Author Archives: Mark Peplow

Triumph turns to tears as Italian physicists are given bleak budget news

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Published on behalf of Nicola Nosengo.

“We had just finished celebrating, and we got our reward.” Voice heavy with irony, Fernando Ferroni, the president of Italy’s National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), had just learned on 6 July that of all the Italian research institutes, his will bear the greatest burden from government cuts.

The news came just two days after researchers at CERN, Europe’s particle physics centre near Geneva, Switzerland, announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, in which the INFN had a key role. It contributed about 15% of the funding for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and has hundreds of researchers in the ATLAS and Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) collaborations that made the discovery.

The cuts are part of the government’s desperate effort to reduce Italy’s huge debt by shrinking budgets in all sectors of public spending. The INFN budget will be cut by 3.8% this year — corresponding to a loss of about €9 million (US$11 million) — and 10% in 2013 and 2014 (a further reduction of about €24 million each year).

What is hardest to understand, say Ferroni and other Italian physicists, is why the cuts to the INFN budget are so disproportionate. The National Research Council, Italy’s largest research organization, will see cuts of 1.23% in 2012 and 3.28% thereafter; the Italian Space Agency will lose less than 1%. Ferroni, who has threatened to resign if the cuts are confirmed, has written a letter to the Italian president Giorgio Napolitano — who had warmly congratulated INFN physicists for their work on the Higgs hunt — asking for his intervention. In the letter, he notes that the cuts will not just affect basic research: Italian participation in the LHC has brought contracts for hundreds of thousands of Euros to Italian companies.

In a letter sent today to the ANSA news agency, CERN’s research director Sergio Bertolucci, ATLAS spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti and CMS honorary spokesperson Guido Tonelli (all Italian) say that these cuts would make it impossible for INFN to fulfill its international commitments, and would send a “devastating signal” to young Italian researchers, effectively inviting them to leave Italy. “The risk of irreversible damage is very high,” they wrote.

The Italian Research Minister Francesco Profumo has said that he hopes to recover some funds before the draft is turned into law, but has invited Ferroni to act “responsibly”. Profumo will meet representatives of all research organizations on 12 July to discuss possible adjustments to the budget plan.

Was Yasser Arafat killed by polonium?

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The body of Yasser Arafat will be exhumed so that tests can determine whether he died after being poisoned with the radioactive metal polonium-210 (see the Guardian).

Arafat was President of the Palestinian National Authority when he died on 11 November 2004, after falling ill about two weeks earlier with what was initially described as flu. His condition deteriorated rapidly, however, and he was transferred to a hospital in France, where he spent his final days in a coma. Despite a plethora of rumours, his death has remained unexplained.

Al Jazeera reported yesterday that tests on Arafat’s personal belongings had found abnormally high levels of polonium-210, the radioactive element used to kill former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in 2006. Polonium-210 emits alpha particles that can tear through cells, damaging DNA and causing radiation poisoning. Since alpha particles cannot penetrate skin, polonium has to be ingested to have fatal effects. In Litvinenko, it initially caused vomiting, diarrhoea and weight loss — symptoms that Arafat also experienced.

Al Jazeera had approached the Institute of Radiation Physics in Lausanne, Switzerland, on behalf of Arafat’s widow, Suha, who provided various items of her husband’s clothing and other effects for analysis.

François Bochud, director of the institute, told Nature that he did not expect to find any polonium in these items. But “we looked for it because of Litvinenko”, he says. Continue reading →

Hey girl! Science wants YOU – but don’t forget the lipstick

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Posted on behalf of Gozde Zorlu.

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The European Commission’s new campaign to stimulate young women’s interest in a career in science has today been lambasted on blogs and social media sites for its patronizing tone.

The Science: It’s a girl thing! campaign (with the first letter ‘i’ helpfully substituted by a pink lipstick, in case you were in any doubt that it was aimed at women), launched in Brussels on 21 June. It aims to attract young women to scientific research careers to increase the total number of female researchers in Europe, part of a broader strategy across the European Union to increase the number of researchers by one million, as well as raising total research-and-development spending to 3% of GDP by 2020 (Washington Post).

“The goal of the campaign is quite simply to get girls and women who probably would not have considered a career in science interested in considering it,” says Michael Jennings, spokesperson for the European Commission’s Research, Innovation and Science Unit.

The first phase of the campaign — aimed at girls aged 13–17 years — includes a website and Facebook page. The website includes a teaser video, profiles of 12 female scientists who talk about their careers in science, a quiz, competition and events. The second phase of the campaign will concentrate on young women who are already thinking about studying science further or who are already involved in science.

But the teaser video for the campaign has drawn scathing criticism across the internet. It features a trio of women sashaying around and striking catwalk poses, choppily cut with those reassuring staples of science — you know, safety glasses, lab coats, glassware … erm, sunglasses, high heels, lipstick. Continue reading →

French biotech sector struggling

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Posted on behalf of Barbara Casassus.

Fallout from the economic crisis continues to cast a pall over the French life-science sector. The number of new firms created in 2011 plunged 47%, from 46 in 2010 to 24 last year, and the number of closures soared by 400%, from 5 in 2008 to 25 in 2011.

And the funding picture is no brighter for the survivors, according to the 150-strong association France Biotech. Its 2011 Life Sciences Panorama showed that biotechnology and medical device firms raised only €277 million (US$348 million) from venture capitalists, new stock market listings and refinancings, down 40% from €460 million in 2010. The French are not alone: biotech financing across the European Union (EU) dropped by an average of 36% year-on-year, to the equivalent of €3,327 million, whereas it jumped by 44% to $31,559 million in the United States.

Despite all that, the Panorama, which was prepared by management consultants Ernst & Young from 190 responses, concludes that the sector remains dynamic in France. Quoting the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, it says that France’s biotech sector ranked second worldwide last year, with 1,359 firms against 6,213 for the United States and 5, 398 for the whole of the EU.

“The sector has reached maturity in France in terms of products in phase 2 and 3,” says André Choulika, France Biotech president and co-founder, chairman and chief executive of genomic-engineering firm Cellectis. “The total number of these products is now equal to a top-ten pharmaceutical company.”

Choulika is counting on new president François Hollande’s government to improve tax breaks for the mostly tiny life-science firms. The Young Innovative Enterprise scheme, which supports start-ups, lasts only eight years, and most Research Tax Credits (CIR) go to big companies. “One of the largest beneficiaries (of the CIR) last year was one of the major French banks,” says Choulika.

Italian earthquake toll highlights poor preparedness

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Posted on behalf of Nicola Nosengo.

To Italian seismology experts, the earthquake that hit the Emilia region on 20 May, killing seven people, was yet another reminder that the country is very unprepared for seismic risks, despite being one the most earthquake-prone areas in Europe.

“Historical buildings are one thing. But it is unacceptable that modern constructions such as warehouses and industrial sheds have collapsed in an earthquake which was strong, but not exceptional,” says Stefano Gresta, president of Italy’s National Institute for Geophysics and Vulcanology (INGV). Although many historical buildings and churches were damaged by the earthquake (injuring about 50 people and forcing more than 5,000 out of their homes), five of the deaths occurred in small, recently built factories that completely collapsed, killing workers on night shifts. Had the earthquake occurred on a working day, those sheds would have been filled with workers, and the death toll would be much higher.

But with the main shocks reaching magnitude 5.9 (at 4:03 a.m. local time on 20 May), and 5.1 (at 15:18 the same day), the earthquake was not a terribly violent one. The L’Aquila earthquake, which killed 309 people on 6 April 2009, reached magnitude 6.3. “Let’s be honest, this was a small earthquake,” says Gian Michele Calvi, a professor of seismic engineering at the Institute of Superior Studies in Pavia, and president of the EUCENTRE Foundation (European Centre for Training and Research in Earthquake Engineering) in the same city.

Part of the problem is that the region around the epicentre of the quake (between the cities of Modena and Ferrara) is not as accustomed to earthquakes as in other parts of Italy, such as the north-east, Sicily, or the Apennine region (where L’Aquila is located). Until 2003, it was not even included in seismic-hazard maps. “The buildings which collapsed were mostly built before then, with no antiseismic measures at all,” says Calvi. “In such cases, prefabricated buildings such as sheds and supermarkets are more at risk than houses, because of their weak structure”.

In 2003, however, seismologists introduced a new map of seismic hazard across Italy, and the area of Sunday’s earthquake was reclassified as one of medium risk. “We were estimating a 10% probability of an earthquake of this kind in that area over the next 450 years,” says Gianluca Valensise, a research director at the INGV. “This earthquake was a rare event, but not a surprising one.”

Current maps of seismic risk in Italy, compiled by INGV scientists, are considered among the most accurate in the world, and form the basis of a 2006 law that imposes varying building standards according to each area’s risk level. Had those sheds complied with existing laws, says Valensise, they would not have collapsed. “But the application of that law has dragged on for years because of the high costs of complying with it, to the point that people were often formally authorized to circumvent it,” he says.

Calvi says that after the L’Aquila earthquake, the standards for new buildings have become stricter — in theory, at least — but few of the older ones have been adapted. “The most typical excuse is that small firms cannot afford it,” he says. “That is why the government should introduce financial incentives or tax exemptions for those who do it. Simply imposing the law and expecting people to comply will never work.”

What is most alarming, say the researchers, is that a relatively modest earthquake still managed to kill seven people in one of Italy’s wealthiest and best-run areas. A much stronger earthquake in the country’s southern regions, which combine higher seismic hazard with the lowest compliance with building standards, could prove to be far more devastating. The highest risk is in Calabria, the most southerly region of continental Italy, and in Sicily. In 1908, the cities of Messina and Reggio Calabria, on the opposite sides of the strait between Calabria and Sicily, were hit by a devastating 7.2 earthquake and tsunami, one of the most violent in Europe’s recent history. Should something of this scale happen again, says Calvi, “there would be tens of thousands of deaths”. And the main problem, according to Valensise, would not be the oldest buildings, which were built in the 1920s and 1930s following strict seismic codes, but rather post-war buildings that were completely unregulated because of corruption and illegal constructions.

Osaka Bioscience Institute fights for survival

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Posted on behalf of David Cyranoski.

On 5 April, Shigetada Nakanishi, the director of the Osaka Bioscience Institute (OBI) in Japan, received some very bad news: the city of Osaka planned to terminate its support for the institute within four years.

The proposed cut is one of many in the city’s renewal plan, which was first posted on the municipality’s website that day. “That was the first I had heard of it,” says Nakanishi, a neuroscientist. “We were never given a chance to explain OBI’s achievements or vision. City hall’s policy is bewildering.”

Nakanishi is fighting back, trying to rouse support with a petition. But he is not optimistic: his adversary, Osaka mayor Toru Hashimoto, polls as the most popular politician in Japan, and some tip him to be the next prime minister.

Under the city’s plan, which came into effect at the beginning of the fiscal year in April, OBI will lose about one-fourth of the ¥626 million (US$7.8 million) in funding it received from the city in 2011. Further cuts will see funding zeroed by 2015. OBI now receives about ¥657 million from external grants and, to a lesser extent, collaborations. But without the overhead support from the city, it will no longer be able to compete for grants, and industry will also turn away, says Nakanishi, meaning that OBI will have to close.

Over its 25-year history, OBI has been a small but extremely active part of Japan’s research community. Between 1991 and 2001, it was ranked first in publication impact in molecular biology and genetics by Thompson Reuters. More recently, it has published prominent papers in neuroscience and behaviour.

To make his case for OBI’s continued existence, Nakanishi is appealing to that publication record. He says that OBI has cultivated dozens of young researchers who later became university professors or scientists in industry and other research institutions. He also says that OBI has proved to be an international success by luring researchers from abroad, sharing disease models and genes with scientists overseas and forging international collaborative projects.

Osaka city says that OBI does basic research that doesn’t directly benefit the city, and advises that OBI seek funding from industry or the government, noting that four other major cities — Kobe, Nagoya, Yokohama and Kyoto — do not support such research institutes.

Nakanishi says that Osaka should instead follow the example set by Tokyo, which gives ¥4 billion a year to the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science, or Chiba prefecture, which spends ¥1.3 billion a year on the Kazusa DNA Research Institute. “Osaka is emphasizing the importance of biomedical research and therapy as a key to future economic growth,” he says. “That’s exactly why we need innovation and internationally competitive basic research.”

But in a Japan disillusioned by the government’s perceived mishandling of last year’s nuclear disaster and by its efforts to restart nuclear reactors despite widespread public opposition, a staunchly anti-nuclear Hashimoto has tremendous popularity and authority.

The city is accepting public comment on the plan until 29 May; Nakanishi has circulated a petition and asked supporters to write to the city office. “Once our record of achievement is interrupted,” he warns, “it’s not possible to rebuild.”

UPDATE 29 June 2012:

Nakanishi today told Nature: “Although the Osaka City received more than 600 public comments against its policy to the OBI, there was no change from the original proposal, in that they will reduce 25% of budget every year and finally close the institute three years later.”

FDA outpaces its global peers at drug reviews

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Cross posted from Nature Medicine’s Spoonful of Medicine blog. Author: Elie Dolgin.

The US Food and Drug Administration is often criticized for taking a plodding approach to drug regulation. But when it comes to approving novel therapeutics, the agency is actually much speedier than its European and Canadian counterparts.

“Many of the criticisms that the FDA has been facing over the past couple years were not based on concrete data,” says Jeff Allen, executive director of Friends of Cancer Research, an advocacy organization based in Washington, DC. “Hopefully this will let people really focus on the challenges facing drug regulation, rather than falling into talking points about approval speed.”

Using publically available records, a team from the Yale University School of Medicinein New Haven, Connecticut compared the review times of all small molecule and biologic drugs approved by the FDA, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and Health Canada from 2001 through 2010. Reporting online today in the New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers found that, regardless of drug type, orphan designation or priority review status, the FDA cleared new medicines, on average, at least a month faster than the other two agencies (see chart).

“Pretty consistently the FDA was coming out on top,” says Yale medical student Nicholas Downing, who led the work. For example, when considering just the 72 agents approved by all three regulators, the median review time at the FDA was a full three months shorter than at the other agencies—under nine months at the FDA, compared to almost a year at the EMA and Health Canada .

Strength in numbers

The results should help shield the FDA against some recent attacks, especially as Congress gears up to renew the Prescription Drug User Fee Act, which allows the FDA to collect ‘user fees’ from pharmaceutical companies to support the infrastructure needed to provide timely and scientifically thorough reviews. But the findings should come as no surprise to people who have actually considered the hard numbers.

Last year, for instance, Allen and his colleagues examined 35 cancer drugs that were reviewed by the FDA and the EMA between 2003 and 2010, and showed that the median approval time was almost six months faster in the US than in Europe. Before that, a team from what is now known as the Centre for Innovation in Regulatory Science in London compared the regulatory review process between 1997 and 2002 across the US, EU, Canada, Switzerland and Australia; they found that the FDA was routinely at the top of the charts for speed. A March 2012 report from the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) also concluded that the FDA met its performance goals for timely drug reviews in all but one year between 2000 and 2010.

“The idea that the FDA somehow inhibits innovation is just based on false premises,” says Michael Halpern, manager for the Scientific Integrity program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science advocacy group based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The agency is able to effectively balance speed without compromising health and safety in a way that suggests Congress should not view the FDA as an obstacle that needs to be reined in, but they need to give the agency the resources and independence so that it effectively protects people.”

The FDA’s track record on medical devices has not been as exemplary, however. Two years ago, researchers from Stanford University in California put out a damning report that compared regulatory timelines for medical devices in Europe and the US. The authors surveyed more than 200 companies, and found that approvals were about two years slower, on average, at the FDA (31 months) compared to the EMA (7 months) for most devices. Adding insult to injury, a GAO report released earlier this year found that the review times for medical device approvals have been creeping upwards in recent years.

The situation could be turning around, though. According to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, device approval times started to drop finally in 2011. “For the majority of devices that we review, we are as fast or faster than our European colleagues,” Hamburg told attendees of last month’s TEDMED conference in Washington, DC (as reported by the Device Talk blog).

I hope Hamburg is correct. Now we just need to wait for the hard numbers to back her up.

Earth overburdened by soaring consumption, says WWF report

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The world is not enough ... {credit}NASA{/credit}

Posted on behalf of Katherine Rowland.

Orbiting high above the Earth inside the International Space Station, an astronaut issued a grim report card on the state of the planet yesterday, describing current levels of resource consumption as 50% higher than the world can sustainably maintain.

In a recorded message, Andre Kuipers of the European Space Agency offered a unique view of the planet he circles 16 times a day. “From up here I can see humanity’s footprint, including forest fires, air pollution and erosion,” he said, launching the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Living Planet Report for 2012.

The biennial audit, produced in collaboration with the Zoological Society of London and the Oakland, California-based Global Footprint Network, projects that by 2030 humanity will require the equivalent of two planets to sustain current levels of population growth and resource depletion. “We are living as if we have an extra planet at our disposal,” writes Jim Leape, director general of WWF International, in the report. “We are using 50% more resources than the Earth can provide, and unless we change course that number will grow very fast.”

The report monitored ecosystem health by tracking 9,000 populations of more than 2,600 species of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish. The findings indicate that global biodiversity has decreased by nearly 30% since 1970, and by as much as 60% in the tropics.

According to the report, the precipitous losses in tropical regions point to a “potentially catastrophic” gap between the ecological footprint of rich and poor nations. By the study’s measures, if everyone on the planet lived like an average person in the United States, four Earths would be required to replenish the annual demand on natural resources. The United States ranks as the country with the fifth-largest per-capita resource footprint, trailing Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Denmark.

And the disparity between rich and poor nations has been increasing, according to the report’s footprint index, which evaluates resource consumption in relation to biocapacity, or the ability to renew resources and absorb CO2 emissions.

This trend is driven by high-income countries that subsidize their economic growth on the backs of developing nations, says Gemma Cranston, an engineer and lead scientist at the Global Footprint Network in Geneva. She argues that the consumption demands of rich nations encourage poor countries to plunder their resource wealth for export.

The report — the eighth of its kind — comes five weeks before the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro. Cranston says that policy-makers there will have an opportunity to forge a new trajectory for economic growth. “High-income countries can help low-income countries set up systems that allow for gains in social well-being that don’t come at the expense of ecological harm.”

But Colin Butfield, head of campaigns at WWF UK, is doubtful that the summit will result in the level of international commitment necessary to halt “the alarming momentum of environmental damage”. Despite the international conventions signed since the original Rio summit in 1992, biodiversity losses and CO2 emissions have accelerated. “Twenty years on and the overall direction of travel has gotten worse,” he says. “And that direction is pretty terrifying.”

Montenegrin academicians at loggerheads

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Posted on behalf of Mico Tatalovic.

Members of Montenegro’s unofficial science academy, the Doclean Academy of Sciences and Arts (DANU), got a nasty surprise this week.

In March, the country’s parliament mandated that DANU should merge with the official academy, the Montenegrin Academy of Science and Arts (CANU), in an effort to unite the country’s scientific potential. The two academies have historically been divided along political and ideological lines.

But on 14 May, only 5 out of 29 DANU members were elected to CANU — and even those only as associate and foreign members.

DANU was established in 1998 as part of the Montenegrin national renaissances that led to its independence from Serbia in 2006. CANU was set up in 1971, when Montenegro was one of the republics in former Yugoslavia.

CANU members have opposed the merger — which effectively forces them to admit verified DANU members to their academy — arguing that it undermines their autonomy from government. CANU challenged the law in the constitutional court and also instituted a new procedure that puts members of DANU through a rigorous selection process instead of simply admitting them, as the law mandates.

Both DANU and the government’s science ministry have deemed this new procedure illegal, and this case is also being fought in the constitutional court. DANU members will probably have to wait for rulings from both of these cases to know whether or not they can join the country’s official academy.

“Decisions made at the CANU assembly on 14 May will not be valid, because their procedures do not call for verification of DANU members, but instead an election of new members,” Milena Milunović, an aide at the science ministry told Pobjeda newspaper earlier this month. The ministry declined to comment further until the court ruling is out.

DANU issued a statement calling CANU’s most recent decision “illegitimate and against the law”. Meanwhile, CANU spokesperson Marina Vukičević told Nature that the election of DANU members was done according to a procedure laid down in the new law, and not according to CANU’s disputed new procedure, and is therefore legitimate.

Encyclopedia of Life passes million-species milestone

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Posted on behalf of Alice Lighton

Profiles of more than one million species are now available at the click of a mouse, thanks to a splurge of images and other data provided by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC. (press release)

The information is part of the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), an online database that hopes to create a record of each of the 1.9 million species currently known to biologists. When it launched in 2008, it had just 30,000 species pages (see ‘First chapter of book of life goes live’), but over the past few years EOL has persuaded partners worldwide to upload their own databases to the site, so scientists can access and compare a wealth of taxonomic information in one place. The latest batch of information has pushed the database past the million-species milestone, and includes photos of skin and bones, mounted specimens, and X-rays.

The project shares content with the leviathan of online encyclopaedias, Wikipedia. But Wikipedia itself is not a suitable host for the content in the EOL, says Cynthia Parr, director of EOL’s Species Pages Group. “Scientists don’t get a whole lot of reward for adding information to Wikipedia by hand,” she points out.

Maintaining such a vast online database costs money, of course, and back in 2008 the project was still trying to secure longer-term funding to augment grants from the MacArthur Foundation and the Alfred P Sloane Foundation. Since then, EOL has got additional support from several academic institutions, including the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “We’re embedding ourselves into the normal budget of these institutions,” says Parr. The EOL hopes to complete its mammoth task by 2017.

Image: Red eyed tree frog (courtesy of Carey James Balboa/EOL)