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Politics

Unknown appointed as new India science minister

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Posted on behalf of K. S. Jayaraman.

India’s newly elected government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has appointed a first-time parliamentarian to be science minister.

Jitendra Singh, 57, a physician — as well as an author and newspaper columnist — was a professor of diabetes and endocrinology at the Government Medical College and Hospital Jammu until 2012, when he became a politician. He ran for the first time as a BJP candidate in the recent parliamentary elections in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, and won. On 26 May Prime Minister Narendra Modi inducted Singh into his government as a junior minister, unlike his predecessor, Jaipal Reddy, who held cabinet rank.

Singh has been given independent charge of the departments of science and technology and Earth sciences. The departments of space and atomic energy will continue to be directly under the prime minister as before, but Singh will oversee their activities.

Few in the science community had heard of Singh until he took the oath. “We were expecting a senior figure and veteran politician to head this very important ministry, with cabinet rank,” says Dipankar Chatterji, a biologist at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and president of Bangalore-based Indian Academy of Sciences. “But we have to give the new man a chance,” he adds. “Being a newcomer does have an advantage as, given his excellent credentials as a physician, he may be a much-needed breath of fresh air.”

C.N.R. Rao, who was science adviser to the previous government, says that the rank of junior minister given to Singh shows that science is not regarded as important by Modi’s government.

Observers say that although it may take some time for the new minister to settle down, he cannot delay the important appointments to top science posts that have been vacant for months. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), with 40 laboratories under its control, has been headless for five months, and since the secretary to the department of science and technology — India’s main agency for funding basic research and promoting science and technology activities — retired in April, his position has not been filled.

US Supreme Court strikes IQ cutoff for death penalty cases

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When deciding whether a defendant is too intellectually disabled to receive the death penalty, courts must take into account inherent variability in intelligence quotient (IQ) scores, the US Supreme Court ruled today.

In its 5-to-4 decision, the court said that it is unconstitutional for states such as Florida to use an IQ score of 70 as a cutoff above which a defendant is considered to be intelligent enough to understand the consequences of his or her actions.

The plaintiff in the case, Freddie Lee Hall, has been on death row in Florida for 35 years after being convicted of murdering two people in 1978. He has taken multiple IQ tests, yielding scores ranging between 60 and 80, and testimony from people who knew him suggest that he has been intellectually disabled his entire life. But under Florida law, an IQ score above 70 disqualifies a defendant from being spared execution on the basis of intellectual disability, and Florida’s Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that Hall’s scores were too high to qualify for this reprieve.

But the American Psychological Association (APA) and the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities hold that IQ tests have an error margin of about ten points. Consequently, Hall’s lawyers argued that IQ tests are too imprecise to determine whether his score falls on one side or the other of this cut-off.

“Florida’s rule disregards established medical practice in two interrelated ways,” Justice Anthony Kennedy writes in the court’s majority opinion. “It takes an IQ score as final and conclusive evidence of a defendant’s intellectual capacity, when experts in the field would consider other evidence. It also relies on a purportedly scientific measurement of the defendant’s abilities, his IQ score, while refusing to recognize that the score is, on its own terms, imprecise.”

The Supreme Court sent Hall’s case back to Florida’s court for a reassessment. It is not yet clear what Florida, and as many as eight other states with similar laws, will adopt in lieu of the IQ threshold. But the court’s decision compels states to incorporate other evidence if a defendant’s scores fall within the range of error.

James Harris, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and an expert on intellectual disability, is pleased with the decision. “The Supreme Court validates professional practice in measurement,” he says. “They confirm the dignity of the process and the dignity of the people with intellectual disability who are being served by the process.”

But Harris would have liked to see the ruling go further in emphasizing the importance of testing for adaptive functioning — a person’s ability to function in society — which is another factor that the APA uses to diagnose intellectual disability. This factor, he contends, is often more relevant to a case than an IQ score, which mainly tests academic ability.

Although the APA has held for decades that IQ scores have a margin of error, Justice Samuel Alito worries that the ruling opens a can of worms, as the guidelines of professional societies change over time. Tying the law to these views will “lead to instability and continue to fuel protracted litigation,” he writes in the minority opinion.  Alito adds that the court’s decision “adopts a uniform national rule that is both conceptually unsound and likely to result in confusion”.

Vermont to require labelling of genetically modified foods

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Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin has signed a law mandating the labeling of genetically engineered foods. {credit}Community College of Vermont via Flickr{/credit}

Vermont is the first US state to mandate labels on foods produced using genetic engineering.

Under a law signed by Vermont governor Peter Shumlin on 8 May, labels must be in place on food sold in Vermont by July 2016.

“We have a right to know what’s in the food we buy,” said Shumlin during the signing, as attendees noshed on free Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. “I am proud that we’re leading the way in the United States to require labeling of genetically engineered food.”

A host of other states are contemplating similar legislation. But even as consumer activists celebrated Vermont’s label law, the Grocery Manufacturers Association, a food-industry group based in Washington DC, pledged to file a lawsuit in federal court with the intention of overturning the law. And last month, Congressman Mike Pompeo (Republican, Kansas) introduced the Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act of 2014 in the US House of Representatives, a bill that allows requirements for labelling of genetically engineered food only when that food differs substantially in make-up from non-engineered counterparts. “The use of bioengineering does not, in itself, constitute a material difference,” the bill states.

Independence wouldn’t break research ties, says Scottish government

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The Scottish government is hoping to put researchers’ minds at ease ahead of a crucial referendum this autumn, but has already been challenged on the feasibility of its plans.

Scotland’s future: higher education research in an independent Scotland, published on 30 April, says that if on 18 September voters choose independence, Scotland would seek to stay part of the existing research system of the United Kingdom. There would even be some perks, it adds, such as a boost in its influence over spending (as Scotland’s financial contribution to the UK research council funding pot would become more direct) and a loosening of immigration restrictions for researchers coming to Scotland from outside of the European Union.

Scotland’s devolved government — run by the pro-independence Scottish National Party — said that an independent Scotland would try to negotiate a “fair funding formula” for paying into, and receiving funding from, the UK research councils (worth a total of £2.9 billion (US$4.9 billion) UK-wide in 2012–13). Scotland’s strength in research means that it currently gets out more cash out from the research-council system than it puts in. In 2012–13, Scottish institutions received 10.7% of the total UK research-council spending, compared to a UK population share of 8.3% and tax contribution of 9.4%.

The Scottish government said that a formula should remain based “on merit not geography”, calculated relative to population share but also taking into account the amount its institutions receive. If allocations were to be brought into line with contributions, Scotland would see a post-break-up cut of around £70 million.

But the idea that the status quo could continue could be wishful thinking. The report quotes Paul Boyle, chief executive of the Economic and Social Research Council, telling members of the Scottish Parliament that Research Councils UK (RCUK) “would like to see a single research system continue whether there is a yes vote for independence or not”. But RCUK swiftly responded that this does not mean the body supports an independent Scotland remaining part of the single system. In a statement published later that day it said: “Should there be a vote for independence the current system could not continue. There would need to be discussions about how Scotland and the UK would work together in the future, as Professor Boyle stressed in the evidence he gave to the Scottish Government in March.”

Earlier this year, UK science minister David Willetts told the Scottish Affairs Committee that the research system would see “big changes” if Scotland became independent. The working relationship in research would become more like that between the United Kingdom and other European countries, he said, than the single system that exists at the moment.

Through its devolved powers, Scotland already does some things differently to the rest of the United Kingdom. Its research pools — cross-institution networks that focus on specific disciplines — are popular with policy-makers and researchers alike. Scotland’s record on university spin-outs is also better than the rest of the United Kingdom’s. The nation was the only one in the United Kingdom to increase the number of life-science spin-outs from its universities in recent years — something an independent report published last year said could be linked to increased public sector support for innovation in the life sciences in Scotland.

Omid Omidvar, a social scientist at the Innogen centre at the University of Edinburgh, which runs the Future of the UK and Scotland programme, says that the academicians he has interviewed (for a yet-to-be-published study) were divided in their attitudes towards Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom sharing a research system. Some thought the practice should continue, but others mentioned that independence might give Scotland some flexibility in modifying the Research Excellence Framework, for example by making it more relevant to industrial needs.

Scottish collaboration with other UK universities could be negatively affected if Scotland becomes independent, says Omidvar. But another promise — to introduce a more flexible immigration structure — could potentially help to fill gaps in the skills base and boost entrepreneurship, he adds. This week’s report says Scotland would reinstate the post-study work visa for students, which was scrapped in the United Kingdom in 2012. In a report published earlier this year, the Science and Technology Select Committee of the UK House of Lords said the United Kingdom was now “unwelcoming” to international science students, and recommended reinstating the visa.

European Commission report urges legal reform to help scientists text-mine research papers

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European copyright law should change to help researchers use computer programs to extract facts and data from published research papers, legal experts have urged in a report (PDF) for the European Commission published today.

The recommendations come just as the UK government is about to pass laws mandating similar freedoms, and could loosen a restrictive legal environment that, researchers complain, has enabled subscription publishers to tightly control the way information can be harvested from online papers.

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UK budget sees boosts for data science, graphene and cell therapy

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British scientists already know that their public funding for the next two years is frozen at £4.6 billion (US$7.6 billion) annually (as it has been since 2010, which for the nation’s seven research-grants agencies has meant a 10% cut in real terms over the past three years), so they did not expect anything transformative from today’s budget.

Right on cue, UK chancellor George Osborne continued his trend of throwing small crumbs of funding to science and technology — £222 million additional cash over the next five years — while at the same time failing to announce either long-term support for basic science or a strategy to develop UK industrial research, both of which are sorely needed, say science-policy experts.

The budget “follows the usual pattern,” tweeted Kieron Flanagan, who studies science policy at Manchester Business School, “a few small science and technology announcements given the name ‘institute’ or ‘centre’ to make them seem significant.”

“More than individual funding for ‘announceable’ projects we need a long-term funding pipeline and a strategy for investment in research to instil confidence in the security of our research ecosystem,” added Lesley Yellowlees, the president of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Osborne said the government would provide £42 million over the next five years for a national institute, named after British computer scientist Alan Turing, which would study ‘big data’.  He also announced £55 million over five years for a centre aimed at large-scale manufacturing of cell therapies for late-stage clinical trials, and £19 million to provide small companies with access to equipment for research and development of products based on graphene, the material for which UK-based researchers Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov won the 2010 Nobel Prize in physics. (The institutes are ‘Catapult’ centres, which are loosely modelled on Germany’s Fraunhofer Institutes and have the aim of stimulating links between universities and businesses.)

“We should break the habit of a lifetime and commercially develop [graphene] in Britain,” Osborne added. The United Kingdom and Europe have far fewer patents on the material than Asia and the United States, although a 10-year, €1-billion European push to commercialize graphene is bidding to change that, and the United Kingdom has already plunged £38 million into a National Graphene Institute at the University of Manchester.

These three fields — big data, regenerative medicine and graphene — are all areas that Osborne and science minister David Willetts have picked out repeatedly in speeches over the past 18 months as technologies in which the United Kingdom can be world leading.

Osborne also announced an extra £106 million for around 20 additional doctoral training centres — university-based hubs in which PhD students are taught in cohorts and given extra courses in networking, business and industrial development. In the United Kingdom, these centres are rapidly eclipsing conventional project grant PhDs, where students train under the wing of one academic research group.

In the big picture, UK spending on research and development as a proportion of its economy is around 1.7%, well below the European average, although the country punches far above its weight  in terms of top-cited research papers.

“The last four years of a flat cash science budget is biting scientists and engineers and squeezing universities,” said Sarah Main, the director of the London-based Campaign for Science and Engineering. By its calculations, the total research budget — including not just research grants, but also a boost to spending on buildings and facilities — will rise from £5.4 billion in 2010 to £5.9 billion in 2015. (In 2010, the government slashed spending on buildings and facilities, the ‘capital’ part of the science budget, by 40%, a reduction which it has subsequently redressed.)

The government is expected to announce a more comprehensive science and innovation strategy in the autumn — though this might be short-lived, as national elections are set for 2015.

US Senate approves France Córdova to lead NSF

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Posted on behalf of Jessica Morrison.

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{credit}Mark Simons/Purdue University{/credit}

The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has a new leader. The US Senate voted today to confirm astrophysicist France Córdova to lead the agency, roughly a year after former director Subra Suresh resigned mid-term.

Córdova was most recently the chairwoman of the Smithsonian Institution’s board of regents, which oversees the sprawling Washington DC-based museum complex, and a member of the National Science Board, the panel that oversees NSF. She has also served as president of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and as chancellor of the University of California, Riverside. During the 1990s, Córdova was chief scientist at NASA, working with then-administrator Daniel Goldin on his “faster, better, cheaper” plan for Earth and space research.

Her confirmation as the NSF’s fourteenth director comes at a time of tight budgets that have frustrated researchers. On 4 March, for example, US President Barack Obama released a budget request for fiscal year 2015 that seeks a meager 1% funding increase for the science agency, compared to the current funding level. The NSF is also under increased pressure to demonstrate the value of its research, and its social-science research division has come under attack from conservative politicians in the House of Representatives.

In an interview today with Nature, Córdova said that better communicating the importance of the basic research that the NSF supports is one of her priorities as she takes the agency’s top job. “We have to better explain why we do what we do,” she said.

For more information, see our expanded news coverage in the 20 March edition of Nature.

Lawmakers aim to restrict US agency’s social-science programmes

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Posted on behalf of Jessica Morrison. 

Conservative politicians in the US House of Representatives are renewing their push to limit the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) support for social-science research. The agency’s social, behavioural, and economic (SBE) sciences directorate would see its recommended funding cut by 42%, under a proposal introduced on 10 March by Representative Lamar Smith (Republican, Texas), the chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee.

The legislation, which would reauthorize NSF for fiscal years 2014‒15, also seeks major changes to the peer-review process by which the agency awards its grants. Smith’s plan would require the NSF to provide written justification that every grant it awards — in all fields — is in the “national interest”. That is defined broadly as research that satisfies at least one of six goals: economic competitiveness, health and welfare, scientific literacy, partnerships between academia and industry, promotion of scientific progress and national defence.

Details of Smith’s plan first surfaced about a year ago, sparking fierce criticism from social scientists and the broader US research community that seems sure to renew with the release of the new bill. Smith and his supporters argue that in a time of limited budgets, focusing on research areas that produce the clearest benefits is wise. But critics worry that the “national interest” requirement will hobble NSF’s time-tested peer review process.

“We don’t build rockets. We don’t usually have patentable goods,” says Rick Wilson, a political scientist at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and a former NSF programme director. “For a lot of these folks, it may just be that they really don’t believe that what we do has scientific merit.”

The bill recommends a budget of $7.17 billion for NSF in 2014, the current fiscal year — equal to what the agency actually received in the budget deal enacted in January — and $7.29 billion for 2015. In an unusual move, the proposal also lays out a detailed plan for distributing that cash to NSF’s seven research directorates. For example, it seeks to cap SBE funding at $150 million per year in 2014 and 2015, well below the directorate’s actual 2014 budget of $257 million.

“I don’t understand the antagonism toward the social, behavioral, and economic sciences,” says Michael Lubell, director of public affairs for the American Physical Society in Washington DC.

Lubell also finds fault with provisos that would restrict principal investigators to no more than five years of funding for a particular project, and allow researchers to include just five citations in grant proposals.

The full text of the bill can be found here. It will receive a public airing on 13 March, when a House subcommittee plans to discuss and vote on the measure.

EU members protest proposed GM crop approval

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Posted on behalf of Barbara Casassus.

Ministers from 12 European Union (EU) member states have urged the European Commission to reconsider its proposal to approve a new strain of genetically modified maize (corn).

The representatives, from countries including Austria, France and Italy, sent a letter dated 12 February to European Health Commissioner Tonio Borg asking him not to sanction the approval of Pioneer 1507. The move follows a debate at an EU General Affairs Council meeting on 11 February, at which it became clear that the commission is almost certain to sanction cultivation of the crop. This is despite the opposition of 19 of the 28 member countries — and the European Parliament. The letter states that this outcome would not “yield approval under any other decision-making procedure”.

At the meeting, Germany indicated that it would abstain in a vote, a move that would swing the decision in favour of planting the genetically modified organism (GMO), made by DuPont and Dow Chemical. This is because its vote carries more weight than those of smaller nations under the EU voting system. Two other large states — the United Kingdom and Spain — are in favour, but France, Italy and several smaller states are against.

Before the letter was received, commission agriculture spokesperson Roger Waite was quoted by Euractiv as saying: “The commission shall adopt the proposal to approve the GMO. The rules are clear — there is no choice. This is why the commissioner made clear that an abstention is equivalent to a vote in favour.”

But Greek foreign minister Evangelos Venizelos told a press conference after the meeting that a legal technicality could allow the commission to reject the law, as the debate had been about voting intentions and did not produce  a formal vote, according to the European Observer. New scientific evidence against the maize could make the difference.

Many consumers in Europe have long been lukewarm or hostile to GM crops, and Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth Europe claim that Pioneer 1507 releases a toxin that is dangerous for butterflies and moths, the European Observer added.

At the moment, two GM crops are authorized for cultivation in the EU, but only Monsanto’s MON810 maize is being grown, and only in a few countries. Last summer, Monsanto threw in the EU towel, saying that it would withdraw all its applications for authorization in the 28 countries.

That paved the way for Pioneer, which filed its application for 1507 in 2001 and has received approval for food and feed use from the European Food Safety Authority.

English research gets cuts reprieve as ministers hit teaching

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English universities will face significant funding cuts in the next two financial years, the government has announced. But research spending has once again been preserved.

Institutions will lose an extra £125 million from their funding in 2014‒2015, the government’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) announced in its annual grant letter sent to the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), published on 10 February. The figures also show that funding in 2015‒2016 will fall by a further £100 million, from £4.1 billion in 2014‒2015 to £4.0 billion.

BIS said the cuts were necessary “in the context of stretched public finances”. The biggest drop will come in the teaching grant, which will fall by £45 million in 2014‒2015 compared with spending plans outlined this time last year, and by another £246 million in 2015‒2016. A £37 million hardship scheme to help fund the poorest students has also been scrapped and merged into other streams.

Universities’ core funding for research will be maintained at £1.57 billion for the coming two years, the same as in 2013‒2014. Research avoided cuts mooted in an internal memo leaked from the department last year, but science advocates are likely to remain concerned about the effects of inflation on the static budget. The government will also maintain the £113-million Higher Education Innovation Fund, which promotes knowledge transfer beyond academia.

The letter does not dictate exactly how HEFCE should spend its budget, but does lay out government priorities. BIS says that the council should deliver savings “in ways that protect as far as possible high-cost subjects (including science, technology, engineering and mathematics), widening participation and small and specialist institutions”.

Capital spending — cut drastically in the 2010 spending review — will see a boost, including a £200-million competitive scheme to fund science teaching facilities, announced in September. Research will also receive an extra £17 million in capital in 2015‒2016, the documents show.

The letter calls for greater efficiency within higher education, specifically highlighting concerns about pay at the highest levels. “We are very concerned about the substantial upward drift of salaries of some top management. We want to see leaders in the sector exercise much greater restraint as part of continuing to hold down increases in pay generally,” it reads.

Within quality-related (QR) research funding, the letter says the sector must continue in its goal to make £238 million of “savings” over the period 2011‒2015, which is being put back into research. This includes more collaboration, sharing equipment and reducing “regulatory and bureaucratic burden”, it says. Ministers have also asked former chair of Research Councils UK, Sir Ian Diamond, to carry out a review of efficiency in higher education — his second such review in three years.

In a statement, Sir Christopher Snowden, vice-chancellor of the University of Surrey and president of the vice-chancellor’s group Universities UK, said the body was pleased that areas were being protected, but added that it failed to see how the projected cuts could be delivered without reducing allocations in those areas.

On 10 February, the government also announced the funding allocations for the UK’s seven research councils for 2015‒2016. The document confirms a pledge, made in June last year, to maintain the UK science budget (which includes research funding for the arts, humanities and social sciences) and increase science infrastructure spending to £1.1 billion in 2015‒2016.

The “ring-fenced” science budget, which ministers have promised not to dip into for non-science purposes, sees a rise of £115 million to £4.7 billion in 2015‒2016. The Campaign for Science and Engineering, which welcomed the news, put this down mainly to the inclusion of the £79-million “International programme and Emerging Powers Fund”, for which funding is transferring to BIS from the Department for International Development, as well as a £51-million boost for the research councils.