We need more contributors to this blog! Rob is moving to a new job and so am I. If you love writing, are based in the Boston area and know something about science, we want you!

Please email me (c.lok at us.nature.com) and Matt Brown (network at nature.com) if you’re interested.

After nearly four years as an editor of Nature Network, I am leaving to become the Research Highlights Editor of Nature. I leave the site in very good hands. Matt Brown, who is a former Nature Network editor and currently a Community Leader with Nature Network London, is already filling in for me until my replacement is hired. And Ian Mulvany has just become NN’s product development manager. You can reach them at network@nature.com.

Although I’m looking forward to my new job, I am sad to be leaving NN as I’ve been with the site since its very beginning (2006!). It’s been a pleasure and privilege to have played a role in making Nature Network what it is today and I look forward to seeing it grow and flourish even more.

I’ll continue to be a part of the community here, including posting to this blog (I’ll remain in Nature’s Boston office).

If anyone is interested in applying for my job, please get in touch with Timo Hannay (t.hannay at nature.com). If you wanted to ask me questions about the job, please email me at c.lok at us.nature.com.

(I’m headed out of the country tomorrow on vacation so if I don’t respond right away, you’ll know why.)

See you on NN!

Things are not looking good over at Harvard. The endowment has taken an unprecedented hit and because the university depends so heavily on its endowment to pay for basic operations, administrators are still looking for more ways to cut costs. While Harvard is aiming to get its spending down to the levels of just four years ago, the university has expanded so much during that time, especially in the sciences, that cost cutting is turning out to be quite painful.

The latest casualty: faculty. According to this Boston Globe article, retiring professors and those being lured away by other universities likely won’t be replaced. The article quotes the chair of the physics department saying that five of his professors have been approached by other schools. Classes and seminars are also being cut and one library has been closed.

How did this happen? Forbes magazine came out a few months ago with this article detailing how Harvard’s endowment managers engaged in some risky practices to milk more money out of the school’s investments. It describes, for example, how Harvard’s chief money manager in the 1990s ran his operation almost like a hedge fund.

As banks and other corporations are reeling and (hopefully) adjusting the way they do business, it will be interesting to see if universities—many of which have seen their endowments plunge—will also re-examine how they finance future construction projects and program expansions.

For now, Harvard’s financial struggles are symbolized by the large construction site in Allston, where building has slowed recently. It was supposed to become a large science complex. For now, it’s a hole in the ground—and a question mark. This article from the Crimson, examining how the Allston expansion is faring in this financial mess, quotes the COO of Harvard’s Allston Development Group saying that it’s “extremely unlikely” that construction of the science complex will stop forever. But the article goes on to say that “he would not say for certain.”

Research hospitals in Boston have been hit with a double whammy; the combination of lower payments from medical insurers on the clinical side, with declining funding from the NIH on the research side, has made life tough at places like Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, one of Harvard’s affiliated hospitals.

Not only has BIDMC laid off people and cut/freeze salaries, but now it’s also reducing its research space by about 11 percent, according to the Globe. Hospitals, especially the big-name ones like those affiliated with Harvard, enjoyed the riches of ballooning NIH budgets of the 1990s and early 2000s and expanded their research facilities, perhaps a little too much, but now are suffering as they can’t afford to maintain them.

There’s been some temporary relief from Obama’s stimulus plan, but still, BIDMC’s share likely won’t be enough to close its $28 million gap. Plus, that money must be spent by 2010…and then what? Will biomedical researchers and institutions ever get out of these boom-bust cycles they seem to be caught in?

At a US Senate hearing yesterday, the chairing senator, Tom Harkin, suggested that the NIH stimulus money should perhaps be exempted from the ‘spend-in-two-years’ rule and should instead be spread out over 4 years.

I covered the biotech industry back in 2003-2005, when there was much exuberance and optimism at meetings I attended—lots of talk about growth, IPOs and big rounds of venture capital funding.

Well, it’s now 2009 and a completely different climate. Funding is scarce, offices sit empty and even biotechs with big-name founders, like Codon Devices, have quietly closed up shop. I got a strong sense of this change in mood at an afternoon get-together of biotech scientists and execs in Cambridge—the Xconomy Forum: Tomorrow’s Biotech-Innovators and Innovation.

It was telling that the first speakers were from a four-person Cambridge-based biotech company, Zafgen that is not only embarking on experiments to develop new obesity drugs, but also experiments on how to develop drugs in a low cost way. Zafgen is what CEO Thomas Hughes called a “virtual company”. It outsources all of its work to contract R&D and consulting firms, rather than hiring the chemists, toxicologists and project managers that many other drug companies would have in house. It makes for a more “efficient” company, said Hughes. It’s quite a change for Hughes, who, before joining Zafgen, was a vice president at Novartis.

The company is bringing an anti-angiogenesis approach to combating obesity. It’s developing a drug that would shrink blood vessels in fat tissue, shrinking the fat along with it and aiding in weight loss in obese people. The drug would work similarly to the way anti-angiogenesis drugs, such as Avastin, work to starve tumors of their blood supply. In fact, Zafgen’s first drug candidate is a molecule that’s already been tested for oncology uses. And it should be no surprise that the scientific founder of the company, Maria Rupnick, a cardiologist and instructor at Harvard Medical School/Brigham and Women’s, worked with Judah Folkman for several years.

Rupnick gave a short talk describing her mice studies in which animals fed a high-fat diet along with an angiogenesis inhibitor gained less weight or even lost weight compared to control mice.

A company that is so focused on developing a specific type of drug for a specific target, mechanism and disease is a prime candidate to be run as a virtual company, said Hughes. Not all companies can or should try this.

The company intends to have its first drug candidate in clinical trials by the end of this year.

Starting this Saturday, the third annual, week-long Cambridge Science Festival (sponsored by MIT and the city of Cambridge) kicks off. The festival is geared primarily towards members of the general public, especially kids and families to spark young people’s interest in science. However, this year, they made the events listing sortable by age range, so here’s my pick of the more interesting adult-oriented events. Go here for the full programme.

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It’s been interesting to watch the response over the last few weeks to the news that the Boston Globe owners are threatening to shut down the paper. When something people take for granted, like a daily newspaper, is at risk of disappearing, only then do they speak up: bloggers, led by the CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Paul Levy, have joined in on an online rally actor Ben Affleck (who grew up in Cambridge) has spoken out about the importance of the Globe.

But, words are cheap.

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Over the weekend, I bought the Boston Globe off the newsstand for the first time in quite a while. The reason for buying the paper was this eye-catching headline: Times Co. threatens to shut Globe; seeks $20m in cuts from unions

I was shaking my head sadly at the irony of the situation as I was walking out the store. Maybe it was a gut reaction…the thought of losing the paper made me want to actually pay money for it for the first time in ages. Shelling out a mere 75 cents was the least I could do—a sort of tribute to an era gone by.

Indeed, people paying too little or nothing at all for content and online advertising has pretty well brought about the demise of newspapers in the US. The list of newspapers and magazines shrinking, on the brink of shutting down, going weekly, going online only etc etc is too long to type up here. The loss of newspapers should be thoroughly freaking you out now.

Or not. Online users have become so used to finding and accessing online content for free that perhaps some don’t really mind the loss of newspapers, because there will be other free content/websites to take their place. With so much free content out there, we’ve been overwhelmed and as a result, we’re losing the ability, or just don’t have the time or energy, to differentiate good content from bad. Voting/recommending/sharing/tagging tools online will only do so much.

So with the glut of free content, the online culture that says that everything should be free, and the perception that good content is worth as much as bad content (ie not much at all) online, could we ever go back to asking people to pay for the good stuff they read online?

If the genie is way too far out of the bottle, what is left to do? Turn journalism into a nonprofit enterprise? Just not have newspapers and well trained, tough-nosed journalists to put in the time and work needed to keep politicians and companies in line, to look out for us little people? The mere thought scares and saddens me.

Maybe we should do some market research before giving up.

What kind of content would you pay for online? Anything?