Author Archives: alison abbott

Schön loses last appeal against PhD revocation

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Jan Hendrik Schön
{credit}Materials Research Society{/credit}

The German Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe has confirmed on 1 October that the University of Constance was within its rights to revoke the PhD thesis of physicist Jan Hendrik Schön, who was dismissed in 2002 from Bell laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, for falsifying research results.

Schön was still in his early 30s when he was dismissed after being found guilty of 16 counts of scientific misconduct.

He had worked in nanotechnology and had been considered a star scientist, able to create transistors out of single molecules. He published numerous papers in rapid succession in high-profile journals, including Nature and Science.

Two years later, following local investigations in Germany, the University of Constance decided in to revoke the PhD it had awarded to Schön in 1998. The university said that although it had no evidence that Schön engaged in wrongdoing during his PhD work, he no longer merited the degree because he had brought science into disrepute.

Schön has appealed that decision through different courts, and in 2010 a court in Freiburg ruled that he should get to keep his graduate degree. But the Federal Constitutional Court has the last word, and the university’s decision stands.

 

Proposed EU research commissioner answers to Parliament

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Carlos Moedas fielded some 50 questions from members of the European Parliament regarding his nomination to research commissioner.
{credit}© European Union 2014 – European Parliament{/credit}

UPDATE 22 October:  the European Parliament has now approved the new commission with 423 votes in favour, 67 abstentions and 209 votes against. Ahead of the vote, European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker announced that, in response to concerns expressed by the Parliament, responsibility for medicines and pharmaceuticals would remain with the Directorate-General for Health, rather than move to Directorate-General for Enterprise as originally proposed. Carlos Moedas will begin his five-year term of office on 1 November alongside the rest of the new Commission.

Carlos Moedas, the man designated to be the European Union’s next research commissioner, got his three-hour hearing by the European Parliament today, giving the continent’s scientists their first opportunity to learn about him.

The parliament is this week interrogating all 27 members of the new Commission proposed by its president Jean-Claude Juncker earlier this month. Hearings focus on nominees’ skills and qualifications for their posts, as well as on their commitment to the European Union and personal integrity. The Commission is due to take office next month, but the European Parliament has the right to reject the line-up if the hearings go badly.

Moedas, a 44-year old economist and politician who began his career studying engineering, is a little-known name outside his native Portugal. Neatly turned out at his hearing, he was courteous and proved competent and well-prepared — in addition to switching fluently between English, French, Spanish and Portuguese.

Responding to 50 or so questions, he showed himself knowledgeable on issues ranging from shale gas, to genetically-modified organisms, to antibiotic resistance. He declared himself a strong believer in the value of basic research in driving innovation.

Moedas ticked all the politically correct boxes. He spoke in favour of the sharing of scientific data and intellectual property, and decried the gender gap in research, which he described as a waste of resources.

He cast himself as a dedicated European – the only question he claimed not to be able to answer had been put by a Eurosceptic MEP — and as a consensus-building, goal-oriented team player. He also professed his dedication to implementing the EU’s €80 billion, seven-year Horizon 2020 research programme.

If the parliament approves the Commission line-up, Moedas’s challenge will be to make his mild and rational – and decidedly non-charismatic – approach an effective one.

 

Economist and lawyer nominated for key science-related EU posts

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Carlos Moedas
Courtesy EC

UPDATE 22 October:  the European Parliament has approved the new commission with 423 votes in favour, 67 abstentions and 209 votes against. Ahead of the vote, European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker announced that, in response to concerns expressed by the Parliament, responsibility for medicines and pharmaceuticals would remain with the Directorate-General for Health, rather than move to Directorate-General for Enterprise as originally proposed. Carlos Moedas and Miguel Arias Cañete will begin their five-year term of office on 1 November alongside the rest of the new Commission.

Portuguese economist Carlos Moedas has been nominated as new European Union commissioner for research, science and innovation. Spain’s Miguel Arias Cañete, a lawyer, has been nominated as commissioner for energy and climate change.

Commission president Jean-Claude Junker announced the two nominations, along with those of the 26 other commissioners, on 10 September.

The commission has to be approved by the European Parliament before taking office on 1 November, and this may not be a shoo-in. In 2007 the Parliament exercised this veto right because it disapproved of one proposed commissioner, and the commission president had to submit a new line-up.

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Miguel Arias Cañete
Courtesy EC

Arias Cañete’s appointment in particular could prove controversial. Parliament might ask him to prove that he is not sexist — despite his widely publicized comments during a debate earlier this year in which he expressed his difficulty in politically challenging a woman for fear of “cornering” someone defenceless.

The new research commission will oversee the progress of the European Union’s €80-billion (US$103-billion) Horizon 2020 research programme, which launched this year.

Additional reporting by Elizabeth Gibney.

 

Balzan prizes honour plant ecologist and mathematician

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Plant ecologist G. David Tilman of the University of Minnesota in Saint Paul and mathematician Dennis Sullivan of the City University of New York are among the four winners of this year’s prestigious Balzan Prize. The announcement was made on 8 September.

The prize is awarded by the International Balzan Prize Foundation, based in Milan, Italy, and Zurich, Switzerland. Each year, the jury selects four different categories for the award. Each winner receives 750,000 Swiss francs (US$800,000) and must spend half of it on research projects carried out, preferably, by young scholars or scientists.

Tilman was recognized for contributions to theoretical and experimental plant ecology that have illuminated how plant communities are structured and interact with their environment.

Sullivan was recognized for his work in topology and the theory of dynamical systems, as well other fields of maths, including geometry, the theory of Kleinian groups, analysis and number theory.

The other 2014 winners were Mario Torelli of the University of Perugia, Italy, for classical archaeology, and Ian Hacking of the University of Toronto, Canada, for epistemology and philosophy of mind.

The categories for the 2015 prizes will be oceanography, astroparticle physics including neutrino and γ-ray observation, history of European art (1300–1700) and economic history.

Baby steps towards rescue of Human Brain Project

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{credit}Human Brain Project{/credit}

Cautious efforts to restore unity to the billion-euro Human Brain Project have begun. Both the European Commission and the project’s leaders have now responded to a scorching open letter in which angry neuroscientists condemn the flagship project, and pledge to boycott it.

Signed by 156 top neuroscientists, including many research institute directors in Europe, the letter was sent on 7 July to the European Commission, which is funding the project’s first phase. The letter’s authors express concern about both the scientific approach in the neuroscience arm of the project, which aims to simulate brain function in supercomputers, and the general project management.

The authors make a series of demands for changes that they say are needed to make the management and governance of the Human Brain Project more transparent and representative of the scientific views of the whole community. Since the letter was sent, a further 408 neuroscientists have added their signatures.

On 10 July, the European Commission sent a bland statement to Nature,  stating that “it is too early to draw conclusions on the success or failure of the project”, given that it has only been running for nine months. The Commission’s response also says that a “divergence of views” is not unusual in large-scale projects, particularly at their beginnings and that the Commission will “continue to engage with all partners in this ambitious project”.

However, on the same day, officials met with some of the letter’s organizers for what were, according to a cautious source, “the beginnings of discussions of some of the issues”.

Later that day the leaders of the Human Brain Project published a four-page statement acknowledging that “the signatories have important concerns about the project”. The document gives no revealing details of how these concerns are likely to be addressed, but does refer to an evolution of governance as the project moves into its next phase.

 

 

 

Human-rights court rules that evidence must support compassionate therapy

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Patients do not have an automatic right to a compassionate therapy for which there is no scientific evidence of efficacy, according to a landmark ruling of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France.

The 28 May ruling referred to the case of Nivio Durisotto, whose daughter has a degenerative brain disease. He wished her to be treated with a controversial stem-cell-based therapy offered by the Stamina Foundation, based in Brescia, Italy.

But more generally, it will guide any judge facing requests from desperate patients for access to unproved therapies promoted from outside the regulated medical sector.

The judgement is yet another blow for the Stamina Foundation, whose president, Davide Vannoni, is now facing charges of fraudulently obtaining public money to support his therapy.

The Italian Medicines Agency had closed down the Stamina operations in August 2012 on safety grounds (see ‘Leaked files slam stem-cell therapy‘). In March 2013, the government issued a decree allowing patients to continue Stamina treatment if they had already begun.

Then on 11 September 2013, an expert committee appointed by the health ministry to examine the Stamina method concluded that there was no evidence to indicate that it might be efficacious (see ‘Advisers declare Italian stem-cell therapy ‘unscientific’ ‘). The committee further warned that it could be dangerous.

With encouragement from Vannoni, some patients appealed to courts for the right to treatment with the Stamina method. Some judges ruled that the treatment should be given on compassionate grounds, while others — including the judge in the Durisotto case — ruled that compassionate therapy was not justified because there was no scientific evidence of efficacy.

Durisotto brought his appeal to the European Court of Human Rights on 28 September 2013, a month after losing his case in Italy.

The European Court dismissed Durisotto’s claim, saying that the Italian court’s ruling had “pursued the legitimate aim of protecting health and was proportionate to that aim”. It further said that the Italian court’s decision had been “properly reasoned and was not arbitrary”, and that “the therapeutic value of the Stamina method had, to date, not yet been proven scientifically”. Because the case had been appropriately reasoned, it said, Durisotto’s daughter had not been discriminated against — even if some other national courts had allowed the therapy for similar medical conditions.

Munich-based patent lawyer Clara Sattler de Sousa e Brito, an expert in biomedical laws, says that this “clear ruling that scientific proof is necessary will help avoid the use of unproven therapies for so-called compassionate purposes in the future”.

 

 

European Commission rejects petition on embryonic stem cells

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The European Commission has, as predicted, turned down a request from more than 1.7 million citizens for new legislation to ban the funding of research using human embryonic stem cells, including those that do not involve destruction of new embryos.

Scientists are relieved. “It is a good decision for us and for Europe,” says stem-cell researcher Elena Cattaneo of the University of Milan, Italy, who works on Huntington’s disease. But One of Us, the organization that led the petition, claims on its website that the Commission has exercised an “unjustifiable veto which flouts the democratic procedure”.

The One of Us petition was among the first to be presented within the Commission’s new European Citizens’ Initiatives (ECIs) scheme, launched two years ago in a bid to widen participatory democracy. The ECIs have drawn criticism for their potential to be exploited by pressure groups wishing to reopen recently closed debates. (Nature‘s editorial pages joined the critics: see ‘The democracy carousel‘.)

Any ECI that can muster more than 1 million signatures across at least seven European Union countries automatically triggers a parliamentary hearing and a formal response from the Commission.

The parliamentary hearing for the One of Us initiative took place on 10 April.

Today the Commission published its reasoning for not proposing new legislation. It said that the EU Council of Member States and the European Parliament had last year debated the issue thoroughly, and no new information was available to warrant a return to the debate so soon. At the time, member states and parliament both agreed that stem-cell research held great promise for currently incurable diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, and it was thus in the public interest to support it. They also agreed that human embryonic stem cells are still sometimes required in such research.

In its statement, the Commission further pointed out that its funding rules already preclude active destruction of new embryos and require strict oversight of experiments.

The petitioners had referred to a 2011 judgement of the European Court of Justice, which ruled that patenting of inventions involving cells derived from human embryos was illegal. But the Commission said that ruling did not apply to research.

German research agencies condemn animal-rights attack on neuroscientist

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A timid silence often follows public attacks on scientists who use animals in their research. But today a group of ten heavyweight academic organisations in Germany shed its habitual reserve and raised a stern collective voice against animal-rights activists whose recent advertising campaign targeted an individual neuroscientist.

The activists overstepped the line between freedom of expression and unacceptable defamation, said the group, known as the Alliance of Science Organisations, which includes the Max Planck Society, the DFG grant-giving agency, the Conference of University Rectors and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. In particular, it said, activists depicted Andreas Kreiter, who uses monkeys in his research, as ‘not quite human’.

The row began on 16 April, when the Tierversuchsgegner Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Opponents of Animal Experiments Federal Republic of Germany) placed an aggressive full-page advertisement in two national quality newspapers and three regional newspapers.

The advertisement comprised a long treatise against animal research. It focused on Kreiter, from the University of Bremen, but also called on “all citizens” to treat every animal experimenter “with contempt and to denounce their work publicly”.

Its headline read “Kreiter cold-bloodedly carries on”, a reference to a federal court’s recent decision that local authorities in Bremen acted illegally in trying to stop his research. This legal decision had led Kreiter to believe his 16-year struggle to continue his studies into mechanisms of attention, one of the pillars of consciousness research, had finally ended. In the late 1990s Kreiter and his family had to be placed under police protection.

The advertisement set Kreiter’s photograph next to a picture of a primate with a number tattooed onto its chest, and with its head secured against movement during an experiment. It claimed that Kreiter’s experiments cruelly torment primates without yielding any medical advances.

This personalisation of the animal debate helped to spur the Alliance into action, as did the advertisement’s provocative opening quotation, attributed to neurologist and animal protectionist Herbert Stiller: “Animal experimenters are a particular type of creature – one should not casually call them human.”

The citation also precipitated an unprecedented debate in the press, because the right to human dignity is considered sacred in Germany and is enshrined in the first article of the country’s post-war constitution. During the Nazi era, categories of people like Jews, gypsies or the handicapped were declared to be ‘sub-human’ and killed.

In its public statement, the Alliance “expressly and decisively condemns” the advertisement. It says that animal research is necessary and is carried out under the tight contol of the authorities.

Welcoming the Alliance’s first public defence of animal research, neuroscientist Stefan Treue, director of the German Primate Centre in Göttingen, says that the affair “reinforces the recognition of the scientific community that we really need a public information platform where citizens and journalists can learn the facts about why animal research is needed”.

Kreiter says he is disappointed that the debate around his work has been reactivated. “This type of attack is hardly new for me,” he adds. “But these advertisements were particularly aggressive.”

 

 

Evidence of misconduct found against cardiologist

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The scientific community has long been sceptical of claims made by German cardiologist Bodo-Eckehard Strauer that stem cells derived from bone-marrow cells can repair damage in diseased hearts, and critical of his clinical trials.

Now an investigation committee at the University of Düsseldorf, where he worked until his retirement in 2009, has found evidence of scientific misconduct in papers reporting the trials’ findings, according to a statement the university sent to reporters by e-mail.

The university has referred the committee’s report to an internal disciplinary procedure, which is not expected to draw a conclusion until next year. In the meantime the university is providing no further public information about the nature of the misconduct — nor the outcome of a parallel investigation into the whether clinical trials involving 537 patients complied with rules of good clinical practice and the provisions of the German Medicines Act. But Benedikt Pannen, acting chief executive of the University Hospital in Düsseldorf, says that the report of the clinical investigation had been sent to the city’s public prosecutors.

New revelations on controversial stem-cell foundation in Italy

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Following the leak last month of a treatment protocol for a controversial stem-cell therapy earmarked for a clinical trial to be sponsored by the Italian government, further leaks from police investigations and other revelations are emerging daily about the activities of the trial’s sponsor, the Stamina Foundation.

The foundation has treated scores of seriously ill patients with the therapy since 2007, and its president Davide Vannoni has whipped up a frenzy of support among the families of dying patients to whom he claims to offer a cure. He has also so far managed to maintain political support.

Now, however, Stamina’s case appears to be unravelling.

On 12 December the newspaper La Stampa published an article describing, based on police witness accounts, how the Stamina Foundation’s roots lay in a call centre run by Vannoni, called Cognition Turin. After experiencing a partial facial paralysis in 2004, he went to Russia seeking a stem cell‒based treatment. He brought back with him two Ukrainian scientists and set up a small lab for them in Cognition’s basement, described by a police witness who had worked there as tiny and dark, with no ventilation. The lab was equipped with a couple of fridges and a few microscopes on a shelf, said the witness. Patients began to arrive from all over Italy.

In its early years, Stamina enjoyed political protection in the Piedmont region, which agreed to provide it with a grant of half a million euros to develop its stem-cell activities. But the region dropped the plan at the last minute after police in Turin began investigating possible fraud in relation to the proposed Piedmont grant. That investigation led to Vannoni being indicted for attempted fraud last month.

Patients were charged tens of thousands of euros for treatment, which consisted of extracting stem cells from their bone marrow, manipulating them in vitro (ostensibly to turn them into neurons) and delivering them back into the blood stream or spinal cords of the same patients.

Police are investigating the fate of 68 patients, or their families,  who claim they were damaged by Stamina treatment.

On 9 January, La Stampa published an interview with Milena Mattavelli, whose husband died within eleven days of his first Stamina injection, though doctors had expected him to live with his incurable disease, multiple system atrophy, for several more years.  Mattavelli said she paid Stamina €50,000 in cash and got no receipt.

In another revelation, the father of a young child treated by Stamina told the police investigators that he also paid €50,000 and had been told by Stamina to transfer the money using a description ‘contributions, donations and offerings’ because the procedure was illegal in Italy. His daughter’s condition, not named in the newspaper article, did not improve.

Nicola De Matteis, whose daughter was born with encephalopathy, ran out of money after several treatments and was told by Stamina’s physician Marino Andolina to make his wife earn it through prostitution, according to an article in La Stampa on 13 January. Andolina did not respond to an email requesting comment.

Meanwhile the University of Udine, where Vannoni had been an assistant professor in psychology, has revoked his teaching contract, saying his “role in the university is no longer compatible with his other activities as president of the Stamina Foundation.” Vannoni says he was leaving anyway to join an online university.

And more top scientists have distanced themselves from diabetes expert Camillo Ricordi from the University of Miami in Florida, who has frequently voiced support for Stamina, and who holds a potentially influential position in Italy as the new president of RiMED, a translational-medicine institute being established in Sicily whose mandate includes development of cellular therapies. Ricordi had also offered to test Stamina cells in his Miami laboratories, although on 13 January he said he would “postpone” the offer.

Immunologist Alberto Mantovani, scientific director of the Clininal Institute Humanitas IRCCS in Milan, and cell biologist Tullio Pozzan from the University of Padua have resigned from RiMED’s scientific board, citing concern that Ricordi has declined to condemn Stamina.  They join cancer researcher Carlo Croce from the Ohio State University in Columbus, who resigned for the same reason at the end of December. The scientific board is now left with just three (non-Italian) members.