News and analysis from the world of science policy
A scandal appears to be brewing among French geologists and other earth scientists. According to a full page story in the 26 December issue of the French daily Le Monde, members of the prestigious Institute of the Physics of the Globe of Paris(IPGP) stand accused of conflicts of interest. Their offenses? While serving on the 7-member editorial board of the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, several IPGP researchers allegedly edited and accepted papers from colleagues at their own institute.
The affairethreatens to taint France’s former research minister, geophysicist Claude Allègre—also a former director of the IPGP--just at the moment when Allègre is reportedly being considered for a cabinet post. According to Le Monde, four of Allègre’s papers received such insider treatment;, one published in 2004, was edited by IPGP researcher Vincent Courtillot, a long time Allègre associate who served as his chief advisor at the research ministry.
The conflict-of-interest accusations are circulating in the form of an anonymously-produced 100 page document consisting largely of the papers concerned. According to Le Monde, the document was sent to the journal’s publisher, Friso Veenstra of the scientific publishing giant Elsevier. Veenstra reportedly told Le Mondethat he had not been aware of the situation, but that in the future he would keep IPGP members from serving on the main editorial committee—citing a formal rule the publisher had adopted in 2006 against such conflicts of interest.
But Courtillot, who reportedly served on the editorial committee from 2003 to 2005, and IPGP geochemist Claude Jaupart, a member from 2006 to 2008, are quoted by Le Mondeas denying that there was any secret about their involvement with the IPGP papers, arguing that they were identified as the editors on each one. Courtillot and Jaupart also say that their role on the editorial committee was explicitly to help publish French papers that, despite their high quality, might not otherwise have seen the light of day.
Le Mondereports that the affair has embarrassed officials of the giant research agency CNRS, with which the IPGP is associated, citing emails that the paper has obtained. As for who took the trouble to dig out all of the offending papers and circulate the anonymous 100 page document of accusation, Le Mondesays that this is an “open question”—but suggests that researchers unhappy about Allègre’s vocal skepticism of global warming being caused by human activities might have been involved.
--Michael Balter
So far, President-elect Barack Obama's scientific appointments are heavily skewed toward one piece of the vast U.S. scientific enterprise: energy and climate research.
Researchers in those communities were generally thrilled by yesterday's news (expected to be announced tomorrow) that Obama has tapped physicist John Holdren, an international expert on energy and climate issues, to be his science adviser. The reaction was similarly positive to the pending appointment of Jane Lubchenco, a marine biologist at Oregon State University, as administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Undersecretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere. Both have also been major players in global environmental policy.
So have Carol Browner, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator under Bill Clinton, who Obama has named to the new position of environment and energy czar, and physics Nobelist Steven Chu, an energy guru, as secretary of the Department of Energy. Then there's Lubchenco's boss at the Commerce Department, Bill Richardson, a former Secretary of Energy under Clinton and a booster of green technology as governor of New Mexico. And don't forget Lisa Jackson, a career environmental regulator, as head of EPA, and Nancy Sutley to head the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
Granted, some of these positions are explicitly environmental slots. But Chu's expertise is novel for an energy secretary, as is Richardson's for Commerce. Holdren, while continuing the streak of physicist-advisers within the White House, has probably paid more attention to energy issues than any of his predecessors.
Scientists aren't complaining about the embarrassment of riches, especially after the way the Bush Administration handled climate science. But for anybody outside the energy and climate realms, the transition news has been sparse. That could soon change, however: Obama is rumored to be close to naming a new director of the National Institutes of Health. Energy and climate scientists need not apply.
—Jeffrey Mervis
In the last 2 years Google and its nonprofit spinoff have launched a variety of science projects in areas ranging from astronomy education to lunar exploration to making electric car batteries work better. But the economic downturn hitting Silicon Valley has forced the company to scale back plans to offer data archiving services for scientists in fields including astronomy and biomedicine, Wired Science reports: Once nicknamed Palimpsests, but more recently going by the staid name, Google Research Datasets, the service was going to offer scientists a way to store the massive amounts of data generated in an increasing number of fields. About 30 datasets — mostly tests — had already been uploaded to the site.
The dream appears to have fallen prey to belt-tightening at Silicon Valley's most innovative company.
"As you know, Google is a company that promotes experimentation with innovative new products and services. At the same time, we have to carefully balance that with ensuring that our resources are used in the most effective possible way to bring maximum value to our users," wrote Robert Tansley of Google on behalf of the Google Research Datasets team to its internal testers.
"It has been a difficult decision, but we have decided not to continue work on Google Research Datasets, but to instead focus our efforts on other activities such as Google Scholar, our Research Programs, and publishing papers about research here at Google," he wrote.
—Eli Kintisch
NASA Administrator Michael Griffin may be under fire for his alleged rude behavior toward the Obama transition team, and he's said he doesn't expect to keep his job. But Representative Bart Gordon (D–TN), the head of the congressional panel with jurisdiction over NASA, still thinks Griffin is the right man to lead the agency.
"He's bright and candid, and he'll tell you the truth, and that's a novelty around here," says Gordon, chair of the House Science and Technology Committee. Speaking this morning at a press briefing on the committee's agenda for 2009, Gordon said that he's recommended to the president-elect that Griffin, appointed in 2005, stay "at least through the transition" and that he "be considered for the job." Then he added, "If they kept him, I'd be comfortable."
Gordon was less effusive in his praise of Arden Bement, director of the U.S. National Science Foundation, which is also under the committee's jurisdiction. Although Bement and Griffin serve at the pleasure of the president, Bement also has a 6-year term that doesn't expire until November 2010. But when asked if he thought Bement should be retained, Gordon told ScienceInsider "that's up to the president-elect. It's his team."
—Jeffrey Mervis
 Strong indications are that President-elect Barack Obama has picked physicist John Holdren to be the president's science adviser.
A top adviser to the Obama campaign and international expert on energy and climate, Holdren would bolster Obama's team in those areas. Both are crowded portfolios. Obama has already created a new position to coordinate energy issues in the White House staffed by well-connected Carol Browner, former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and nominated a Nobel-prize winning physicist, Steve Chu, to head the Department of Energy. That could complicate how the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which Holdren will run, will manage energy and environmental policy. "OSTP will have to be redefined in relation to these other centers of formulating policy," says current White House science adviser Jack Marburger.
Holdren had been planning to attend a staff meeting this morning with colleagues at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where he heads the technology and science program. But instead, he flew today to Chicago to meet with the transition team and prepare for the announcement; initial plans are to release the official news of the appointment on a weekly radio program that Obama records and will be broadcast on Saturday. The transition office declined to comment.
Holdren is well known for his work on energy, climate change, and nuclear proliferation. Trained in fluid dynamics and plasma physics, Holdren branched out into policy early in his career. He has led the Woods Hole Research Center for the past 3 years and served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (which publishes ScienceInsider) in 2006.
—Eli Kintisch
The National Research Council has just issued another report calling for substantive changes in how the Environmental Protection Agency conducts risk assessments of hazardous chemicals.
Earlier this month, an NRC panel recommended policy changes to minimize the odds of political interference in risk assessments. According to the new report, the agency should simultaneously consider risks for all chemicals that have a similar effect.
The approach is spelled out in detail for phthalates, chemicals found in baby bottles and other plastic objects, but should be applied broadly, the report urges. Considering cumulative exposure in this way would increase the estimated risk of chemicals. How the agency will use this new approach to regulate chemicals under existing law is unclear. Stay tuned for details.
—Erik Stokstad
 She sends regrets, from orbit
Image via Wikipedia Astronaut Sandra Magnus won't be joining her six fellow crewmates in the presidential inauguration parade in which they've been invited to march next month. But she's got good reason: She's busy doing experiments in areas ranging from low-gravity materials science work and human physiology, 350 kilometers up in space. She was dropped off on the International Space Station last month by the space shuttle Endeavor during a repairs-and-renovation mission. "But I'm sure she'll be doing it in spirit," says NASA spokesperson Bob Jacobs. Magnus will be in orbit until February.
Joining the astronauts on the Earthwalk will be a conceptual model of a lunar rover and astronaut and engineer Gregory Chamitoff, whom Magnus replaced on the space station. This is not the first time NASA has marched in an inaugural parade, but it's the first in recent memory to include astronauts, Jacobs says. And a lunar rover hasn't been rolled out for a parade since Richard Nixon's second inauguration in 1973.
—Rachel Zelkowitz
President-elect Barack Obama continued last week's theme of energy independence—think Steve Chu. Today's announcement of his choices to lead the departments of the Interior and Agriculture focus instead on resources in the ground—oil, gas, and corn-based ethanol. Headed to Interior, Senator Ken Salazar (D–CO) has worked to promote fossil-fuel exploration, though he's respected by mainstream environmental groups for trying to balance that with environmental safeguards. Like Obama, both Salazar and Tom Vilsack, who will head USDA, are proponents of biofuels. But The New York Times's editorialists put science at the top of the agenda for Interior today, highlighting controversial decisions on endangered species during the Bush Administration: Mr. Salazar’s most urgent task will be to remove the influence of politics and ideology from decisions that are best left to science.
—Erik Stokstad
 At the stroke of midnight in the United Kingdom, university officials and scientists from 159 higher education institutions began poring over a much anticipated—and feared—report to see how their work has measured up in the first Research Assessment Exercise since 2001. The RAE is a massive evaluation of government-funded institutions that takes place every few years and is produced largely by peer-review panels of 1000-plus scientists in and outside the United Kingdom. But unlike widely publicized university rankings produced by individuals and various publications, the RAE officially matters--the United Kingdom will use the results to annually dole out £1.5 billion in research funds until the next such evaluation, which may not take place until 2013. (That evaluation exercise is expected to depend more on "metrics"—citation analyses and impact factors of journals—rather than peer-review panels.)
The last RAE took place in 2001 and proved controversial as the government followed a policy of rewarding top-ranked schools with more money rather than spreading the wealth, which led to hard times and even closures for some science departments. The United Kingdom has tweaked this RAE in several ways, some apparently designed to frustrate British publications trying to rank the overall excellence of individual universities. The new system assigns to five categories research submitted by schools in 67 subjects, ranging from world-leading to below national standard, and RAE officials bragged at a press briefing Wednesday that the results confirm U.K. science as world-class. (The chart above summarizes the evaluation of material submitted to the RAE—click for larger version.) Unlike in 2001, the 2008 RAE results are not accompanied by new funding allocations as the U.K. won't disclose those plans until the spring. Until then, those schools whose research was deemed hot can sleep easier. But those that proved less hot than hoped will have an agonizing few months.
—John Travis
Health care provider Kaiser Permanente has finally landed the money it needed to fulfill plans for a massive DNA biobank. It has just announced receiving an $8.6 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that should allow the company to put together 500,000 DNA samples, along with health and environmental information about their donors. The intent is to ferret out the causes of and develop personalized treatments for common conditions such as cancer, diabetes, and heart disease.
The expanded biobank will be among the largest and will join several in Europe and one in Canada. It beats to the punch the National Children's Study, which has undergone delay after delay in enrolling 100,000 U.S. children.
The biobank will be run by Catherine Schaefer, director of Kaiser Permanente's Research Program on Genes, Environment and Health, and Neil Risch, a professor of human genetics at the University of California, San Francisco. The repository already contains 200,000 DNA samples and hopes to meet the 500,000 mark by 2012 now that funding is in place.
—Lila Guterman
The science education community is adding its voice to the chorus of praise accompanying President-elect Barack Obama's selection of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education. As CEO of Chicago Public Schools for the past 7 years, Duncan has pushed to narrow the achievement gap in math and science between poor, minority students and the rest of the student population as part of a broader program of reform. Along the way, he's made quite an impression on scientists working to improve the quality of what are called STEM—science, technology, engineering, and math—fields.
"He's a good guy, and he's been a breath of fresh air," says physics Nobelist Leon Lederman, a leader in STEM education in Illinois and around the country. "Of course, I wouldn't be so excited about his chances of being a good education secretary if the big boss wasn't also interested in improving STEM education."
Two years ago, Duncan wowed a commission, co-chaired by Lederman, that was asked by the oversight body of the National Science Foundation to examine STEM. Duncan described a host of changes, from streamlining the math curriculum to sending teachers back to school for additional training. That's no easy task for what was once one of the country's worst-performing school districts, although he admits that the district still has a long way to go.
Duncan has also brought in outside science groups to lend a hand. Next month, one such group, the Illinois Math and Science Academy (IMSA), will open its first field office at a school on the city's South Side. Staff at the academy, a residential high school for top students from around the state, will give students hands-on, inquiry-based instruction at the same time their teachers are learning how to incorporate such techniques into their daily lessons. "We can run a program after school, on the weekends, over the summer, or whatever," says Glenn "Max" McGee, president of IMSA.
McGee, a former Illinois school superintendent, says that closing the achievement gap in math and science is a priority for Duncan that he is likely to take with him to Washington, D.C. "He's a visionary who gets things done. He hires good people, and sets out clear goals. He also has an uncanny ability to keep from getting distracted."
Although he's not a scientist, Duncan isn't above using the appeal of science to sell education reform. Two years ago, in one of his many appearances before Congress, Duncan told a House education panel that it should follow the path taken by biomedical research advocates in pushing for additional funding for the National Institutes of Health. "So today I am going to challenge Congress to show the same confidence it showed for medical research," Duncan said at the conclusion of his testimony. "My challenge is this: Double the funding for No Child Left Behind within 5 years."
—Jeffrey Mervis
The Science Careers Blog has a nice summary of what we know so far about the impact of the Bernard Madoff scandal on scientific institutions and philanthropies that donate to scientific research. Many organizations invested in Madoff's hedge fund, which prosecutors allege was a $50 billion scam. The blog reads: Yeshiva University in New York, home to the Albert Einstein School of Medicine, has apparently taken a significant hit. … Sources [say] that the school has lost at least $100 million from its endowment. …
Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa, Israel, invested in Madoff's securities, according to the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, which estimates its losses at about NIS 25 million ($6.5 million). Victims of Madoff's apparent fraud include foundations headed by household names such as Nobel laureate Elie Weisel, Senator Frank Lautenberg, and film director Steven Spielberg, as well as many smaller family foundations and institutions that serve Jewish communities in North America, Europe, and Israel. Madoff managed most of the investment income of Spielberg's Wunderkinder Foundation, which donated some $3.3 million for medical research to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. …
The Madoff scandal has further shaken an already nervous environment for philanthropies. John Ruskay, executive vice president and CEO of the UJA-Federation of New York [said], "Already in the context of a very challenging economic environment this will present another significant difficulty. We don’t know yet the extent of the wreckage."
Archaeologists around the world are condemning the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology for laying off 18 researchers, in particular one of the world's leading archaeobotanists, Naomi Miller, who has been in the field for 30 years. News of the planned layoffs, announced late last month, has ricocheted through the global archaeology community, with help from several academics who have notified more than 1000 of their colleagues.
Miller's "departure from the field will have serious ramifications for many on-going archaeological projects throughout" the Near East, where she studies plant remains to better understand agricultural economies, wrote Melinda Zeder, director of the archaeobiology program at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., in a letter sent last weekend to Richard Hodges, the museum's director. Hodges was traveling and not available to speak with ScienceInsider, but spokesperson Pam Kosty said that "it's obviously difficult for everybody at the museum, these layoffs," and "we're doing what we can to try to save people." Like many other museums and nonprofits, the University of Pennsylvania Museum has been hard-hit by a sinking endowment and a difficult fundraising environment.
In an interview, Zeder, who has collaborated with Miller, sympathized with the museum's plight but argued that while the museum has presented the cuts as a solution to a short-term budget shortfall, "it seems to me counterintuitive to take measures that have a permanent impact on just the thing you're trying to save."
"There's quite an active campaign" to protest the loss of Miller, which will be effective at the end of May, Zeder says. "We're just stunned."
—Jennifer Couzin
12/16 update:
The director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology tells ScienceInsider this morning that the layoffs had been mislabeled and that many of those affected would be able to garner outside grants and stay on at the museum before the end of the May deadline. “We’re starting to think strategically to safeguard people like Naomi [Miller],” says Richard Hodges, “as opposed to facing up to the fact in 6 months time that we won’t have any choices.” Hodges says museum staff are committed to helping Miller and the others find grant money from the university’s endowment, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and other sources and says he’s “very certain” that Miller will still be at the museum on 1 June. “We have no interest in getting rid of decent scholars,” Hodges says. The 18 affected scholars were originally brought in on grants but in the last several years have been supported under the museum’s operating budget.
A new Institute of Medicine report released today by a prominent group of scientists and former public officials on a global health committee has a message for President-Elect Barack Obama: Give us some of that change you've promised.
The committee, co-chaired by Harold Varmus, head of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and Thomas Pickering, retired Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, urges Obama to make "a major speech early in his tenure" that declares that the United States sees global health as "an essential component of U.S. foreign policy." In the eyes of the committee, a more substantial investment in global health will yield diplomatic, economic, and security returns. Specifically, they call on the administration to double its commitment from $7.5 billion to $15 billion by 2012. They suggest that $13 billion should go toward health-related Millennium Development Goals, and another $2 billion toward noncommunicable diseases and injury.
Although the committee commended the United States for making "dramatic increases" in global health during the past decade, it noted that the U.S. "does not come close" to the spending on development aid made by most other rich countries. Denmark, one of the most generous countries, spends $1.07 per day per person, while U.S. public and private contributions only amount to 35¢, for example. In terms of gross national income, the U.S. spends 0.16%, while several Scandinavian countries contribute more than 0.8% (see graph). "Overall as a percentage we're still battling with Greece at the bottom of the pile," Varmus, who also is on Obama's transition team, told ScienceInsider. "We ought to get the level up."
But is it realistic to call for a doubling of funding during the current economic crisis? "We're talking about spending a lot of money on the stimulus package, but a relatively small investment in healthcare," says Varmus, a Nobel laureate who formerly headed the U.S. National Institutes of Health. "We have to recognize we have a lot at stake here."
More from the committee, including a blistering passage, after the jump.
Continue reading "IOM to Obama: Get Your Act Together on Global Health" »
Last week, the annual Nobel Prize award ceremony took place in Stockholm, but not everyone was celebrating. A brouhaha erupted when a Swedish government anticorruption official told the media he had concerns about a pharmaceutical company's ties to the Nobel Prize awarded this year to Germany's Harald zur Hausen for his discovery of the link between human papilloma virus (HPV) and cervical cancer. (Zur Hausen's Nobel lecture and those of the other winners can be viewed here.) The British-Swedish company AstraZeneca receives patent royalties from HPV vaccines, and in November, AstraZeneca launched a collaboration with Nobel Web, the Nobel Foundation's Web site, and Nobel Media, a subsidiary company, to produce documentaries and sponsor lectures that increase interest in the prize. The Swedish media also reported that a member of AstraZeneca's board, Bo Angelin, sits on the Nobel Assembly that awarded zur Hausen the prize. According to Forbes magazine, Angelin has received $42,000 in compensation for sitting on the company's board.
The anticorruption official who raised the potential conflict-of-interest issues reportedly said he may launch an investigation. Yet no evidence has come to light that AstraZeneca or Angelin had any special influence on the prize going to zur Hausen, and colleagues widely felt he was deserving of the honor. AstraZeneca's collaboration with Nobel Web and Nobel Media also came a month after the announcement of zur Hausen's prize.
Conflict of interest is a real problem that deserves serious scrutiny. But unless something more substantial surfaces about AstraZeneca or Angelin's role in this award, there's no need to put an asterisk next to zur Hausen's name.
The media flap may have had one result: According to Swedish news reports, the head of the Nobel Committee, which recommends potential prizewinners to the assembly, said the committee plans to discuss links between prizewinners and Nobel sponsors, a new issue for them.
—Jon Cohen
Addendum: Hans Jornvall, the secretary of the Nobel Committee and Assembly, on 16 December sent ScienceInsider and others a statement that said at the time of the vote, neither Bo Angelin nor the Committee or Assembly knew of AstraZeneca's HPV vaccine patents. "Nothing subsequently discussed has changed our integrity at that moment or our depth of investigation of the discoveries honoured," wrote Jornvall. He further said the collaboration between AstraZeneca, Nobel Web and Nobel Media was done "without our knowledge or agreement" and has "no connection with our prize-selecting work."
Two of the most likely candidates to take over the beleagered U.S. Food and Drug Administration have been vociferous critics of the agency. The Wall Street Journal says Steven Nissen and Joshua Sharfstein are top candidates to run the FDA.
Nissen has frequently and publicly attacked FDA’s handling of drug safety from his perch as head of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, particularly when it comes to painkillers like Vioxx, which was yanked from the market in 2004 after it was linked to heart attacks. A cardiologist who speaks his mind --even to reporters – he’s often nabbed the spotlight with his sharp words while serving on FDA advisory committees, and was described last year as a “Naderesque figure and the nation’s unofficial arbiter of drug safety.” While Nissen himself doesn’t take money from drug companies, he oversees many others at the Cleveland Clinic who work closely with the pharmaceutical industry on clinical trials.
Sharfstein’s a physician who heads Baltimore’s Health Department.
—Jennifer Couzin
A collection of U.S. research universities is making the case for science to be included in legislation aimed at reviving the moribund economy.
In a letter today to President-elect Barack Obama, the 62-member Association of American Universities proposes $2.7 billion in immediate spending on academic buildings, scientific equipment, and young researchers. AAU joins a long line of interest groups hoping to tap into an economic stimulus package topping $500 billion in emergency spending that will be taken up next month by Congress and the incoming administration. Several higher education groups are also making a pitch to make college more affordable, arguing that a better-trained workforce will help the country climb out of the recession sooner.
AAU's proposals mostly involve huge increases to existing programs at the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Department of Energy. They are long-shots at best. But the letter also serves to remind politicians that science is important to the nation's economy, an argument that they hope will pay off next year as Congress completes work on the 2009 budget and then turns to President-elect Obama's request for 2010.
Letter follows after the jump.
—Jeffrey Mervis
Continue reading "Scientists Seeking Stimuli" »
California regulators yesterday laid out a plan to cut the state's greenhouse gas emissions by 15% over the next 12 years. That blueprint is the most ambitious greenhouse gas–reduction plan in the United States and could serve as a model for the incoming Obama Administration. The move is designed to combat the effects of the state's fast-growing population, which is expected to cause by 2020 a spike in greenhouse emissions by 30% over 1990 levels. Among the plan's hallmarks: producing at least one-third of all electricity from renewables, the most of any state.
—Robert F. Service
Austrian scientists are in a cold sweat after learning that they could face a 90% budget cut. That bomb was buried within a draft budget document released 2 weeks ago, just days after a major electoral win by the country's conservative Austrian People's Party. Austrian scientists had been promised a 5-year budget of €2.35 billion—that is, back in the warm and lazy summer days when the liberal party was in power and global financial markets were riding high. The number now suggested is just €350 million. "Scientists are upset and alarmed," says a spokesperson at the Austrian Council for Research and Technology Development who requested anonymity. "But the real numbers will come in January." If the cut turns out to be true, he predicts that scientists will take to the streets. However, he says, such a budget would be so disastrous for Austrian science that he can't believe the cut is a serious proposal. "I think it was just a clerical error."
—John Bohannon
… gets full and mostly positive coverage today in the Washington Post's take on Energy nominee Steve Chu and their look at Carol Browner, Lisa Jackson, and Nancy Sutley, his respective picks for Climate Czar, Environmental Protection Agency Director, and Head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. The Wall Street Journal, however, is not a fan.
More on how EPA science could be affected by the picks on ScienceInsider soon.
—Eli Kintisch
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