Author Archives: Davide Castelvecchi

Sponsor a fish and save Canada’s experimental lakes

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Canada’s Experimental Lakes Area is now raising crowdfunding donations.{credit}Government of Ontario{/credit}

Posted on behalf of Brian Owens.

Fans of environmental science can now have a direct role in helping Canada’s unique Experimental Lakes Area (ELA) continue to do the research it has done for decades.

The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), based in Winnipeg, took over running the ELA on 1 April, after the federal government eliminated funding for the decades-old environmental research facility (see ‘Test lakes face closure’ and ‘Last minute reprieve for Canada’s research lakes’). The Canadian provinces of Ontario and Manitoba have stepped in to provide money to run the facility and conduct research for the next several years, but more cash is needed to restore research at the ELA to its former levels.

So the IISD has turned to the public. It launched an appeal on the crowdfunding site Indiegogo seeking contributions to expand research and make the ELA less dependent on government largesse.

Along with the usual array of magnets and t-shirts offered as perks by typical crowdfunding campaigns, the IISD has a few unique offers. For CAN$100 (US$90) you can sponsor a plankton count in one sample of lake water, and for CAN$200 you can sponsor a fish in one of the lakes. When your trout, white sucker or pike is caught and tagged, researchers will send you a photo of it and keep you updated on its life for the next five years, every time it is recaptured.

And if you’re feeling really generous (and have a high tolerance for mosquito bites), CAN$2,000 gets you a spot on a tour of the ELA. If that seems a bit steep, there is a cheaper option. Send them CAN$60 and a digital photo of yourself, and they will Photoshop you into a picture of Lake 239.

South Korean Supreme Court confirms Hwang’s sentence

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Posted on behalf of David Cyranoski and Soo Bin Park.

The South Korean Supreme Court has upheld a 2010 ruling that sentences disgraced cloning expert Woo Suk Hwang to a one-and-a-half-year prison term for embezzlement and violation of the country’s bioethics law. The term comes with a two-year probation, however, and if Hwang does not commit a crime during that period, he will not have to serve jail time at all. This is the final judgment on a trial that started in 2006 and reached its first verdict in 2009 after 43 hearings involving 60 witnesses.

In a separate judgment also handed down yesterday — one that might be more troubling for Hwang — the Supreme Court overturned an earlier decision that would have forced Seoul National University (SNU) to reinstate Hwang.

Hwang received a doctorate degree in veterinary medicine from SNU in 1982 and had been a professor there since 1986 (see ‘Timeline of controversy‘). In March 2006, in the wake of the finding that his team had fabricated data in the two human therapeutic cloning papers and Hwang’s admission that he had ordered some of that fabrication, SNU fired Hwang. (Other members of the team, including as Curie Ahn and BC Lee, retained their positions.)

In 2006 Hwang sued to get his position back. He lost that initial court battle, but in November 2011 a Seoul court of appeals decided in favour of Hwang, saying that firing him was excessive given uncertainty over details of Hwang’s role in the fraud.

The Supreme Court has now annulled that judgment, leaving Hwang without claim to the professorship. The court noted Hwang’s responsibility as leader of the group that fabricated data and his role in ordering some of that fabrication. It added that such discipline is necessary to restore the public’s confidence in the university.

Hwang, who is now the head of increasingly visible animal-cloning institute in Seoul, did receive happier news earlier this month when the US patent office granted his application for a patent on methods used to create cloned human embryonic stem cells. All of stem cell lines that Hwang claimed to have made using that process were found to be faked.

Hollande pledges to avoid cuts to France’s science funding

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Posted on behalf of Barbara Casassus.

PARIS – French President François Hollande today promised to spare the research and higher-education budget from savings of €50 billion (US$67 billion) that his government has pledged to find over the next three years to reign in its massive public deficit.

The government will find other ways to cut the deficit, avoid tax increases and ensure business can increase investment and create jobs, he said during a visit to the University of Strasbourg.

In a speech devoted entirely to research and higher education, Hollande also said he would maintain the controversial research tax credit (CIR) because companies appreciate it and it helps attracts foreign investment.

Reacting to the speech, Dominique Guellec, head of country studies at the Science, Technology and Industry division of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), said the CIR is a good measure, but has become far too costly.

“It has failed to boost private-sector R&D spending as intended,” Guellec told Nature. “Its cost to the country is rising from €1.5 billion in 2008 to a projected €7 billion next year. But at the same time, companies have sharply reduced R&D outlays from their own resources.”

On the cash front, Hollande also pledged €2 billion ($2.71 billion) out of the €12 billion for the second Investments for the Future programme announced in July to the so-called initiatives of excellence, which are aimed to create world-class research and higher-education clusters. Eight, including Strasbourg, were created in the first round in 2011 when conservative president Nicolas Sarkozy was still in office.

Hollande added that another €1 billion would be earmarked to help regional universities boost their cooperative research and €100 million over five years would go to systems biology.

During a round table with students, Hollande floated the idea of creating a European campus in Strasbourg and said that he would raise the issue at the next Franco-German council of ministers meeting in Paris on 19 February, according to press reports.

Climate comments push open-access publisher to terminate journal

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Posted on behalf of Andy Extance.

A German academic publisher that has journals of respected scientific societies among its titles has announced that it shut down its journal Pattern Recognition in Physics, citing what it calls nepotistic reviewing and malpractice. The firm, Copernicus Publications of Göttingen, Germany, was responding to a recent special issue on ‘solar variability’. “The special issue editors ultimately submitted their conclusions in which they ‘doubt the continued, even accelerated, warming as claimed by the IPCC project,'” the publisher wrote in its statement.

The move has quickly attracted the ire of climate-change sceptics. “I’m shocked at this censorship of science,” responded Roger Tattersall on his blog after the decision on Friday. Tattersall, a web-content editor at the School of Education of the University of Leeds, UK, has published papers in the journal and has served as one of its referees.

But Copernicus also cited concerns over how the troublesome special issue‘s authors reached their conclusion regarding the role of solar variability. Author names recur frequently on different papers, and Copernicus’ ‘public peer review’ reveals the same names again as editors and reviewers. “The editors selected the referees on a nepotistic basis, which we regard as malpractice in scientific publishing,” Copernicus asserted. Nature has requested comments from the editors of the now-defunct journal.

The journal was controversial from its outset, thanks partly to the two co-editors-in-chief, Sid-Ali Ouadfeul, from the Algerian Petroleum Institute in Boumerdès, and geophysicist Nils-Axel Morner, formerly of Stockholm University, but now retired.

In July 2013, Scholarly Open Access, a watchdog blog written by Jeffrey Beall, a Colorado librarian, warned that Ouadfeul had few journal citations to his name, and pointed to Morner’s reputation as a climate sceptic. Beall also saw a similar pattern to the special issue. “The journal so far contains only five articles: two articles by a co-editor (Ouadfeul), two by climate sceptics whose views align with the other editor (Morner), and one article bearing a significant amount of self-plagiarism,” he wrote at the time.

Copernicus, whose journals include titles published on behalf of scientific societies such as the European Geosciences Union, will keep the controversial papers available online, its statement said, but it now wants to “distance itself from the apparent misuse of the originally agreed aims and scope of the journal”.

India’s heavy-lift rocket passes crucial test

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Posted on behalf of Sanjay Kumar.

With the successful liftoff of a Geo-Synchronous Launch Vehicle (GSLV) D 5 yesterday, India became the sixth nation to possess cryogenic propulsion rocket technology. The 415-tonne rocket successfully injected a 2-tonne communications satellite into the intended geosynchronous orbit, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has announced.

Cryogenic engines burn liquid oxygen and hydrogen, which liquefy at ‒183 °C and ‒253 °C respectively, and provide more thrust per kilogram of propellant, compared to room-temperature liquid fuels such as hydrazine or to solid fuels. The only countries that had the technology so far were the US, Russia, France, Japan and China.

Cryogenic technology is required for putting heavy payloads into orbit, and its lack had been ISRO’s proverbial Achilles’ heel for more than two decades, denting its capabilities.

In January 1991 India signed an agreement with the erstwhile Soviet Union to acquire cryogenic engines and also transfer technology. With the break-up of the Soviet Union later that year, and under pressure from the US, which alleged the sale would violate the Missile Technology Control Regime, the Russian government reneged on it promise of technology transfer while agreeing to provide seven cryogenic engines.

India was then forced to develop its own cryogenic technology, but its journey has been quite turbulent.

Since its first experimental launch in 2001, the GSLV has faced four failures in seven launches. In April 2010, a GSLV fitted with an indigenously built cryogenic upper stage and carrying an experimental communications satellite went off course and fell into the Indian Ocean. In August 2013, a scheduled launch was abruptly cancelled just few hours before lift-off, when a leak was detected in the hydrazine fuel system of the rocket’s second stage.

India’s cryogenic technology programme also took center stage in a high-profile scandal when leading scientists S. Nambi Narayan and D. Sasikumaran were arrested in 1994 on espionage charges. Nambi Narayan was later exonerated.

With GSLV D5’s success, India will now be able to launch its heavy satellites at a fraction of the price other space agencies charge for launches. The technology will also come handy for the country’s lunar mission Chandrayaan-2, as well as for future manned space flights.

 

Patient’s suicide forces belated university investigation

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Posted on behalf of David Cyranoski.

In May 2004 Daniel Markingson, a patient with schizophrenia in an anti-psychotic drug trial at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, “stabbed himself to death in the bathtub with a box cutter, ripping open his abdomen and nearly decapitating himself,” as a magazine article would report six years later.

Controversy has rumbled since the story broke in May 2008. Should Markingson have been in the trial in the first place? Should he have been removed from it earlier? Were those running the trial negligent and, if so, does the university share responsibility?

The university has consistently denied wrongdoing. Critics, mainly bioethicists, have maintained that there are many unresolved issues. On 5 December, the university faculty senate agreed that there was a need for investigation into the way the university handles clinical research — but the ambiguous wording of its official statement has started another round of debate about how it will proceed.

The study, begun in March 2002 and sponsored by AstraZeneca, compared the tolerability and efficacy of three antipsychotic drugs that were already on the market. Stephen Olson, a psychiatry professor at the university, enrolled Markingson, his patient. Markingson’s condition deteriorated until his suicide.

Markingson’s mother, Mary Weiss, who had been trying to remove her son from the study for months, sued the university, Olson, the drug company and other parties. The court dismissed the various claims raised on legal grounds (“statutory immunity”) except for testimony that Olson failed to monitor Markingson’s compliance with the drug protocol and withheld information on risks and benefits of other treatments. This led him “to enter a drug study in which he was inadequately monitored, untreated, with this lack of treatment causing his psychosis to persist, thus causing his death by ritualistic, psychotic, suicide”.

In April 2008, Weiss and Olson settled out of court for US$75,000. University administrators have themselves called this a “nominal” fee, and Weiss told Mother Jones magazine in the 2010 article that it would not cover her own legal expenses. She also said that she agreed to a settlement only after the university threatened to sue her for court fees — a highly unusual request in the US legal system.

The university administration has since insisted that the case was closed, pointing to the court ruling and to other “examinations”, such as those by the US Food and Drug Administration and the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice.

Bioethicists, however, continue to argue that, legal considerations aside, the university should establish responsibility, particularly about whether Markingson had been coerced into entering the trial and whether doctors missed warning signs. They point to Olson’s conflict of interest in enrolling his own patient in a study by which he stood to gain financially, and the fact that Olson had testified that Markingson “was mentally ill and lacked the capacity to make decisions regarding his medical treatment” a week before getting his informed consent to put him in the trial.

On 14 November, a letter to the Faculty Consultative Committee accompanied by 175 signatures of bioethicists, psychiatrists and legal experts, argued that each of the reviews that the university used to defend itself was either flawed or misinterpreted into suggesting that there was no wrongdoing. The letter called for an independent investigation.

The faculty senate resolution passed on 5 December calls for just that: “an independent and transparent examination”. The resolution says that “previous investigations did not address the broader question of whether the university’s procedures, practices and policies governing clinical research on human subjects, some of them changed since the Markingson case, reflect both best practices in clinical research on human subjects and the faculties high ambitions for ethical behavior”. The resolution passed 67 to 23.

Carl Elliott, a bioethicist at the university who has been pushing in vain for a re-investigation for years, was happily surprised to see member after member speaking in support of the measure at the senate hearing. He was also surprised to see Olson, who had generally shied away from making public statements about the case, step up to the microphone to defend himself with what Elliott considers a questionable comparison. Olson said: “Cancer patients die in cancer studies all the time, and it’s not a surprise that people with mental illness will die in a trial of mental illness.”

But will this new investigation put the matter to rest? The resolution specified an investigation of “current” practices and makes no explicit reference to re-opening the Markingson case, although it mentions it as the trigger for its investigation and it includes a clause noting the special demands for “oversight of clinical research involving adult participants with diminished functional abilities” — a clear reference to Markingson.

On 10 December, university president Eric Kaler told the Minnesota Daily, a student-run newspaper, that he is “willing to take the advice of the Senate and the panel”, with the goal of airing “out clearly and very publicly what we do and have a panel of external experts validate that and be sure we are doing this absolutely as well as can be done”. But, he added, it will not examine the Markingson case: “It’s not a review of the Markingson case; it’s a review of what we are doing now and what we’re going to do moving forward.”

The next day, on 11 December, Trudo Lemmens, a professor of health law and policy at the University of Toronto in Canada, and five of the other authors behind the petition, wrote to Kaler to tell him that their concerns would be met only if “the investigation covers problems in the Markingson case and examines whether other similar cases exist”.

Whether the Markingson case gets the thorough look Lemmens and others hope for might hinge on whether the committee is truly independent.

UK government’s overspending could hit science budget

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Posted on behalf of Elizabeth Gibney.

Leaked documents suggest that the UK research budget may be cut by 2%, or around £200 million, over two years.

The revelations came in an internal memo from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills that lays out a package of measures ministers are said to be discussing to balance the department’s budget.

The document — a brief for a meeting between universities and science minister David Willetts and business secretary Vince Cable — outlines how £100 million of the total science ‘ring fence’  for each year could be spent on items that were previously budgeted elsewhere — effectively cutting the money available for research.

Knock-on cuts within the science budget could be manifested in the loss of 700 PhD studentships and close to 2,000 full-time academic positions, or alternatively in the “closure of a large UK-based facility”, the Guardian reported on 22 November.

The science ring fence, which includes funding for the UK Research Councils — the seven main research funding agencies — and core research funding allocated by the Higher Education Funding Council for England, has been frozen at £4.6 billion since 2010, without keeping up with inflation.

The newspaper also reports that higher education could be hit more widely as part of the range of cuts aimed at filling a reported £1.4-billion hole in the BIS budget. The Guardian‘s report says the shortfall came from a failure to police and apply controls on the number of students admitted to the country’s universities.

A BIS spokesperson said the department would not comment on leaks, adding: “Work continues to resolve the difficult but important challenge of balancing the departmental books while not damaging growth. A range of proposals are being considered but final decisions have not been made.”

Sarah Main, who heads the Campaign for Science and Engineering, a non-profit organization, says the options presented in the memo illustrate the seriousness of on-going negotiations in BIS to make savings.

“Negotiations will continue, and the details are likely to be different when the allocation is officially announced at the end of this year. But the scenarios presented in this document show that the outcomes could be pretty severe,” says Main.

She also noted the struggle UK scientist and universities have faced under the flat-cash budget since 2010. “Instead of a continued and ever-tighter squeeze, we want to see a long-term plan for government investment in science that will enable us to be a world-leading scientific nation for generations to come,” she adds.

Frances Saunders, president of the Institute of Physics, says, “We don’t comment on leaks but it’s hard to imagine how a government that has been so supportive of science could be considering this option.”

Taiwan scientist’s findings did not constitute defamation

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Posted on behalf of Michele Catanzaro.

The legal odyssey of Taiwanese environmental engineer Ben-Jei Tsuang has come to an end, as the petrochemical company that had accused him of libel did not appeal an earlier ‘not guilty’ verdict by the legally-required deadline of 20 November. The company had claimed that Tsuang’s release of data linking a petrochemical plant to increased cancer rates amounted to libel.

Tsuang, an environmental engineer at National Chung Hsing University in Taichung, presented evidence of correlations between FPG’s emissions and cancer in a scientific conference in December 2010 and in a press conference in November 2011. A paper containing these results is currently submitted to Atmospheric Environment.

In April 2012, two units of the FPG group filed a civil suit against Tsuang for libel, asking for US$1.33 million in damages and for him to publish an apology in four major newspapers; they also filed a criminal complaint that accused him of defamation. In response, more than 1,000 academics, including Nobel chemistry laureate Lee Yuan Tseh, signed an open letter in support of Tsuang (see letter in Chinese).

In findings issued on 4 September, the Taipei District Court ruled in favour of Tsuang in both the civil and the criminal case.

The court subsequently issued its reasoning, in which it deemed Tsuang’s statements as “fair comment on facts subject to public criticism”. The court noted that Tsuang’s arguments would not be considered libellous even if their content were eventually proven to be false. “The content of the defendant’s speech is deeply related to the life, health and safety of the public… and since the FPG affiliates voluntarily engaged in activities that implicate public health, they should be more prepared to tolerate the criticism,” the sentence states.

The company had until 20 November to appeal the court’s rulings, and its apparent decision not to do so effectively closes the case and clears Tsuang of any wrongdoing.

Tsuang has repeatedly said that FPG’s actions are part of a strategy of intimidation to keep scientists quiet. “The case is over, but the struggle is not finished,” he says.

Balzan prizes honour research on ‘spooky action at a distance’ and infectious bacteria

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ASPECT_Inst_Optique

Alain Aspect
CREDIT: International Balzan Prize Foundation

A physicist and a bacteriologist, both French, have claimed two of this year’s Balzan prizes, each worth 750,000 Swiss francs (US$ 800,000), the Italo-Swiss International Balzan Prize Foundation announced today.

Physicist Alain Aspect of the École Polytechnique in Palaiseau, France, is being honoured “for his pioneering experiments which led to a striking confirmation of quantum mechanics as opposed to local hidden-variable theories,” a statement by the foundation said. In the 1980s Aspect dazzled the physics community by demonstrating an effect that Albert Einstein had derisively named ‘spooky action at a distance’.

In 1935, Einstein, in work with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, had shown theoretically that quantum theory predicts that two particles can have their quantum states ‘entangled’, so that altering the state of one of the particle seemingly affects the state of the other particle instantaneously — something the three physicists regarded as a paradox that proved that quantum physics was wrong or, at best, incomplete. After Aspect’s first proof of principle, the EPR effect has now become a staple of ‘quantum weirdness’ experiments, and is at the heart of so-called quantum teleportation.

PascaleCOSSART_2

Pascale Cossart
CREDIT: International Balzan Prize Foundation

Aspect is a previous recipient of several awards, including the Wolf Prize.

Bacteriologist Pascale Cossart of the Pasteur Institute in Paris was recognized “for her seminal discoveries on the molecular biology of pathogenic bacteria and their interaction with host cells”, the Balzan foundation statement said.  Cossart’s most celebrated achievement was that she worked out how the intracellular bacteria pathogen Listeria monocytogenes enters and takes over host cells. She has previously been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Robert Koch prize.

Ewen Callaway contributed reporting.

Swedish scientists decry government links to anti-GMO ‘vandals’

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Posted on behalf of Marta Paterlini.

A group of Swedish scientists challenged their government in an open letter on 22 October in which they alleged that Swedish foreign aid has supported vandalism in the Philippines against research plots of genetically modified crops.

Last August, a group of Philippine anti-GMO activists attacked and destroyed a field trial of so-called ‘golden rice’ in the Bicol region. The trial was being conducted by the government’s Philippine Rice Research Institute, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), and other public-sector partners. IRRI, whose general director, Robert Zeigler, also signed the open letter, is supported by Sweden through foreign aid to the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, CGIAR.

Among the protesters, Philippine authorities identified members of MASIPAG, an organisation that expressed support for the attack on its webpage.

MASIPAG is one of the bodies funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, an agency of the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, through funds to the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation (Naturskyddsföreningen SSNC).

In the open letter, the writers voice concerns that Swedish aid funds are used “to sabotage research that aims at mitigating human suffering”.

A week later the minister for development cooperation, Hillevi Engström, wrote a reply which said, in part: “Foreign aid intended for agricultural development should obviously never be used to finance criminal activities,” and “SIDA has a clear mandate to conduct effective aid and combat fraud in its handling of aid efforts.”

Charlotte Petri-Gornitzka, SIDA’s
 general director, said in a statement, “It may seem strange that Swedish aid goes to IRRI’s work to develop GM crops and simultaneously supports organisations such as MASIPAG to develop alternatives to these GM crops — and even campaigning against them.” She added that Swedish aid funds may not be used in illegal actions, and that SIDA might reconsider the support to organisations that are involved in illegal actions. SIDA has appointed SSNC to investigate if and how MASIPAG has given support to individual farmers in connection with vandalism acts.

In an email to Nature, SSNC president Mikael Karlsson claimed that there is no evidence supporting the accusation in the scientists’ letter that MASIPAG was involved in the uprooting, or that SIDA’s money financed that event.

Jens Sundström, a plant biologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala and one of the authors of the letter, told Nature that he finds Karlsson’s statement surprising, because the open letter provided links to official documents that alleged that unnamed MASIPAG members took part in the acts.

Sundström also says he’s troubled that the Swedish government seems to have accepted what he calls a “false dichotomy” between traditional and modern farming. “Both activities must be founded in science to be successful, and would both benefit if we just could co-operate.”