Finger and Kinnamon discuss their findings in a F1000 Biology Report, as well as in an article published in the latest edition of The Scientist magazine. They speculate on the different roles that these taste receptors could play:

Despite the similarities in receptor molecules and signaling cascades, … these seemingly misplaced taste-like pathways do not, however, give rise to sensations of taste, though they appear to detect compounds known to elicit a taste response in the mouth.

So, the taste transduction cascade is not restricted to the sensation of taste per se or even to systems regulating food intake. In fact, it’s widely thought that the receptors mediating taste transduction are a chemodetection system in a variety of organ systems. In the gut for example, sweet sensations could trigger the release of insulin, while bitter sensations in the colon could elicit the secretion of anions, leading to fluid secretion into the intestine, in turn resulting in diarrhea.

In the video below, Sue Kinnamon talks to editorial director Kathleen Wets at the Society for Neuroscience 2011, about her and Tom’s research:

Our editor-in-chief, Sarah Greene, also caught up with Tom Finger at SFN, and below he tells us about the research relevant to his work that has caught his interest.

Read Finger and Kinnamon’s F1000 Biology Report.

A UN peacekeeper with children in Port-au-Prince after the 2010 earthquake

United Nations peacekeepers inadvertently sparked the cholera outbreak that killed thousands of people in Haiti, according to an independent report released last week. Genetic and epidemiological data strongly suggested that Nepalese UN staffers working in the earthquake-ravaged island nation brought with them a strain of the cholera bacteria common to South Asia. Improper disposal of waste water at a camp housing the workers is likely to blame for the spread of the disease. (Hat tip to ScienceInsider.)

Evidence contravenes nuke plant-leukemia link

Children living within 5 kilometers of a nuclear power plant are not at an increased risk for developing leukemia, according to an analysis released last week by an independent government advisory committee in the United Kingdom. The report covered a period of 35 years and studied the incidence of the cancer in children under the age of 5 living in close proximity to the UK’s 13 nuclear power stations. Alex Elliott, chair of the committee and a clinical physicist at the University of Glasgow, told Nature that the report found “no significant association” between leukemia in the children living close to the plants, challenging a 2008 German study that suggested living within 5 kilometers of nuclear facilities doubled the risk of leukemia in children.

Growth hormone scandal in court

A French biochemist and a pediatrician were cleared last week of involuntary manslaughter and other charges stemming from the administration of growth hormones to children from 1959-1988, according to ScienceInsider. During that era, growth hormone was derived from pituitary glands harvested from human cadavers, and 125 French children died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD)—a prion-mediated brain condition—after receiving the treatment. This latest ruling, handed down by a French appeals court, was the latest in two decades of litigation over the cases, and upholds a 2009 ruling that cleared Fernand Dray (the Pasteur Institute biochemist who was tasked with purifying the hormone formulations) and Elisabeth Mugnier (the pediatrician who oversaw the pituitary sample collection and administration of the treatments) of wrongdoing.

Fungus-proof GM corn

With the help of a family of highly-conserved immune proteins, researchers in Australia are developing corn that can fight off yield-decreasing fungal infections. Biochemist Marilyn Anderson of La Trobe University is partnering with agribusiness giant Pioneer to create corn that expresses a particular defense protein called NaD1 that is normally only present in the flowers of the ornamental tobacco plant. If corn plants engineered to express NaD1 in all parts of the plant can resist fungal infections, it may be possible to greatly increase annual crop yields, Anderson told the ABC.

Another study fails to find XMRV in chronic fatigue patients

The latest in a string of studies searching for a mouse virus in patients suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome has failed to turn up evidence of the pathogen, XMRV. The study, which was published online last week in the Journal of Virology, couldn’t detect XMRV in 100 people with chronic fatigue syndrome, including 14 of the patients who tested positive in the 2009 Science study that originally posited a link between the virus and the syndrome. University of Utah in Salt Lake City virologist Ila Singh, who led the new study, suggests (as have others) that the XMRV previously found in chronic fatigue patients was a result of contamination in the lab. But Judy Mikovits, senior author of that 2009 Science paper and virologist at the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease, is standing by her findings. “We have complete confidence in every bit of the results in the Science paper,” she told ScienceInsider.

There goes the picnic

A new species of extinct, 2-inch-long ant would have been a real bummer to prehistoric picnickers. A fossilized impression of the flying ant, named Titanomyrma lubei, was found in 50 million-year-old rock from Wyoming by two paleoentomologists who were poking around in drawers at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. But even at more than 5 centimeters long, the species is still not the largest ant ever. Fossil ants from Germany and queens from an extant African species of driver ant are even bigger. (Hat tip to Wired.)

Related News Stories:

View a complete calendar of events for the Philly Science Festival here.

Last month we also published the results of our Best Places to Work (Postdocs) survey, in which University College London came out top of the ‘International’ list. UCL is just across the road from F1000 Central, so I took my camera and had a chat with F1000 Member Paul Riley, who has been doing some rather splendid BHF-funded work on heart regeneration. I also spoke with a few of his lab members, about why UCL is so great.

Enjoy!

Despite what it sounds like, this show doesn’t promise to be simple naked sensationalism. The series features Cornell University’s Linda Rayor, an entomologist who studies the social behavior of insect predators, such as huntsman and whip spiders, among which you wouldn’t expect to find such congeniality.

Check out a couple of clips from the show:

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Tokyo campuses of two US universities remain closed today after an 8.9 magnitude earthquake and a subsequent tsunami rocked the island nation last week, killing thousands. The Tokyo campuses of Temple University and Wisconsin’s Lakeland College both cancelled classes today, citing disruptions to transportation systems and government recommendations to stay home. Though no injuries or serious damages have been reported from either campus, the powerful quake was felt at both even though its epicenter was more than 200 miles away. The temblor “sent teachers and students scurrying under desks, while boxes, books, and other debris fell around them,” wrote the Lakeland campus’s interim associate dean, Alan Brender, in an email to The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Gut bugs worsen malnutrition?

While most the news on gut bacteria these days is good—regulating immunity, for example, and even behavior—new evidence from Africa suggests that these commensal microbes may play a role in the negative consequences of malnutrition. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis studied malnourished children in the African nation of Malawi and found that identical twins with similar diets seldom suffer equally from kwashiorkor—the condition that swells the bellies of malnourished children and makes them more susceptible to disease and death. In fact, in only 7% of more than 300 pairs of twins did both children have the condition, the researchers reported last week at the International Human Microbiome Congress in Vancouver, Canada.

Transplanting gut bacterial communities from twins with and without kwashiorkor into mouse models, the scientists found that mice colonized by bacteria from children with the condition lost more weight on the typical Malawian diet of maize flour and vegetables than mice implanted with bacteria from the healthier twin. Though parasites could also play into kwashiorkor and otherwise worsening the health of some malnourished children, the study yields tantalizing clues that could lead to a regimen of healthy bacteria to supplement nutrient-enriched foods dispersed to the world’s hungry. “Maybe we can do earlier interventions — before they suffer,” Michelle Smith, the Washington University postdoc who presented the preliminary results, told Nature News.

Introducing two new journals

The scientific community welcomes two new scientific journals to the peer-reviewed landscape—Nature Publishing Group’s Nature Climate Change and Stem Cells Translational Medicine, an open-access title launched by the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM). Nature Climate Change will make its official debut next month, but has been publishing free content (about 12 papers or commentaries per month) since January on its website. Stem Cells Translational Medicine is the first foray into the publishing world for California’s state-funded stem cell agency, and the first print installment is slated for publication next January, with some online articles going up in December. You can check out an iPad preview of the journal here.

European court says no patents for stem cell therapy

In a move that shocked the European stem cell research community, a high court ruled that procedures involving human embryonic stem cell (hESC) lines could not be patented. Judge Yves Bot, advocate general of the European Court of Justice, issued the preliminary opinion on Thursday (March 10), in response to a case involving a German researcher, Oliver Brustle, who patented a method for generating nerve cells from hESCs in 1991. “It’s the worst possible outcome,” Brüstle, director of the Institute of Reconstructive Neurobiology at the University of Bonn, told Nature News. Thirteen judges that make up the court’s Grand Chamber will now consider the preliminary opinion and will lodge their final decision in a couple of months.

US Navy to take climate change seriously

The United States Navy should prepare to undertake more humanitarian aid missions, strengthen its presence in the Arctic, and consider the security of its seaside bases and installations in the face of the increasing effects of climate change, according to a report by the National Research Council. As Arctic Sea ice melts, sea lanes open up and commercial activities—shipping, oil and gas exploration, etc.—increase. Climate change also raises the likelihood of environmental disasters such as floods, drought, and strong storms. And naval installations, which hug coastlines around the world, are vulnerable to the sea level rise predicted in most models of future climate change. For all of these reasons, the Navy-sponsored report found, the US Navy must act now to protect itself and America’s national security from the ravages of an uncertain future. “Even the most moderate predicted trends in climate change will present new national security challenges for the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard,” said Frank L. Bowman, co-chair of the committee that wrote the report and a retired U.S. navy admiral, in a statement.  “Naval forces need to monitor more closely and start preparing now for projected challenges climate change will present in the future.”

Lost city of Atlantis found?

Scientists claim to have found the sunken metropolis that gave rise to the legend of the lost city of Atlantis. Using deep-ground radar, digital mapping, and satellite imagery, researchers say that the lost city lies buried in the mudflats of a Spanish national park north of Cadiz. Richard Freund, a University of Hartford, Connecticut archaeologist, led an international team that studied the site for several years and told Reuters that the ancient city was likely engulfed by a huge tsunami that swamped the Spanish coast hundreds of years ago.

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A controversial study linking childhood vaccines to autism was a sham, according to an investigative journalist from the BMJ who spent several years looking into the research and its findings. Journalist Brian Deer provides “clear evidence of falsification of data” in the paper, published in the Lancet in 1998 and retracted last year, according to an editorial that ran in the BMJ last week. In particular, Deer reported that the authors of the study downplayed the pre-vaccine autism symptoms of some of the 12 children involved in the research.

People willing to pay top dollar for genetic tests

Consumers would gladly pay hundreds of dollars out-of-pocket for the results of genetic tests that would inform them of the likelihood of contracting diseases like arthritis, cancer, and Alzheimer’s, according to a new study published last week in Health Economics. Of the almost 1500 people who answered the web-based survey, about 76 percent said they’d take such tests, and would pay $300-$600 to know the results. “This study brings us a step closer to understanding people’s preferences and motivations for wanting a diagnostic test, even if it has no bearing on subsequent medical treatment,” lead author Peter Neumann of the Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies at Tufts Medical Center said in a statement.

Synthetic proteins support life

Princeton University scientists constructed several artificial proteins that could sustain growth in living cells. Drawing on a library of about 1 million de novo amino acid sequences, the team inserted the sequences into 27 different knockout strains of E. coli and found that four of these mutant strains were rescued by about 15 proteins in the library. The research, published in last week’s issue of PLoS, demonstrates the ability of man-made proteins to sustain cellular growth, but may stoke the ethical fears surrounding synthetic biology.

Genetic abnormalities plague stem cell lines

Both embryonic and induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell lines have more genetic abnormalities than do other cells, according to researchers from the University of California, San Diego and the Scripps Research Institute. Embryonic stem cells tended to have duplications in the genome while iPS stem cells had more deletions, according to the paper published in Cell Stem Cell last week. Both of these abnormalities can push cells towards becoming cancerous, thereby limiting their suitability as therapeutic agents.

Scientists honored in New Year’s list

Several researchers were recognized in the United Kingdom’s annual New Year’s Honours, which bestow symbolic titles upon deserving individuals as determined by the Queen. University of Cambridge biotechnology professor Christopher Lowe, and Carol Turley, research scientist at Plymouth Marine Laboratory, were named Officers of the British Empire for their service to science. The Queen dubbed Cambridge biologist Ronald Laskey, Southampton University immunologist Stephen Holgate, and Oxford entomologist Hugh Godfray Commanders of the British Empire. See the full list of honorees here.

Hair color encoded in DNA

Perhaps blondness does run deep. Researchers from the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands, reported in Human Genetics last week that they could predict subtly different shades of hair color based on a person’s DNA, a possibly valuable advancement for criminal forensic investigations.

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Faculty Member Daniel Beard of the Medical College of Wisconsin argues that the problem stems from interpretation of the statistical methods used. Models are, by definition, simplifications of complex events. As long as this caveat is kept in mind, the scientific method itself is not at fault.

What do you think? Why are scientists increasingly unable to replicate their results? And what does this mean for the future of science?

–Jef Akst, Associate Editor, The Scientist

The Coast Guard Cutter Oak helps with the oil spill response by performing oil skimming operations. Photo by Ensign Jason Radcliffe.

Sand berms have proven to be an ineffective strategy for protecting the coast from last April’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill, according to a new report from the presidential commission investigating the spill. Scientists (such as Len Bahr, who penned an article for The Scientist) had warned the berms were a “foolish” idea, and would not have the desired effects. But Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and other government officials ignored this advice, and had the berms built anyway. Now, although Jindal “has publicly declared success,” according to ScienceInsider, the commission’s report concluded that the $220 million was not worth the 1,000-or-so barrels of oil the berms trapped (relative to the nearly 5 million barrels likely released during the spill).

Senate pushes for more science funding

While the US House of Representatives recently passed a spending bill that would hold the 2011 budgets flat for the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) , a Senate spending panel last week designed a budget that would boost the budgets of several science agencies, including the NSF and NIH. While the Senate bill is still well below President Obama’s request of $1.134 trillion, it has an extra $20 billion in domestic discretionary spending than the House version and would give NSF an increase of 5.7%, to $7.345 billion, and another $750 million to the NIH, along with additional money for individual programs, according to ScienceInsider.

2 in 5 Americans are creationists

Forty percent of Americans believe in creationism, according to a recent Gallup poll. These respondents believe that humans were created in their current form about 10,000 years ago by God, while 38 percent believe humans have evolved over millions of years, with God guiding the process, and only 16 percent believe that God had no hand in human evolution (up from 9 percent in 1982). Six percent responded “other/no opinion.”

Protecting science from politics

Last Friday, the administration of US President Barack Obama released long-awaited guidelines regarding how to shield government research from various political influences when it comes to policy making. The new guidelines allow government scientists to speak with journalists and the public about their research, prohibit agencies from altering the reports of advisory committees, and require officials to explain the underlying assumptions of new scientific findings. Reactions to the guidelines are mixed, according to The New York Times, with some scientists praising the effort and others criticizing the lack of detail the guidelines provide.

Harvard provost returns to science

Neuroscientist and long-time Harvard provost Steven E. Hyman announced last week that he will be leaving his administrative position at the end of the academic year to return his focus to science, starting with a year-long sabbatical at the Broad Institute, a genomics research organization in Cambridge. Hat tip to The Boston Globe.

How to develop drug combos

Wikimedia commons, Ragesoss

The US Food and Drug Administration issued draft guidelines last week to encourage collaborations among biotech and pharmaceutical companies to develop drug combinations for cancer and other ailments, according to The Wall Street Journal. “I think that’s fantastic,” Erica Golemis, cancer researcher and deputy chief scientific officer at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, told The Scientist. Research is revealing that “you can’t get a good anti-cancer effect by just blocking one pathway because of the complex networks of resistance,” she said. “So you want to have the ability to combine different agents, not only from the same company, but across companies.” Sanofi-Aventis and Merck have already announced that they will work together to test new cancer drug combinations. (With reporting by Bob Grant)

Veterinary pioneer dies

Former Director General of the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) Jean Blancou died last month in Paris at age 74, according to the International Society for Infectious Diseases. Trained as a veterinarian, Blancou traveled the world working to develop better diagnoses and vaccines for animals. He served as director of the National Centre for Research on Rabies and Wildlife Diseases, an affiliate of the World Health Organization, where he researched the causal agents and epidemiology of rabies. He published more than 370 papers during his career, and received many honors, including an Honoris Causa degree from the University of Liege in Belgium.

Stem cell transplant HIV patient still virus-free

Scanning electron micrograph of HIV-1 budding (in green) from cultured lymphocyte. Photo Credit: C. Goldsmith

The so-called “cure” for HIV hasn’t faltered: Doctors report that a man with HIV and leukemia, who received a bone marrow transplant from a donor with a mutation in the CCR5 gene, remains virus-free 3 ½ years after the transplant. The patient needed a transplant for his leukemia, so aware of his HIV status, his German doctors chose a bone marrow donor with the CCR5 mutation, known to confer natural resistance to the virus. The update on his status appears in this month’s Blood. Bone marrow transplants may be too radical a procedure for general use against AIDS, but the finding opens up directions for the search for more practical cures, AIDS researcher Margaret Fischl of the University of Miami told The Seattle Times.

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News in a nutshell
[13th December 2010]
Opinion: Louisiana shuns science
[5th August 2010]
More hope for genetic fix for HIV
[16th June 2010]

Mass spec Laureate dies

Chemist John Fenn, who shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for vastly improving the ability of mass spectrometry to identify large proteins, passed away on Friday at the age of 93. As a Yale professor, Fenn developed a technique called electrospray ionization, in which a strong electric field is used to “unclump” bulky proteins, making them discernible as individual molecules in a mass spectrometer. His work netted him science’s highest honor, but according to the New York Times, legal wrangling over the patent rights cost Fenn $1 million in fines after he personally patented the process and licensed it to a company he co-founded—against Yale policy.

House OKs flat 2011 science budget

In a move that is worrying researchers and science advocacy groups, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a spending bill last week that would hold the 2011 budgets of three key federal science agencies to the levels at which they were funded in 2010. The National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science would not receive the budget boosts (7%, 3.2%, and 4.4%, respectively) that President Barack Obama requested in his 2011 budget. The Senate is working on an alternate version of the spending bill that does provide slight increases for the three agencies. And even in the House bill, the news was not all bad for science—NASA would get a 1.5% increase in 2011, while the National Institute of Food and Agriculture would get a 2.5% boost to its competitive grants program, and the Department of Energy’s new Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy would get $300 million next year. Hat tip to ScienceInsider.

Nearly 10,000 ask for more

The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) has received nearly 10,000 messages from concerned citizens, urging lawmakers to increase funding to the National Institutes of Health by $1 billion in 2011. “We are doing everything we can to ensure that NIH has the necessary resources to meet the health and scientific challenges of the 21^st century,” FASEB president Bill Talman said in a statement from the group.

African innovation struggling?

According to several papers published last week, basic discoveries from laboratories across Africa are failing to make the jump into the clinic or field due to the scarcity of venture capital, lackluster intellectual property protections, and a paucity of institutional support for tech transfer, among other factors. The papers, published in BioMed Central, indicate that while basic research is improving in Africa, important drugs or healthcare technologies—such as a malaria treatment extracted from native African plants and a rapid field test for schistosomiasis—cannot make their way into the market in the current atmosphere. “What we found in Africa is that there is funding for basic research, but there is nobody taking these findings forward,” Ken Simiyu, a technology commercialization researcher at the University of Toronto and co-author on one of the papers, told Nature.

More self-plagiarism

How much self-plagiarism is too much? The question was raised again when a prominent mechanical engineer came under scrutiny for allegedly duplicating several of his own publications over the years. Reginald Smith, an emeritus professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, apparently included copied material in about 20 published papers. Smith was formally reprimanded for research misconduct by his institution, and four of his papers were retracted from two journals. “He was a very good scientist, but something happened and he got into this business of duplicating papers,” Chris Pickles, the Queen’s University metallurgist who blew the whistle on Smith, told Nature. The situation is complicated by the fact that rules against self-plagiarism are nowhere near as clear-cut as are policies against copy the work of others.

Rapid sequencing vs. cholera in Haiti

Researchers working in disaster-ravaged Haiti have employed a new technology to help track the cholera epidemic racing across the country. Publishing their findings last week in the New England Journal of Medicine, scientists used a rapid genome sequencer (none other than Pacific Bioscience’s PacBio RS, which we named the Top Innovation of 2010) to decipher the cholera bacteria’s 4.5 million nitrogenous bases and determine that the strain that has killed more than 2,000 people in Haiti likely came from Asia and not Latin America, as some had previously suspected.

(Editor’s Note — 13th December, 1:50 PM EST: This post has been updated from a previous version.)

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The Long Journey Home
[June 2006]
The Nobel Prize for Chemistry 2002
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According to Douglas Erwin, a palaeobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, such complexity indicates that sponges must have descended from a more advanced ancestor than previously suspected. “This flies in the face of what we think of early metazoan evolution,” says Erwin.

Doug said that when this was published, he was getting calls from colleagues asking if he’d gone mad.

What he was saying is that the idea that modern sponges have descended from a more complex ancestor “flies in the the face of what we think…” Or, as he said to me, “that’s almost certainly wrong.”

Just in case there’s still any doubt: Doug Erwin doesn’t think that sponges evolved from a more complex ancestor. We’re happy to help set the record straight.

Lane, a University College London researcher, sparked a lively debate on The Scientist‘s Website this spring when he detailed his list and asked our readers to weigh in: “Are these the best ten evolutionary inventions?” he wrote. “Smell” and “proteins and the ribosomes that make them” were just a couple of the suggested additions submitted by commenters.

Upon winning the £10,000 prize, Lane didn’t pass up on the opportunity to advocate for a strong financial commitment to UK science, which was spared a much-protested 25% cut in the government’s Comprehensive Spending Review, released last week. “The prize stands for getting the best science to the widest audience possible,” Lane said at the Royal Society award ceremony,  “and I hope that it attracts funding next year and continues for as long as possible.”

Our congratulations go out to Lane!

Bob Grant, Associate Editor, The Scientist

Hideo Otsuna of the Chi-Bin Chien zebrafish development lab at the University of Utah Medical Center won second prize for his shot of a zebrafish head.

And sticking with zebrafish, 3rd prize went to Oliver Braubach, a PhD student at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada, for a great image of the model organism’s olfactory bulbs.

Check out all the winners, the honorable mentions, and the images of distinction here.

[Warning: Be prepared to blissfully burn through several minutes/hours perusing the beautiful images on this page.]

–Bob Grant, Associate Editor, The Scientist

Don’t expect a reply from the authors of that study you just publicly criticized by leaving a comment on the journal web page where it was published. A study conducted by BMJ found that of more than 100 studies published on the journal’s website that attracted substantive criticism, fewer than half of the papers’ authors responded to the criticism. Vehement criticism was no more likely to garner an author response than less damning critiques. “[A] mountain of poor quality unfocused literature has left its readership fatigued, numb, and passive,” wrote UCLA physician David Schriger and University of Oxford statistician Douglas Altman in an editorial that accompanied the study. “Each new paper is another monologue added to the heap. Few read it and fewer care. Errors remain unnoticed or un-noted, and no one seems terribly bothered.” Read more at the Scholarly Kitchen blog.

Peer review, privatized?

In somewhat related news, two ecologists have floated a brash plan to incentivize anonymous manuscript review. It aims to encourage reviewers who might otherwise pass on reviewing the work of their peers, while still expecting their own research to be reviewed, while fixing imbalance in the reviewing workload. Jeremy Fox of the University of Calgary and University of Sheffield researcher Owen Petchey suggest privatizing the peer review process by providing reviewers with symbolic currency called “PubCreds” as payment for reviewing services in an article published in the July issue of the Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America. Review an article, receive one PubCred. Collect three of them, and you can submit your own work for review. While Fox and Petchey claim their system can stop qualified scientists (but lazy reviewers) from gaming the system, commentators at the Scholarly Kitchen blog have criticized the plan, writing that it could diminish the quality of reviews or lead to reduced research productivity.

US Congress talks stem cells

United States Senators assembled on Thursday (16th September) to discuss the precarious state of federally-funded embryonic stem cell research in the wake of the temporary injunction issued by a federal judge last month. Though Judge Royce Lamberth’s injunction, which barred the National Institutes of Health from funding any research involving human embryonic stem cells, was put on hold by a higher court while it considers the case, stem cell researchers around the country fear for the survival of their field. Two prominent scientists, the University of Michigan’s Sean Morrison and George Daley of Harvard University, testified before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, telling lawmakers that their labs have been in turmoil since Lamberth’s injunction. “With the recent upheavals, scientists have again been reminded that human embryonic stem cell research is on fragile and fickle footing,” Daley — who also said that one of his PhD students had to abandon a study using embryonic stem cells treat sickle cell anemia — told the subcommittee. NIH director Francis Collins echoed Daley’s sentiment: “Today there is a cloud hanging over this field.” Meanwhile, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to which the Obama administration appealed the original injunction, scheduled 30 minutes of oral arguments set to take place next Monday (27th September).

Woo retractions

More details surface regarding Savio Woo, the Mount Sinai Medical Center researcher at the middle of a storm of questions surrounding his work on gene therapy, as news comes that two of the postdoctoral fellows under his supervision were dismissed from the institution for “research misconduct,” according Mount Sinai spokesperson Ian Michaels, who spoke to the Retractions Watch blog. Three  major journals — Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Human Gene Therapy, and the Journal of the National Cancer Institute — recently retracted papers authored by Woo and others. It appears as though the papers contained duplicated micrographs among other potential problems. According to ScienceInsider, the names of postdocs Li Chen and Zhiyu Li were recently removed from Mount Sinai’s directory. Chen and Li were listed as first authors on the retracted papers.

Spanish science under the knife

Spanish scientists are bracing for more bad news in what has already been a tough year for research in the country. According to ScienceInsider, rumors are circulating that Spain’s Science and Innovation Minister Cristina Garmendia may step down from her government post and return to research in the biotech sector. In an interview with Spain’s El Confidencial newspaper, Garmendia cited recent cuts to the country’s science budget as the main reason for her desire to leave. The budget of Spain’s Ministry of Science and Education was slashed by 15% in the 2010 budget, and further cuts in the 2011 budget are expected. All of this news is still somewhere between rumor and reality for the moment, as Spain continues to hash out its budgetary details, but things don’t look bright for the state of Spanish science.

Chocolate, decoded

Researchers have cracked the cacao bean, sequencing the genome of the plant that chocolate makers use to create the sweet treat. Funded by Mars Inc., researchers working for the Cacao Genome Database project announced their accomplishment on the project’s website last Wednesday (15th September). The Theobroma cacao sequence took more than 10 years to resolve, and is thought to contain about 35,000 genes.

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My question is why?

I mean, yes, I get it that if the allegations coming from research assistants and grad students who worked with Hauser are true, then it paints a pretty stomach-churning portrait of the renowned biologist that has the potential to sully the entire scientific enterprise in the eyes of some. And I understand that Hauser was receiving federal funding (our tax dollars!) to do his work, so if in fact he did fudge data to fit preconceived notions, he did it on our dime. Sure, that’s infuriating.

I even appreciate the potential scientific value of Hauser’s line of inquiry. Contrary to what some members of the public might think, doing this type of behavioral work with our primate evolutionary cousins is incredibly valuable to honing humanity’s sense of what exactly it means to behave and think like a human.

But is Hauser’s alleged malfeasance really that damaging outside the realm of academic science? I mean, he was studying monkey behavior after all.

When names like Charles Nemeroff and Andrew Wakefield are mentioned, I can understand the widespread sense of anger and frustration that is evoked. These researchers allegedly engaged in research misconduct that could (and likely did) do real harm to thousands (millions?) of people. Their stories of apparent clinical research fraud should be told over and over and remembered by a wide swath of the public, the scientific community included.

And to be sure, the Hauser story does make good reading. He was a prominent research who is facing some pretty serious charges from within his own lab. As one commenter on the Chronicle‘s piece wrote: “What is extraordinary here is the courage and integrity of the students in the lab.” When more information about this whole protracted saga comes to light, it may make very good reading indeed, if just for David and Goliath overtones already coming into focus.

But still, is this case of alleged misconduct worthy of all the attention it’s getting? Is Schadenfreude at play here? Should we be looking instead at the subjective nature of the types of behavioral experiments that Hauser’s lab was undertaking as a contributor to the problem?

We’re interested to hear your thoughts!

Bob Grant – Associate Editor, The Scientist

Check out the poll! How does Hauser stack up against other cases?

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Avrion Mitchison, the British zoologist, is currently Professor Emeritus at University College London and is best known for his work demonstrating the role of lymphocytes in tumour rejection and for the separate and cooperative roles of T- and B-lymphocytes in this and other processes. Read and see more at Web of Stories. Web of Stories, along with F1000 and The Scientist, is part of the Science Navigation Group.

As the New York Times reported this week, gambling website paddypower.com — which places odds on events from political elections and stock market crashes to volcano eruptions and summer heatwaves — is taking bets on which marine species in the Gulf will be the first to go the way of the dodo as a result of what may be the world’s largest oil spill.

“We kind of have a very simple philosophy at Paddy Power — within reason if there is a very newsworthy event that are people are talking about, people should be allowed to back up their opinion with some cash,” company spokesperson Ken Robertson, told the NYT.

Kemp’s Ridley turtle is currently leading the pack with 4/5 odds. Long shots (at 20/1) include the Gulf sturgeon, the elkhorn coral, and the smalltooth sawfish, whose cousin, the largetooth sawfish, was proposed as a federally endangered species on May 7.

Is this a good way to “highlight the environmental catastrophe,” as

According to the Associated Press, since this paper, UK vaccination rates have not returned to their former levels, and each year brings outbreaks of measles.

The UK’s General Medical Council found Wakefield guilty of serious professional misconduct, based on how he carried out his research. He has set up a practice in the U.S., and can appeal the ruling.

What’s your reaction to this latest news?

Alison McCook, Deputy Editor, The Scientist

Talking of parentage, there have been big changes at The Scientist, recently. The magazine is now published by Faculty of 1000, and you’ll see more F1000 content in it as time goes by. The old F1000 blog is now defunct, replaced by Naturally Selected. We’re also moving the more ‘bloggy’ content from The Scientist’s main site to here, as you may have noticed already.

We’re very fortunate to have a friend in Andrzej Krauze. Andrezj has designed a cartoon to celebrate this blog, and we’ve had it printed on sweatshirts, as demonstrated by Eva (who is never going to forgive me for this):

And here’s Georg:

And the good news is that you can have one too! Although we’re saving the bulk of these highly desirable items for our FMs, I’m going to give one away each month to what, in my opinion, is the best comment posted here on Naturally Selected.

How can you resist that?

We profiled William Ja, a Scripps molecular biologist who received an award from the Found Animals Foundation to develop a new non-surgical sterilization technique for cats and dogs.

Sounds good? Well, not really. We’re a bit upset that they’re also creating a social networking site called ‘Faculty of a Million’, funded by a grant from Facebook, where scientists can vote papers for acceptance by pressing a “Like” thumbs-up button or reject the paper by pressing a “Dislike” button. Our company lawyer has just had an apoplectic fit.

And this seems to be a direct invasion of privacy:

readers will have the option of Skyping authors directly to share their thoughts and feelings about a paper simply by clicking that author’s name. As an added incentive, the first 100 new subscribers will get free genome scans.

It’s a nice cover though:

Sounds good? Well, not really. We’re a bit upset that they’re also creating a social networking site called ‘Faculty of a Million’, funded by a grant from Facebook, where scientists can vote papers for acceptance by pressing a “Like” thumbs-up button or reject the paper by pressing a “Dislike” button. Our company lawyer has just had an apoplectic fit.

And this seems to be a direct invasion of privacy:

readers will have the option of Skyping authors directly to share their thoughts and feelings about a paper simply by clicking that author’s name. As an added incentive, the first 100 new subscribers will get free genome scans.

It’s a nice cover though: