A former graduate student has been found guilty of misconduct in a high profile case that rocked the chemistry community four years ago and resulted in the retraction of six papers.

Dalibor Sames, a chemist at Columbia University in New York, retracted the six papers between March and June, 2006, when he and his colleagues found they could not reproduce the results. The research focused on selectively breaking carbon-hydrogen bonds within molecules with the aim of modifying the molecules for industrial purposes, such as producing pharmaceuticals or fuels.

The Office of Research Integrity yesterday published a notice finding Bengu Sezen, a former graduate student in Sames’s lab, guilty of 21 counts of misconduct – specifically, falsifying, fabricating and plagiarizing data in three papers and in her doctoral dissertation.

The punishment: a five year ban on “any contracting or subcontracting with any agency of the United States Government” – that is, receiving US funding — and on “serving in any advisory capacity to the US Public Health Service (PHS)” – such as scientific peer review.

Sezen completed another doctorate in the lab of chromosome biologist Elmar Schiebel at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. According to a list of lab alumni posted on Schiebel’s website, she then moved on to become a group leader at Yeditepe University in Istanbul, Turkey.

Image: ball and stick model of methane (CH4) via Wikipedia

Is anthropology a science? Don’t ask the American Anthropological Association (AAA), which recently voted to strike the word “science” from its long-term mission statement.

At the society’s annual meeting in New Orleans two weeks ago, the AAA’s executive board voted to change its long term goal statement from: “The purposes of the Association shall be to advance anthropology as the science that studies humankind in all its aspects” to: “The purposes of the Association shall be to advance public understanding of humankind in all its aspects.”

Three other mentions of science were removed from the three-paragraph statement, while teaching and promoting public understanding were emphasized.

The changes have drawn the condemnation of data-collecting anthropologists, including the Society for Anthropological Science, which is a subsection of the AAA.

At the Chronicle of Higher Education, Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars and an anthropologist, says the change represents longstanding tension over whether human culture should be studied using a data-driven scientific approach, or with a more interpretative perspective that’s characterisic of humanities scholarship.

My own view of anthropology is that it is a hybrid discipline. Its main scholarly tradition is rooted in science, or at least the aspiration for science. If those roots wither or are cut off, anthropology will lose any real claim to serious intellectual attention and perhaps even its identity as a discipline.

At Psychology Today, Alice Dregger singles out “fluff-head cultural anthropological types who think science is just another way of knowing.”

Not all cultural anthropologists are fluff-heads, of course. You can usually tell the ones who are fluff-heads by their constant need to look like superheroes for oppressed peoples, and you can tell the non-fluff-heads by their attention to data. But the non-fluff-head cultural anthropologists are feeling utterly beleaguered in this environment that actively denigrates science and consistently promotes activism over data collection and scientific theorizing.

Damon Dozier, a spokesman for the AAA, tells Inside Higher Ed that the mission statement changes are not a fait accompli and that they represent changes in words, not values. “We have no interest in taking science out of the discipline,” he says. “It’s not as if the anthropology community is turning its back on science.”

The United States Senate today approved a historic food safety bill, responding to repeated oubreaks of food-borne illness and addressing perennial assessments from groups like the Institute of Medicine and the Government Accountability Office, which have called the US food safety system weak and fractured.

The bill, the Food Safety Modernization Act, was passed by the Senate on an 73-25 vote this morning.

“I asked Senator [Richard] Durbin (Democrat, Illinois) when he started working on this bill and he said back in the House 18 years ago,” Senator Tom Harkin (Democrat, Iowa) said in a speech on the Senate floor lauding its passage. “This is the first time in 70 years that we have actually had a major revision of our food safety laws.”

The bill gives the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which oversees the safety of roughly 80% of US food, new powers to order food recalls, new access to records of food processing plants, and a new requirement to more frequently inspect food plants. It also compels the FDA to identify the most significant food-borne contaminants at least every two years, and, where they are called for, to issue science-based documents guiding the industry on how to fight these specific agents.

The agency, whose own science board several years ago sounded a pronounced alarm about its deteriorating scientific capacity, will be required to improve the way it collects, analyzes and reports data on food-borne illnesses, and to hone methods to rapidly and effectively track and trace fruits and vegetables. And each manufacturer will for the first time have to put in place a written plan describing their preventive controls to significantly minimize or prevent contamination hazards at their facility. The legislation also tightens requirements on food importers.

A companion bill was passed by the House of Representatives in July 2009, on the heels of an outbreak of illnesses from salmonella-tainted peanuts that caused President Barack Obama to worry aloud about the safety of his daughters’ peanut butter sandwiches. More recently, half a billion eggs produced at two Iowa farms were recalled this summer after salmonella sickened more than 1,800 people . That put the issue squarely back in the limelight on Capitol Hill.

Because the House and Senate bills are similar in overall thrust, but not identical in detail, proponents are hoping that the House will now pass the Senate’s version of the legislation, enabling it then to be sent to Obama for signing into law.

The FDA oversees the safety of most US food, including fresh fruits, vegetables, peanuts and eggs. Meat and poultry are regulated by the US Department of Agriculture.

The first comprehensive external review of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) has come to overwhelmingly positive conclusions about the state stem cell agency’s progress. But some in the biotech community continue to grumble that the agency, which began operations in 2006, is focusing too much on basic research rather than fulfilling its mandate of taking stem cell therapies from bench to bedside.

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