News in a nutshell
| 13 December, 2010 | Adie Chan |
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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 21st 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.)
Related articles:
When is self-plagiarism ok?
[9th September 2010]
The Long Journey Home
[June 2006]
The Nobel Prize for Chemistry 2002
[9th October 2002]
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My information (albeit much of it from Dr. Fenn) is that Yale declined to file the patent during the period just before they forced Dr. Fenn to retire at the mandatory 70. After he retired, he formed a company to file the patent and commercialize the invention. After Yale learned that the patent had issued and had aroused much commercial interest, Yale filed criminal charges and Fenn was convicted in a criminal court in New Haven (not the US patent court) for ‘stealing’ Yale’s invention. (Fenn was a graduate of Berea College and earned his Ph.D. at Yate, worked for Monsanto and worked in a small instrument company before a distinguished academic career at Princeton and Yale prior to his mandatory retirement from Yale. Virginia Commonwealth University provided him a laboratory and access to students and he worked there until his death last week
Very interesting tidbit George… it never ceases to amaze me how one can be left out in the cold by those for whom one toils only to have them return wanting a “cut” once the very thing that they dismissed becomes a commercial success.
If the story from George is true, Yale should get no benefit but lawsuit bill. Did Yale get any benefit from the lawsuit? if yes, why? In other words, if Yale did not like to patent it at the time then, this left the right for inventor to patent it, which will have nothing with Yale, since Yale did not choose to patent it. Can George provide more detail information for the lawsuit going on.