Researchers presented their best case for the use of chimpanzees in research when the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) Committee on the Use of Chimpanzees in Biomedical and Behavioral Research met today in Washington, DC.

Spurned by a Congressional request last year, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) asked the IOM to form a committee that would evaluate the current and future need for federally funded research on chimpanzees – increasingly controversial in the public eye and legal in only one other country, Gabon. The committee held an introductory meeting in May, but got to the heart of the issues today, the first of the two-day meeting.

As biomedical and behavioral researchers from around the country gave presentations, the committee made it clear that it needed to be convinced of the necessity of using chimpanzees, the closest living relative to human beings, for both non-invasive and invasive studies. It especially wanted to know whether alternative small animal or cellular models were advanced enough to do the job.

The strongest case for continued use of chimpanzees came from Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) researchers, who emphasized that the animals were still needed for vaccine development. The liver disease-causing virus is the most common chronic blood borne infection in the United States, infecting 3.2 million individuals. Human vaccine trials aren’t feasible, they said, and neither mice nor cellular models can mimic human infection as well as chimpanzees – the only other animal naturally susceptible to the virus. “These technologies have advanced, but they are clearly not there yet,” said Alexander Ploss, a virologist at Rockefeller University in New York.

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It’s been a week of budget mayhem in Washington and the impact of what is almost certain to be a tougher fiscal climate in 2012 is making itself felt in all kinds of ways.

One example is the now often repeated mantra that investment in science and technology can become a driver of economic prosperity. Exactly how research dollars can be optimized for this — or whether they should be — are long debated questions. What does not seem to be up for debate if that if government funded science is to continue to thrive in the US it had better look useful.

That was the message conveyed on 28 and 29 July during the latest meeting of the National Science Board (NSB), the body that governs the US National Science Foundation (NSF) in Arlington, Virginia. Many of the board’s deliberations revolved around how science funded by the NSF needs to further the administration’s far-reaching national goals, such as creating jobs and reviving a moribund US economy. In the context of such discussions, slogans such as “bringing science to society” fly around the room like bosons in a particle collider.

For instance, yesterday NSF director Subra Suresh and John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced the launch of a new NSF grant program called I-Corps (short for Innovation Corps). Meant to bridge the gap between bench science and innovation, the program invites principal investigators with an existing or recent NSF grant, to apply for one of 100 grants of up to US$50,000 to help turn newly discovered knowledge into marketable technologies, products and processes.

“NSF’s core mission is to fund basic research in all fields of science and engineering,” said Suresh at the conference. “I-Corps supports this mission by helping to transform scientific output funded by NSF into technological innovation.”

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Mother Nature has devised all sorts of ways for plants to attract pollinators: colorful flowers, enticing odors, and yes, even echo acoustics.

A team of scientists has found the loudest example yet of a plant – Marcgravia evenia – that attracts nectar-feeding bats to its flower by manipulating sound. It has a large, cup-shaped leaf above its red-and-pink buds – a veritable dinner bell for passing bats. Its deep shape reflects bat sonar with a strong echo that says “Come and get it!” The findings are published today in Science.

Biologist Ralph Simon at the University of Ulm in Germany and his colleagues had done training experiments with bats before, testing to see which shapes they could detect best with their sonar. They found that bats preferred a hollow hemisphere. The team was “totally amazed,” says Simon, to find that very shape on a rainforest vine in Cuba that depends on bats for pollination

Back in the lab, the team made a replica of the leaf and tested its acoustic properties. Whereas sound bouncing off any other leaf changes with the angle of sound incidence, the deep, round leaf reflected a strong echo from many angles, meaning the signal doesn’t change as the bat moves around. That would help the leaf stand out against a background of varying vegetation, say the researchers.

“It’s a very reliable signal,” says Simon.

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A US House subcommittee today held a hearing to determine whether the National Science Foundation (NSF) merit review process — by which agency selects the research projects it will fund each year — is identifying the best science possible to support. The subcommittee heard testimony from four witnesses about the quality of selected research and solicited suggestions for how to improve the process.

“This subcommittee must ensure that federal dollars are being spent on the best science,” said Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL, pictured), who chaired the hearing, held by the House Science, Space and Technology Subcommittee on Research and Science Education. “We want to know if the current process spurs or stifles innovation, … and if there are flaws in the system that may be providing precious federal funds to lower rated proposals over more highly rated proposals.”

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Biodiversity and ecosystem data gathered by US environmental monitoring programs need to be better centralized, according to Sustaining Environmental Capital: Protecting Society and the Economy, a report released today by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), an independent council of scientists and engineers that advises the president on science and technology matters.

The report represents an update of a 1998 document called Teaming With Life, which urged President Bill Clinton to step up how the US assesses, monitors and studies its wealth of biodiversity and ecosystem services. The new report suggests ways to better document the threatened biological wealth of the US, from species to ecosystems, as well as the impacts of climate change.

“It is difficult to stem degradation and the loss of environmental capital if we don’t have an accounting of what’s out there, what condition it’s in and what its real value is,” said Rosina Biermaum, PCAST member and co-chair of the working group that led the study, at a press briefing. “Right now, not all the data that come from [monitoring] efforts is available in usable formats, but if it were, both the private and the public sectors could use the information to manage their businesses, fisheries, farms and forests, and be cognizant of environmental change.”

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Animal rescue teams and government agencies have rushed to Billings, Montana where they are assessing the damage from the Exxonmobil pipeline spill that occurred 2 July in the Yellowstone River, the longest undammed river in the US. Exxonmobil has estimated that up to about 160,000 litres of oil leaked from a ruptured pipeline into the river. But so far, teams haven’t come across any animals in distress.

“We aren’t seeing a lot yet, but that doesn’t mean there may not be some stuff out there,” says Ron Aasheim, chief of communication for the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks department in Helena, Montana. “We haven’t had much time to look.”

Dangerously swift currents have hampered assessment efforts, limiting teams’ knowledge of the damage, but so far the short term problems seems to be minimal.

“We haven’t seen any floating fish or anything like that,” says Bob Gibson, “The water is running very high so that means the oil that went into the river could have been carried away very quickly.”

Floods could also have kept birds out of the area during the time of the spill, says Darcie Vallant, director of the Montana Audubon Education Center in Billings.

“We’re in an extreme flood situation, so many of the birds normally around, including pelicans, are not in their usual spots,” she says.

But damage to the ecosystem could be floating just beneath the surface, Gibson told local reporters. Floodwaters have left standing pools of water alongside the river, where oil has accumulated and could affect organisms that live there. Insects and fish that populate those areas could suffer from a lack of food and oxygen.

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The Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GRI) Research Board today awarded US$1.5 million in funds to 17 scientists doing research on the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Short term funding made available in these grants will allow researchers to collect crucial summer data, tiding them over until more of BP’s funds become available in the fall.

“We’re elated,” says marine botanist Suzanne Fredericq from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette who received one of the awards. She will use the funds to continue data gathering on seaweed and crustacean recovery deep in the Gulf of Mexico. “Otherwise we would miss an entire summer.”

The board determined in early May that it needed to make some emergency stop-gap funds available for summer data gathering. Since the review process for grants under the original requests for proposals (RFP-I and RFP-II) had been delayed, most funding wouldn’t reach researchers until the September. The first year’s funding ended June 1.

“We didn’t want to miss those three months,” says Rita Colwell, former director of the US National Science Foundation and the chair of the 20-member GRI research board. “If this is going to be a full 10-year study, it certainly would not be scientifically appropriate to have a three-month gap between June and September.”

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The Food and Drug Administration’s Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee voted today to move forward with its December decision to withdraw approval for the drug Avastin in the treatment of metastatic breast cancer. The committee’s vote was unanimous on the grounds that the available evidence doesn’t show that the drug is effective enough to justify serious toxic side effects, including severe high blood pressure, hemorrhage and heart failure.

“The modest magnitude of benefit in progression-free survival is not substantial enough to justify the additional toxicity,” said Brent Logan, associate professor of biostatistics at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee who served on the committee. “These toxicities have an impact on patient quality of life.”

Although non-binding, the vote is a blow to the drugmaker, Genentech, which asked for the review — a first for the agency. The hearing, held yesterday and today at the FDA campus in Silver Spring, Maryland near Washingon DC, also drew patient advocates who demonstrated outside the building and urged the FDA to reconsider its decision.

Agency commissioner Margaret Hamburg will consider the committee’s recommendation along with public comment and final summaries from Genentech and the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research and make a final decision after the public docket closes on 28 July.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie yesterday announced his decision to withdraw his state from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the only functioning US carbon cap-and-trade system, by year’s end. He argued that the program not only fails to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but creates an unnecessary tax burden on citizens and businesses.

“RGGI does nothing more than tax electricity, tax our citizens, tax our businesses with no measurable impact upon our environment,” said Christie at a 26 May press conference in Trenton, New Jersey.

While Christie said he believes climate change is real, humans are contributing, and that New Jersey is committed to combating it, he said RGGI is ineffective at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The cost of allowances remains too low to change behavior, he said, and New Jersey’s emissions are already below the goals for 2020 set out in the state’s Global Warming Response Act.

“The market, not RGGI has created incentives to reduce the use of carbon-based fuels,” he said. “Given that we now have laws that provide significant market incentives for wind, solar and in-state natural gas generation, any benefits that the RGGI tax may have had are miniscule.”

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Since last year’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, microbiologists have been working to understand how the microbial environment responds to and ultimately breaks down oil from a spill. (For more information, see our feature on the topic.) This weekend at the 111th general meeting of The American Society for Microbiology in New Orleans – the nearest large city to the spill site – an entire session was dedicated to the newest results from spill studies.

Here’s an overview of what came out of the plenary session held on 22 May:

David Valentine, a geomicrobiologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, showed that the motion of deep water in the Gulf boosted oil-eating microbes’ ability to break down oil spurting from the well. Using a model of the deep water plumes developed with UC Santa Barbara colleague Igor Mezic, Valentine showed that water sitting over the leaking oil well was first carried away, bringing with it oil and blooming microbes. Then those waters, teeming with bacteria prepped to devour oil, were carried back over the well where more oil flowed in. The result was pulses of accelerated oil biodegradation as waters were circulated around. Valentine says the model is helping understand how rapidly the oil and gas were consumed.

“It’s very difficult to get down there and study what happened a year ago nearly a mile deep in the ocean,” says Valentine. “By understanding the fundamentals of what was controlling where the oil went and how long things were exposed to it, I think we’re one step closer to understanding the damage.”

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