publication of important results and harm one’s career,” they write.

They constructed models of increasing complexity, starting with just the journal’s characteristics (fees, time taken to decide) and the impatience of the author and moving on to include factors such as the quality of the manuscript, flaws in the reviewing process and how impatient authors are to get their work published in economics journals.

Applying mathematics to this question proves common sense correct: “This paper provides new evidence that, on the whole, the advice supplied to young faculty members by veterans of academia is correct. Authors largely have an incentive to submit to the best journals and then subsequently, work their way down a schedule of journals.”

However, there is an exception to this: “particularly impatient or risk-averse” researchers should begin their submission ordeal further down the chain.

Finally, Heintzelman and Nocetti discuss the implications of their work for journals themselves. They conclude that the best thing for journals to do would be to review papers faster and charge higher submission fees. This would reduce the impact of time lags on impatient authors and reduce the number of lower-quality paper submissions trying their luck with an imperfect reviewing system.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 07, 2009
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The UK’s Conservative party has appointed James Dyson as their technology tsar.

Speaking at the party’s annual conference in Manchester, Dyson called for more support for science, via avenues such as tax breaks for high tech industry. He also called for education, saying Britain had 58,000 engineering vacancies but produced only 20,000 engineering graduates a year.

“More than ever, we need to value our scientists and engineers. Our future wealth depends on it,” said Dyson (Guardian).

In a suggestion that may not go down well in the financial services sector – where employees are traditionally viewed as Conservative voters – he added that the UK could “make money from money – or money from making things” (Daily Telegraph).

Dyson will be heading up a taskforce aiming to see how Britain can be made a high-tech exporter. UK policy addict and founder of Research Fortnight William Cullerne Bown posts this joke (although he claims not to be its originator):

re Dyson Review - how much is he going to Hoover up?

As the Guardian notes, self-styled champion of engineering Dyson has already had to admit that his high tech products are actually manufactured overseas. But the R&D, patents, and profits remain British, says the Guardian.

Dyson is most famous for inventing a widely used bag-less vacuum cleaner and his appointment sets up an intriguing clash with Amstrad founder and Labour ‘enterprise tsar’ Alan Sugar.

There’s only one route left for the UK’s third party, the Liberal Democrats: hire Clive Sinclair, and quickly!

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 06, 2009
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Animal-human hybrid embryo research has been “driven out of Britain”, according to the front page of today’s Independent. However, one of the scientists involved has already cast doubt on the paper’s story.

The paper claims that “all research involving the controversial creation of animal-human ‘hybrid’ embryos has been refused funding in Britain”. It also says that “every one of the three projects to develop embryonic stem cells from cloned embryos created by fusing human cells with animal eggs has now been abandoned”.

Earlier this year the UK bodies responsible for funding (or not funding) such research were forced to deny that moral objections played a part in the rejection of funding applications (see: Moral objections to hybrid embryo research claims rejected).

The three holders of licences for animal-human hybrids in the UK were Stephen Minger, Lyle Armstrong, and Justin St John.

Minger recently departed King’s College London to work in industry (see: Top scientist’s industry move heralds stem-cell shift). When this issue reared its head earlier this year Minger claimed he was misinterpreted by the Independent, which claimed he suggested moral factors were an issue in funding rejections.

Armstrong, says the Independent, has departed Newcastle University for Spain (although no-one at the university’s Institute for Human Genetics was immediately available to confirm this).

Finally, and the apparent trigger for the story, Justin St John is leaving the UK for Australia. In a statement distributed by the Science Media Centre, St John says:

The MRC [Medical Research Council] funded me to make mouse-pig hybrids and I am grateful to them for their support for my work. Hybrid work will continue in the UK. However my hybrid work was a spin off from my main research interest which I will be pursuing at Monash [University in Australia].

Both the Medical Research Council and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council also released statements defending their use of peer-review as the best way to approve or reject grant applications. “Having a HFEA licence and legislative approval to conduct certain research does not give an area special treatment,” said Colin Miles, BBSRC’s Head of Integrative and Systems Biology.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 05, 2009
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Produced by Evidence for the government, the performance report compares papers and citations for UK researchers with other players, such as the USA, Germany, Japan and China.

“Once again, we have outperformed other nations in the G8 and secured our position as second in the world in scientific productivity,” says UK science minister Lord Drayson (press release).

While UK output fell to 7.9% of world papers, down from 9.3% in 1999, citations rose very slightly to 11.8% in 2008. Only the USA did better in citations for clinical, health, biological, environmental, and social sciences. In mathematics Germany pipped Blighty to second while China nosed ahead in engineering. Physical scientists need to pull their socks up though: you’re in fifth, behind Germany, China, Japan and the research behemoth that is the USA.

As ever, a picture is worth a thousand blog posts, so below the fold are the ‘research footprints’ for various nations in 2008 (previous figures for comparison can be found in the previous report).

Continue reading "Research footprints of the G8" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 02, 2009
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The journal Transport today retracted a 2006 paper co-authored by Hamid Behbahani, Iran's transport minister, and two other scientists. In a news article published yesterday, Nature had drawn attention to the fact that the paper ("Providing a decreasing congestion probability model for urban streets network") contained large amounts of text identical with that of three earlier articles by other researchers. The retraction statement can be found here.
In a response yesterday that was attributed to Behbahani, he defended the article --- see statement (in Persian) on the Iranian news site Alef.ir.

As also reported by Nature yesterday, over the past week other journals have said they intend to retract, on grounds of plagiarism, three papers co-authored by Iran's science minister Kamran Daneshjou.

Posted by Declan Butler on October 01, 2009
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Posted on behalf of Meredith Wadman

Seven months after signing into law $10.4 billion in economic stimulus funding for the National Institutes of Health, President Barack Obama visited the Bethesda-based biomedical agency today to announce that...$5 billion of the money has been spent.

Coming as it did on the last day of the government’s 2009 fiscal year, this “major Recovery Act announcement,” as billed by the White House, was in fact considerable testimony to the speed with which the huge agency can shovel money out the door when the pressure is on. After all, only nine days ago, according to the calculations of Patrick Clemins at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a mere $2.67 billion of the windfall had been spent. (All of it needs to be disbursed by one year from today, when the government’s 2010 fiscal year ends.)

The president was received with great enthusiasm by a crowd of several hundred gathered in a packed auditorium at NIH’s Clinical Center, many of whom (this reporter included) had waited 2.5 hours to hear a 15-minute speech in which Obama proclaimed the stimulus funds “the single largest boost to biomedical research in history.”

Continue reading "Obama visits Bethesda for stimulus announcement" »

Posted by Alex Witze on September 30, 2009
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Two more journals, Springer's Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology and the Taiwanese Journal of Mechanics, have told Nature that they intend to retract, on grounds of plagiarism, papers co-authored by Iran's science and education minister Kamran Daneshjou, a professor in the school of mechanical engineering at the Iran University of Science & Technology (IUST) in Tehran, and his colleague. This follows an investigation by Nature published online this afternoon.

Springer had already indicated last week that they would retract another paper by the same coauthors after Nature drew attention to duplications of the text and figures from an earlier paper by Korean researchers.

Before being appointed science minister in early September, Daneshjou was also head of the interior ministry office overseeing the disputed presidential elections in June that kept Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power. This week's story in Nature also calls into question a paper coauthored by Hamid Behbahani, Iran's transport minister.

Meanwhile, visits by Daneshjou to Tehran University on Monday, and Sharif University yesterday, for the start of the academic year, were met with protests by students. Radio Free Europe reported:

"The student said classmates brandished copies of "Nature" magazine, the publication that recently highlighted apparent plagiarism in an article coauthored by Daneshjou. Chants rang out of "Daneshjou the Liar, where are your articles?"

Posted by Declan Butler on September 30, 2009
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As the 2009 fiscal year comes to a close, the new director of the AAAS R&D budget and policy programme, Patrick Clemins, has put up a timely analysis of how three major science agencies -- DOE, NIH and NSF -- are doing spending the billions they were given in the Recovery Act funding associated with February's economic stimulus package.

Clemins identifies that, of $32.7 billion given to the DOE for everything from weatherization grants to 'smart grid' investment, the agency has only spent $11.2 billion. Within the DOE's office of science, however, the spending is almost complete: $1.3 billion of $1.6 billion has been spent.

At the NIH, $2.7 billion of $10.4 billion has been spent, while the NSF has spent $2.2 billion of its $3 billion in stimulus funding. The NSF seems faster than the NIH, Clemins says, because the NIH made the decision to spread the funding out over two fiscal years, 2009-2010, while the NSF was aiming to finish in one. "They [the NIH] are actually on schedule even though they appear behind the rest of them," says Clemins, who adds that another reason why the NIH is behind in spending is because it established more new grant programmes -- something that takes time -- while the NSF spent most of its money by simply increasing success rates for existing grant programmes.

Posted by Eric Hand on September 29, 2009
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German science is already feeling the impact of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s victory in the Sunday’s general election.

Merkel is abandoning her previous ‘grand coalition’ with the left-leaning Social Democratic Party and will instead form a government with the more right-of-centre Free Democratic Party.

Nature’s Quirin Schiermeier predicted on 23 September that a new coalition with the FDP could be on the cards, and noted it’s implications for German research:

[The Free Democrats] have a distinctly liberal approach in hot-button areas such as genetically modified crops and stem cells. … If the Free Democrats, led by Guido Westerwelle, succeed in becoming the new coalition partner, they may use their influence to reduce red tape and restrictions in ethically sensitive branches of science.

"The economic situation won't allow excessive increases in science budgets," says Ulrike Flach, the party's spokeswoman for science and technology. "But we are set to increase the general freedom to research, and ease existing restrictions to stem-cell research and genetic engineering."

Chancellor Merkel is a chemist by training, and her reign has been generally seen as pro-science.

Her re-election is already being credited with moving certain science-related markets. The expectation that the new government will back nuclear power and abandon plans to close many reactors sent utility company stocks up today. In contrast, solar power companies fell amid speculation that incentives for renewables could be cut.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 28, 2009
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The Shrine of Fatima-al-Massumeh, not an enrichment facility

If you find yourself traveling through central Iran, you might want to visit the historic city of Qom. While you're there you should check out the Mar'ashi Najafi Library, with over 500,000 handwritten texts; the Shrine of Fatima-al-Massumeh, one of the holy sites of Shi'a Islam; and of course the Namak Lake, a large salt lake just 100km outside the city.

Or you could skip all that and go see Iran's super-secret underground enrichment plant, which Western intelligence officials believe is located somewhere nearby. America, France and Britain outted the facility today at the opening of the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. According to the New York Times, the plant has room for a cascade of around 3,000 gas centrifuges of the type used to enrich uranium for fuel, or nuclear weapons.

Technically, as a signatory to the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Iran has the right to enrich uranium for use in nuclear power plants. That is what it's claimed to be doing with its main enrichment facility at Natanz, ever since an opposition group exposed its existence in 2002.

But the new facility is both undeclared to the international community and perhaps too small to be very useful as a fuel fabrication plant. "The size and configuration of this facility is inconsistent with a peaceful program," President Obama said in a brief statement. Obama, together with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French Prime Minister Nicholas Sarkozy, condemned the plant, the existence of which emerged just a day after the UN Security Council passed a resolution calling for tough action against those who violate the NPT.

Iran's response to all this has been muted so far. In a letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the nation admitted to "a new pilot fuel enrichment plant", according to a statement from the agency. No nuclear material has yet been introduced into the facility and inspectors are seeking access as soon as possible.

Given the growing international momentum against Iran, the Islamic Republic should probably let nuclear inspectors come to Qom soon to check out all the sites ASAP.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 25, 2009
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The US Food and Drug Administration admitted yesterday that political influence led to the agency's decision last year to approve a device to repair damaged knees against the recommendation of its own scientists.

Since 2006, the FDA's scientific reviewers have twice turned down applications for the device, known as Menaflex and manufactured by ReGen Biologics of Hackensack, New Jersey, according to an FDA report. The company did not show "that patients who received the device experienced any benefit", one scientist wrote in a rejection letter. (AP)

But following persistent lobbying from four New Jersey Democratic congressmen — Senators Robert Menendez and Frank R. Lautenberg and Representatives Frank Pallone Jr and Steven R. Rothman — FDA officials overruled the scientists' advice and granted approval for the US$3,000 knee patch last December. All four legislators received significant campaign contributions from ReGen; for example, Rothman alone took in US$13,300 last year, according to OpenSecrets.org.

The director of the FDA's device division who gave the go-ahead, Daniel Schultz, resigned last month following numerous safety concerns and other scandals. (Reuters)

Continue reading "FDA's review process knee-deep in trouble" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin on September 25, 2009
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A research team from an Israeli university has been thrown out of a solar power competition for being based on the West Bank.

Many in Israel have reacted with anger to the news that Ariel University Center of Samaria has been excluded from the Solar Decathalon, a competition to design solar powered housing.

Although this contest has previously been run by the US Department of Energy the Spanish housing ministry is hosting the 2010 version. The ministry says EU law prevents the West Bank-based university from participating.

“The EU does not recognise the occupation of the West Bank, which is where this university is,” said a spokesman (Guardian).

The West Bank has been occupied by Israel since 1967. The European Union has continually condemned Israel’s illegal building of settlements in the area.

Ariel University claims the decision is “an expression of an illegitimate political struggle” that “blatantly violates international law and charters regarding academic freedom” (Jerusalem Post, World Jewish Congress).

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 25, 2009
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A European court injected a fair bit of doubt and confusion into carbon markets Wednesday, ruling that the European Commission exceeded its authority when it imposed tighter caps for greenhouse gas emissions in Poland and Estonia (Reuters, The Times)

At first glance, the ruling could be interpreted to curtail the commission's authority to impose a European cap, which would threaten the integrity of the entire multi-national system and fuel existing tensions among countries. But analysts say the ruling is actually limited to the second commitment period, which runs from 2008 to 2012. The commission's authority moving forward does not appear to be in any danger, which means the impacts, whatever they turn out to be, will likely be temporary.

Milo Sjardin, an expert on carbon markets for the consultancy New Energy Finance in New York, said he isn't expecting any major changes in the overall European cap, in part because the recession has already significantly reduced pressure on European industries. NEF's latest estimates indicate that covered emissions (which include power and major industrial sources) are likely to drop by a whopping 10 percent in 2009 alone.

The result is a 50 percent reduction in the cost of curbing emissions by 20 percent by 2020. In fact, NEF now says it will be cheaper to curb emissions by 30 percent (an EU pledge that is contingent on action by the rest of the world) than original forecast for the 20 percent target, Sjardin says.

For his part, EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas made it clear that the commission isn't about to back down (AFP).

Regardless, the price of carbon allowances in Europe dropped on the news as traders weighed the possibility of the commission losing its battle and granting additional allowances, not only to Poland and Estonia but six other countries that have appealed their caps. That would make compliance easier and thus decrease the likelihood that companies would need to buy additional allowances to cover their emissions.

If all eight countries were to return to their originally proposed CAP, NEF says allowances would increase by 15 percent. And because companies can carry their allowances forward into the third trading period, which runs from 2013 to 2020, such a scenario could theoretically depress prices for years to come. That would be good news for traditional industries, although it might make clean energy technologies less competitive.

"But we regard that as a very unlikely scenario," Sjardin says. "There’s likely to be a compromise somewhere down the road."

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on September 24, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Energy, Policy, Road to Copenhagen | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The United Nations Security Council has passed a resolution from president Barack Obama that would strengthen efforts to slow the spread of nuclear weapons. Plenty in this White House statement, but the long and the short of it is that the resolution endorses strengthening the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and improving nuclear security.

It also called for "full compliance" on all Security Council resolutions relating to Iran and North Korea, two trouble states for the non-proliferation regime.

There's some reason to suspect that Obama's announcement of the withdrawal of a proposed missile defence system from Poland and the Czech Republic may have helped to aid the resolution's passage, particularly with Russia—one of the Security Council's permanent members and a long time hold out against sanctions against Iran. The New York Times quotes Russian President Dmitri Medvedev as saying:

“I told His Excellency Mr. President that we believe we need to help Iran to take a right decision,” Mr. Medvedev said, adding that “sanctions rarely lead to productive results, but in some cases, sanctions are inevitable.”

Even though the resolution is non-binding, meaning nobody's obligated to follow through, the press is already endorsing it as a diplomatic victory for Obama and for non-proliferation. A look at the times:

U.N. Security Council Adopts Measure on Nuclear Arms (NY Times)

Obama wins passage of nuclear nonproliferation resolution at U.N. (LA Times)

Barack "No Bomb" Obama pushes for world without nukes
(Times of India)

Credit: United Nations

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 24, 2009
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Today we hail the most underappreciated people in the world of research. People without whose unstinting and oft-unacknowledged effort the cogs of the science machine would surely seize up.

No, not science news reporters, but the lowly post-doc. For today is the first annual National Postdoc Appreciation Day.

“We are celebrating the significant contribution that postdoctoral scholars make to the US scientific research enterprise and, at the same time, increasing awareness of this contribution,” says the National Postdoctoral Association.

Events celebrating the contribution of post-docs are taking place across the US today. Perhaps reflecting the fact that many of these researchers live something of a hand to mouth existence, many of these events focus on offering food and career advice.

Bonus points to UCSF for having a magician at their event: “And for my next trick, I will make your dreams of tenure disappear.”

Why not join in the appreciation by telling us why you love post docs? Over on the Nature News twitter feed we’re asking you to complete this sentence:

I luv pdocs bcos…(hashtag: #luvpdocs)

And lab-managers, the correct answer is not ‘because they’re cheap’…

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 24, 2009
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Irina Bokova, Bulgaria's ambassador to France, was last night elected director general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) in the fifth and final round of voting in Paris by the 58 member states making up Unesco's executive board. She obtained 31 votes, beating Farouk Hosny, 71, Egypt's minister of culture, who won 27 votes – see press release. If, as is expected, the appointment is confirmed by the body's general conference when it meets next month Bokova, 57, would be the first woman, and the first East European, to head the agency. Hosny would have been the first from the Arab world.

Only a few weeks ago Bokova was considered a long shot for the post, with Hosny the longstanding favourite among the initial nine candidates. But Hosny's campaign was dogged in the runup to the election by allegations that he had made antisemitic comments, and concerns over Egypt's poor track record on liberty of expression.

Continue reading "Bulgaria's Bokova wins top Unesco job in photo-finish election" »

Posted by Declan Butler on September 23, 2009
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Large chunks of text, figures, and tables in a 2009 paper co-authored by Kamran Daneshjou, Iran's science minister, are identical to those of a 2002 paper published by South Korean researchers, Nature has learned. Daneshjou served as the head of the interior ministry office which ran the disputed presidential elections in June, which returned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power. Daneshjou is also a former governor general of Tehran.

The paper by Daneshjou and Majid Shahravi from the department of mechanical engineering at the Iran University of Science and Technology in Tehran is entitled "Analysis of critical ricochet angle using two space discretization methods", and was published in the journal Engineering with Computers in 2009. In many places the text duplicates verbatim that of an earlier paper: "Ricochet of a tungsten heavy alloy long-rod projectile from deformable steel plates", published by South Korean scientists in the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics in 2002.

Other sentences in Daneshjou's paper are identical to those in a paper given by other researchers at a 2003 conference.

The scientific credentials of Daneshjou, who was appointed as science minister earlier this month, have been the subject of controversy, with the Los Angeles Times reporting in late August about question marks over his PhD. According to his university webpage at the time, the PhD was awarded by the 'Manchester Imperial Institute of Science and Technology.' The webpage this afternoon has changed and says that the PhD was awarded in 1989 after working at Imperial College in London, but that the defence of the thesis was held in Amirkabir University of Technology in Iran.

Update: for more, see our full news story on this.

Posted by Declan Butler on September 22, 2009
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All eyes are now on tomorrow's UN Summit on Climate Change in New York and the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh later this week, although it's not yet clear whether either of these meetings is going to produce any meaningful breakthroughs.

Indeed, if last week's US-sponsored Major Economies Forum is any indication, the outlook isn't particularly good. The meeting ended as quietly as it began, leaving the United States' top climate envoy, Todd Stern, with little to say except that there was a "narrowing of differences" among the globe's top 17 greenhouse gas emitters. Combine that with increasing skepticism that the US Senate is going to be able to squeeze a climate bill out before the UN global warming talks in Copenhagen in December, and things begin to look positively gloomy.

Nonetheless, there are signs of movement at the highest levels, which is what people at the lower levels have been saying was needed for some time. Chinese President Hu Jintao will discuss his country's climate policies during a much-anticipated address on Tuesday. US President Barack Obama plans to do the same, although it's not clear how far he will be able to go given that his hands are tied by Congress.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has announced that he would be willing to personally attend the talks in Copenhagen if it comes down to that, and The Associated Press has reported that Obama might attend as well. This would certainly qualify as an important gesture of goodwill if the US delegation is unable to sign on to any significant commitments due to slow-moving domestic politics.

And just for kicks, Conservation International reports that out that Guyana President Bharrat Jagdeo and Harrison Ford (who does not lead a country but has appeared in some cool films) will attend an "extraordinary origami event" in New York, calling for the inclusion of tropical forest conservation an eventual climate change pact. Pictures aren't yet available, but keep an eye out for "life-size origami trees and wildlife."

Continue reading "Mixed signals as 'Climate Week' kicks off" »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on September 21, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Energy, Policy, Road to Copenhagen | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Peter Chen, Vice President of Research and Corporate Relations of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, will resign from his post over data falsification concerns in his research group, ETH announced today.

Chen requested an investigation in January 2009 at the same time that he withdrew one of his organic chemistry group's spectroscopy publications, which was inconsistent with results from other groups working on the same topic, according to the ETH press release. The outside investigation board could not find a key lab notebook and did find identical background noise in purportedly independent spectra, so it "concluded that some of the data...were falsified."

The institute has not publicly accused any individuals over the falsification it uncovered, though a second paper was also retracted and a Ph.D. candidate withdrew a dissertation, before retracting the withdrawal. According to ETH President Ralph Eichler, "there is now no legal way of finding out for sure who was responsible for the falsifications."

Posted by Lucas Laursen on September 21, 2009
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Energy-efficiency researcher Arun Majumdar will, if confirmed by the US Senate, take the reins of the controversial new federal agency tasked with coming up with brilliant new insights into energy independence.

Congress allocated money to create the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) earlier this year in hopes of replicating the success of the Pentagon's own high-risk, high-return research agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Pretty much everyone in government wants a DARPA spin-off these days; there's an intelligence version too, IARPA, and some people want NASA to have one too.

But ARPA-E has both the best shot at actually producing useful breakthroughs, and the highest chance of getting mired in federal bureaucracy. In 2007, for instance, Nature columnist David Goldston pointed out that the ARPA-E approach blithely takes "the technocratic path of assuming that US energy problems are largely the result of an inadequate supply of fresh ideas. But there's ample evidence that a bigger problem is the lack of demand for new ideas in the marketplace."

Others are more optimistic. In a news release announcing Majumdar's nomination, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he works, notes that "ARPA-E’s goals are to create technologies that have the potential to reduce the nation’s reliance on foreign energy supplies, reduce energy-related greenhouse gas emissions, and improve energy efficiency."

Few would disagree that sounds like a good goal. The problem is getting there. ARPA-E has reportedly had problems filling its all-important positions of program managers, and Science's Jeffrey Mervis reported in August that researchers were griping about how the first round of grant proposals was handled.

Majumdar has held several key management positions at Berkeley Lab, including serving as associate lab director for energy and environmental sciences. If he makes it through the Senate, those management skills will surely be put to the test.

Image: LBNL

Posted by Alex Witze on September 20, 2009
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Farouk Hosny, Egypt's minister of culture and the favourite to succeed Koichiro Matsuura as director general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco), failed to win an outright majority in the first round of a secret ballot held last night at a meeting of the agency's executive board in Paris. Hosny won 22 of the 57 votes made – there was one abstention -- giving him a clear lead over other the eight other contenders, but short of the 30 votes needed for election.

Bulgaria's candidate, former foreign minister Irina Gueorguieva Bokova won eight votes, and three other candidates seven – Russia's deputy foreign minister Alexander Vladimirovich Yakovenko, Ecuador's Ivonne Juez de Baki, a diplomat, and Austria's Benita Ferrero-Waldner, European Commissioner for external relations. The remainder won no votes, or less than three.

Four further rounds of voting will be held this evening, and, if necessary, tomorrow. All nine candidates can rerun. If it goes to a third round, the two winners of this would go head-to-head in a final tiebreaker round. Unesco's general assembly must officially confirm the nomination at a meeting on 15 October.

The 71 year old Egyptian candidate has been widely considered the front-runner in the election, which is highly-political and subject to intense horsetrading. It would be the first time that a director general of Unesco came from an Arab country, and several countries are supporting his candidacy as a bridge between the West and Islamic countries. Hosny also has the united backing of the Arab League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and the African Union.

But the candidature of Hosny, a painter, and culture minister for two decades, has become steeped in controversy over allegations that he has made antisemitic comments, and criticism of Egypt's poor track record on censorship and press freedom – liberty of expression is one of Unesco's founding principles. His candidature has been opposed by Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace prize winner, and some intellectuals, as well as Jewish, and human rights groups.

Posted by Declan Butler on September 18, 2009
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Partisan bickering in Washington has so many bigger things to fight about these days – health-care reform and climate change among them – that it is sad, rather than amusing, to watch the Democrats and Republicans sparring over the notion of administration ‘czars’.

Czars are senior advisors appointed directly by the president. In most cases their appointment does not need to confirmed by the Senate, and they are not subject to Congressional oversight as directors of federal agencies would be. Their background is also apparently not as rigorously fact-checked as it could be; the latest frenzy in Washington peaked when conservative commentators found that Van Jones, Obama’s ‘green jobs czar’, had signed a questionable petition about the Bush administration role in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Jones resigned earlier this month (FoxNews).

Republican talk-show hosts such as Glenn Beck have forced the issue of czars onto centre stage. And many of these positions involve key science and technology posts in the Obama administration. Carol Browner is his ‘climate czar’, overseeing cross-agency efforts to deal with energy and climate change – not, of course, to be confused with Todd Stern, who also shows up on lists of czars but whose role is as chief climate envoy to the United Nations climate talks.

Obama’s love of technology has triggered a crop of titles in this arena: Vivek Kundra is his ‘information czar’, and Aneesh Chopra his ‘technology czar’.

Some czar positions have been around for a while; George W. Bush created the ‘faith-based czar’ position, and the ‘science czar’ (a.k.a. presidential science advisor) has been around for decades (although it is a Senate-confirmed position as the head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy).

Next up on the target list appears to be David Michaels, a distinguished epidemiologist and Obama’s choice for head of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. The Washington Times minced no words this month in calling Michaels “one [of] the nation's foremost proponents of allowing junk science to be used in jackpot-justice lawsuits.”

The White House has fired back with what it calls "the truth about czars".

Posted by Alex Witze on September 17, 2009
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A report released today calls on the United States to launch a new interagency, multidisciplinary life sciences scheme aimed at tackling society's most pressing problems.

A national "new biology" initiative that brings together physical scientists, engineers and biologists of all stripes is essential to find solutions in the areas of food production, environmental protection, renewable energies and personalized medicine, the National Research Council's Board on Life Sciences concluded. The report urges that new funding be set aside on a 10-year timescale to establish the interagency effort, with money earmarked for new information technologies and training initiatives as well as scientific research.

Continue reading "New biology initiative to solve world's problems" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin on September 17, 2009
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The Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force released an interim report on Thursday, calling for a comprehensive national approach to managing oceans, what goes into them and pretty much anything that they contain or affect.

It is both an honorable goal and an enormous challenge. Achieving it would mean seamless management of everything from freshwater resources, stormwater runoff and coastal ecosystems to fisheries, aquaculture, commercial shipping, offshore energy, military activities and global warming (not to mention coordination with state and local governments).

Perhaps the biggest initiative would be the creation of a National Ocean Council to coordinate federal policy, although it's not entirely clear what kind of authority that council might have. Administration officials largely offered up broad statements without going into details about how the new policy, once finalized, might actually impact these activities.

"For the first time, we as a nation say loudly and clearly that healthy oceans matter," said Jane Lubchenco, Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "Today as never before, we better comprehend the connections between healthy oceans and people."

Appointed by President Barack Obama in June, the task force includes representatives from the full suite of federal agencies and departments. Its interium report will be available for public comment for 30 days, and a final report will be issued in December.

Just as a reminder, this is actually the second major ocean policy review in as many administrations, although the last one was not limited to federal agencies. As directed by Congress, President George W. Bush appointed 16 people to the US Commission on Ocean Policy, which finalized its report and closed up shop in 2004.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on September 17, 2009
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One year after Hurricane Ike slammed into the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston, flooding the island campus with anywhere from six inches to six feet of water and causing $710 million in damages, the medical school's diagnosis looks good.

Within months of the storm, UTMB was ready to handle dangerous biological agents again, but the same could not be said about patients. The John Sealy Hospital, the school's main source of income, was shuttered after the storm. It eventually reopened, but at only a fraction of its initial capacity. Now, the Texas legislature has earmarked $150 million in direct funds to increase John Sealy's capacity back to its pre-Ike levels of 550 beds. (Houston Press)

Continue reading "A year after Ike, Texas school on the upswing" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin on September 11, 2009
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The United States' climate envoy, Todd Stern, appeared on Capitol Hill Thursday to deliver what has become a depressingly familiar update. Yes, the chasm between the developed and developing worlds remains wide and deep; yes, talks are progressing with key players like China and India; yes, all sides are taking the issue seriously; no, there are no details to report; but yes, yes, of course, there is hope.

For more detail, check Bloomberg and Reuters, but suffice it to say that reporters in the room were generally left scratching their heads as to why Stern had been called to testify in the first place. And perhaps lawmakers felt the same way: Only seven members of the House Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming showed up; three stuck it out for the duration.

Indeed, there's no particular reason why anyone would expect Stern to have any major progress to report at this point. The most likely venues for breaking news come later this month, when the United Nations holds its Summit on Climate Change in New York and the G20 convenes on Pittsburgh. Moreover, Congress has just returned to town after a lengthy August recess, and pretty much everybody, including President Barack Obama, is talking about health care, not climate.

Continue reading "Stern talks; Congress flounders; EPA gears up?" »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on September 10, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Energy, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The European Commission has abandoned plans for an EU-managed scheme to buy swine flu vaccines due to a lack of support from member states, reports the European Voice.

In July, Androulla Vassiliou, the European commissioner for health, said the Commission was considering a joint EU procurement scheme for the vaccines. But the proposal now looks likely to not be included in the EU’s swine flu strategy to be published next week. Instead the Commission will offer countries “technical advice” on procurement, the report says.

Jo Leinen, a German Socialist MEP who chairs the European Parliament's environment and public health committee, said the omission is a mistake.

“We know some countries are well prepared and others are less well prepared. There must be a mechanism for shifting the vaccine... The added value of the EU is to show solidarity,” he says.

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on September 10, 2009
Categories: Health and medicine, Policy | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Switzerland has this year become the world’s most competitive economy overtaking the United States, new figures show.

The country moved up one place from its ranking in 2008 to come top out of 133 others in the 2009/2010 Global Competitiveness Report, released by the World Economic Forum on 8 September. The US slipped from the top spot in 2008 taking second this year, the figures show.

Continue reading "US slips from the top of competitiveness ranking " »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on September 10, 2009
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The European Commission is expected to publish a proposal today that would offer €15 billion a year in aid to developing nations so that they can combat climate change. The Financial Times has a nice piece outlining the promise and problems with the plan. The good news is that it may help to bridge the gap between developed and developing nations at the upcoming Copenhagen talks in December. The bad news is that the proposal's is based on an estimated need of just €100 billion between now and 2020, a third of China's estimated cost for controlling just its own emissions over that same period. The plan would also allow the EU to repurpose development money for climate, something aid groups aren't too happy about.

Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom (which is part of Europe as far as everyone but the UK is concerned) a series of reports is calling for more action on climate change. The first, by the government's independent advisory Committee on Climate Change calls for caps on global air travel to cut aviation-related emissions. A second report by the Institute for Public Policy Research looks at a scheme known as personal carbon trading that would allocate a carbon cap to individual citizens. The conclusion is that personal carbon trading is "politically risky", but may be necessary if other policies fail.

All these proposals come at a time of great uncertainty for the future of a global climate agreement. At a press luncheon yesterday, David Milliband, the UK's Foreign Secretary, warned that there was about a 50/50 chance that the Copenhagen talks would reach any sort of reasonable conclusion. You can see more of his fairly dire predictions by watching the video at right (courtesy of ITV).

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 09, 2009
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The British non-profit science lobby Sense About Science has unveiled the findings from its survey of 4,000 peer-reviewers. No need for suspense, I'll give you the bottom line now: Peer review is hardly perfect, but nobody's got a better idea. Interestingly though, researchers seem to think that more secrecy in the peer-review process could help to improve it.

Now the details. Overall, 69% of those surveyed said that they were "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with peer review. Another 22% could care less, and only 9% were "dissatisfied" or "very dissatisfied" (see graph right).

But that hardly means that these researchers thought peer review as it stood was the best possible system. Only a third of researchers thought that the current peer review system was the best that could be achieved by scientists.

The surveyors were also asked to weigh in about what they thought could make peer review better. The idea of "open peer review," where reviewers names are made public, scored just 20% on the survey, while a whopping 76% of researchers thought that "double blind" peer review, where the names of authors and reviewers are hidden from each other, was a good idea. That contrasts with the last time the survey was done in 2007. Back then, 27% of survey participants supported open peer review, while just 71% wanted the reviews to be done double-blind. Incidentally, most Nature-brand journals don't use double-blind peer review.

Final thought, 41% of those surveyed thought monetary compensation would make them more likely to peer-review papers. Of those wanting benjamins for their time, almost all thought societies or publishers should pony up. There's lots more in the survey, so take a look and see what you think.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 08, 2009
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African leaders are threatening to boycott the global warming summit in Copenhagen this December if negotiations come up short. Of course it's not yet clear whether they have the collective will to do so, at least as a unified block, but the message came through in no uncertain terms.

Speaking at a meeting of the Africa Partnership Forum in Addis Ababa, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi declared that African leaders are prepared to "walk out of any negotiations that threaten to be another rape of our continent.”

Though least responsible and most at risk due, Meles said, Africans have largely been locked out of the already small transfer of wealth created to help poor nations cope and develop along a cleaner path. "But we have no intention to a free ride," he added, suggesting that Africa is prepared to protect and expand forests and remains a "green field" for clean energy investments.

African has been trying to formulate a unified position since making a decision to negotiate as a block earlier this year. Environment ministers were able to collectively call on industrialized nations to reduce emissions by a whopping 25-40 percent by 2020 earlier this summer, but many details were left unresolved. This week's meeting represented the latest attempt to consolidate positions.

Press reports indicate that they made some progress, although verifying details proved difficult. More than one story (see here and here) suggested that Africans planned to call on developing nations to provide some $200 billion, presumably annually, to developing countries by 2020, although it was not clear what that money would cover.

Lim Li Lin, who works on developing country issues for the Third World Network, says Africa has always more or less negotiated as a group. The question moving forward, she says, is whether leaders will be able to settle on a concrete position and then stick to it in the negotiations. "What is clear is that all this has not impacted the negotiations yet," she says.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on September 04, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday the Royal Society, Britain's premier scientific body, delivered its official view on geoengineering. Scientists analyzed a dozen different approaches and weighed their pros and cons. Then, being scientists, they plotted their results in a bizarre phase space that nobody could understand. Many a reporter, myself included, were scratching our heads when co-author Ken Caldeira popped this little gem up onto the screen:

(Note: error bars are purely symbolic. Huh?)

Now I want to be fair, the Royal Society report is actually very well written and it contains a lot of good information about the geoengineering proposals out there. But it's a nuanced take on a complex issue. So it's not surprising that you saw a range of headlines. The most inaccurate enthusiastic one by far, came from those lovely folks at the Register:

Boffins: Give up on CO₂ cuts, only geoengineering can work

The Financial Times landed on the other end of the spectrum:

Hopes dashed for geo-engineering solutions

And in between came everybody else:

Study says 'geoengineering' to flight climate likely, but risky (USA Today)

Royal Society warns climate engineering 'could cause disaster' (the Times)

World must plan for climate emergency-report (Reuters)

Investment in geo-engineering needed immediately, says Royal Society (the Guardian)

These headlines make the report look like a Kurosawa film, but most of the actual stories are pretty accurate in my opinion. The bottom line is that the Royal Society felt that the only sure way to save the planet is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But in the event of a global climate emergency, we should at least know the consequences of geoengineering.

You can read our coverage here.

Update: I've included the updated diagram off the Royal Society website.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 02, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Neat technologies, Policy | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

Geo-engineering has been all the rage recently, and yesterday the UK-based Institution of Mechanical Engineers weighed in with their recommendations for how best to engineer the environment.

The report was a mix of the very specific and very vague. On the specific side, the panel recommended three technologies, which they believed represent the cheapest, quickest form of geo-engineering:

*Reflective roofs on buildings in order to cool urban areas (although the panel noted that this, technically doesn't count as geoengineering, since it doesn't actually involve changing the climate).

*Putting algae tanks on the side of buildings. The idea is that this algae would soak up carbon and could then be charred and sequestered.

*Finally came the suggestion that grabbed most of the headlines—fake trees. The trees are basically just carbon dioxide filters that are thousands of times more efficient than the real thing. 100,000 such trees would be able to remove all carbon from transport related CO2 emissions in the UK.

But the engineers were much more vague about how much such proposals might cost, or what their overall influence on carbon dioxide levels could be. This report is more a "case study of what needs to be done," it says. Follow-up work could be done with £10-20 million from a UK contribution to an international research programme. The report comes just days ahead of a second, more comprehensive study by the Royal Society.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on August 27, 2009
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I’ve always wanted a PhD. Working in the Nature office and not having one can make you feel like a bit of a dunce. Now it seems I could have assuaged some of my insecurities by hopping on a plane to Germany with a suitcase full of euros.

According to the German magazine Focus, “many renowned universities” have been caught up in a scandal involving thousands of doctoral candidates paying bribes to gain that precious ‘Dr’ in front of their names*.

Prosecutors in Cologne are now investigating links between a now-defunct consultancy firm and professors across the country. AP notes that the director of the consultancy firm and a Hannover law professor have already been convicted and given jail sentences in relation to the scandal.

It seems some professors may have been accepting payments of between 4,000 and 20,000 euros (£3,500-£18,000) to ‘supervise’ students’ doctorates, with ‘supervise’ meaning little more than ‘rubber stamp APPROVED’.

“We’re talking about honorary professors from all kinds of departments including medical science, law and economic science,” Guenter Feld, the prosecutors’ spokesman told Bloomberg.

* yes, I know that they might not use ‘Dr’ in Germany.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 26, 2009
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According to a report in SciDev.net a survey in China shoes that a third of workers in science and technology there would rather be civil servants or managers than do their current job.

The survey, undertaken by the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) also shows that the number of science and technology workers in China has risen by 74% since 2002, to 52 million.

Part of the problem, apparently is the pressure that comes with the job, especially in the high flying academic ranks. This includes pressure to publish as well as the pressure of constant evaluations.

Amazingly 32% of science and technology workers – and this list includes researchers, engineers, technicians and teachers – earn less than the national average. No wonder then that the civil service is seen as a more attractive career.

For more facts and figures, check out SciDev.net’s article.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on August 26, 2009
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The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents 3 million large and small businesses, wants to put the science of climate change on trial, reports the Los Angeles Times.

The chamber is pushing for the Environmental Protection Agency to hold a public hearing -- with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge to rule on whether humans are causing global warming, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Continue reading "Industry wants to try climate change " »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on August 25, 2009
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Abuse of ADHD medications appears to be rising among American teens.

According to data from poison centres fielding calls on potential teen overdoses, queries regarding attention deficit drugs rose 76%. This rise was more than increases seen generally for teenage substance abuse.

“The sharp increase, out of proportion to other poison center calls, suggests a rising problem with teen ADHD stimulant medication abuse,” write the researchers behind the analysis, published in Pediatrics.

Study author Jennifer Setlik, of Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, says there is a “rising problem” with the abuse of ADHD medications, which are sometimes taken as cognitive enhancers, for example to improve exam performance, as well as for more traditional recreational reasons.

In April last year a Nature survey found one in five respondents said they had used drugs such as ADHD treatments to stimulate their focus, concentration or memory (see: Poll results: look who's doping). Later in the year a commentary paper in Nature called for an evidence based approach to evaluating the use of cognitive enhancers by healthy people.

That commentary noted:

Safe and effective cognitive enhancers will benefit both the individual and society. But it would also be foolish to ignore problems that such use of drugs could create or exacerbate.

Setlik et al’s new study shows again how necessary research into this issue is.

Photo: by FGMB via Flickr under creative commons

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 25, 2009
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The percentage of scientific journal articles that are retracted has risen from 0.0007% in 1990 to 0.007% last year.

That's according to an analysis performed by academic-data provider Thomson Reuters, for Times Higher Education (THE). In 1990 just five of the nearly 690,000 journal articles covered by its Science Citation Index Expanded were retracted. Last year, it was 95 out of 1.4 million.

THE quotes James Parry, acting head of the UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO), as suggesting that a 'conservative' estimate of actual misconduct might be 1% - in which case, we'd expect to find 15,000 articles retracted a year. So, Parry reckons: "This suggests significant under-detection, which fits with what editors have told UKRIO".

The stat may suggest that editors are increasingly prepared to investigate claims of scientific fraud or error. "Anyone looking at this problem in detail knows of dozens of papers that are frankly fraudulent, but they are never retracted," says Aubrey Blumsohn, a campaigner and blogger for greater openness in research conduct.

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on August 20, 2009
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Potentially vital information on the prevalence of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease in the UK is still not being collected, as coroners believe they are unable to test for it.

In a story now getting wide pickup, the BBC this morning reported that coroners are refusing to routinely test for CJD during post mortems, arguing that their job is only to discover the cause of death and not to collect such data.

The government wants routine tests but Michael Powers, a coroners’ law expert, told the Today programme, “This is a function which is outside the coroner’s statutory authority, because they are not – those tests – directed to ascertaining the [cause of] death in an individual case. If you step outside the coroner’s authority different considerations apply, most particularly of course consent.”

To date there have been 168 ‘definite and probable’ cases of vCJD in the UK, according to the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (pdf).

John Collinge, of University College London, told Today, “There is a concern that what we’ve seen so far may be the first wave … and that there may be more people silently infected in the community than the number of clinical cases would suggest.”

Powers said he would welcome a change to the law to enable testing and the Department of Health is running a pilot project to obtain samples from post-mortem examinations later this year (Daily Mail).

The issue is not entirely a new one however. In February last year the Guardian reported on the same issue, and was told by coroners’ society secretary André Rebello that “Coroners want to avoid any misapprehension that they might be ordering a post-mortem examination for access to research material rather than our statutory function ... Even if this was not inappropriate, coroners have neither the resources nor the time to be involved."

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 19, 2009
Categories: Health and medicine, Policy | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Yale University Press has been forced onto the defensive, amid accusations that it is unfairly curtailing a social scientist’s ability to publish her research.

The publisher has refused to print 12 cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in a book discussing the controversy these images created when they were first published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005.

Yale press is due to publish an analysis of these events by Jytte Klausen, professor of politics at Brandeis University, but is being attacked over its decision to omit the controversial material and any other images of Mohammed from the book.

Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Publishers Professors, was one of many expressing their outrage at this perceived censorship of an academic publishing their research.

“‘We do not negotiate with terrorists. We just accede to their anticipated demands.’ That is effectively the new policy position at Yale University Press,” he said last week.

Continue reading "University press caught up in censorship row" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 18, 2009
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The genomics blogosphere is abuzz over allegations that a purchasing decision of next-generation sequencing machines was politically motivated. In a November 2008 letter sent to a UK House of Lords select committee, Kevin McKernan, senior director of scientific operations at Applied Biosystems (ABI), cried foul at the Sanger Centre's decision to return five of ABI's SOLiD System machines in favour of the platform developed by Illumina/Solexa.

The letter accused Sanger researchers of bearing a grudge against ABI because of its Craig Venter-tinged connections in the race to sequence the human genome. McKernan also asserted that the institute leadership took "a more historical approach" in its decision to go with more Illumina Genome Analyzer sequencers, noting that many Sanger staff members have close ties with the rival company.

Nick Loman of the University of Birmingham ridiculed this claim. "Calling the approach historical is slightly ironic given that ABI used to be the only show in town and the Sanger had over a hundred ABI machines running during the [Human Genome Project]," he wrote on the blog Pathogens: Genes and Genomes. Moreover, Solexa, which Illumina acquired in January 2007, was headquartered in Cambridgeshire, and many of their former workers turned Hinxton, UK-based Sanger staff stayed close to home, Loman noted.

Continue reading "A rock SoLiD complaint?" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin on August 14, 2009
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The upper echelons of the FDA are getting a lot of unwanted attention today. Yesterday, the top regulator of the medical devices division, Daniel Schultz, announced his resignation, and now the head of drug approvals is under investigation by the Department of Health and Human Services, reports the Wall Street Journal.

For months, the medical devices division has been on the list of Margaret Hamburg, whom Obama appointed to whip the controversy-plagued FDA into shape. At the center of the division's current mess are products that were approved despite the safety and efficacy concerns of agency scientists. The approval of such products — including a brain-zapping depression-treating device and a knee surgery device — led to allegations of being a bit too friendly with industry.

The criticism isn't just from outsiders. In a letter to the House Energy and Commerce Committee last October, nine employees alleged that some scientists had been pressured to approve the devices.

Schultz has some company. Janet Woodcock is the director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, which approves drugs, and is also accused of being too cozy with industry. (Back in November, she was a drug maker hopeful for FDA commissioner but didn't get it).

Continue reading "Shakedown at the FDA" »

Posted by Lizzie Buchen on August 12, 2009
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Just a month after being tapped by the White House, the physician and geneticist Francis Collins was unanimously confirmed today by the US Senate as the new director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Collins, who headed the NIH's National Human Genome Research Institute from 1993-2008, will return to the institutes' Bethesda, Maryland, headquarters with a full plate on his hands. His first duties will include getting the NIH's $10.4 billion stimulus windfall out the door and working on the new registry of approved human embryonic stem cells.

"Dr. Collins will be an outstanding leader," Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement. "Today is an exciting day for NIH and for science in this country."

Collins, though widely praised for his scientific accomplishments, which include leading the Human Genome Project and discovering many disease genes, has been criticized for his openly religious views. The author of the The Language of God, Collins recently launched the BioLogos Foundation, which aims to reconcile Christain faith and science. BioLogos officials said that the new director would step down from its leadership once confirmed. (USA Today)

A round-up of early accolades follows the jump.

Continue reading "Collins confirmed" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin on August 07, 2009
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The University of California has agreed to lend the Golden State nearly $200 million for the state to give back to the university at a premium.

Confused? Read on.

California is in quite a state. The spiraling budget crisis has forced the state government to make huge cuts, including hacking $2 billion in funding to the campuses of the University of California (UC), California State University, and community colleges. The UC — the best public higher education system in the world, according to rankings by China's Shanghai Jiao Tong University — alone took a $813 million hit. To plug the gap, the cash-strapped university raised tuition fees, slashed enrollment, reduced course options, and introduced mandatory unpaid furlough days for its employees.

But as bad as things are, they could be worse. Just ask Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Unable to borrow money by selling bonds, his government's credit rating has plummeted well below that of the UC's. So the university plans to borrow $199.8-million that it will then offer the California taxpayers for the state to lend back at 3.2% interest over the next three years. This will allow the universities to restart stalled building projects at eight of its 10 campuses and the state to get its money at a better rate than it would on the open market, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

Continue reading "A creative fix for the University of California's budget woes" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin on August 07, 2009
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UPDATED 6/8/09 – Since this post was originally published, another grave belonging to a member of Novartis Chief Executive Daniel Vasella’s family has been desecrated (Reuters).

“There have been a series of terrorist-like attacks on individuals and company buildings. Last week, the graves of [Novartis CEO Daniel] Vasella’s parents were desecrated and the urn with the ashes of his mother was stolen,” a company spokesman told Reuters.

This is not the first time animal activists have resorted to grave robbing in support of their utterly moronic campaign. In 2004 the owners of a guinea pig farm had the body of a relative exhumed and stolen. It was later recovered.

According to the new reports, Vasella has also seen his hunting lodge in Austria burned down by those who want his company to sever ties with the company Huntingdon Life Sciences. Activists have sprayed “Drop HLS Now” on gravestones (AP).

A Novartis spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal the company “does not work with HLS and has not for many years”.

“It is important that people realize that it is not possible to discover novel products...which save thousands of human lives every year without some use of animal data, which is required by regulatory authorities,” she added.

Swiss newspaper Blick has a number of disturbing stories about these attacks on Novartis employees and other incidents.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 06, 2009
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US plans to build a new all-singing, all-dancing dangerous-pathogens lab suffered a slight setback last week, with a report from the Government Accountability Office saying the risks of building a biosafety level-four facility on the mainland haven’t been adequately looked at.

But there is still no place for poor old Plum Island, New York, in government research plans. Plum Island currently hosts a relatively small bio-safety level three research facility. As the government wants a new, huge level four-rated set of labs, Plum Island is up for sale.

“My hope of hopes is that it continues to be used as a Biolevel-3 facility. It has all of the infrastructure to support research - perhaps we could get a university program over there,” local official Scott Russell said recently (Northfork.com). “But I can’t suggest that my idea is anything but a pipe dream.”

All this leads The Scientist to suggest that anyone looking for a nice property near the Hamptons should consider the island. One recent valuation puts the property’s worth at about $2 million.

But what else could you do with the site? The Great Beyond presents: 101 uses for a Plum Island.

Continue reading "101 uses for a Plum Island" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 06, 2009
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This week South Korea sketched out several options for reducing greenhouse gases in the coming decade, inching closer to a national commitment before the United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen this December.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, only industrialized "Annex I" nations were required to take on specific emissions targets.
Seoul has already announced massive investments in clean energy technologies, earning a place among a core group of developing nations that are taking significant action to curb the growth of greenhouse gas emissions. If it moves forward, South Korea would join the ranks of Mexico, South Africa and Brazil in volunteering quantifiable pledges as world leaders negotiate a follow-on treaty.

Government officials say they are considering three emissions trajectories for 2020, all using a 2005 baseline: an 8 percent increase, a return to the 2005 level or a 4 percent decrease; that compares to a projected 30 percent increase under a "business-as-usual" scenario. The 2005 baseline is revealing because South Korea's emissions have increased by 95 percent since 1990, the baseline used in the Kyoto Protocol, according to the World Resources Institute in Washington.

Compared to a 1990 baseline, the proposals seem decidedly less ambitious, and the government has not spelled out exactly how it plans to meet such a commitment. Nonetheless, says Remi Moncel, an energy and climate expert at the institute, "it’s a good sign of leadership from a developing country."

Continue reading "South Korea unveils climate proposals" »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on August 05, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Energy, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

According those ever-loquacious unnamed ‘intelligence sources’, Iran could have a nuclear bomb within a year.

Speaking this time to The Times, the sources say Iran’s nuclear scientists are merely waiting on their country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to give the word.

“If the Supreme Leader takes the decision, we assess they have to enrich low-enriched uranium to highly-enriched uranium at the Natanz plant, which could take six months, depending on how many centrifuges are operating. We don’t know if the decision was made yet,” they told the Times.

After enrichment it would take another six months to assemble a warhead, says the paper.

Continue reading "Iran nuclear news" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 03, 2009
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The US National Academies has launched its long-awaited review of the scientific evidence used to track down the alleged creator of the deadly anthrax attacks of 2001. A 15-member expert panel met in Washington DC on 30-31 July to determine whether the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) relied on appropriate scientific techniques when it implicated government biodefence researcher Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide last July as prosecutors prepared to indict him as the person responsible for mailing the Bacillus anthracis spores that killed five people and sickened 17 others.

"It is important that we understand what happened," Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ) told the committee on Friday. "The illogic of the investigation that I witnessed leads me to question whether the scientific and technical steps were well undertaken."

Continue reading "Anthrax investigation probe underway" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin on July 31, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

A former SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory researcher who allegedly destroyed $500,000 worth of protein crystals earlier this month was arrested and charged on Monday for willfully ruining government property.

The 4,000 to 5,000 now-useless protein crystals represented a “whole variety of different samples” involved in the Protein Structure Initiative, a federally-funded project to expedite the discovery of atomic-level protein structures, says Ian Wilson, director of the Joint Center for Structural Genomics (JCSG), which oversees the initiative. Some crystals were aimed at matching three-dimensional protein structures with their corresponding DNA sequences; others were part of targeted research projects including the Human Microbiome Project and efforts to map every protein made by the bacterium Thermotoga maritima.

Continue reading "Vandal destroys protein crystals in California" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin on July 29, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Chemistry, Policy | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Pfizer is again reportedly close to agreeing a $75 million settlement over a drug trial in Nigeria that allegedly left 11 children dead and others injured.

Earlier this year in April it was reported that this settlement related to the trial of Trovan had been agreed (see: Pfizer settles Nigerian drug case out of court - April 06, 2009). Pfizer denied any wrongdoing in the trial, which Kano State prosecutors alleged was illegal. Pfizer, in contrast, says the trial was carried out with the consent of the Nigerian government, and conformed to standard ethical practices.

Now the agreement has been officially announced. AFP says:

The agreement, which is due to be inked on Thursday in Nigeria, was formally announced in court on Monday, lawyers from both sides said, without giving details of the amounts involved.
…
"Yes, we have agreed on the out-of-court settlement and we will sign the agreement on Thursday," confirmed Pfizer lawyer Anthony Idigbe.

AFP reports that Pfizer will cough up $35m for the victims and their families, $10m for state costs and $5m to do up Kano’s infectious disease hospitals; $50m in total. However Reuters agrees with the first two numbers but says that $30m is being set aside for “healthcare initiatives chosen by the Kano State government”; $75m in total.

Reuters’ numbers would agree with reports earlier this year from the BBC.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 29, 2009
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A poll by Gallup has put NASA and the Centers for Disease Control as the federal agencies deemed to be doing their jobs best by the US public. For the space agency, 58% of the public thought it was doing a good or excellent job, with appreciation of the CDC running at 61%.

It’s not all good for science bodies though. The Food and Drug Administration put in a rather poor show, with only 38% rating it good or excellent.

Gallup notes:

The new poll, conducted just prior to the 40th anniversary of the July 20, 1969, moon landing by Apollo 11 -- perhaps the most celebrated of all NASA achievements -- finds NASA's rating about where it has been in recent years. While not nearly as high as it was in late 1998 (a month after John Glenn's successful return to space), NASA's current excellent/good score falls within the upper half of ratings it has received over the past two decades.

Graph data: Gallup

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 28, 2009
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A multi-million refurb on the site at the epicentre of the UK’s 2007 foot-and-mouth disease outbreak has done a Lazurus and come back to life.

Earlier this year plans to do up the Institute for Animal Health at Pirbright to the tune of £120 million appeared to have been scuppered when the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs backed off (see: Britain hits a hurdle in replacing key animal-pathogen facility).

But yesterday the Government announced it would be funding a £100 million overhaul, with investment from a different sector, the newly formed Department of Business, Innovation and Skills. The money will allow the institute to implement the recommendations of reviews produced in the wake of the foot-and-mouth outbreak, including new labs (press release).

“What I hope is that it will give confidence to all our stakeholders that here at Pirbright we have the world’s leading experts. That it will be state-of-the-art and it will be as safe as it can possibly be,” says institute director, Martin Shirley (BBC).

The funding, says Shirley, is also a recognition of the “increasing threats” posed by animal diseases such as … err … foot and mouth.

Previous Pirbright
Britain hits a hurdle in replacing key animal-pathogen facility – Nature News, 10 February 2009
Setback for key UK animal lab – Nature News, 5 December 2008
British government tightens up lab biosecurity – The Great Beyond, 10 October 2008
Anybody know a good plumber? – The Great Beyond, 07 September 2007

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 28, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Earth, environment & ecology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It’s not everyday you’ll find Richard Dawkins agreeing with a priest who was hounded out of his job for daring to suggest creationists shouldn’t be totally ostracised. However, Dawkins and Reverend Professor Michael Reiss have both put their names to a demand that evolution should not be excluded from primary schools in the UK.

A new science curriculum for under-11s is being developed by the government, which is currently considering responses to a consultation that closed last week (consultation pdf). The British Humanist Association, which has gathered Dawkins, Reiss and 24 others to sign its letter to education minister Ed Balls, says:

We find it extraordinary that evolution and natural selection find no place in the section ‘Science – life and living things’. The theory of evolution is one of the most important ideas underlying biological science. It is a key concept that children should be introduced to at an early stage so as to ensure a firmer scientific understanding when they study it in more detail later on.

On the BBC’s Today Programme this morning Reiss said, “Evolution is really at the core of biology … we’re suggesting that we must make sure that this core aspect of science and biology is included even in primary schools.”

Many of those involved in science education where aghast when Reiss was forced from his job at the Royal Society after a media storm over comments he made at conference last year. At best, the media reports of his comments were misinterpreted (see: Creationism stir fries Reiss).

Since then he has popped up a couple of times to comment on these issues. Welcome back professor/reverend.

More
BHA press release
BHA letter to Balls (pdf)

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 28, 2009
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Pharmaceutical giant Wyeth just can’t catch a break. Before being swallowed by larger-giant Pfizer, the company will need to brace for a major PR thumping: A federal judge has ordered the company to release documents relating to its alleged practice of ghostwriting medical articles.

In December 2008, the New York Times reported that Wyeth played a suspiciously large role in preparing articles that cast its hormone replacement therapy PremPro in a favourable light. The articles, published in medical journals, contrast with the findings from major studies conducted by the National Institutes of Health, which found that (pdf) women who have taken PremPro have an increased risk of breast cancer, stroke, heart attack and blood clots in the legs and lungs.

Continue reading "Judge orders Wyeth to open up" »

Posted by Lizzie Buchen on July 27, 2009
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The UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon has given China a kick-up-the-bum on climate change by urging them to set a leading example to developing nations by promoting green living and environmentally-friendly economic growth.

Ban was launching a project to promote energy-saving lighting (Press release). "China has long been the world's fastest-growing major economy," Ban said. "It is also a leading emitter of greenhouse gases, and it is one of the countries most vulnerable to the impact of climate change."

"Without China there can be no success this year on a new global climate framework deal," said Ban, (AFP).

Meanwhile Nobel-prize winning chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri has “slammed” the US for its plans to introduce carbon tariffs (Wall Street Journal). These tariffs will be charged to countries importing to the US, when those countries don’t take their own steps to cut their emissions. “Please don’t use this weapon. I’m afraid that those that have been pushing these provisions probably don’t realize that all of this can cause a major negative reaction,” Pachauri said.

Pachauri has also been defending India’s use of coal (The Hindu).

Image: UN Photo/Paulo Filgueiras

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on July 24, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Science has been reduced to a “political bargaining chip” in government, according to MPs (Telegraph, BBC News).

In a report by the House of Commons Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills (IUSS) committee, MPs say science should be at the heart of government, with a permanent home in the Cabinet Office, where it would be able to influence policymaking in all government departments. Instead science is “shuffled” between different departments, reports the Telegraph.

Continue reading "Science sidelined in government, say MPs" »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on July 23, 2009
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With the emergence of web-based lab notebooks, digital image “enhancement”, and the quick and easy (and possibly dirty) generation and dissemination of colossal amounts of data, it’s becoming increasingly clear that technology provides new challenges to maintaining scientific integrity. In an attempt to tame the beast while it still has its baby teeth, the US National Academy of Sciences released a report today that provided a framework for dealing with these challenges: “Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age”.

The NAS commissioned the report back in May 2006, when the editors of Nature, Cell, Science, and Nature Cell Biology wrote a letter to NAS president Ralph Cicerone regarding the recent rise in cases of data manipulation.

Continue reading "Data integrity in the digital age" »

Posted by Lizzie Buchen on July 22, 2009
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Britain is considering upgrading its national space centre to a full blown space agency to take the UK to-infinity-and-beyond / where-no-man-has-gone-before / etc.

Currently the country’s British National Space Centre oversees the space science sector, but it operates as a partnership of six government departments, two research councils and two other government bodies. As the Daily Telegraph notes, “critics say the inability of this club sometimes to adopt coherent positions on complex programmes means that UK delegations often find themselves marginalised when they go into international negotiations”.

A new consultation – which launches properly today – will ask whether a single agency would be a better way to go.

Continue reading "UK government wants a space agency" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 21, 2009
Categories: Policy, Space and astronomy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Rajendra Pachauri turned up the heat on global policymakers in a series of interviews following last week's meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Venice.

Speaking to reporters in New York on Monday, the IPCC chairman credited global leaders with endorsing a goal of holding global warming to 2 degrees Celsius but said countries must now follow up with real action. "The reality is that we have very little time," Pachauri said. Despite an alarmingly wide gap between developed and developing nations, Pachauri said he remains "cautiously optimistic" that a climate deal will be reached in Copenhagen this December.

Following the IPCC's fourth assessment in 2007, some experts suggested that the panel should switch gears and begin performing more rapid assessments, but in the end the panel decided to stay the course. Pachauri said the IPCC will begin rolling out its next major assessment as scheduled in 2013.

Reuters summarized some of the major issues that the panel will be digging into. At the top are sea level change, one of the more contentious issues in the fourth assessment, and the role clouds, which are the source of the largest uncertainties in current climate models.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on July 20, 2009
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As researchers at the University of California system cope with unpaid leave, it looks like the troubles for higher education will soon stretch to this side of the pond. The University and College Union (UCU), the UK's largest postgraduate Union, has made a grim prediction of massive layoffs at London universities.

The UCU predicts that over 2,000 jobs are "at risk" at 18 institutions across London. Of particular concern to scientists are a possible 130 jobs at Imperial College's faculty of medicine, and a possible 530 job cuts at University College London (right). The UCU is highly critical of the possible cuts: "Most of these universities and colleges are not in financial crisis", they've written in their statement. "Nobody is saying that the sector in the capital is awash with money but the fact is that universities and colleges in the capital are in relatively good financial health."

That may be true at the moment, but universities in Britain are heavily dependant on government funding—funding which is expected to be cut back dramatically in coming years as the recession deepens. "Public spending is already tight and all the signs are that it is likely to get tighter yet," says Dominique Fourniol, a spokesperson at University College London. "It is likely that we will see a decrease in our income in the next few years, requiring us to reduce our spending."

Fourniol confirmed that UCL is looking to reduce spending by 6%, but he says it's "not a simple question" of lopping 6% off the current staffing level. A spokesperson at Imperial similarly said that the college "is making every effort to avoid compulsory redundancies" at the faculty of medicine.

Unlike the situation at the University of California, which is very immediate, it seems that researchers at London's universities have to wait and see just how bad the pain from the current financial crisis will be.

Image: Wikipedia

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on July 17, 2009
Categories: Financial Crisis, Policy | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Thirty-four Nobel Laureates have penned a letter urging President Barack Obama to push for a $150 billion clean energy fund in the climate legislation currently moving through Congress. Not that Obama needs any prodding - this message was clearly targeted at Congress.

The president kicked things off earlier this spring by assumed the existence of roughly $600 billion in cap-and-trade revenues in his first 10-year budget. Some $150 billion of that money was dedicated to a Clean Energy Technology Fund, but the Senate eventually stripped all of this out of its budget bill, illustrating precisely why advocates are pushing for a dedicated and untouchable stream of revenue in the climate legislation itself.

Those efforts fell apart when House Democrats began striking deals to secure votes, eventually paving the way for passage on June 26. The last Congressional Budget Office analysis forecasts that the bill would effectively raise $873 billion over 10 years, but most of that sum would be doled out to various causes in an effort hold consumer and business costs down.

Burt Richter, the Nobel-prize winning physicist and former director of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, offered up a few numbers in a conference call with journalists: Energy makes up about 10 percent of the nation's gross national product, or about $1.5 trillion per year; $15 billion would represent just 1 percent of the nation's energy expenditures. Small potatoes in the grand scheme, but Richter says it would get the nation started on the kind of energy innovation that will be needed to meet the climate challenge - and stay ahead in an increasingly competitive world.

"The United States is getting to the point where it doesn’t make anything that anybody wants to buy," he said, pointing to nuclear and wind power as two energy technologies that the United States pioneered and then shipped overseas. "We would be well advised to invest at an appropriate scale ... if we want to preserve our position of technological leadership."

Continue reading "Nobelists call for energy R&D in climate bill" »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on July 16, 2009
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Shrug-worthy, disappointing, too slow, reactionary, lacking ambition, could-do-better: the scientist’s attitude to most UK politicians’ policy statements on reducing carbon emissions.

Today’s “low-carbon transition plan” looks different – although we could have done with it a lot earlier.

In a collection of four strategy documents which together proclaim themselves “the most systematic response to climate change of any major developed country”, the UK government plots out exactly how it plans to meet its legally binding targets for cutting carbon dioxide emissions.

Energy secretary Ed Miliband says that by 2020 he wants 40% of electricity to come from low-carbon sources: over 30% from renewables – overwhelmingly wind power, but also biomass, and tidal energy – and the rest from nuclear and carbon capture and storage. Heat and transport will also see vastly-boosted renewables contributions. By 2020, there will be 3,000 offshore wind turbines across the country and every home will have a smart meter. Every government department has been given its own carbon budget to follow. Thousands of ‘green jobs’ (undefined) will be created.

The ambition on paper is praiseworthy. It leaves only sizeable doubts about whether the government can match deeds to fine-sounding words – and whether they can persuade households and firms that they must pay increased costs on energy bills.

“Eventually the Government must move from analysis paralysis to doing and building," says Stuart Haszeldine, a geologist at the University of Edinburgh. “All the right plans are there, but it’s hard to believe that this is actually going to happen.”

Continue reading "UK low carbon drive: at last the right sounds; now let’s see it happen" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on July 15, 2009
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Jerzy Buzek became the first eastern European president of the European Parliament in a vote yesterday. He also becomes the first president to have a strong and still-active scientific background. A PhD chemical engineer, he worked for many years at the Chemical Engineering Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Gliwice, southern Poland. He generated a strong bibliography and has three patents, in the area of energy. He spent a year at the University of Cambridge, UK, in 1972, but declined the offer of a grant to stay longer, preferring to return to Poland.

After the fall of communism he has concerned himself with environmental energy issues, serving on different national and international commissions.

He became prime minister of Poland from 1997 until 2001, then returned to academia before becoming an Member of the European Parliament in 2004. There he became an active member of the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE) and was rapporteur for the multi-billion-euro Framework 7 Research Programme legislation.
The presidency of the European Parliament is more ceremonial than powerful, but Buzek will at least throw a positive light on the deliberations of the Framework 8 Research Programme which must be approved during this legisalture.

Buzek’s wife is a chemist and his daughter a famous actress – she costarred with Roman Polanski in Andrzej Wajdas’ 2002 film Revenge.

Conservative MEP Herbert Reul of Germany is expected to be elected chair of the new ITRE parliamentary committee tomorrow.

Posted by Alison Abbott on July 15, 2009
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As predicted, science and Africa featured only marginally in the G8 discussions in Italy held on 8-10 July. But at least in two key research areas, agriculture and health, world leaders agreed to make some progress.

Continue reading "G8 pledges support for research in African agriculture and health" »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on July 13, 2009
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The Obama administration this week unveiled a programme to funnel billions of dollars directly into renewable energy projects, thus helping alleviate the capital crunch that has arisen as a result of the financial crisis.

The programme, announced jointly by the US Energy and Treasury departments, basically monetizes existing tax credits that subsidize development of wind, solar and other renewable resources. The way these deals worked in the past is that banks would finance individual projects and then take advantage of the tax credits themselves. But because these credits reduce taxes that would normally be paid on profits, they are completely useless if banks aren't making any money, as is currently the case.

Nature covered this problem back in October, when the impacts of the financial meltdown on Wall Street were just beginning to emerge, and again in January. The renewable energy industry seized on the issue and pushed to make the tax credits available as cash when Congress was working on a stimulus bill; their efforts paid off, and this week's announcement kicks off the new programme.

The Energy Department hopes to begin accepting applications on Aug. 1; checks would be cut within 60 days of submission. Agency officials estimate demand at roughly $3 billion (enough to get $10 to $14 billion in projects off the ground) but said there is no ceiling on the subsidy. "The real question is just how many projects come in," says Matt Rogers, who is working on the stimulus program at the Energy Department. "Three billion is the initial estimate, but we would be quite excited to see a number larger than that."

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on July 10, 2009
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Science and scientists are pretty well respected by the American public, even as they disagree on specific issues like evolution, global warming, and use of animals in research.

So finds a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, together with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

84% of the 2,001 members of the public who were surveyed thought science had a mostly positive effect on society, while scientists came third behind members of the military and teachers in a chart of professions contributing “a lot” to society’s well-being.

Despite this general approval for science, just 32% of the public thought that humans had evolved due to natural processes (as opposed to 87% of the 2,500 AAAS members surveyed); just under half thought that earth was getting warmer because of human activity (84% of scientists) and 52% favoured the use of animals in scientific research (93% of scientists).

Continue reading "US public likes science; doesn’t agree with scientists" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on July 10, 2009
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Posted for Lizzie Buchen

Researchers in the newly emerging field of synthetic biology need to explain their science to the public to avoid unwarranted fears over its potential, an international group of researchers warned this week.

Public education and engagement are two of most important challenges facing the field, which aims to build biological components with potentially useful functions, they told a symposium held at the US National Academy of Sciences. But the relatively new discipline also presents a unique opportunity for public outreach, according to keynote speaker Arden Bement, Jr, director of the National Science Foundation: “we have the chance to get it right at the outset”.

Continue reading "‘Shiny happy biology’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 10, 2009
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With the international climate community focused on Italy, a key US senator casually announced plans to delay the first round of votes on a climate bill until September. The news from Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat who chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee, came just two days after her committee kicked off the legislative process.

To what extent this counts as a setback remains unclear. For her part, Boxer downplayed the announcement by saying the committee would get its work done quickly after the August recess, leaving plenty of time to push the bill through the Senate during the fall session. In doing so, she issued her first warning to colleagues who might think they have better things to do in December: "We'll be in until Christmas, so I'm not worried about it."

There are two easy explanations for the delay. The first is that energy is competing for attention with another big-ticket issue: health care reform. The second is that Democrats are worried about cobbling together votes. Undoubtedly both are true to some extent, but it might also be that her staff needs time to organize hearings and write legislation, likely modelled after that passed by the House on June 26. After all, Boxer shouldn't have a problem getting a bill out of her committee, which consists of 12 Democrats and seven Republicans.

The difficulty will come when the bill hits the Senate floor, where it will surely need 60 out of 100 votes to pass. Boxer's committee is the most important of several that will take up the issue and then report legislative language to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada. Congressional Quarterly reports that Reid has pushed back his deadline for committee work by 10 days, to 28 September. That's certainly not enough to derail the whole process, but every day counts.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on July 09, 2009
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The threat of nanoparticles in the environment takes a new twist. A report from researchers at the admirable Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN) at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, assesses the use of free nanomaterials as clean-up agents for contaminated land (pdf of the report here).

The science makes sense – to clean up contaminated land, reactive nanoparticles can be injected underground and because of their tiny size should be able to penetrate places where other particles can’t reach. Nanoparticles can have their outer shells tagged with reactive chemical groups to start reactions that break down toxic waste.

According to PEN’s press release, “Most of the materials discussed are a form of nano-scale zero-valent iron that are injected into the ground in a slurry which provide a reducing environment that enables the breakdown of contaminants.”

But the message we’ve been getting from those concerned about regulation for many years is that until the long terms potential risks of these teeny particles are known it is irresponsible to allow them to be released into the environment.

This latest report doesn’t offer the answer, merely highlights the pros and cons of such a system. But nanoremediation, as it is called, is already being used across parts of the world, particularly in the United States. To accompany the review article, Nanotechnology and in situ remediation: a review of the benefits and potential risks by Barbara Karn, Todd Kuiken and Martha Otto from PEN and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), PEN has produced a map showing the 45 known sites where nanoremediation is already being used.

Apparently, a 2004 EPA report but the price tag at $250 billion to clear up the US’s hazardous waste sites, and operation they estimate will take 30 – 35 years. “Nanoremediation has the potential not only to reduce the overall costs of cleaning up large scale contaminated sites, but it also can reduce cleanup time, eliminate the need for treatment and disposal of contaminated dredged soil, reduce some contaminant concentrations to near zero, and can be done in situ,” says the PEN website.

The bottom line remains, though that until the impact of using these nanoparticles is assessed and understood they shouldn’t be used on a large scale. And proper large-scale testing of the technology is what the report recommends should be the next step. Report author Todd Kuiken: “Despite the potentially high performance and low cost of nanoremediation, more research is needed to understand and prevent any potential adverse environmental impacts, particularly studies on full-scale ecosystem-wide impacts. To date, little research has been done.”

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on July 09, 2009
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Europe’s pharmaceutical industry breathed a sigh of relief yesterday as the European Commission unveiled the results of its inquiry into anti-competitive activities of major companies.

These activities might include deals between companies or complex patenting strategies designed to delay the arrival of generic drugs on the market. This could mean consumers end up paying for the more expensive branded drugs rather than cheaper generics.

Despite the fact that antitrust proceedings have been initiated against several pharma players, the perception seems to be that the industry had dodged a bullet. The European Commission announced a formal antitrust investigation into French pharma company Servier and a number of generics companies over “agreements” which may have been designed for “hindering entry on to the market of generic perindopril, a cardio-vascular medicine” (press release).

That announcement came as the Commission released its final report on antitrust and generics, claiming that “shortcomings in pharmaceutical sector require further action”. It says that the appearance of generic drugs on the market is being delayed and that “company practices are among the causes”.

Continue reading "Europe takes gentle aim at pharma deals" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 09, 2009
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John Holdren, science advisor to President Barack Obama, swung by Blighty today for some tea and crumpets with the Brits. But before embarking on a who's who tour of UK science policymakers, he joined the press in the basement of the US embassy for some all-American cookies and black coffee.

Most of his hour-long round table was spent discussing climate change. He expressed some disappointment with the climate change legislation winding its way through the US Congress, but sees it as a make-or-break step for getting an effective international accord out of the UN's Copenhagen conference, which will take place in December. Some of the reporters expressed scepticism that a bill could be passed in time, but Holdren was optimistic, noting that the administration only needed around 12-15 additional votes in the Senate to pass the legislation. "I would still bet that it will happen, but I have to admit that it's going to be a challenge," he said.

Holdren believes a big part of the solution to climate change will come from nuclear energy. He reiterated his longstanding support of that technology, but poo-pooed commercial reprocessing of old nuclear fuel, an approach advocated by previous president George W. Bush (but not by Nature). He also dismissed the US's deeply-troubled nuclear waste disposal site in Yucca Mountain, Nevada, advocating instead for a number of regional interim storage facilities. Such facilities, he notes, would get the current waste off the sites of commercial power plants, while minimizing the distance it will have to travel. There's a good political reason for regional sites as well—it won't force the US to choose a single location for waste disposal, something that's difficult in the highly decentralized federal system.

Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, Holdren reiterated his belief in a coordinated international approach for supplying nuclear fuel. "I would personally like to see uranium enrichment around the world put under international management," he said. Putting enrichment under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency, for example, would discourage nations from developing dual-use enrichment capabilities that could be used for nuclear weapons. Holdren pointed out that the Obama administration has yet to take any firm stand on the issue.

None of these positions are really new, but it was good to hear them from the horse's mouth.

By the way, I've decided that the US and UK are in some sort of twisted competition to see who can have the ugliest embassy in the other nation's capital. I've now visited both buildings, and they're absolutely hideous.

Image: Harvard University

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on July 09, 2009
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Posted on behalf of Meredith Wadman

US President Barack Obama today announced that geneticist Francis Collins will be his nominee to direct the National Institutes of Health (NIH.) The announcement caps months of waiting, watching and speculating by NIH groupies who, like the authors of this Nature editorial, were getting restive about the White House delay in naming a permanent chief for the $31 billion agency.

The president’s announcement that he intends to nominate Collins, who from 1993 to 2008 directed NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute (called the National Center for Human Genome Research until 1997), came during what has already a big week for the NIH; two days ago, the agency issued its final guidelines on human embryonic stem cell research. Collins, an MD-PhD who turned 59 in April, will find their implementation in his inbox, along with the shepherding of a crush of stimulus-incited grant applications through an overburdened peer review system.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on July 08, 2009
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An international crew of academics this week boldly declared that the world is headed down the wrong track in trying to put a lid on global greenhouse gas emissions. But with global leaders pressing the issue in Italy this week, it's not clear that anybody is listening.

The team includes Gwyn Prins of the London School of Economics and Steve Rayner of Oxford University, who made a splash with their 2007 indictment of the Kyoto Protocol, dubbed The Wrong Trousers (Nature also published a summary of the article). Their latest paper, which includes additional authors, including Roger Pielke, Jr. at the University of Colorado in Boulder, maintains a hard line and advocates policies that directly promote energy efficiency and decarbonization in place of a messy global carbon market that might or might not do the work it is intended to do. The researchers see a model in Japan, long a leader on energy efficiency thanks in part to a dearth of domestic resources.

Although the BBC posted a story and the New York Times' Andrew Revkin included a blurb in his blog, the paper hasn't garnered much traction. To be sure, Japan has lessons to teach the world, and carbon markets are unlikely to solve all of the world's problems. But like it or not, given the amount of time and political capital that has been invested in the current negotiations, there's little appetite for radical new ideas.

This perspective was nicely summed up in the BBC's coverage by Tom Burke of Imperial College. He acknowledged that many of the authors' criticisms are valid but suggested that "nothing could be more harmful" than the solution they propose, which is to reverse course.

So far, however, that doesn't appear to be a danger. On Wednesday, G8 leaders backed the establishment of a global carbon market as part of a commitment to curb their emissions by some 80 percent by 2050. They also signed on to a goal, long held by the European Union, to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius. The question facing the Major Economies Forum, to be convened Thursday by US president Barack Obama, is whether major developing countries such as China and India will agree to the 2-degree goal and commit themselves to halving global emissions by 2050 in order to make it happen.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on July 08, 2009
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Photo credit

I’ve an interview in this week’s Nature with Mostafa Moin — pdf here — who was the reformist candidate in Iran’s 2005 presidential elections, following which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president. Moin, a medical researcher, and former minister for higher education and for science, has long argued – see my 2006 interview here — that building a stronger civil and democratic society in Iran is key to the country’s scientific development and it becoming a knowledge-based society. He says that events since the disputed 12 June election mark a turning point in the relationship between the people of Iran and its government.

To read the full print version of the Q&A click here. I’ve also three answers which we didn’t have space for in the print version.

On 2 July, Nature also published a strong editorial, “We are all Iranians.” Mir Hossein Mousavi, the reformist candidate, has cited the Editorial on his Facebook page, here.

Nature also published a news article 24 June, “Iran diaspora responds to protests”

I've a fuller version of this post on my personal blog here.

Posted by Declan Butler on July 08, 2009
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Perhaps the biggest question facing the international climate community is how to divvy up the burden of reducing emissions. The arguments tend to centre on historical responsibility in the wealthy world versus future growth in developing countries, but a new study offers up a different metric: wealthy individuals everywhere (see Reuters, CNN).

The Kyoto Protocol requires developed countries to take on mandatory targets while giving developing countries a temporary pass, but international negotiators hope to craft a new agreement this year. This time around wealthy nations say they are willing to take on more substantial cuts but only if developing countries agree to slow, and eventually reverse, the rapid growth in emissions.

They have a point: like it or not, tackling climate change is impossible without the help of developing countries that are now, according to a recent analysis by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, responsible for more than half of the global emissions. On the other hand, poor countries are wary of restricting economic development that could lift billions of people out of poverty.

Continue reading "A new climate proposal: target rich people, not rich nations " »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on July 07, 2009
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On only the second legislative day after a historic climate bill squeaked through the U.S. House of Representatives, the Senate kicked off hearings to shape its own version of the bill. The legislation, which creates a "cap and trade" system and includes initiatives to encourage renewable and clean fuel sources, will face a much tougher battle in the Senate, where a supermajority of 60 votes is necessary to break an almost-certain filibuster by Republicans.

At the hearing on 7 July, members of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, one of six committees that will craft the bill, heard testimony from President Barack Obama's environmental big guns: Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lisa Jackson, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. The panel uniformly urged the committee members to follow the House's lead in passing the legislation.

Continue reading "Senate picks up climate bill" »

Posted by Lizzie Buchen on July 07, 2009
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I got to hear Al Gore speak today at the close of the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment in Oxford, and I was amazed to be treated to a pop neuroscience lecture.

Rather than climate, Gore opened by talking about human psychology and physiology. Climate change, he said, is "ultimately a problem of consciousness". He went on: "What is being tested is the proposition of whether or not the combination of an opposable thumb and a neocortex is a viable construct on this planet".

That's pretty deep, but Gore got deeper. Evolution, he said, had trained us to to respond quickly and viscerally to threats. But when humans are confronted with "a threat to the existence of civilization that can only be perceived in the abstract", we don't do so well. Citing functional magnetic resonance imaging, he said that the connecting line between amygdalae, which he described as the urgency centre of the brain, with the neocortex is a one way street: emotional emergencies can spark reasoning, but not the other way around.

Gore went on to speak about lots of other stuff: how better management of soil would be critical to solving the climate crisis. How geothermal energy had the potential for enormous development, and how existing technologies, such as coal-fired power plants had to become more efficient.

But in the end, he brought it back to human consciousness. Until the majority of citizens perceive climate change as a true crisis, he said, politicians will be sluggish to act. That's the bad news. The good news, though, is that when we do decide to act, we will be able to do so more rapidly than anyone currently thinks is possible. "Just remember, when we become aware of what we have to do, and when we have the tools available to us to get the job done, it can change", he said. "We ought to approach this challenge with a sense of joy."

I'm not sure what it says about human consciousness, but it certainly is an interesting insight into Mr. Gore's psychology. I'm curious to hear what neuroscientists make of his analysis.

If you want to hear the whole speech, have a listen here (audio quality isn't brilliant, sorry about that).

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on July 07, 2009
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The G8 meeting in L’Alquila, Italy kicks off tomorrow, although exactly what the agenda will be is still being debated – and the Italian leadership criticised by some quarters. (For a round up of the trials and tribulations facing Silvio Berlusconi, try here.)

Ahead of the meeting, Oxfam has released a report about climate change and the world’s poorest people. The report, introduced by Diana Liverman, director of Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute, lists a number of examples where climate change is affecting people’s lives already. “The reality of life under climate change is largely missing from the big debate,” the report says.

The headline of a press release that came out shortly after that to accompany the report outlines Oxfam’s opinion: “More than 3 million face death while Berlusconi and the G8 fiddle”.

The timing is, of course deliberate – the report has been put out to urge the G8 leaders to make serious decisions about tackling climate change. And the exposure has been widespread. The New York Times blog highlights the reports economic warning, which ought to hit home to the G8 leaders. Elsewhere around the world the report has received much coverage, in Canada the Globe and Mail, China’s Xinhua agency, the BBC, to name a few.

Nature News will be keeping you updated on science news from the G8. Watch this space.

Image: Soil in Uganda, James Akena/ OXFAM

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on July 07, 2009
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President Obama has been in Russia for two days and has so far given a key note speech to the New Economic School in Moscow, “exchanged pleasantries” with prime minister Vladimir Putin and met with president Dmitry Medvedev to talk about nuclear arms cuts.

The meeting with Medvedev has got people talking. The two presidents signed a deal that will see both countries agreeing to cut its nuclear weapons arsenal. According to AP, “The declaration called for a reduction in the number of nuclear warheads in Russian and US strategic arsenals to between 1,500 and 1,675 within seven years and the number of ballistic missile carriers to between 500-1,100.” This is a reduction on the previous levels of 2,200 warheads and 1600 carriers (FT).

The press conference where this was announced is transcribed on the White House’s website. The new agreement will replace the old START (strategic arms reduction treaty) set to expire in December of this year, after being in place since 1991.

The move, along with Obama’s speech looking to “reset” relations between the US and Russia has been declared by one UK tabloid as a thaw in the Cold War, (I’m pretty sure the cold war ended a few years ago, actually).

Not everyone is happy, though. This op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Keith Payne, a professor of defense and strategic studies at Missouri State University, argues that the agreement will compromise US security, and that Russia’s aging weapons mean that their arsenal would naturally be reduced to these newly agreed levels by retirement of their stash.

And the deal isn't done yet - the treaty hasn't been signed, and the nuances of the agreement have not been fully agreed, with some reports suggesting that things are not quite as amiable as they might appear (Guardian).

Image: Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on July 07, 2009
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Space.com is reporting that the United States Department of Defense (DOD) is rethinking a decision that cut off astronomers from access to data on incoming meteors.

The DOD has collected the data with a network of satellites and sensors designed to detect atmospheric nuclear detonations. The same sensors can spot a meteor streaking across the sky, and for over a decade, the military has provided astronomers with some of that data on an ad-hoc basis.

As we reported, that relationship came to a screeching halt earlier this year, when in March, a memo from Air Force Space Command, which operates the satellites, cautioned against sharing data with scientists. The decision was apparently made because DOD officials were worried that the data could reveal details of the US monitoring system.

But now, Brigadier General Robert Rego, the space command's mobilization assistant to the director of air, space and nuclear operations, says that the organization is considering once again sharing data with scientists, albeit in a more carefully vetted way. The new process will be faster, more systematic, and it in compliance with classification procedures, he says. It could begin within the next few months.

Image: USAF

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on July 06, 2009
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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 yesterday by U. S. District Court, Eastern District of Tennessee for violating the Arms Export Control Act. Roth and a now bankrupt company had been developing ways to reduce the drag on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (pictured right) and improve their take-off and landing capabilities. Roth employed two graduate students, a Chinese and an Iranian national, without obtaining the required license.

Roth, 71, maintained he did nothing wrong when I spoke to him in 2006, and he was unrepentant at sentencing. According to the Knoxville Sentinel he did not admit guilt or apologize for his actions. He told the judge that his wife and he both have health problems. "I would like to respectfully request the court take these into account when passing sentence, and that's all I have to say," Roth said.

He plans to appeal the verdict.

Image: USAF

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on July 02, 2009
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US President Barack Obama controversially decided to spend a billion dollars on ‘comparative effectiveness’ research, as part of the huge stimulus package announced earlier this year. Now the Institute of Medicine has brought out the list he asked for suggesting where the money should go.

Comparing difference between different treatments is hugely controversial in the US, where some see it as an outrageous attempt to bring cost as a factor into the health system.

Others disagree. In a statement Harold Sox, co-chair of the committee behind the new IOM list, said, “Health care decisions too often are a matter of guesswork because we lack good evidence to inform them. For example, we spend a great deal on diagnostic tests for coronary heart disease in this country, but we lack sufficient evidence to determine which test is best.”

His committee whittled down 1,268 suggestions for comparative effectiveness research topics into a 100 item list. It will come as no surprise to find out that coronary heart disease is on it. The best suggestion though has to be this one:

Compare the effectiveness of dissemination and translation techniques to facilitate the use of CER [Comparative Effectiveness Research] by patients, clinicians, payers, and others.

So the committee carefully considering controversial comparisons concluded comparing clinician communication criteria could create crucial clarity? Crikey!

Stand by for more fighting. “Because the committee's work was requested by Congress and the resulting portfolio is so broad in scope, the recommendations may be more influential than they might otherwise have been, but the report is unlikely to quell the controversy surrounding CER,” opines the New England Journal of Medicine.

More coverage
Candidates Aplenty for Spending on Comparative Effectiveness – WSJ health blog
Panel Suggests U.S. Medical Priorities – NY Times

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 01, 2009
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The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is once again being accused of politicizing science, only this time conservatives are the ones crying foul.

At issue is a 98-page "comment" on the EPA's recent finding that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are endangering human health. The comment was authored by an EPA economist Alan Carlin, and claimed, among other things, that the EPA was relying on outdated data because it used the last assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to help shape its finding. Carlin also echoes the old arguments of climate sceptics, which say that solar cycles, not human activity, are responsible for the recent increase in global temperatures.

Continue reading "Hot air and politics at the EPA" »

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on June 29, 2009
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Biologic drugs should face the same generic competition as standard pharmaceuticals after seven years, aides of US president Barack Obama have stated.

Be they called bio-similars, bio-generics, follow-on biologics or something else, products derived from biotechnology have been a hot topic in the US recently. Obama has come down somewhere between the extremes currently proposed for these drugs.

Democratic House rep Henry Waxman proposed legislation that would give biotech drugs just five years of exclusivity before other companies could muscle in. Another rep, Republican Anna Eshoo, put forward a proposal offering 12 years.

Now Bloomberg has obtained a letter from Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the White House Office of Health Reform, and Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, pushing for a “generous compromise” on seven years.

“Lengthy periods of exclusivity will harm patients by diminishing innovation and unnecessarily delaying access to affordable drugs,” they wrote.

Continue reading "Biosimilars: Obama’s seven year pitch" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 29, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Chemistry, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This sweet little piece of gossip seems well suited to an old-style longform RT: The nonprofit Project on Government Oversight group points readers to an article in the June 29, 2009 issue of the Nuclear Weapons & Materials Monitor (article not available online), which describes how journalists were asked to leave the room when Deputy Energy Secretary Dan Poneman spoke to 'a group of lobbyists and private interests'.

"While no explanation was given at the time, according to those present, the move was apparently intended to ensure that journalists not only didn't cover, but couldn't even hear, a routine address on DOE's priorities under the Obama Administration and efforts to address climate change. In what one can only hope was meant with a sense of irony, Poneman reportedly also stressed the need for improved transparency at DOE in a speech closed to the news media," according to the article.

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on June 29, 2009
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Dark allegations are being muttered about the ongoing International Renewable Energy Agency meeting in Egypt.

The agency, known as IRENA, is not even up and running yet and already sources are reporting tiffs over where it should be sited and how much power (no pun intended) the nuclear industry should have.

Even before the meeting in Sharm El Sheik began today some were warning that the French government was backing a push by the United Arab Emirates to host IRENA in Abu Dhabi in order to ensure it was friendly to nuclear power.

“An IRENA located in Abu Dhabi under such circumstances would be ‘nuclear tainted’ because the negotiating process used to select a host country would be based on support for nuclear power,” Eric Martinot, of the Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies, told the Huffington Post. “Are the original goals of IRENA being co-opted so that renewables become a mere appendage to a nuclear agenda – ‘sprinkling some renewables on top of our nuclear power?’”

Continue reading "UAE and Germany fight for IRENA" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 29, 2009
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The legislative process wasn't pretty, but the US House of Representatives voted 219-212 on 26 June to approve the most sweeping piece of energy and environmental legislation in history. (New York Times)

The predictable result is a bill that almost nobody likes. Greenpeace's opposition illustrates a general sentiment on the left side of the political spectrum that the bill's Democratic sponsors, Henry Waxman of California and Edward Markey of Massachusetts, compromised too much. The US Chamber of Commerce says they compromised too little. And even the American Farm Bureau, whose members sought and won massive concessions in a deal that secured enough votes for passage, maintained its opposition (for a rather scathing take on this issue, see Steven Pearlstein's column in the Washington Post).

What holds the current coalition together is a core group of seasoned legislators backed by pragmatic environmentalists and businesses who understand and are willing to play by the rules on Capitol Hill. And of course a president who supports the idea. In this respect, it's hard to imagine a more concrete example of the political transformation wrought by the past two elections (whether this momentum will carry through a third election in 2010 is an open question - and one that increases pressure on Democrats to get the job done this year).

At its core, the bill would create a cap-and-trade system that would reduce covered greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050. But the legislation contains a host of initiatives meant to boost things like energy efficiency and renewable power while controlling costs on industry and consumers. Nearly every one has its critics.

Continue reading "Climate bill clears US House, faces long road ahead" »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on June 27, 2009
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The news that New York’s stem cell research initiative will be allowed to pay $10,000 to women who donate their eggs is enjoying another round of media coverage today.

As we noted last week:

[The New York Empire State Stem Cell Board] reached the decision on 11 June. Board members noted that taxpayer funds are already used to compensate some egg donors in state-subsidized in vitro fertilization programs. They also emphasized that researchers in other states that do not allow payment for eggs – including Massachusetts and California -- have largely failed to recruit donors.

The Washington Post published a sizeable piece on the decision today, noting that it makes NY state the first to allow taxpayer-funded researchers to pay women for eggs for stem cell research.

Researchers quoted in the Post story are divided over the move.

“In a field that’s already the object of a great deal of controversy, the question is, are we at the point where we really need to go that route in order to do the science?” says Jonathan Moreno, professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. “I’m not convinced.”

The NY Times notes that National Academy of Science guidelines prohibit paying women for eggs used in stem cell research.

Headline watch
$10,000 is an egg-cellent price, says stem cell panel – NY Daily News

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 26, 2009
Categories: Health and medicine, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

ISIS, Britain’s world-class neutron and muon source, might as well be called IS – as budget cuts announced today by the Science and Technologies Facilities Council (STFC) will shut down its operations for half the year.

The STFC has had to make some £12 million in research cuts for its 2009-10 budget – a deficit it had revealed in May. ISIS lost £2.3 million, and will only run for 120 days in 2009-10. It’s a familiar tale for the facility, which last year lost a similar amount, dropping its operating time from an average 180 to 150 days. (Fully funded, it should run around 220 days, according to a National Audit Office report).

The cuts will affect a number of research programmes; ISIS is used by over 1000 scientists and has just installed a £145 million second neutron target station.

Exact budget numbers were not available from STFC’s press officers on the day it announced the cuts, but the agency said it would also reduce its allocation to the Diamond Light Source synchrotron, and dial down operations at the Central Laser Facility (along with ISIS, all at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire).

It is also cutting funding for astronomy units in Cambridge and Edinburgh, deferring spending on MoonLITE (a lunar orbiting satellite that would shoot scientific instruments below the Moon’s surface), and delaying funding for other particle physics and nuclear physics projects.

Robert Kirby-Harris, chief executive at the Institute of Physics, called the cuts an “ill omen”. He added: “The over-riding message [to young scientists] appears to still be ‘Forget science, go and make shed-loads of money in banking’. Nothing has changed.”

Other coverage:

Flagship ISIS facility to go 'part-time' in wake of funding cuts (The Times)

UK physics hit by new cuts (Physics World)

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on June 25, 2009
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Bloomsberg news agency reports this morning that 70 academics were taken into custody last night after a meeting with Mir Hossein Mousavi. Their location is unknown. Mousavi, a candidate in the 12 June presidential election, contests the results, and has since become the most prominent figure in the popular protest movement that has coalesced following the announce of the election results.

Because of restrictions on reporting imposed by the Iranian regime, media there are often unable to verify or investigate emerging news from Iran. The Bloomsberg report is based on one by the Kalemeh website which is linked to the Mousavi campaign. The website is in Persian, but Google introduced on 18 June a Persian translation facility in response to current events which you can use to read this and other Persian language sites.

I published a news article last night about efforts by the Iran scientific and academic diaspora to help their colleagues in Iran.

Posted by Declan Butler on June 25, 2009
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What price reputation? Somebody at Elsevier thought $25 gift cards would do, at least for positive reviews of its textbooks on online bookstores.

Inside Higher Education reported yesterday that an Elsevier marketing representative offered free books and $25 Amazon gift cards to authors of a recent Elsevier title--or anyone else--willing to write 5-star reviews of the book on Amazon or Barnes & Noble's websites.

According to the writer of the email, forwarded by whistleblower--and Elsevier textbook author--George Tremblay of Antioch University, in Keene, New Hampshire, "the tactics defined above have proven to dramatically increase exposure and boost sales."

Tremblay told Elsevier he would be forwarding their email to a list of professonal psychologists--the book's target audience--along with a note suggesting the psychologists "reconsider any weight you accord to those Amazon reviews."

Two Elsevier higher-ups have weighed in, telling Inside Higher Ed that compensation for book reviewers' time is normal, but that there should be "no incentives for a positive review, and that's where this particular e-mail went too far."

In unrelated events Elsevier admitted last month that it accepted payment from drugmaker Merck to pick and choose Vioxx-friendly medical articles for inclusion in a custom journal look-alike distributed to doctors in Australia. (The Great Beyond, 8 May 2009). It's not all bad news at the academic publishing giant, however. Last week the Special Library Association named Elsevier "The Most Influential Publisher of the Last 100 Years in BioMedicine and the Life Sciences."

Posted by Lucas Laursen on June 24, 2009
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Female Italian researchers are urging the first ladies of the G8 nations to abandon plans to attend the forthcoming meeting in L’Aquila in protest at Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s treatment of women.

Berlusconi, who owns much of the Italian media, has faced a series of lurid allegations since his wife announced earlier this year she was leaving him. These have included questions over his relationship with a young model, his selections for political office including a high proportion of young, attractive women with little experience, and allegations about escorts.

“As Italian women active in Academia and Culture we are profoundly indignant about the way the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, treats women in the public sphere as well as in private,” the researchers write in a letter entitled ‘Appeal to the First Ladies’.

“These behaviours, appalling from a moral, civil, and cultural perspective, threaten the dignity of women and exert a negative impact on the self-determination and achievement of women.”

The Times calls the letter the “first sign of a public reaction” to stories about young models attending parties thrown by Berlusconi.

The prime minister has denied many of the claims about him and called the coverage of them a smear campaign (Times, Daily Telegraph).

Full list of signatories below the fold.

Continue reading "‘Boycott Berlusconi’ researchers urge" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 23, 2009
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It seems that everybody has a set of numbers to explain how climate legislation moving through the US House of Representatives could impact the economy, but it's the official Congressional Budget Office score that really counts. That document came out Friday, estimating net costs of the program at $22 billion annually, which translates to an average impact of $175 dollars per household.

It's a remarkably low number, ringing in around 48 cents per day (supporters of the legislation say it would cost households little more than a daily postage stamp). And it turns out even that is misleading: If you divide households up by income into five groups, the lowest quintile would actually save $40 annually while the second-lowest quintile would spend only $40 extra each year; for everybody else (those who can afford it most), the cost comes in between $235 and $340.

CBO director Douglas Elmendorf kindly provides a quick summary of how his organization arrived at these figures in his blog. Notably, although CBO's model is able to capture some savings (gross costs are higher than $22 billion), Elmendorf admits that the model doesn't pick up all of them.

Continue reading "Climate costs: What's in a number?" »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on June 22, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Peru's Congress has overturned two laws that would have allowed foreign companies to exploit mineral resources and gain mining rights in the Amazon forest, according to BBC News. The volte-face came after weeks of protests from Indigenous groups, who say they were not consulted about the laws which would threaten their way of life.

The laws were passed 2007 and 2008 under powers Congress had granted Peruvian president, Alan Garcia, to implement a free trade agreement with the US, the BBC News report says.

Continue reading "Peru overturns laws allowing exploitation of Amazon forest " »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on June 19, 2009
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The New York Times reported this week that the current US President's Council on Bioethics has been disbanded. Its charter had been due to expire on 30 September.

The advisory council has had a somewhat turbulent past. President George W. Bush set it up in late 2001, following his decision to permit federally funded research on human embryonic stem cells, but only on cell lines that were in existence at the time of the announcement. Its first chair, Leon Kass, drew fire for what some regarded as ideological decisions. In 2004, council member Elizabeth Blackburn was removed after speaking out against Bush's stem-cell regulations; at the time, Kass said that she was not removed because of her political views (Nature; Nature Biotechnology). The following year, Kass left and was replaced as chair by Edmund Pellegrino of Georgetown University.

This March, 10 members of the 18-member council took the unusual step of putting out a personal consensus statement criticising President Obama's lifting of Bush's restrictions on human embryonic stem cell research.

A White House spokesman told the Times that President Obama will appoint a new council with a new mandate that “offers practical policy options". Reports from the current council include such topics as ethical caregiving and the determination of death.

It remains to be seen whether Obama will fall prey to the same trap in selecting council members. One can, however, reasonably expect Jonathan Moreno, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, to be involved in the process. Moreno is also a leading bioethicist at the Center for American Progress, the Washington-based think tank that has served as a farm system for appointees in the new administration.

Posted by Alex Witze on June 19, 2009
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This is a drill, actual inventory procedures may vary.

It's a fact of lab life that stuff gets lost in the shuffle. Digging up that old data spreadsheet or lab notebook is probably not too much more than an inconvenience for most researchers. But if you happen to work at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick in Fredrick, Maryland then it's a lot more serious than that.

At a press conference yesterday Col. Mark Kortepeter, USAMRIID's deputy commander told reporters that a recent inventory had turned up some 9,300 vials of previously uncatalogued pathogens, including serum samples from patients who had contracted hemorrhagic fever during the Korean War. The inventory also turned up Ebola, plague, anthrax, and botulism. Most of the samples were left by researchers who had since retired from the laboratory.

The report was bound to get tonnes of press, in part because USAMRIID is the former employer of Bruce Ivins, a researcher who the FBI named a "person of interest" in the 2001 anthrax attacks. Ivans died of a Tylenol overdose in July of 2008. This February, it emerged that Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus at the lab had gone unaccounted for, and all work was suspended until this inventory was completed.

Officials told reporters that numerous new security measures have been installed at the lab since 2001, and they've instituted an "aggressive" inventory system to ensure that future samples don't go unnoticed. It's clear that USAMRIID hopes to use this event to draw a line under its recently troubled past.

Image: US Army/ArraySarah

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on June 18, 2009
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The White House opened its gates to a gaggle of science reporters Tuesday as administration officials and scientists released a much-anticipated assessment of global warming's impacts on the United States. The message - global warming is upon us - was delivered clearly and forcefully, several times over.

Hardly a novel finding, but, in a sign of the times, the audience proved receptive. The report echoed over the wires (see the Washington Post, New York Times) and filled up email in-boxes as environmental groups and politicians put their seal on the document.

President Barack Obama's chief science adviser, John Holdren, called the report "the most up-to-date, comprehensive and authoritative assessment" of global warming in the United States. The document focuses on regional impacts, he added, "talking about climate where people actually experience it: in their back yards."

Continue reading "US releases assessment of climate impacts" »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on June 16, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Energy, Policy | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Britain’s science minister, Paul Drayson, has backed calls for science to have its own parliamentary committee to scrutinise the government’s funding and use of science (BBC News, THE)

After a cabinet reshuffle on 5 June, responsibility for science was absorbed into a newly created department for business from the former Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills. In the reorganisation, Drayson’s brief has also expanded to include responsibility for defence equipment at the Ministry of Defence.

Continue reading "Drayson backs committee for science scrutiny " »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on June 16, 2009
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A fine example of the pitfalls of the “author-pays” scheme for the open access publishing of academic papers is revealed by The Scholarly Kitchen - the Society for Scholarly Publishing’s blog.

Philip Davis, a graduate student at Cornell University in the US, decided to investigate how rigorously academic articles submitted to journals owned by the Bentham Science Publishers, which uses the author-pays model, are peer reviewed.

Continue reading "Pay to publish" »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on June 10, 2009
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Peter Mandelson, the government's new Secretary of State for Business, Innovation & Skills offered some reassurance this morning about the role of science within the newly formed Department for Business Innovations and Skills (DBIS or just BIS). Mandelson spoke at the centenary celebration of London's Science Museum.

For those in need of a catch-up, BIS was formed last Friday after a number of resignations from Gordon Brown's cabinet rocked the government. BIS took over the science brief from the short-lived Department of Innovation Universities and Skills, which is now defunct after just 20 months.

Some folks fret that moving science into BIS means that it will come second to business, but that's not going to happen according to Mandelson. "We will be operating on a budget which is ring-fenced safe and sound," he told reporters at a press conference after the event. He added that the Haldane principle, which says that government should not interfere with the research councils, should be respected.

That's not to say there won't changes. At one point Mandelson said that applied research "obviously will receive greater emphasis." But when pressed about it, he backed down: "Applied research does not operate at the expense of fundamental science. You need both," he told me.

There have also been some worries about Paul Drayson, currently the minister of state for science. Under the cabinet reshuffle, it looks like he'll also be working for the Ministry of Defence. The BBC reports that he'll be managing the Defence R&D portfolio along with some procurement (although the MoD couldn't confirm it). Will that mean less time to devote to science?

No, says Mandelson. "Lord Drayson will give the overwhelming bulk of his time to science, innovation, and technology," he says. "I think you will find that he is a spokesman for the MoD in the Lords, rather than a minister who is going to be developing the bulk of his time to that title."

Indeed, several people are feeling pretty good about the Mandelson/Drayson tag team. Jessica Bland over at Just a Theory has a nice analysis of why it might be good for science.

But many others are still adopting a wait-and-see approach, including Universities UK, the UK's largest higher education group. They're hoping to set up some face time with Mandelson later this month to find out what this will mean for higher ed.

Bill Hartnett of the Royal Society summed up the press conference rather well: "The words are reassuring," he says

Reassurance is one thing, but it's the policy that will matter in the end.

UPDATE: Drayson's duties have now been outlined by the MoD. Among other things he will be "championing new technologies" in defence.

Image: J. Sutcliffe/Science Museum

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on June 10, 2009
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Posted on behalf of Richard Van Noorden

Lisa Jackson, new administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), won beams of approval at a Senate hearing today as she explained how the agency had changed its processes to increase scientific integrity and transparency. But more could still be done to throw off a dark eight-year blanket of political interference in environmental scientists’ work, senators heard.

“In all my years I’ve never encountered an administrator who hit the ground running the way you did,” chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-California) praised Jackson.

Continue reading "It's a Senate lovefest for the EPA" »

Posted by Alex Witze on June 09, 2009
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Lord Paul Drayson, the UK's science minister, is on Twitter. This afternoon, he hosted an impromptu question and answer session with researchers and policy-watchers. Among other things, he reassured the research community that he will be able to continue to advocate for science, even as he takes on a new job as the Ministry of Defence's defence equipment minister. As he put it in 136 characters:

"lorddrayson: @PD_Smith But, many ministers have dual roles.. it really helps departments work together better. Silos in whitehall are not helpful. "

He also said that the ring-fence around science funding was "safe and sound," following the recent reshuffling of the government.

You can read some more excerpts here.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on June 09, 2009
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Posted for Richard Van Noorden

A month after British scientists successfully protested against one of their research council’s policies, they’re at it again – this time, with a wider beef.

In May, researchers overturned a controversial banning policy [subscription required] from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. An electronic petition to Downing Street kicked off that campaign, and attracted over 2,000 signatures.

Last Tuesday another scientist-backed e-petition went live – it’s garnered over 1,100 signatures so far. The petition, organized by John Allen, a biochemist at Queen Mary University of London, requests to reverse a policy applied by UK research councils that “directs funds to projects whose outcomes are specified in advance.”

Continue reading "British scientists petition research councils: round two" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on June 09, 2009
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Libel scorekeepers take note: campaigners have collected over 4000 signatures from the public, joining a core of 150 prominent figures in science, government and the media who signed a statement Wednesday to “Keep Libel Laws Out of Science.”

The spark for the campaign was the libel case brought by the British Chiropractic Association against science writer Simon Singh. Last month, a British judge decided that Singh’s words, published in The Guardian in 2008, made a factual allegation that the BCA dishonestly promoted medical treatments its members knew did not work. Singh maintains otherwise, and he announced last Wednesday that he is appealing the ruling.

The BCA released a statement Friday in response to the campaign, declaring that “The BCA sued Simon Singh only as an act of last resort.” The brief statement notes that “to stifle scientific debate would clearly be wrong,” but that “scientists must realise that they cannot simply publish with impunity what they know to be untrue and libellous.”

Fear of libel suits also means that web publishers must closely monitor--and sometimes remove--potentially libellous public comments from their sites, as happened with a statement by Stephen Curry last week on Nature Network. He has since commented on the removal, writing that, "This development seems to introduce a level of self-censorship that I had not been fully aware of before. If I can find a positive note, it will make us rely even more heavily that we already do on solid evidence."

The UK judge presiding over the case—who with a single previous ruling prompted legislation denying the jurisdiction of UK libel law in several US states—is unlikely to be overruled by the appeals court, Singh says. For now, then, the present ruling on meaning stands, and the score is BCA: one ruling; Simon Singh: thousands of supporters.

Previous coverage on Nature:
Science writer will appeal libel case ruling (Nature News, 3 June 2009)
Science writer waits on legal advice in libel case (The Great Beyond, 19 May 2009)
Court setback for science writer (Nature News, 13 May 2009)
Simon Singh loses first round in chiropractic fight (The Great Beyond, 8 May 2009)

Posted by Lucas Laursen on June 08, 2009
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Do they wind up in a standoff, beating their chests as the other primates stand by angry and embarrassed? Or might they initiate an inspiring public display of mutual respect and cooperation, if not affection?

The United States' lead climate negotiator, Todd Stern, is hoping for the latter and will depart for China on Saturday in search of ways to make it happen. "We're the two gorillas in the room," Stern told a crowd gathered at the Center for American Progress in Washington this week. "If we can join hands, it will truly change the world."

Among those accompanying Stern will be White House Science Adviser John Holdren and David Sandalow, assistant secretary for policy and international affairs at the Energy Department. It is only the latest in a string of delegations shuttling back and forth between the two countries, and it comes at a potentially revealing time.

The rest of the international climate community will be focusing on Bonn, where the United Nations is currently holding the latest round of global warming talks. With 184 days before Copenhagen, where the talks are scheduled to come to a close, the two countries appear to be seeking a little quiet time together.

The US-China relationship has sparked a fair bit of speculation as of late, spurred in part by an article about "secret" bilateral talks in the Guardian last month. In truth, the talks weren't all that secret, and in any case it would have been surprising if such talks weren't under way. But the sense of optimism raised plenty of eyebrows.

Continue reading "Two gorillas walk into a UN climate meeting... " »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on June 05, 2009
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The UK government department that houses science looks likely to be broken up amidst the flailings of under-fire prime minister Gordon Brown's cabinet reshuffle.

The Department for Universities, Innovation and Skills (DIUS) was set up by Brown when he came to power in 2007, bringing together the science and higher education agendas. Its head, John Denham - who has a chemistry degree - has been promoted in today's reshuffle, with no replacement announced.

Rumours abound that the department will be taken wholesale under the wing of business secretary Peter Mandelson (in the Department for business, enterprise and regulatory reform, or BERR). Alternatively, responsibility for science may move to BERR, and another department will take on universities.

Either way, science would be back under the control of business interests, as it was before DIUS was created. The move would reinforce the government’s push to fund research that boosts the national economy - a desire which science minister Lord Drayson has expressed on a number of occasions.

The best of the blow-by-blow speculation can be found on Twitter, but in blog action, The Times points out that the opposition Conservatives wanted to abolish the DIUS experiment anyway. "We'll get no more penguin poo research with Mandelson running the show," thinks The Ethical Palaeontologist.

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on June 05, 2009
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The United States has accidentally published a top-secret, highly-classified, I'd-show-you-but -then-I'd-have-to-kill-you list of nuclear installations on the Internets.

OK, it's not quite that bad. What they've gone and done is published a "highly confidential" disclosure document that was meant for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). This document is part of the US obligation under the IAEA "additional protocol"—a set of rules that requires America to provide the agency with a list of the location and type of civilian nuclear facilities currently on its territory. You can find the whole document on Secrecy News, the excellent blog of the Federation of American Scientists website.

The key word there is civilian. This list doesn't disclose anything about the facilities in which the US handles or dismantles its nuclear weapons. But it does have the addresses, details and sometimes schematics, of every other nuclear facility in the country (click the image for an example). Not exactly the sort of thing the government may have wanted to go public with in the post-9/11 world. The government is particularly sweating the publication of detailed information about the Y-12 site at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. "That's of great concern," energy secretary Stephen Chu told a congressional committee.

Of course there's a silver lining, the document does show that the US is taking seriously its obligations to the IAEA.

UPDATE: Secrecy News has taken down the file, but nothing dies on the Internet. You can find it on WikiLeaks.

Image: Super-secret US archives/GPO

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on June 04, 2009
Categories: Energy, Physics & Mathematics, Policy | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The US National Research Council put a pretty positive spin on its latest report on women in science, released earlier this week. Women in science and engineering jobs are “faring well” in hiring and tenure processes, according to the report, which was demanded by lawmakers in Congress.

Two surveys carried out by the NRC show that women who apply for tenure-track positions have a better chance of being interviewed and receiving job offers than male applicants.

“Overall the newly released data indicate important progress, and signal to both young men and especially to young women that what had been the status quo at research-intensive universities is changing,” says Sally Shaywitz, of Yale University School of Medicine (press release). “There is a movement toward more gender equity than noted in previous reports or often publicly appreciated.”

But then comes the caveat: “At the same time, the findings show that we are not there yet.”

Continue reading "Women still struggling in US science" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 04, 2009
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A staunch advocate for science in the Labour government has become one of the latest casualties in a scandal over the misuse of expenses by MPs.

Backbench MP, Ian Gibson, who is a member and former chairman, of the House of Commons committee that scrutinises the use and funding of science in government, has been barred from standing for Labour at the next general elections. The penalty was handed down by a disciplinary panel, following questions over his expenses, reports BBC News.

Gibson reportedly claimed for mortgage interest and bills totally nearly £80,000 for a flat that he said was his second home, but in which his daughter lived rent free ((BBC, Guardian, Telegraph). The expenses are paid for out of public funds.

BBC News reports that Gibson is said to be “very upset” at the decision.

Martin Booth, the chairman of the local Labour Party in Norwich North – Gibson’s constituency - has defended the beleaguered MP. Booth told BBC News he was “horrified” that Gibson has been barred, and accused the panel of being a “kangaroo court”.

Continue reading "Labour science advocate barred from next elections " »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on June 03, 2009
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The Global Humanitarian Forum certainly attracted some publicity last week when it published a report suggesting that global warming kills 315,000 people each year and seriously harms another 300,000. Total price tag: $125 billion annually.

Such numbers are as appealing to journalists as they are to those who put them out, precisely because they are easy to understand and explain. They should also raise alarms, and for the very same reasons. It's not that anybody really doubts that global warming is impacting ecosystems and communities and thus affecting lives, but these are complex issues that resist quick attempts at quantification.

The New York Times published a quick story about the report while raising some basic questions about the estimations. The story quotes Roger Pielke Jr., who has been researching these issues for years, calling the report a "methodological embarrassment" that simply glosses over socioeconomic factors (like people moving into hurricane-prone coasts). For an in-depth discussion, check Pielke's blog.

Although the GHF didn't shy away from using the eye-catching estimates, the authors do explain their calculations in the report. Among other things, they cite data from Munich Re estimating that 40 percent of the increase in weather-related disasters from 1980 to present is due to climate change. As it happens, Pielke says Munich Re itself has come to the opposite conclusion when it comes to assessing the data and assigning blame.

Pielke's message appears to be getting out there. Reuters followed up its initial story with a second, more thematic piece raising various questions about this kind of research.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on June 01, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The US Forest Service (USFS) must halt road-building in 58 million acres of national forest for one year, according to a directive issued yesterday by the US agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack. The move is a reversal of a Bush-era environmental policy, which in turn undermined a rule Clinton instated late in his presidential term.

The Clinton and Bush rulings spawned numerous lawsuits, according to today's AP report. Vilsack, who oversees the USFS, said in a statement yesterday that "this interim directive will provide consistency and clarity that will help protect our national forests until a long-term roadless policy reflecting President Obama's commitment is developed."

Continue reading "End of the roads" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen on May 29, 2009
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Posted for Declan Butler

Strong rumours abound inside the Parisian Beltway that French president Nicolas Sarkozy is considering offering the former Socialist science minister, 72-year old maverick geophysicist and climate sceptic Claude Allègre, a ministerial post in his government -- possibly a ministry of industry and innovation. (Financial Times).

Allègre has the scientific credentials. He won the 1986 Crafoord Prize, awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for outstanding basic research in disciplines not covered by the Nobel prizes. He also headed the Institut de Physique de Globe in Paris from 1976 to 1986, and was president of the French geological survey — the Bureau des Recherches Géologiques et Minières — from 1992 until 1997, as well as being a member of the European Parliament from 1989 to 1994.

But when Allègre, a former prominent Socialist, was minister for science and higher education in Lionel Jospin’s government from 1997 to 2000 he probably broke all records for unpopularity of a French science minister. He described the education system as a fat "mammoth" in need of slimming, and said that the trade unions were "chloroformed". In 1998, Nature called for Jospin to fire Allègre unless he changed his ways – which Jospin finally did in 2000. Since then Allègre has divorced himself further from many French scientists with his views that carbon dioxide is not the main cause of global warming. (see Real Climate here and here)

Continue reading "Claude Allègre back in French government? " »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on May 28, 2009
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It wouldn't be Washington if the rumour mill weren't spinning out of control. Just days after Barack Obama finally nominated Charles Bolden, a Marine Corps general, to head NASA (Nature), media reports are buzzing yet again about another long-anticipated science nominee: Francis Collins, supposedly to head the National Institutes of Health.

The shortlist for NIH head reportedly included more than just Collins, but he has long been considered a frontrunner. The former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, he spearheaded the publicly funded drive to sequence the human genome. Never shy, he has been outspoken about his efforts to reconcile science and religion, such as in his 2006 book The Language of God (Nature story, subscription required). Most recently he has drawn attention through his BioLogos Foundation, funded by the Templeton Foundation and meant "to address the escalating culture war between science and faith in the United States". It drew a fair amount of ire for its apparent fluffiness, for instance from blogger PZ Myers.

Obama's personnel announcements come near the end of most days on the White House listserv, often titled 'President Announces More Key Administration Posts'. For reporters, this means opening each email with baited breath to see if it will be, finally, the NIH head announcement -- or something about the chief of protocol for the state department.

Posted by Alex Witze on May 27, 2009
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The storyline is familiar by now: US President Barack Obama overturns industry-friendly policy established by Bush administration, reaping praise from environmental groups. And so it was on Thursday, when the Environmental Protection Agency announced plans to reinstate an obscure-but-important component of the scientific review process within an equally obscure-but-important component of the air quality program.

The gist is that EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has formally restored the role of its independent science advisors in producing a staff paper detailing recommendations on air quality standards. For a bit of history, check the Union of Concerned Scientists' website here and here.

The announcement even picked up some news coverage (Reuters, Philadelphia Enquirer), which is something given the flurry of energy and climate news coming out of Washington this week.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on May 22, 2009
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The chairman and his immediate predecessor on an influential parliamentary science committee in the UK have become enmeshed in the widening scandal over politicians’ expense claims.

Liberal Democrat Phil Willis, the current chairman of the Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee, reportedly claimed around £15,000 of expenses for renovating a flat in Kennington, London where his daughter, Rachel Willis, now lives. Willis says his daughter, an actress who appeared in an advertising campaign as a critically panned electronic genie for five years until 2003, was not a permanent resident in the flat (though intriguingly, a BBC report after the actress was mugged in 2002, claims she was yards away from her home… in Kennington). The MP and his daughter have received a death threat since the allegations surfaced.

Meanwhile, Ian Gibson, current member and former chairman of the IUSS committee in its former guise as the Science and Technology select committee, reportedly also claimed expenses for a flat which was the main home of his daughter, Helen Gibson. The MP has offered to resign if his constituents think he should go. Gibson was a geneticist and served as dean of the school of biological sciences at the University of East Anglia from 1991-1997.

Posted by Ananyo Bhattacharya on May 22, 2009
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A new programme to develop cures for rare or ‘orphan’ diseases has been unveiled in the US. The National Institutes of Health is putting $24 million up for work on some of the 6,600 rare diseases that impact 25 million Americans and which currently have no effective treatments.

“The federal government may be the only institution that can take the financial risks needed to jumpstart the development of treatments for these diseases, and NIH clearly has the scientific capability to do the work,” says NIH Acting Director Raynard Kington (press release).

NIH’s definition of a rare disease is “one that affects fewer than 200,000 Americans”. It also notes that it can cost $10 million to get a treatment through the pre-clinical drug trial process. Between 80 and 90% of drugs fail, leading this stage to be dubbed the ‘valley of death’.

Obviously $24 million isn’t going to go far with costs of up to $10 million per drug, but NIH’s new Therapeutics for Rare and Neglected Diseases programme will aim to improve the drug development process itself, as well as coming up with its own treatments.

”Preclinical work is hard and our resources will be limited,” Stephen Groft, director of the NHI rare diseases offices acknowledges (WSJ).

Reuters notes the TRND programme will also be reporting its failures, something not widely practised in drug development. “We are going to tell everyone what we are doing,” says Christopher Austin of the NIH Chemical Genomics Center. “That alone will be revolutionary.”

Derek Lowe, on the In the Pipeline blog, adds:

Treating rare diseases can be quite profitable in the industrialized world (ask Genzyme, among other companies), but if the conditions are localized in poorer areas no one's likely to take a crack at them. So my first reaction is ‘Good, and the best of luck to you’.

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 21, 2009
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A Venezuelan scientist and thorn in the side of the country’s Chavez government is threatening to go to court over his dismissal from an institute he lead in the 1980s.

Biologist Jaime Requena says his removal from the Foundation Institute of Advanced Studies of Venezuela was politically motivated. He has previously criticised the government (including in this letter to Nature) and claimed scientific productivity in Venezuela is at its lowest in years.

He told SciDevNet, “Up to the moment no legal action has been taken because my attorneys are studying the options that we have.”

Luis Carbonell, chairman of the Human Rights Commission of the Venezuelan Association for the Advancement of Science, says Requena has not been told what alleged misconduct led to his sacking.

“Requena is a man internationally recognized for his work, but disagrees with the regime of President Hugo Chávez,” he says (El Nacional, via Google Translate). “The problem is that his removal has not complied with due process. He received the communication, but by law he is entitled to defend himself …”

The El Librepensador website noted that there have been other cases of researchers allegedly being dismissed for their political views. “But in Venezuela, the dismissal of researchers for meddling in politics is not a new matter,” it noted in April.

Requena was dismissed from the same institute before, but was reinstated after a previous court battle.

Image: Flag of Venezuela / Wikipedia

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 21, 2009
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Arnold Schwarzenegger’s headache this week could soon be felt by California’s university researchers, after the state’s voters overwhelmingly terminated their governor’s suggestions for ending an ongoing budget crisis.

While the star of such movie greats as Conan and Commando will be worrying about his political future, scientists may be more concerned about their paycheques, as the state has no solution in sight for its $20 billion deficit.

On Tuesday voters rejected Schwarzenegger’s proposals to plug the hole with tax rises, borrowing and other measures and the state could soon have problems paying its bills.

Continue reading "Should scientists sweat over Schwarzenegger’s shortfall?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 21, 2009
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The International Whaling Commission has yet again failed to reach an agreement between those nations that would hunt cetaceans and those that oppose all whaling. A key working group has failed to make a decision on Japan’s proposal that it phase out its controversial Antarctic hunts in return for being allowed to hunt minke whales in its own coastal waters.

The Small Working Group on the Future of the IWC is tasked with attempting to solve the issues related to Japanese coastal whaling, ‘special permit’ or ‘scientific whaling’ and sanctuaries. In the report of its 18 May meeting, it notes:

However, given the complexity and the sensitivity of the issues involved, it should not come as a surprise that it has thus far not been possible to secure agreement on key specifics ... . The inter-relatedness of the three issues singled out cannot be overemphasized; hence the importance of the principle that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.

It notes that two working group members expressed concern that too much attention is being given to Japanese coastal whaling versus the more general issues of commercial whaling bans and management issues.

Although the report does not identify these members, Australia’s environment minister Peter ‘Burning Beds’ Garrett said, “We don’t consider a solution to this particular issue to be a reduction in whaling in one area and an increase in whaling in another. Until such time as the commission is able to reach a strong view about the appropriate ways of determining matters such as scientific whaling and other measures, then we will just continue to remain in the tough negotiation.” (The Age.)

Other coverage
Decision postponed on minke hunt off Japan – UPI
IWC delays decision on coastal whaling – Kyodo

Other whaling news
“The Federal Opposition has accused the [Australian] Government of secretly dropping its election promise to take Japan to the international court over its whaling program.” - ABC News

Image: Gulf of Maine Cod Project, NOAA National Marine Sanctuaries; Courtesy of National Archives

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 20, 2009
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Austria has stepped back from abandoning Europe’s most important particle physics lab.

Last week Johannes Hahn, the country’s science minister, said his country would withdraw from CERN, which runs the high profile Large Hadron Collider project. The decision was greeted with shock by Austrian physicists (see: Austria quits CERN after 50 years).

Now Chancellor Werner Faymann appears to have overruled Hahn, issuing a statement saying Austria will “remain a reliable partner in the CERN project”.

Reuters sees the u-turn as a spat between Faymann, a social democrat, and Hahn, a conservative. It notes that one national paper is running the story under the headline ‘CERN clash: government in a black hole’.

A petition against the pull out attracted over 30,000 signatures. Austria contributes around 20 million Euros to CERN.

Image: flags of member states fly at CERN’s Meyrin site / CERN

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 19, 2009
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A senior official in the Obama administration held an anonymous background briefing with reporters Monday evening, confirming earlier reports that the administration plans to issue new regulations for automobiles tomorrow.

Given that the official largely confirmed everything that has already been written, it wasn't entirely clear why anonymity was required, but there you go. The new standard does indeed achieve the same requirement in 2016 as the California standard, although the ramp-up in the first three years is slightly slower. California has consequently agreed to drop its request for a separate standard, at least through 2016.

The proposed rule, to be filed jointly by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Transportation Department, would break vehicles into unspecified categories and require each category to increase in fuel-efficiency. This new system is designed to ensure that all vehicles improve, because companies can't simply make a few more fuel-efficient vehicles to offset their gas-guzzlers. Manufacturers would still be required to make sure that their entire fleet meets the average of 35.5 miles per gallon.

The official said the new proposal is expected to add $600 to the price of a new car on average, in addition to the $700 increase expected from the previous regulations. But once you factor in savings due to increased fuel efficiency, the official explained, 'it might end up being a wash."

Although the proposal must still negotiate the regular rule-making process, the administration seems confident that it will sail through as written, thanks to support from not only California but also the automobile manufacturers themselves.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on May 19, 2009
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It is all too common to hear complaints that there are not enough women in science. Yesterday, Europe’s research commissioner warned an audience in Prague that, “It’s a little like being a magician - take a look at the upper levels of the occupational ladder in science and technology: women disappear!”

Janez Potocnik, along with many before him, points out that there is a ‘leaky pipeline’. While many women pass through universities at the lower levels, relatively few make it to lofty positions.

Potocnik was not just in Prague to re-state previous wisdom though.

Continue reading "Women in science and Europe" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 15, 2009
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There seems to be one easy way to get a top public health spot in the new US administration: be a leading official in the New York health department. Today, President Barack Obama announced that he had appointed the current health commissioner in New York City, Thomas Frieden, to head the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The person who was the New York health commissioner between 1992 and 1997, Peggy Hamburg, is currently awaiting confirmation as the nominee to head the Food and Drug Administration.

Friedman's background includes extensive experience in various areas of public health, from fighting tuberculosis in India to working on tobacco control in New York City. He worked for the CDC between 1990 and 2002, including a stint in its Epidemiologic Intelligence Service, the crack team that investigates emerging infectious disease worldwide. A Newsday profile published in 2002 details his workaholic habits. A 2006 Nature Medicine profile also delves into his record in New York.

He takes over an agency not exactly in crisis but somewhat limping along; some had accused the previous CDC director, Julie Geberding, of politicizing the agency's scientific work. However, many experts have praised the CDC's response to the recent swine flu outbreak. More than 4,200 cases have been confirmed within US borders, including three deaths.

Richard Besser, the acting director for the CDC who has been handling most of the swine flu press briefings, will stay on at the agency in his job running its office for terrorism preparedness and emergency response.

Some AIDS activists have challenged Frieden's potential appointment before. They oppose his efforts to drop a reporting requirement -- instituted in the early days of the AIDS epidemic -- that means potentially HIV-infected patients need to provide written consent and get counseling before getting an AIDS test. Many public health experts think this step is today unnecessary paperwork, but some activists support the mandatory counseling part of it.

The position of surgeon general is still open. Any former New York health commissioners out there interested?

Posted by Alex Witze on May 15, 2009
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Russia is banging its Arctic war drums again this week, with the release of a report warning that it cannot rule out “problems that involve the use of military force” along its borders.

The strategy document was approved on Tuesday by President Dmitry Medvedev (Reuters, CanWest News).

Other nations, including Canada and the United States, are eyeing up potential oil resources under the Arctic. Thinning sea ice and a UN convention that allows countries to claim rights to the sea floor if they can fulfil certain criteria are also raising the frequency of sabre rattling over the cold region.

“The Russians have been talking very co-operatively, but they have been backing it up with an increasingly strong military set of actions,” Rob Huebert, a University of Calgary political scientist, told CanWest. “You mix uncertain boundaries with major powers and massive amounts of oil and gas, and you always get difficult international circumstances.”

The Times opines that “Unlike the Antarctic, there is still no international treaty governing the Arctic. There should be. What the Arctic urgently needs is a fleet of lawyers, not a fleet of gunboats.”

(From the Times, see also: Kremlin keeps up James Bond theme with talk of Arctic war.)

Previous Nature coverage of this topic
Norway’s undersea dominions just got larger – 16 April 2009
Europe crashes the Arctic party – 21 November 2008
Arctic cold war gets hotter again – 13 August 2008
Arctic mapping redraws borders – 15 February 2008
Mapping the Arctic dispute – 06 August 2008
Sea floor claims madness – 21 April 2008
Climate change ‘could lead to conflict with Russia’ – 10 March 2008
Russian pole stunt’s American origin – 19 February 2008
News Feature: The next land rush – 2 January 2008

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 14, 2009
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Australia’s new budget was announced earlier this week, bringing with it smiles for researchers. The new budget for science in 2009/10 is 8.6 billion Australian dollars (£4.3 bn).

“This is an historic budget for science, education and innovation, with a record spend in this area representing a 25% increase on last year, the highest annual increase since records began,” says Ken Baldwin, president of the Federation of Australian Science and Technological Societies (ABC News).

Continue reading "Australian scientists celebrate cash boost" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 14, 2009
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While Reporters Without Borders celebrates the release of Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi, Physicians for Human Rights are holding a virtual and live vigil today to draw attention to the continued imprisonment of Iranian doctors Kamiar and Arash Alaei.

The brothers’ HIV relief work landed them in an Iranian prison in June 2008. They were charged and later convicted of “communications with an enemy government” and “seeking to overthrow the Iranian government under article 508 of Iran’s Islamic Penal Code” this winter according to the vigil website.

The doctors, who studied and have attended conferences in the US, had distributed condoms and clean needles in Iranian prisons to curtail HIV transmission.

Saberi's conviction ("cooperating with a hostile state" ) was overthrown on the grounds that the United States is not hostile to Iran, according to an editorial in the Boston Globe. The reversal has diplomatic overtones, writes the Globe, which should also apply to the doctors.

Previous Nature coverage of this topic
An appeal to President Ahmadinejad - Nature Editorial, 29 January 2009
Iranian AIDS doctors' trial draws condemnation - Nature, 28 January 2009
Iran puts leading HIV scientists on trial - The Great Beyond, 07 January 2009
Iran holds AIDS doctors - Nature, 17 September 2008

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 12, 2009
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A member of the US military’s Human Terrain programme has avoided jail time after being sentenced last week for shooting a restrained Afghan man in the head.

Don Ayala, a contractor on the controversial military social sciences programme, previously pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Although this crime would normally carry up to eight years of jail time, AP reports, he instead received a $12,500 fine and five years on probation.

Nature has previously called for the programme to be reformed or scrapped, noting, “Questions have been raised about how well the programme vets its employees. Some scientists who have joined the system have complained about inadequate training. And qualified researchers have been dismissed for seemingly trivial reasons, even though much more questionable people seem to breeze onto the payroll.”

Ayala killed Abdul Salam in Afghanistan in November 2008, minutes after an incident in which Salam attacked Human Terrain researcher Paula Loyd, setting her on fire. Loyd later died of her injuries.

On Friday, the New Orleans Times Picayune reported:

There were tears and sighs of relief from friends and supporters of Don Ayala, 46, of New Orleans, when District Court Judge Claude Hilton announced a sentence of five years probation. Hilton said he is sympathetic to the horror Ayala experienced after learning social scientist Paula Loyd had been attacked.

The Human Terrain programme has been mired in controversy. In addition to the death of Loyd and Salam, two other members have been killed in action.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 11, 2009
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A string of e-mails posted on the non-for-profit news site ProPublica has reignited a long-running debate on the role of psychologists in interrogation.

The e-mails relate to a 2005 document from the American Psychological Association (APA) on psychological ethics and national security. The document lays out guidelines for psychologists working for the Pentagon and other security services. Among other things the document says that psychologists must report acts of cruel or degrading treatment, but that they may consult on interrogations.

The e-mails show that psychologists actively involved with the military had a disproportionate influence on the way the guidelines were written. "These guys were writing a get out of jail free card for themselves," says Nathaniel Raymond, senior investigator at the Cambridge-based Physicians for Human Rights, which has called on the APA to investigate.

The APA calls those accusations "ill-founded". The guidelines were meant to help psychologists working in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, to navigate the ethical minefield surrounding military intelligence gathering. In that context it only makes sense that the panel would consult with those who needed guidance the most. "To allege that the APA leadership engaged in unethical conduct in the development of this task force’s report is wholly without merit," the organization said in a statement.

The Boston Globe has done a really good story on the subject here.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on May 08, 2009
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Posted for David Cyranoski

Question: What to do with all those spare Japanese postdocs?
Answer: Sell them to industry.

Japan's science and education ministry has an unemployment problem on its hands: postdocs. Efforts in the 1990s to cultivate postdocs to fill in gaps in the research environment worked--all too well--and now there are tens of thousands without work in a university system shrinking under pressures from government streamlining and declining population (declining student bodies).

Industry traditionally has not wanted to deal with postdocs, preferring to recruit straight out of university and train its R&D staff on location.

The education ministry wants to change this.

Continue reading "Pssst. Wanna buy a posutodoku?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 08, 2009
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The Obama Administration has nominated Tara O'Toole, director of the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, as the chief scientist for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

O'Toole is inheriting a deeply troubled programme. From its inception in 2002, the DHS S&T programme has been a bit of a mess. It's been slow to release grant money, failed to justify its spending to Congress, and lost its power to other organizations such as the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office. Morale has been low and staff turnover high.

In some sense she's perfect for the job. If confirmed, she will oversee programmes such as BioWatch, which is designed to detect biological attacks. But she's already drawing criticism over at Danger Room. Among others, George Smith, a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org, says that O'Toole is a scaremonger who will pander to the bio-defence industry.

We can probably look forward to some tough questions at her confirmation hearing.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on May 07, 2009
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Last year the European Court of Human Rights told the UK government it couldn’t keep the DNA of innocent people on its police database. Today the UK government announced how it would deal with the ruling, in a response that basically amounts to two fingers to the court.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, who has already been beset by controversy this year, wants to keep DNA profiles of innocent people arrested but not convicted of serious violent or sexual crimes for 12 years. Innocent people arrested but not convicted of other crimes would be kept for six years.

Opposition party shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling said, “The government just doesn’t get this. People in Britain should be innocent until proven guilty.” (Reuters.)

Civil liberties groups and opinion writers have also reacted with outrage to the proposals.

Continue reading "UK will retain DNA of innocent accused" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 07, 2009
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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded 81 grants worth $100,000 (£65,000) each for research projects into unconventional approaches to tackle global health issues, such as HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, pneumonia and diarrheal diseases (Telegraph, AP, Baltimore Sun).

Among the grant recipients of five-year grants is Eric Lam at Rutgers University in New Jersey, who is exploring tomatoes as an antiviral drug delivery system.

Continue reading "Gates Foundation awards grants for unconventional projects " »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on May 06, 2009
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