The tobacco industry produces a product that, used as intended, kills millions of people each year. So it seems a lot to ask the industry to assume ethical standards in another of its favorite endeavors—funding scientific research.

The tobacco industry is up to some of its usual antics, as reported by
The New York Times. It seems tobacco money helped fund one of the most controversial studies to recently emerge from The New England Journal of Medicine.

The study concluded that the widespread use of CT scans could prevent 80 percent of lung cancer deaths.

The primary author of the study, Claudia Henschke of Weill Cornell Medical College declared funding through a little-known group, the Foundation for Lung Cancer: Early Detection, Prevention and Treatment. It took an investigative
reporter checking tax records to discover that foundation is actually funded by the parent company of the Liggett group, which manufactures several cigarette brands. Henschke did not reveal the source of the foundation’s money to the journal—what’s more, she helped create the foundation and is its president; the dean of Weill Cornell is a director.

The study’s findings obviously are favorable to the tobacco industry. But they have been controversial in part because early screening can lead to unnecessary procedures for spots on a CT scan that are not an imminent threat to health. A $200 million follow-up trial is now under way at the NCI.

What the tobacco linkage will mean for the validity of the study in the minds of experts remains to be seen—although this quote, from Catherine D. DeAngelis, the editor of The Journal of the American Medical Association, is telling:

I would never publish a paper dealing with lung cancer from a person who had taken money from a tobacco company.

Why so much fuss?

As DeAngelis is undoubtedly aware, the industry’s influence in this study fits into an overall pattern.

Tobacco companies fund research that has the potential to minimize the severe effects of smoking, and they also underwrite unrelated, legitimate, research, to bolster their reputation. It’s also not unusual for tobacco companies to keep their fingerprints away from the research they fund.

Tobacco companies also have a well-documented history of trying to stir up ‘debate’ about the dangers of smoking and second-hand smoke. Their support of research to bolster their arguments helped, for many years,
create public uncertainty about the dangers of tobacco and staved off anti-tobacco legislation. Sowing doubt about generally-accepted science is a tactic that foes of global warming legislation successfully borrowed; indeed, the tobacco industry spawned some of the ‘think tanks’ that now fight against global-warming legislation by supporting industry-friendly scientists.

Manipulating science has been a core tactic of the tobacco industry for years. So it’s not surprising that some schools, such as Harvard’s School of Public Health, have banned tobacco money. The University of California system refused to follow suit, but they have implemented a system of extra scrutiny over research funded by the tobacco industry. Opponents of a ban in California argued that it would constrain ‘academic freedom.’

What do you think? Does the source of funding for the NEJM study throw its findings into doubt? Or is this all a bunch of fuss about nothing?

Finally, is it fair for the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association to refuse lung cancer papers funded by the tobacco industry?

Posted by Charlotte Schubert at 02:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Similar to what happened in the US after the 9/11 attacks, the UK government has now decided to carry out security checks on foreign students going to Britain. The aim of this plan is to prevent sensitive knowledge from getting into the wrong hands.

Not surprisingly, some people are wary of this scheme, as they feel that it may deny opportunities for genuine students with no aim other than pursuing a scientific career. Others have expressed concerns about the loss of income from students whose countries pick up the tuition tab. And many more are simply concerned about the extra paperwork that both host institutions and prospective students will have to contend with.

I don't know if the equivalent scheme in the US has been considered a success. I'm not even sure how one would measure its success. Sure, they may have caught a few malicious guys, but how many 'false positives' have been the victims of this paranoia? The one thing most people seem to agree on is the observation that, after prospective US students got hit by the extra security checks, many simply chose an alternative destination. As a result, some observers worry that the balance of scientific power will shift away from the US. Will a similar thing happen in Britain?

Reassuringly, the UK authorities have said that their decision-making process will be quick. But how tough will it be? Will there be many 'false positives' who will then have to choose a different country to do scientific research? I'm sure that other European countries, Canada, Australia and a few other nations will be very attentive in case there's a repeat of the bonanza of students they welcomed after the US turned them down. That is, of course, until those countries decide that maybe they also should place more guards at their borders.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The scientific community shunned Nobel laureate James Watson, of double-helix fame, this week after he suggested that Africa’s prospect is “gloomy” because blacks are not as intelligent as other races. Watson was quoted by the UK’s Sunday Times as saying, “All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really.”

The backlash was swift. On Wednesday, the Science Museum in London cancelled a sold-out talk Watson was scheduled to give this evening. A day later the board of trustees at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where Watson serves as chancellor, suspended Watson’s administrative responsibilities. Watson, who had plans to tour the UK promoting his new book, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science, apologized and came home.

As a scientist, Watson should know better than to make such sweeping generalizations. I can think of a few other reasons to be gloomy about Africa’s prospects: AIDS, a history of intense colonization, and the persistence of corrupt leadership, to name just a few.

James Watson is wrong, but should he be silenced?

Posted on behalf of Cassandra Willyard, Nature Medicine's news intern.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 09:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Is it just me, or do people in the US pay more attention to scientific misconduct than, say, Europeans? Maybe it's not just me; a recent editorial by Xavier Bosch in BMJ argues that Europe lags significantly behind the US in monitoring scientific integrity.

In the US, many institutions and have departments in charge of handling allegations of misconduct. And failing this, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) deals with cases of misconduct and fosters scientific honesty at a national level. Furthermore, the ORI is taken very seriously; if you're facing the possibility of an ORI investigation, you are very likely to make sure your lab comes clean as soon as possible to try to keep their officers from paying you a visit.

In Europe, monitoring of scientific integrity is fragmented. Each country deals with the problem as they see fit, and the editorial does a good job of telling you what happens in what country. From my own experience, Spain is not an example of good practices. We once had an allegation of misconduct and could never get anybody from the university in question to get involved.

Bosch also puts forward some possible solutions to the problem. He seems to think that tackling it at a pan-European level would be the best way forward. This certainly makes sense if we consider that many European papers report the work of labs from different countries and that European funding promotes the formation of international networks.

The flip side of this is that European bureaucracy has a reputation for slowness and inefficiency. It is therefore easy to imagine an allegation of misconduct getting lost in the Kafkian labyrinths of the European Union's offices in Brussels, slowly ripening like a good French wine, but turning into vinegar for those who made the accusation and those who are trying to reproduce a piece of work that may be flawed.

In other words, the creation of a "European ORI" would be of value only if its procedures are streamlined and is not hindered by European policy and National laws. If it isn't given enough authority and autonomy, and is dragged down by bureaucratic procedures, then what sounds like a good idea in principle is also likely to turn into vinegar.

An alternative, also mentioned by Bosch, is the creation of ORIs in those countries in which research integirty is currently not monitored. This may sound less dramatic, but it strikes me as more useful, specifically in the context of the push by some journals (including ours) to encourage authors to disclose the specific contribution of each person in the author list to the work being reported. So, if there are problems with the confocal images, the Western blots or the statistical analysis, one can know without ambiguity who is responsible and who should be investigated by the local authorities.

Regardless of whether one prefers national or pan-European solutions, one thing's for sure: Europe has a lot of catching up to do on this front.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Speaking of Apoorva, before she left the journal she managed to produce a fitting swan song -- a collection of reports called "Science on a shoestring". In this collection, we present the stories of some scientists who, using materials as simple as litmus paper, bamboo and blenders, prove that science on a shoestring is possible.

We hope that these stories are inspiring, not only to other people who may not have the resources to do research, but also to those in rich labs, who often complain about their grants being rejected and about equipment being too expensive.

Back in Mexico, when I was starting in research, I do remember having to wash the plastic pipettes, as well as the pipette tips to reuse as many times as possible. We also had to remove the bottom of plastic graduated cylinders and glue a spout to them so that we could quantify the volume of liquid that our animals drank during their behavioral training. And we had these very elaborate contraptions to distill water, which was a precious commodity.

But that's enough reminiscing for one day. Instead, tell us what's happening in your neck of the woods. Do you also have to come up with clever inventions to compensate for the paucity of resources?

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 02:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Biopiracy=stealing (indigenous) knowledge without proper compensation or credit in return.

Today's New York Times carries a fascinating story about Marc van Roosmalen, a primatologist credited with discovering five species of monkeys and a new primate genus, who has been sentenced to nearly 16 years in a Brazilian jail.

van Roosmalen, one of Time magazine's “Heroes for the Planet” in 2000, is charged with, among other things, taking monkeys from the forest without permits and offering to name new species after wealthy donors -- a practice that is historically common in science, as the Times article points out.

Scientists are rallying to his defense, and 287 of them have signed a petition protesting his sentencing and saying it is indicative of the trend of government repression in Brazil. The government is apparently going overboard in its attempts to prevent biopiracy and, some say, making an example out of van Roosmalen.

This is all well and good. But this article is essentially a rehash of one that appeared in Nature three weeks ago. As anyone who works for scientific journals knows, this is par for the course. Articles that appear in Nature and Science routinely come out slightly modified in newspapers like the Times. And I suppose that's fair enough. But my complaint here is that nowhere in the article is the acknowledgement that Nature first reported the story.

I'll let the irony wash over you.

P.S. I particularly like the picture that ran with the Times article of this snake. Very eye-catching.

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 06:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've just returned from a two-week trip to Australia to scout out stories on the state of research in the country. We're planning to run a special issue about Australia science early next year so you can read about it in detail then, but one thing I can tell you is I have never met a bunch of people who take more pride in their country.

Almost every scientist I spoke to had trained abroad and they all said they couldn't imagine living anywhere else. They could go on — and do — for hours about the marvelous lifestyle. Despite the lack of jobs for young scientists, postdocs come back to Australia for the 9-to-5 days, the slower pace, the lack of intense competition all around them.

There's no doubt that despite this lack of intensity, Australia does produce some world-class science. But here's my question for you: Is it possible for scientists to lead this kind of laidback lifestyle and still stay competitive? Or would Australia be a much bigger contender in science if its researchers burned the midnight oil like their American and European counterparts do?

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 05:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Talk about chipping away at human rights: lawmakers in Papua, an Indonesian province, want to implant microchips in HIV-positive people.

Yep, you read right. Apparently, the government is fed up with its inability to control the country's AIDS epidemic so the parliament's health committee came up with this scheme to track those who are infected and stop them from transmitting the virus to others. Oh, and they're also calling for mandatory testing of the general population — about 2.4% of whom are believed to be HIV-positive.

Fortunately, saner heads prevailed and the bill was turned down, but no doubt the parliamentarians will come up with more boneheaded schemes.

At one point, they also apparently dicussed tattooing those infected. What would the tattoos say, I wonder? Something along the lines of: "I live in a fascist state"?

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 05:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

South African president Thabo Mbeki, famous for questioning the link between HIV and AIDS, has dismissed Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, the health minister who seemed to be making a real difference to the country's fight against AIDS.

Madlala-Routledge had replaced previous health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang — often called simply "Manto" — who likes to offer beetroot, lemon juice and garlic as remedies for AIDS. After that particular brand of denialism, Madlala-Routledge's tenure was particularly welcome, as I wrote last November.

After her arrival, South Africa announced a comprehensive prevention program and openly acknowledged the gravity of its epidemic. Only a few days ago, the government announced that for the first time in years, its HIV prevalence had fallen — albeit not by much.

It's a shame that the president has so quickly undone the small progress the country had made. No more beetroot and garlic, please!

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 05:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A lesson for us all: when reason and logic don’t work, try bribery. After eight years in prison, the medics being held in Libya for allegedly infecting more than 400 children with HIV are free.

But their freedom has been bought rather than won, with the US and Europe helping to pay off the affected families and promising Libya millions, if not billions, of dollars in aid and debt forgiveness.

Many expected the five Bulgarian nurses and Palestinian doctor to be freed five years ago, when expert virologists Luc Montagnier and Vittorio Colizzi submitted a report showing that the children had become infected before the medics ever set foot in Libya, and that the infections were almost certainly the result of poor hospital hygiene rather than sinister acts.

But the court threw out the report and refused to accept further international evidence, relying instead on a flimsy Libyan document that researchers say contained “a shocking lack of evidence” to slap the accused with a death sentence.

Just as children who misbehave shouldn’t be given treats, Libya shouldn’t be rewarded for acting up. With lives hanging in the balance, the international community couldn’t afford the diplomatic version of tough love. But now that the medics are on friendly soil, I think we should stop dangling cupcakes.

Uploaded on behalf of Cassandra Willyard, Nature Medicine's news intern

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 03:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Why is it that the most bizarre — and disturbing — science stories always come from Asia, usually China or India? (I can say that, I'm from India).

I live about three blocks from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which has some of the most stunning displays anywhere of dinosaur fossils. People come from all over the world to gawk at these wonders.

In China's Henan province, it seems, I could have bought dinosaur bones for a mere 50 cents per kilogram.

For at least the last 20 years, villagers in China have apparently been grinding up precious dinosaur bones and boiling them in soup to treat dizziness, leg cramps and such or making a paste and applying them to fractures. One local had collected up to 8,000 kilos of bones, according to the BBC.

The villagers did this because they believed that the bones were from dragons that could fly in the sky and had special powers, according to Dong Zhiming of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

**

On a far more serious and horrible note, China has executed its former Food and Administration chief, who had been made the scapegoat for all its recent problems with the regulation of food and drugs. The Associated Press led its story on this saying it was "the strongest signal yet from Beijing that it is serious about tackling its product safety crisis."

I'm sorry, what??

How is rushing to execute one man, who became a convenient symbol for everything that ails China's regulatory system, an indication that the country is serious about fixing its problems?

Although many versions of this story included the offensive phrase, (The Guradian, the NYT) some papers at least (The Independent) edited it out. China may blunder in its rush to fix its image, but we should be demanding an actual clean up of the system, not this tyrannical turn of events, as proof of its intentions.

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 05:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

After the fall of the Soviet Union, state-owned tobacco companies in the former Eastern block fell by the wayside as multinational tobacco companies took over and instituted Marlboro-style marketing campaigns. Many of these countries have some of the highest smoking rates in the world. One counter-influence is the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, a legally-binding international treaty designed to limit smoking by regulating marketing, increasing taxes and other measures (see our editorial ). Georgia was the 124th country to ratify the treaty. Suzaynn Schick, a friend of mine and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco, traveled to Georgia this February and got a first hand look at the country’s efforts to enforce the new regulations. I asked Suzaynn to tell us about her trip. She paints a picture of a country with bad air but great food.

One quiet afternoon in late January I answered the phone, heard the raspy, nasal voice of my ex-boss Stan Glantz and tensed up. Working with Stan, a high-profile tobacco researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, had been exciting and very good for my career—but it had also featured some experiences common to demonic possession.

11 months after leaving his group I was almost done with our last paper and enjoying my autonomy in a new job. Stan, who was on the phone with Tom Novotny, fellow UCSF researcher and former US Assistant Surgeon General, said " We have a project you might be interested in." Tom asked me if I'd like to go to Tbilisi, Georgia to assist local public-health scientists in monitoring Georgia’s compliance with their new ban on smoking in health care facilities. I immediately said yes.

My task was to deliver 50 passive nicotine monitors to scientists at the Institute for Public Health, a Georgian Nongovernmental Organization. The monitors are small cassettes of filter paper, impregnated with a compound that binds nicotine present in the air. We spent Tuesday chatting up directors and doctors and being stared at by patients as we climbed on top of chairs, desks, gurneys and ladders, hanging the monitors in nine hospitals and clinics in Tiblisi and the vicinity.

Ultimately, I visited seven of the nine facilities—all gray, concrete block Soviet style. Two had been upgraded but five were broken down—-with cold dark corridors, shattered light fixtures, and water damage.

Despite the grim surroundings, the doctors and nurses seemed engaged, caring and confident—and they worked in a haze of smoke. People smoked cigarettes everywhere and no one seemed to think anything about it.

We visited a cardiology facility where people smoked in the stairwells just across from critical care wards. Patients and visitors smoked in the hallways as they waited in the clinics. The doctors smoked. In terms of prevalence, Georgia is probably worse off than United States was in the 1950s: more than 40% of men smoke and the percentage of women who smoke is rising rapidly.

However, there is hope. For instance, the director of one the new facilities I visited actually enforced the federal smoking ban. My Georgian colleagues will use the data we collected to pressure the federal and local governments to start enforcing the ban on smoking in health care facilities.

By Wednesday I had time to relax. The monitors were in place, my luggage finally arrived, my jet lag was beginning to relent and I started to enjoy the visit. Georgia was beautiful when I saw it in cold, gray February. I can only imagine how it looks in spring when the fruit trees blossom and the grapevines leaf out.

My hosts were incredibly kind and solicitous: I never ate lunch or dinner alone and suspect that I was taken to the very best restaurants in Tbilisi. I had some truly amazing food. Georgian food reminded me of Yugoslavian food, Persian food, Indian food and even Chinese food. Traditional Georgian bread is baked in an oven like an Indian tandoor, but it’s heftier, with a stout European crust. The stews were like Persian stews: tart with sour plums or pomegranate and full of green herbs. Kinkhali dumplings reminded me of succulent Shanghai soup dumplings, but the seasoning was herbal, an ineffable combination of celery, coriander, dill, garlic and pepper.

On the last two days I carried my aerosol particle monitor with me everywhere. The outdoor air pollution level in downtown Tbilisi was about four times higher than in downtown San Francisco. Indoors it was much worse. The man who owned my hotel was a chain smoker, so at breakfast I imbibed more than 600 ug/m3 particulates (40 times the EPA limit for continuous exposure) along with my coffee, yoghurt and wildflower honey.

One night we went to a restaurant/nightclub. The later it got, the smokier the air became. We lingered until the monitor showed over 3,000 ug/m3. To be honest, I'm not sure it was any worse in that nightclub than in the smoky bars I used to frequent in San Francisco. It's been almost 10 years since Californian bars went smoke-free though, and I've become accustomed to it. I loved visiting Georgia, but I was glad to get home to clean air.

Posted by Charlotte Schubert at 06:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

By now, there's mountains of depressing evidence that in the Bush administration, ideology always trumps science.

Nowhere does this seem more cruelly short-sighted than in the administration's approach to AIDS. I've written here before about the government's insistence that any groups that receive federal funds have to formally oppose prostitution.

Here's one more disheartening report: after a year-long investigation, the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit based in Washington DC, has found that PEPFAR, the administration's $15 billion AIDS initiative, "has not worked out the way it was envisioned."

One of PEPFAR's most criticized aspects is the ABC approach for prevention: abstinence, be faithful and condoms. Neither abstinence nor being faithful is much of an option for a married woman whose husband is unfaithful, but let's not get bogged down by practical details.

The center's Consortium of Investigative Journalists filed two dozen Freedom of Information Act requests, FOIA lawsuits against the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of Health and Human Services. After more than 100 interviews, examination of thousands of pages of documents and reporting on the ground in affected countries, they say that:

In fact, the actual prevention practices stress the "AB" messages — abstinence until marriage and being faithful to one partner. The "C" has moved to a small c, and the use of condoms is lumped into the category of "other preventions" that includes prevention of mother-to-child transmission, blood safety, safe medical injections and control of intravenous drug use.

It's nice to see that tomorrow, this ambitious project, dubbed "Divine intervention", is set to win the first prize in online and trade journals category from the Association of Health Care Journalists.

On another positive note, I mentioned before that Brazil had turned down money from the US rather than meet the ideological demands. Looks like even within this country, there's some rebellion afoot.

On March 5, Wisconsin turned down about $600,000 in federal "abstinence-only-before-marriage" funds because the money would have prevented programs from teaching kids about contraception or sexually transmitted diseases. California, Maine, New Jersey and Pennsylvania have also turned down the funds and another dozen are set to do the same, according to Madison's The Capital Times

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 03:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

My New Yorker mag arrived Monday with an article about a topic that's all too familiar to us, here at Nature Medicine. Science reporter Michael Specter wrote about AIDS denialists — or dissenters as they like to call themselves — who say either that HIV does not cause AIDS or that antiretroviral drugs do more harm than good, and that most scientists are in the pockets of the pharmaceutical industry. That last bit may be debatable, but to us and to everyone we consider credible, there's no doubt that HIV causes AIDS or that antiretroviral drugs are safe.

I'm happy the New Yorker gave this urgent and deeply troubling issue some much-needed attention, but I'm a bit disappointed with its tepid tone. If you get through the whole article — and I suppose many of the magazine's readers do — you come away with the feeling that the denialists are certainly wrong. But the first few pages give so much space to Peter Duesberg, the most famous denialist, and to the potential benefits of South Africa's traditional medicines that you might almost be tempted to think these people have a fair point. After all, who among us hasn't thought that scientists can be too harsh on those who don't agree with the reigning hypothesis or that they don't pay enough attention to traditional therapies?

But this is not your average scientific disagreement. There is NO question that HIV causes AIDS and to follow the "he said-she said" school of journalism in this case, strikes me as tame and... well, I'll leave it there. I hope the New Yorker piece goes some way to repairing the damage caused last year by an article in Harper's by dissenter Celia Farber.

For our part, we've covered the resurgence of denialists and the activities, in particular, of one Matthias Rath, who markets multivitamins as a cure for AIDS. Scientists and AIDS activists have sued the South African government and Rath for conducting trials of the so-called vitamin cures.

These denialists like to distort scientists' own statements to support their theories and have even misappropriated sentences from one of our scientific reports, which we explicitly countered in an editorial last year after the Harper's piece appeared. And we hope more of the mainstream press steps up to cover this issue.

Update: We have decided not to accept any more comments on this post, as the discussion between the two camps is not productive. We don't want this blog to perpetuate a discussion that has already received too much attention

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 05:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

Can the US government compel non-governmental organziations (NGOs) to condemn prostitution?

Yes, if those NGOs want to qualify for government funds. That's the upshot of a ruling on Tuesday by a federal appeals court.

Since 2003, the US has required that to qualify for funds from the $15 billion PEPFAR program for AIDS, nonprofit groups abroad have to explicitly oppose prostitution and sex trafficking.

NGOs say that taking an explicit antiprostitution stance would make it harder for them to work with sex workers, one of the highest risk groups for HIV infection. In 2005, Brazil refused $40 million from the US rather than comply with the requriements.

Even within the US, the law has been controversial and has gone through a long process of rulings and counter-rulings.

In 2005, after the law expanded to include US groups, DKT International, a Washington D.C-based organization, sued the government, arguing that the law violated its free speech rights.

Last year, a lower court agreed and ruled that the law is unconstitutional. But on Tuesday, US Circuit Judge A Raymond Randolph reversed that ruling, saying that the US Congress has authorized the Bush administration to fund these groups "on such terms and conditions as the President may determine."

What do you think? Are these acceptable strings?

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 04:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Something strange--and embarassing--has happened in India.

For the past few weeks, Novartis has been fighting a lawsuit in India that could affect the availability of cheap drugs worldwide. The lawsuit challenges India's decision to interpret WTO rules and only honor patents on drugs that are entirely new, not just derivatives or variations of existing drugs.

This clause allows Indian companies to make cheap copies that they then sell all over the world. The case is still being heard, although high-profile voices, including nonprofit group MSF (Doctors Without Borders) and Henry Waxman, chair of the influential US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, have asked Novartis to drop the suit. More than 250,000 people have signed the MSF petition.

In the meantime, the Indian government had asked a high-level committee, including R.A. Mashelkar, who retired last year as Director General of India's Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and is arguably one of the most respected Indian scientists, to look into the patent issue. After nearly two years' deliberations, the committee produced a report on the law that is favorable to Novartis.

But get this: an Indian newspaper discovered that the crucial bits of the report were plagiarized from a paper published by a think tank in the UK and funded by INTERPAT, an association of pharma companies whose members include Novartis. Mashelkar says he didn't know about the plagiarism and has withdrawn the report, asking for three months to review it. I buy that he didn't know about the plagiarism and that it might have crept in when the "draft was being worked on by a sub-group" but the larger issue is the potentially biased source of the original conclusions.

The government hasn't yet said whether it will accept the revised report, but any way you slice it, this is a deeply embarassing incident for Indian science. Earlier this month, Nature challenged Indian scientists to speak up and help shape policies. This is an inauspicious start indeed.

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 05:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

You might have seen the New York Times article yesterday so delightfully called "Of gay sheep, modern science and bad publicity." In case the article has disappeared into the archive by the time you read this, briefly, it was a rather funny cautionary tale about a scientist who set out to study homosexuality in sheep, made one too many comments about the possible implications in people, and ended up getting skewered by the press and the blogosphere, who thought the point of his research was eventually to alter people's sexuality.

I was particularly struck by a comment that the scientist, Charles Roselli made.

Mentioning human implications, he said, is “in the nature of the way we write our grants” and talk to reporters. Scientists who do basic research find themselves in a bind, he said, adding, “We have been forced to draw connections in a way that we can justify our research.”

As a reporter, I'm guilty of this myself. Drawing human conenctions makes the story more accessible and it's an easy, if cheap, way of drawing the reader in. Even in my previous life as a scientist, I had an American Heart Association grant although my thesis, on lipid transport, was classic cell biology and had little to do with heart disease. That's where the money was, and so that's how we wrote the grant.

But all and said done, it is dishonest, isn't it? Is Roselli right? Is the system so warped now that we have to lie about human implications to justify working on important, but obscure, questions in science? Have you done it?

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 04:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

When I worked at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle I was struck by the chemicals researchers routinely tossed away—often down the drain. It seemed paradoxical that the attempt to understand cancer involved the manufacture of some nasty carcinogens.

Of course, in the big scheme of things the amount of chemicals used in cancer research is small. And almost any positive endeavor has its shades of grey.

Take the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Its role in public health has been extraordinary—but as a report in the Los Angeles Times reveals, the financial arm of the foundation invests in companies that spew some pretty toxic stuff, and may otherwise undermine the mission of the foundation.

These investments include oil companies that pollute regions of Africa where the foundation operates and a health care company embroiled in lawsuits for allegedly unnecessary surgeries. The Times claims that at least 41% of the foundation’s assets, or $8.7 billion, are in companies that “countered the foundation’s charitable goals or socially concerned philosophy.

Unlike some other philanthropies, such as the Ford Foundation, the Gates Foundation has apparently set up a firewall between its investment and granting arms—to try to keep the fund as flush as possible.

It may be easy to quibble with some of the standards used by the LA Times to criticize the Gates Foundation. Nonetheless, with an endowment boosted by Warren Buffett to more than $60 billion, it seems that the foundation could wield its substantial investment power in ways more in keeping with its public health mission.

Posted by Charlotte Schubert at 05:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Against all our best hopes, the Libyan court has delivered the worst verdict possible: it sentenced six foreign medical workers accused of deliberately infecting children with HIV to be shot.

The defense says it will appeal to the Libyan supreme court.

The Libyan courts have refused to consider scientific evidence that the more than 400 children infected at a Libyan hospital were the victims of unsafe medical practices—and that the outbreak had begun before the medics arrived. Whether the diplomatic community has been forceful enough in pushing this evidence forward is unclear. An article in today’s New York Times, for instance, says that some diplomats have suggested that the US response has been muted.

Despite the efforts of the scientific community in the last few months, continuing activism—and stepped up diplomatic pressure—will be necessary if the medics are to have any hope. In Declan’s article on news@nature, Emmanuel Altit, head of the international defense team backs up this view. He says that the international community can help by insisting that the scientific evidence of the medic’s innocence be included.

Posted by Charlotte Schubert at 04:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tomorrow a Libyan court will release its verdict on whether to sentence six foreign medical workers to death.

Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor are accused of deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV in a Libyan hospital in 1998. Scientists and medical groups have rallied behind the medics, with forceful letters highlighting the scientific evidence of their innocence.

The diplomatic community seems to be less energized. Both the European Union and the United States have called for a fair trial. But when the United States resumed diplomatic relations with Libya this spring, the plight of the medics was not part of the deal. And in a recent press conference, a spokesperson for the US State Department was dismissive of evidence published last week in Nature that would exonerate the accused.

Many familiar with the trial are pessimistic about the outcome. Whether the EU and the US are exerting enough pressure on Libya for a fair verdict should become clear tomorrow. If the medics are sentenced to death, it would not only be a miscarriage of justice; it may also reflect a failure of diplomatic will.

To learn more about the trial, go to Declan Butler’s blog. Declan is a reporter at Nature, who is following the case. Mickey Grant, an independent film-maker, has also covered the trial in his movie, “Injection," which I reviewed for news@nature. Grant explores the probable cause of the childrens' infection—poor medical practices, which he claims are rife and underreported in Africa.

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