Imperial College cleared of animal-cruelty allegations

Posted on 02 Oct 2014 by Daniel Cressey

{credit}Courtesy of Imperial College London{/credit}

One of the United Kingdom’s leading universities has been cleared of charges of animal cruelty at the end of a long-running and contentious series of investigations, an official report has concluded. However, the report found that Imperial College London had a “widespread poor culture of care” in its animal-research labs.

The controversy began in April 2013, when the London-based British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) revealed that it had conducted an undercover investigation in 2012 at Imperial, and alleged that this had uncovered large-scale suffering and breaches of the law.

An official Home Office investigation into the BUAV allegations, the report of which is released today and refers to Imperial only as ‘the Establishment’, concludes: “Overall, the animal rights organisation’s allegations of cruelty at the Establishment have not been substantiated.”

The Home Office report says that more than 180 individual allegations were made, and only five were substantiated. These five led to formal non-compliance cases, resulting in sanctions to eight individuals, including letters of reprimand and further training. However it also says these non-compliances with regulations were “of a persistent nature” and “could broadly be traced back to failing in management structures”.

“It is concluded that there was a widespread poor culture of care,” says the report.

In December 2013, an independent academic review of Imperial’s animal-research culture found serious problems with Imperial’s animal research (see ‘Report slams university’s animal research’).

Earlier this year it emerged that government inspectors had expressed concerns about animal research at Imperial before the BUAV allegations, and the university official responsible for animal research stepped down from that role.

In a statement released today, James Stirling, the university’s provost, said: “We welcome the publication of the report about this extensive Home Office investigation, which shows that the vast majority of the allegations made against Imperial by BUAV have not been substantiated. … We recognise that there have been problems with the culture and management around our animal research. We are sorry for these shortcomings and we have addressed them through considerable efforts and investment in our animal research infrastructure, to improve our culture of care and to ensure that we meet the very highest standards in our animal research.”

In response, BUAV head Michelle Thew said that there was “continuing complacency” at Imperial and that today’s report highlighted the need to reform the government inspection regime.

“Problems identified [by the Home Office] in 2012 were still documented by the subsequent BUAV investigation, with a leisurely inspection regime and mild sanctions such as a requirement for further training failing to breach the wall of indifference,” Thew’s statement said. “The conclusion is that the system is simply inadequate to enforce the standards that it purports to uphold.”

UK and US universities slip in latest rankings

Posted on 02 Oct 2014 by Elizabeth Gibney

The California Institute of Technology was ranked #1 university in the world by the Times Higher Education, but overall the US lost three institutions from the top-200.
{credit}Bob Paz/Caltech{/credit}

Universities in both the United States and United Kingdom slipped slightly down the tables in the latest Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2014-15, released on 1 October.

Both countries still dominate the rankings, with 103 of the top 200 institutions — and the totality of the top 12 spots — between them. The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena topped the table for the fourth year in a row (see Top 10 below). But overall the US lost three institutions from the top 200, and the UK lost two. According to THE, over four years the US has suffered the largest total loss in rankings position.

Meanwhile universities on the Asian continent continued to rise within the ranking, with China, Russia and Hong Kong gaining one top 200 representative each, and Turkey gaining three. German universities also increased their representation, with two new top-200 entrants.

The rankings, which were revamped in 2010, try to measure an institution’s research, teaching, knowledge transfer and international outlook, based on 13 criteria, which include a reputation survey, subject-averaged citation impact, income from industry and international co-authorship.

Flaws in such rankings are well documented (see ‘University rankings ranked’), but the annual tables continue to prove popular among students and policymakers. The THE results come on the back of the QS World University Rankings, which painted a rosier picture for UK universities.

2014-15 Rank	2013-14 Rank	Institution name
1	1	California Institute of Technology
2	2	Harvard University
3	2	University of Oxford
4	4	Stanford University
5	7	University of Cambridge
6	5	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
7	6	Princeton University
8	8	University of California, Berkeley
9	10	Imperial College London

Scripps president resigns after faculty revolt

Posted on 23 Jul 2014 by Erika Check Hayden

The president of the Scripps Research Institute intends to leave his post, according to a statement from Richard Gephardt, the chair of the institute’s board of trustees. The announcement came in the wake of a faculty rebellion against the president, Michael Marletta, who had attempted to broker a deal in which the research lab, in La Jolla, California, would be acquired by the Los Angeles-based University of Southern California (USC) for US$600 million.

In the statement, posted on 21 July, Gephardt said that Marletta “has indicated his desire to leave” Scripps and that the board “is working with Dr Marletta on a possible transition plan”.

Scripps Research Institute president Michael Marletta resigned after clashing with faculty over a proposed merger.{credit}Scripps Research Institute{/credit}

Scripps faculty members see Marletta’s departure as a victory. They had been angered by the terms of the USC deal, which was scrapped on 9 July, and by the fact that Marletta did not consult with faculty during his negotiations with USC. Faculty members told the Scripps board of trustees earlier this month that they had an almost unanimous consensus of no confidence in Marletta.

“I think we are more optimistic than we have been in many years, because we feel like we have some control over our own fate,” says Scripps biologist Jeanne Loring.

Loring said that at a meeting with a majority of Scripps faculty on 21 July, Gephardt indicated that the board had thought that Marletta was communicating with the faculty as he negotiated the USC deal. Gephardt also promised that faculty would involved in choosing Marletta’s successor.

Whoever replaces Marletta must find a way to close a projected $21-million budget gap this year left by the contraction of funding from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and by the virtual disappearance of support from pharmaceutical companies, who had provided major support for Scripps until 2011.

How Scripps solves its funding issue will be watched by other independent institutes, which have been hard hit by the contraction in NIH dollars. Scripps’ neighbour institutes have brought in hundreds of millions of dollars in philanthropy, and many involved see that as part of the solution for Scripps as well. But, Loring says, “the funding that other institutes have got from philanthropy is going to be a short-term solution, because even though it seems like an awful lot of money, they have to spend it, so they will eventually be facing the same issues.”

Follow Erika on Twitter: @Erika_Check.

Portugal cuts funding for lowest-rated labs

Posted on 09 Jul 2014 by Elizabeth Gibney

More than a fifth of research departments in Portugal are to have their funding cut, leaving the future of the groups and their staff uncertain.

As part of the latest five-yearly evaluation of the country’s Science and Technology Foundation (FCT), its primary funding body, 22% of 322 evaluated units (representing 1,904 researchers or 12% of the total) were graded as fair or poor, and will receive no funding between 2015 and 2020.

A spokeswoman for the FCT told Nature that these units “may face a difficult period… and will have to re-group and re-think their strategy for the coming years”. Units can appeal their grade, a process that is already underway.

Meanwhile, another 26% of units – graded as “good” – will receive core funding only. This funding, which depends on the size of the lab and its equipment and activities, is minimal. “High intensity” labs with more than 81 researchers will receive just €40,000 per year, while “low-intensity” research units with fewer than 40 members will receive €5,000 a year. The FCT says this funding “may be used to re-structure the unit, in order to be better prepared for future review and funding rounds, both in Portugal and internationally”.

The remaining 52% of units (66% of the pool of associated researchers) were graded as “very good” or better and will now pass through to a second round of funding. There they will compete for strategic funding, which they will receive on top of enhanced levels of core funding, up to 10 times that of “good” units. The results will be based on a further assessment, including a site visit, with the final results due by the end of the year.

The total funding being allocated – which amounts to around €50 million ($68 million) each year – is unchanged from previous years. The number of units being denied funding in the latest round is comparable to the 2007-2008 evaluation, in which 17% of 378 units received no funding.

But changes to the evaluation process have drawn criticism from some researchers. In a blog post on Science 2.0, science writer and former immunologist Catarina Amorim says that most of the units that have been denied funding show “competitive productivity” scores at the international level and the decisions were largely made by non-specialists in each field.

She adds that the level of basic funding for units rated as good “in practice is a a slow death sentence”.

In an open letter to the president of FCT, a group of 13 social scientists from universities across Portugal also criticised the assessment. They claimed that rigour and impartiality were “glaringly absent” in the evaluation, taking as their case in point the failure of one of the country’s benchmark research units in the social sciences, the University Institute of Lisbon’s Centre of Investigation and Study in Sociology (CIES), to pass to the second stage.

The FCT told Nature that while bibliometrics formed part of the process (which for the first time was carried out in two phases, and in collaboration with the European Science Foundation), each unit’s evaluation was carried out by three reviewers, whose report fed into an assessment by between 9 and 17 academics drawn from a pool of international experts. Reviews were based on measures such as graduate training output and the unit’s research strategy, as well as productivity. The first phase also included a rebuttal phase for researchers to respond to comments, she adds.

Imperial College under renewed pressure over animal research

Posted on 02 Jul 2014 by Daniel Cressey

Government inspections of animal research in the UK should be reviewed, an independent advisory group said today, in a report which also adds to pressure on Imperial College London over its work in this area.

The Animals in Science Committee, a group including respected scientists, lay persons, animal welfare experts and others which advises the government on animal research, says the minister in charge of the area “should consider whether he can continue to have confidence” in John Neilson, the senior figure at the university who is the licence holder for such work.

The Committee’s report also reveals that inspectors from the UK Home Office expressed concerns about animal research at Imperial before allegations of poor practice were made by London-based animal rights group the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection in 2013 after an undercover investigation.

In a statement today, the Home Office minister Norman Baker said, “I regard this as a very serious matter and will consider the report carefully. The Government will publish its response as soon as possible.”

Imperial has responded strongly to the report. It says that Neilson, “who has served in this role since May 2012, has strengthened the College’s governance and operational management of animal research”. In a statement, the university added, “Imperial fully supports his leadership and handling of responsibilities as [the licence holder].”

Imperial has already been subjected to an independent review it commissioned in the wake of the allegations. The university has accepted the conclusions of that review — including that animal-research facilities were understaffed and systems related to management, training and ethical review should be improved – and produced an action plan to work on this.

Imperial says it was “surprised” that today’s report did not refer to this action plan, and that it is “disappointed” that its offer to meet the authors of the report was not taken up.

“The College has made substantial progress in implementing changes set out in the Plan,” it says. “These build on the good standards of animal husbandry identified in the Brown Review and are enabling the College to build a new culture around animal research by establishing and promoting best practice, and taking ethical, welfare and 3Rs issues into account at every level.”

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NIH to require sex-reporting in preclinical studies

Posted on 14 May 2014 by Sara Reardon

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) will require grant applicants to report the sex of animals and cells used in preclinical studies, officials said today.

The shift could help to reveal differences in the ways that diseases affect males and females. Depression, for instance, more often causes anger in males and hopelessness in females; failing to account for this type of variation can skew research results. It can also be dangerous — last January, the US Food and Drug Administration halved the recommended dose of the sleep aid Ambien for women. Although the drug has been available for 22 years, researchers only recently discovered that women who take Ambien are at increased risk of accident.

The NIH has long recognized animal sex bias as a problem, says Janine Clayton, director of the agency’s Office of Research on Women’s Health (ORWH), who announced the agency’s new policy in a Nature commentary with NIH director Francis Collins.

A 1993 law requires that NIH-funded clinical trials include women, with few exceptions, and the numbers of participants recruited to such trials appear to have evened out over time. “If you look at NIH clinical research last year, over 50% of participants were women,” says Clayton. “It’s in the preclinical space where we haven’t seen a corresponding revolution.”

Much of this, she says, is due to a belief that the oestrus cycle affects the female animals’ physiology and throws off results; as a result, researchers tend to prefer male animals, though recent meta-analysis studies of literature have shown that this is not the case. (Some studies use female animals because they can be housed in groups, whereas male animals tend to fight unless given their own cages.)

Under the new NIH policy, which will begin to take effect in October of this year, grant applicants will have to describe how they plan to balance the sexes for cells and animals used in their studies. Clayton says that the NIH rules will not be so prescriptive as to require equal numbers of males and females, but both sexes must be represented. “This is more than a numbers game,” she says.

The NIH will monitor whether its grantees are complying with these plans “so we get pinged if there’s a problem,” says Clayton. There will be exceptions — research on reproductive organs, for example — but they will be few and far between.

In recent years, researchers have come to recognize the importance of sex differences in animal work, and many are actively including both sexes and reporting them in the methods of their papers, says Sherril Green, a comparative pathologist at Stanford University in California. She adds that pharmaceutical companies are also separating animals by sex early in the drug development process so as to avoid costly missteps such as the case with Ambien, which may have been avoided with more testing in women.

Yet the problem is bigger than just sex bias: factors such as age and genetic background can all greatly influence how an animal responds to a treatment. Brad Bolon, a veterinary pathologist at Ohio State University in Columbus, thinks the new NIH rules ignore the real problem. “By drawing so much attention to matter of sex, it avoids the whole crux of the issue,” which is too little transparency on the details of experimental design as a whole, he says.

Bolon also worries about added costs that may result from the new rules. To get enough statistical power to draw conclusions about each sex, researchers may need to double the number of animals used in the study. “Arbitrarily saying that research must be done in both sexes, especially early on, is going to take money out of testing truly novel hypotheses,” he says.

In recognition of such concerns, in 2013 the ORWH began offering funding supplements to grantees to allow them to add the appropriate number of animals to their studies. But Clayton says that this programme will probably be eliminated because investigators must now begin accounting for sex difference in their experiments from the very beginning.

Bolon says that a more direct way to persuade scientists to use both sexes in their research would be for journals to require reporting of certain variables in their methods sections. Many journals already have such guidelines, and Clayton says that NIH plans to work with journals so that sex reporting becomes the norm.

Editor’s note: a previous version of this story incorrectly referred to the “gender” of lab animals and cells rather than their “sex”.

UK politicians wade into pharma mega-deal

Posted on 02 May 2014 by Daniel Cressey

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has attempted to reassure UK politicians over its attempts to buy AstraZeneca, as political parties traded blows over the potential merger.

AstraZeneca today rejected an improved offer of approximately £50 (US$84) per AstraZeneca share from New York-based Pfizer, which would have valued the London-based company at around £63 billion ($106 billion).

As well as releasing this new bid, Pfizer today took the unusual move of sending a public letter to Prime Minister David Cameron, after a number of commentators expressed fears that a merger could devastate the UK research ecosystem if the resulting company slashed research and development (R&D). In 2011 Pfizer shocked many observers in the United Kingdom when it closed the Sandwich research park as part of global cuts to research.

“We recognize that our approach [to buy AstraZeneca] may create uncertainty for the UK Government and scientific community,” says the letter. It also commits Pfizer to setting its corporate and tax headquarters in the United Kingdom, completing AstraZeneca’s planned research site in Cambridge and employing at least 20% of the merged company’s R&D work force in the country.

On BBC radio this morning the government’s science minister sparred with his opposition number over the merger.

“We have been having very tough conversations with Pfizer and have made it clear to them that the British government attaches great importance to the R&D activities happening here in Britain and also manufacturing,” said science minister David Willetts. He added the government would expect Pfizer to commit to R&D and manufacturing in the United Kingdom if there were a merger but that this would ultimately be a decision for the AstraZeneca stakeholders.

But his counterpart in the opposition, shadow science minister Chuka Umunna, said that Pfizer has a “very poor” record on previous purchases, which had led to “deep cuts” in research facilities, and that the government was not doing enough to protect UK research.

IPCC report calls for climate mitigation action now, not later

Posted on 13 Apr 2014 by Quirin Schiermeier

The world is heading towards possibly dangerous levels of global warming despite increasing efforts to promote the transition to a low-carbon economy, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns in its latest report today.

As the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continues to rise to unprecedented levels, the groups says only major institutional and technological change will give the world a better than even chance of staying below 2C warming – the widely accepted threshold to dangerous climate change. Stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations at 450 parts per million CO2 equivalent – a level which scientists think is needed to limit warming to 2C – will require a three to four-fold increase in the share of low-carbon energies, such as renewables and nuclear, in the global power mix. Improvements in energy efficiency and, possibly, the use of carbon capture and storage technology will be needed to assist the process, the IPCC says.

The report was produced by the IPCC’s Working Group III, which has been tasked with looking into the mitigation of climate change. Its 33-page Summary for Policymakers was approved, line by line, by hundreds of IPCC authors and representatives of 195 governments over the past week in Berlin. Launching the report at a presentation in the city, Ottmar Edenhofer, the co-chair of the working group, admitted the discussions were at times nerve-rackingly tense.

To assess the options, costs and possible adverse side-effects of different pathways to stabilizing emissions at safe levels, the 235 lead authors of the report analysed close to 1,200 scenarios of socioeconomic development and cited almost 10,000 scientific papers. The resulting work, although phrased in rather technical language, is unambiguous in its message that the challenge of climate change is mounting as time proceeds.

“Global emissions have increased despite the recent economic crisis and remarkable mitigation efforts by some countries,” Edenhofer says. “Economic growth and population growth have outpaced improvements in energy efficiency – and since the turn of the century coal has become competitive again in many parts of the world.”

The report makes clear that it would be wise to act now rather than later. But, in line with the IPCC’s mandate to be policy-neutral, it includes no specific recommendations as to the energy and related policies that individual countries should follow.

“Substantial investment in clean energies is needed in all sectors of the global economy, including in some parts of the world in nuclear power,” says Edenhofer. “But it would be inappropriate for the IPCC to prescribe reduction targets or energy policies to specific countries.”

Doing nothing is not an option, he says. In a business-as-usual scenario run without meaningful mitigation policies, greenhouse gas concentrations double by the end of the century, the working group found. This would result in global warming of 4C to 5C above the pre-industrial (1750) level with possibly dramatic consequences on natural systems and human welfare.

Mitigating climate change would lead to a roughly 5% reduction in global consumption, according to the report. But, says Edenhofer, this does not mean that the world has to sacrifice economic growth. In fact, the group found that action to keep temperature rises at bay would reduce global economic growth by no more than 0.06% per year. This figure excludes the benefits of climate mitigation, such as from better air quality and health, which are thought to lower the actual costs of mitigation.

The full report outlines in great detail over 16 chapters the emission reduction potential of sectors including energy production and use, industry, transport and building and land use, and describes how mitigation efforts in one sector determine the needs in others. The IPCC has also assessed the potential of carbon capture and storage technology, which it says would be essential for achieving low-stabilization targets. More ambitious geoengineering possibilities, such as proposals to deliberately reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface, have not been assessed in the report.

“There is a whole portfolio of mitigation options that can be combined in ways that meet the political priorities of individual countries,” says Edenhofer. “The means to tackle the problem exist, but we need to use them.”

Effective climate mitigation, adds Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, will not be achieved if individual nations and agents advance their own interests independently. Nations hope to agree on binding emission reduction targets at a United Nations climate meeting in 2015 in Paris.

Delaying action is getting increasingly risky and will only lead to tougher requirements and higher costs at a later stage, says Pachauri.

“We haven’t done nearly enough yet,” he says. “A high-speed mitigation train needs to leave the station soon and all of global society needs to get on board.”

Australia’s scientists brace for major job losses

Posted on 12 Nov 2013 by Davide Castelvecchi

Posted on behalf of Stephen Pincock.

Scientists at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia’s national science agency, are concerned by a management announcement that may see hundreds of contract and casual employees let go in coming months.

At the end of October, chief executive Megan Clark told staff that CSIRO was implementing a temporary suspension of external recruitment and the renewal of contracts except in “exceptional circumstances”.

CSIRO’s headcount currently stands at 6,299, after a round of redundancies announced earlier this year. Some media outlets have claimed that as many as 1,400 additional jobs may be at risk from the new policy.

But interpreting the impact of CSIRO’s latest announcement is difficult because an end date for the freeze has not been made public. The size of the job losses will depend partly on how long the hiatus remains in place.

There are currently 933 fixed-term employees and 430 casual staff at CSIRO. Among those, 315 fixed-term contracts and 262 casual contracts will expire before June 2014, according to figures supplied to Nature by a spokesman.

Another source of confusion has been the timing of the CSIRO announcement. It came as Prime Minister Tony Abbott was making good on a pre-election promise to dramatically reduce the public-sector payroll.

Earlier this month the Public Service Commission, a workplace authority, had issued orders to agency heads not to renew any temporary contracts or casual positions and to begin sacking “non-ongoing” workers.

But the CSIRO spokesman says the agency decided to make the cuts of its own accord. “It wasn’t a decision of the Federal Government. We certainly took some of our cues from what they were doing with the APS [Australian Public Service] but because we’re a statutory authority, we could make our own decisions,” he says.

At first, staff thought the CSIRO was acting on orders from the government, says Sam Popovski, Secretary of the CSIRO staff union. Realising it was an independent decision left many baffled.

“Initially … staff were upset, but understood the context. They’re more bewildered now. The leadership of the organisation haven’t really made clear what the premise of the decision was.”

Clark said in her statement that the decision would not compromise commitments to industry or other stakeholders.

But Popovski says roughly three-quarters of those employed in fixed-term positions were directly involved in research. “I just can’t see how it [the cuts] can’t have an effect on research.”

$80 million anti-poaching initiative unveiled

Posted on 26 Sep 2013 by Daniel Cressey

An $80 million effort to clamp down on Africa’s rampant elephant poaching was unveiled today in New York.

A collection of 16 NGOs and African nations including Uganda and Kenya along with the Clinton Global Initiative will use the money to increase law enforcement at 50 sites. They hope this will mean that elephant population decline is halted at half of these sites.

Work to detect and prosecute smugglers will also be increased, and the governments involved have committed to call for an international trade ban on imports, exports and sales of all commercial ivory products.

Elephant poaching in Africa has surged in recent years, driven mainly by demand in Asia. Earlier this year the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora meeting agreed to clamp down on illegal trading, but widespread killing of the animals appears to have continued. Zimbabwe recently reported more than 80 had been killed with cyanide in one of its national parks.

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