Engineer Francesco Profumo was today appointed minister of education, universities and research in the technical government being put together by Mario Monti following the resignation of Silvio Berlusconi on 12 November.

Profumo, who is close to the centre-left Democratic Party, was former rector of the University of Turin until he was appointed in August as president of Italy’s National Research Council, which runs some 100 research institutes.

Italy’s chronically underfunded universities and research institutes, where academic recruitment has been stagnant for years, have recently undergone reform to make them more autonomous and to encourage them to be more efficient. One of Profumo’s challenges will be to ensure that the reforms are enacted; universities have been slow to draft their new statutes, and as a result few competitions for academic posts have been announced.

Image courtesy of www.polito.it

Musciologists value Kraftwerk as much as techno-freaks – in their quieter way, of course. The band’s pioneering electronic music in the 1970s and after was revolutionary.

Kraftwerk’s founders studied at the Dusseldorf Conservatory but quickly detoured from classical music, adopting electronics and digital themes as their own. Kraftwerk’s themes have always been technology and modern life. Think Autobahn (1974), Radio-Activity (1975), The Man-Machine (1978) or Computer World (1981).

Their music may be danceable but it is also minimalised and abstracted. It owes a debt to musicians like Karlheinz Stockhausen – and also to the minimalist and abstract art movements in which Dusseldorf was steeped in previous decades. At least that’s the interpretation of Matthias Mühling, curator of the Lenbachhaus Kunstbau, an important art gallery in Munich, who invited Kraftwerk to create a sort of ‘retrospective’ of its music, using new film technologies.

The exhibition opens 14 October at Munich’s Lenbachhaus Kunstbau.

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Italian scientists are exceptionally good at winning European Research Council (ERC) grants. That means a lot, since ERC Starting Grants and Advanced Grants are highly prestigious and unusually lucrative – they can bring up to €3.5 million to the host institute over five years, enough to establish a well-endowed research group.

Yet rules at home make it so complicated to operate the grants that a large proportion of Italian winners choose to bring them to a host institute in another European country – meaning that Italian institutions (such as the University of Padua, right) lose out.

Now 30 ERC grant holders working in Italy have written to their research minister, Mariastella Gelmini, asking that they be excluded from a number of restrictions introduced in a new law on universities which came into effect in January. The law was designed to regularise national academic hiring practices, but in practice sets conditions that are not internationally competitive.

They also ask to be independent of controversial 2008 rules restricting turnover of academic staff. The government hopes to save money by gradually reducing the total number of professors at Italian universities.

“The research ministry was not thinking about ERC grants when they wrote these rules,” says particle physicist Vincenzo Greco at the University of Catania, who won an ERC Starting Grant in 2009 and signed the letter. “It doesn’t make sense that all the rules should apply when money is brought in from outside – particularly when it is intended to bring a culture of excellence with it.”

The twists and turns of the new universities law mean that a grant holder wishing to spend part of the grant on hiring academic colleagues for his or her research group has two options, both unattractive.

One option is a one-size-fits-all contract for a maximum of four years which offers no pension. “This makes it hard to attract a person from abroad with the skills you might want; even if you find someone suitable in Italy, you feel guilty that you are depriving him or her of years of pension,” says ERC grant-holder Guildo Martinelli, director of SISSA (International School for Advanced Studies) in Trieste, who organised the petition to the ministry.

The second option – rather theoretical in practice – is a faculty position. Even though money for an ERC grant comes from outside Italy, the research ministry requires that an ERC associate professorship, for example, be considered as one of the fixed number of faculty positions available. The grant holder would firstly have to fight for one of the rare positions internally – and then take it through a national competition. Even if successful, those procedures could take a year or more, making it somewhat unrealistic in the context of a five-year grant, particularly since the outcome of a national competition may not be predictable. In any case, such a position would by definition carry a significant teaching load which a foreign researcher might find unattractive.

The letter asks the ministry to allow more flexibility in fixed-term contracts for researchers hired on external grants. It also says that a new position of research professor should be created which would allow academics to be hired fixed-term on a regular contract without teaching requirements. The current situation, where scientists designated as excellent by the ERC are unable to operate competitively in Italian universities, is “absurd”, it says.

The European Commission, which finances the independent ERC, said that it was aware of the problem and “it is up to the Italian ministry to respond to the researchers’ letter”.

But advanced ERC grant holder Massimo Inguscio, says the situation is “not so dramatic”. He signed the letter because there are “clear problems” he says, but he thinks they will be addressed. The new university law includes a clause which could allow special status for those holding European grants, he points out. “The ministry is already trying to make rules that will work for ERC grant holders.”

German politicians found guilty of plagiarism have seen their careers stumble. First came the forced resignation in March of the German defence minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg – the University of Bayreuth withdrew his PhD thesis after identifying extensive plagiarism. Other German politicians wielding doctor titles were then gleefully been targeted by plagiarism software users. Only last month, Silvana Koch-Mehrin of Germany’s Free Democratic Party (FDP) was forced to withdraw from the European Parliament’s Committee on Industry, Research and Energy after the University of Heidelberg had revoked her plagiarizing PhD. Her predecessor on the committee, Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, had his own PhD revoked by the University of Bonn last week for plagiarism.

In Turkey, on the other hand, a controversial charge of plagiarism has not stopped Ömer Dinçer from being appointed minister of education in Prime Minister Erdogan’s new government. The new government was approved by parliament on 13 July.

Dinçer got his PhD from İstanbul University School of Business Administration in 1984. He went on to build up a high flying academic career in parallel with a political career, becoming chief undersecretary in Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s first government in 2003, and minister of labour in Erdoğan’s second government after 2007 elections.

But he lost his title of professor in 2005 when the Turkish Council of Higher Education YÖK identified extensive plagiarism in his academic book Introduction to Business Administration. Dinçer appealed the charge, but it was upheld in court.

On 8 July newspapers reported that YÖK had quietly cleared him early this year to the dismay of many academics. YÖK confirmed to Nature that it had withdrawn the charge but did not provide reasons.

Dinçer has told newspapers that the charge of plagiarism was part of a smear campaign from a supposed network of people, known as Ergenekon, who favour a military coup.

Posted on behalf of Marian Turner

The next 24 hours will be critical for scientists in Germany who are trying to understand if an outbreak of infections from a deadly strain of E. coli currently sweeping the country is a severe instance of a normal infection, or something different.

Three women have died today from suspected infections with the bacteria enterohaemorrhagic Escherichia coli (EHEC) which causes dysentery-like, bloody diarrhoea, severe cramping and fever. Health authorities have registered a further 400 confirmed cases – mostly young women. First cases emerged barely two weeks ago and authorities have been shocked at the rate at which this outbreak has spread.

At least a hundred patients are being treated in hospital. The Robert Koch Institute, the national institute responsible for disease control, confirmed this morning that 80 patients with EHEC infection had gone on to develop the life-threatening haemolytic uraemic syndrome (HUS), which can lead to acute kidney failure.

Today’s deaths were of two women in their 80s – one of these has already been confirmed as an EHEC case – and one young woman.

Normally just a thousand or so cases of EHEC are reported in Germany over the course of a year, and these happen mostly in children. So health authorities are perplexed that this time most victims have so far been young adult women, not a group typically prone to infection.

Early cases were confined to northern Germany, but this afternoon, the first suspected cases have been reported in the southern German state of Bavaria.

Martin Aepfelbacher at the Hamburg-Eppendorf University Clinic says the patient specimens that have come into his clinic are revealing E. coli strains that haven’t been seen in outbreaks in Germany in the past. The normal EHEC strain is called 0157:H7, but antibodies to this strain, which scientists usually use to diagnose the infection, are not reacting with the patient samples. The bacterial strains currently infecting patients also show different biology to known EHEC strains.

According to Aepfelbacher, these different strains are also showing up in other clinics around the country. “This is not a cause for concern at the moment” says Aepfelbacher, adding that treatment for patients is not dependent on the bacterial strain. “But further analysis of these unusual strains – like deep sequencing – might tell us more about their pathogenicity, and maybe give us clues as to why this outbreak is behaving differently”.

EHEC strains of E. coli are endemic in cattle and typically passed to humans through contaminated foods such as undercooked meat or raw milk products. The German authorities are frantically searching for the source of this outbreak. They currently think people may have the contracted the infection from fruit or vegetables from fields fertilized with manure. This may explain the predominance of cases in young women – those buying, and handling, the foods.

Germans are being advised to thoroughly wash fruit and vegetables, and preferably cook them at high heat to kill bacteria. Anyone with diarrhoeal symptoms is recommended to contact a doctor immediately.

The elaborate webpage of one of the world’s most notorious stem cell-therapy clinics – where an 18-month old boy died, and a ten-year old boy nearly died, under treatment last year – shrunk dramatically last week. Now there is just a single, short – and somewhat disingenuous – page. ‘Due to a new development in German law, stem cell therapy is currently not possible to perform at the XCell-Center’, the page says. ’Regretfully for this reason, we must cancel your appointment until further notice.’

The centre, which has units in Düsseldorf and Cologne, opened in 2007. It offered treatments involving manipulating stem cells derived from bone marrow and injecting them into the brain, spinal cord or other body parts of patients. German stem cell scientists were quick to criticise its brazen claims that the transplanted stem cells could even help heal devastating neurological diseases such as multiple sclerosis or the consequence of stroke.

Despite their expressions of concernand numerous exposés in the media describing some of the therapies to be at best useless and at worst dangerous, the centre continued to operate, attracting thousands of patients each year. Treatments cost up to €26,000.

The problem became apparent when the European Union attempted to control innovative new therapies based on biotechnological or tissue engineering – including cell-based therapies – in a 2007 regulation which introduces an EU-wide licence recommended by the European Medicines Agency. In Germany, hospital doctors had been allowed to use such therapies without a specific license on an experimental basis on individual patients.

The regulation was implemented into German law in July 2009. It included a so-called ‘hospital exemption’ allowing EU member states to regulate non-routinely manufactured products according to their own national laws. The Paul Ehrlich Institute, the federal biomedicines authority, was put in charge of authorising hospital exemptions in Germany. But an 18-month transition period was allowed for tissue-engineered already being manufactured non-routinely, like the XCell stem cell therapies.

This is why XCell had been able to continue operations. But when the transition period ran out in January this year, the Paul Ehrlich Institute noted that the company had not applied for licenses covering all of the medical therapies they offered on their website. It issued an order to cease operations involving transfer of stem cells on 21 April. That order was executed by the regional health authorities within a few days.

In fact, the Paul Ehrlich Institute had already issued a report to the regional health authorities last year, after the death of the 18-month old, declaring that XCell’s products and procedures for injection of stem cells under the arachnoid membrane of the brain and spinal cord were unsafe and should therefore not be used.

The company is not speaking to the press.

If XCell wishes to apply for licenses to continue some of its activities this year, it will have to submit a formal application to the Paul Ehrlich Institute supported by data on proof-of-concept studies, says the institute’s president Klaus Cichutek. Otherwise it will have to apply to the European Medicines Agency in 2012, providing also supporting clinical trial data. “We will support any company’s efforts to develop advanced therapies in authorised controlled clinical trials, if the benefit-risk ratio is acceptable,” says Cichutek.

Local public prosecutors are considering charges of malpractice and mismanagement against an XCell doctor and the company’s management. Stem cell scientists in Germany and elsewhere are also concerned that the XCell affair could taint prospects for future stem-cell based therapies.

The Fukushima disaster has shaken public confidence worldwide in the safety of nuclear power stations. Most governments have proven reluctant to pull the plug on their nuclear power stations entirely, promising instead to rethink strategies and undertake safety checks.

On March 15th, the European Union decided to apply stress tests to its nuclear reactors to see how they would perform during earthquakes or other disasters. The tests are voluntary.

Switzerland, an associated EU member, suspended plans to build three new reactors and is carrying out safety tests on its existing five reactors. The country will not take part in the EU stress tests, arguing that they would take too long; test criteria have not yet been decided. Swiss engineers plan to have results of their own safety tests by the end of this month.

In other EU countries, Germany, which has 17 reactors, has taken the most extreme action by temporarily switching off its seven oldest, pending safety tests. A three-month moratorium has been slapped on plans to extend life-spans of nuclear reactors.

The two EU countries with the largest number of reactors — Britain, which has 19 and four in planning, and France, which has 58 reactors and two in planning – have planned safety reviews but will not delay their expansion plans.

Italy, Poland and the Czech Republic will similarly stick to their plans to begin nuclear power programmes, say their governments.

Russia will safety test its 32 existing nuclear power plants but will continue its plans to build more – 11 are already in construction and 14 more are planned.

China adopted a surprisingly sensitive stance in the face of a population deeply fearful of contamination from Fukushima. On March 17 it announced plans to temporarily suspend work on 26 or so nuclear reactors currently under construction, pending revision of safety standards, to safety check its 13 operating reactors, and to reconsider longer-term expansion plans for its nuclear programme involving at least 60 more reactors.

In other earthquake-prone countries, expansion of nuclear programmes is continuing undeterred. India, which has 20 reactors, will continue its ambitious nuclear programme to add a further 23. Its government says that all required safety measures will be taken. Turkey will continue plans to build its first four reactors at a site near Mersin on its eastern Mediterranean coast. Chile says it is not planning to build nuclear plants, but has nonetheless signed recent agreements with France and the US to train nuclear engineers. It signed the US agreement on 18 March.

On 17 March, US president Barack Obama ordered a comprehensive safety review of nuclear facilities in the United States, while voicing support for nuclear energy.

For full coverage of the Fukushima disaster, go to Nature’s news special.

China has temporarily suspended work on 26 or so nuclear reactors currently under construction, pending revision of its safety standards.

The decision was made at a meeting of China’s State Council today, and reflects the country’s increasing concern about safety following the nuclear accident at Fukushima, Japan.

A statement from the State Council said that existing nuclear plants would also be checked for safety. Medium- and long-term plans for expansion of its nuclear programme would be re-considered, it said.

China has 13 reactors in operation and plans to increase that number to 110 in the next decade or so, to reduce its current dependence on coal. There are currently 440 nuclear power stations operating in the world in 30 countries.