ScienceInsider

by Martin Enserink

PARIS—France's collective brainpower may be headed for a massive boost in the government's long-awaited economic stimulus plan. A panel chaired by two former prime ministers recommends spending more than €20 billion on boosting research, higher education, innovation, and technology. The plan would also give the 5-year-old National Research Agency (ANR), whose €800 million budget has been flat for several years, considerably more clout.

After months of study and testimony by more than 200 witnesses, the panel, chaired by former French prime ministers Alain Juppé and Michel Rocard, presented its report to French President Nicolas Sarkozy yesterday. In total, it recommends a €35 billion "investment in the future," €22 billion of which is to be borrowed on the financial markets—which is why the plan is also known as the Big Loan.

Noting that France is lagging in international rankings of scientific output and fails to turn science into business, the group says that investing in knowledge should be the top priority. The panel’s spending proposals include:

By Adrian Cho

For the first time in more than a year, protons should soon be whizzing around the world’s biggest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), officials at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, have announced. Within the next several hours, physicists at the lab near Geneva, Switzerland, aim to have beams of particle making complete laps through the 27-kilometer-long ring-shaped accelerator. That would get them back to where they were on 19 September 2008, when the LHC suffered a catastrophic failure just 9 days after researchers first fed particles all the way around it. “Keep your fingers crossed for us,” says Steve Myers, CERN’s director of accelerators and technology.

After researchers achieve stable circulating beams, they will likely try to accelerate them to an unprecedented energy of 1.2 tera-electron volts—only 1/6 of the LHC’s design energy of 7 TeV per beam. “The dream scenario is that people come to work Monday morning and find that we’ve broken the world record for energy,” says CERN spokesperson James Gillies.

by Dennis Normile

TOKYO—Nothing rouses a research community like a threat to its funding, as could be seen this week here in Japan after a task force recommended deep cuts (subs req) in the Ministry of Education's budget for fiscal year 2010. Grass-roots efforts have sprung up to defend individual projects, while community leaders are asserting the importance of research to Japan's future.

The Government Revitalization Unit was set up by the newly elected Democratic Party to identify wasteful spending in the budget requests for the year beginning next April so that money can be steered toward social programs. Three working groups are in the midst of a 9-day review, with just an hour or so allowed for discussion of each line item. One of the three working groups reviewed 40 projects and spending categories in the education ministry's budget during hearings on 13 and 17 November. Few were spared. Based on just a partial list of the projects carried in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, the task force recommended cuts running up to $3 billion, equivalent to more than 10% of the education ministry's research-related spending this year.

But backers of targeted projects are fighting back.

Paul Alivisatos has been named director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

Experts told a congressional panel today that the United States is losing its lead in spaceflight.

The Senate Energy Committee will explore the economics of the climate bill next Wednesday.

Meanwhile, the Navy prepares for global warming by envisioning an ice-free Arctic.

Did a classification error doom a fish called a slapper skate to near extinction?

Students at the University of California, Los Angeles protested ahead of a vote in which the Regents approved fee hikes.

Americans polled say they believe a cure for cancer will be found and aliens discovered before peace in the Middle East is reached.

by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

Advances in synthetic biology have prompted fears that terrorists might develop biological weapons by purchasing made-to-order DNA sequences from gene synthesis companies and using them to engineer deadly pathogens. Five of the world's leading gene synthesis companies today announced steps they are already implementing—or plan to implement—a plan to prevent misuse of the technology. The announcement comes amid calls for tougher government controls on the field of synthetic genomics.

The companies, which make up what they call the International Gene Synthesis Consortium, already examine purchase orders to ensure that they are not supplying customers with genomes of pathogens that many governments consider as potential threats to biosecurity. The consortium's members now plan to strengthen this procedure by screening orders against a database they say will be more comprehensive.

by Constance Holden

Social and behavioral research is finally getting some of the high-level attention it has sought for years at the National Institutes of Health. Yesterday NIH Director Francis Collins announced that $10 million in recovery money will go to support the launch of the Basic Behavioral and Social Science Opportunity Network – they're calling it OppNet, an initiative to support and coordinate basic behavioral research throughout NIH.

The American Psychological Society  Association for Psychological Science (APS), which has been working with Congress for about a decade to get more behavioral science into NIH, is ecstatic about OppNet. APS Executive Director Alan Kraut says NIH's Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, which isn't a funding agency, "has had less and less impact over time." OppNet, to be led by Jeremy Berg, director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, and National Institute on Aging Director Richard Hodes, "is much higher visibility." It will be getting all institute directors together on a regular basis to talk about behavioral research needs. Although basic behavioral research already gets about $1 billion a year from NIH, Kraut says OppNet will funnel money into cross-disciplinary areas that have hitherto been ignored. NIH institutes and centers have committed to putting another $110 million into the initiative over the next 5 years.

by Eli Kintisch

The secretive JASON group of academic physicists have given a thumbs up to the current program of refurbishing nuclear warheads in the U.S. stockpile instead of building new, more reliable ones. The report should bolster efforts by the Obama Administration to keep dead the Reliable Replacement Warhead program, a Bush-era program to build new nukes. Bush's Energy Department and Pentagon officials had argued that flaws in the refurbishment program were a key rationale for new bombs, but Obama disagreed. (Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a holdover, tried to revive the program this past summer, but failed.) The strong endorsement of the status quo by JASON, says Arms Control Wonk:

should drive a stake through the heart of the RRW and warhead “replacement” in general.

by Constance Holden

Nebraska citizens don't like the open-ended new Obama policy on research with human embryonic stem cells. So in response to public pressure, the University of Nebraska board of regents will vote tomorrow on whether to limit its researchers to the cell lines allowed under President Bush:

... if it approves the restrictions — some opponents of the research say they have the votes, though others remain doubtful — the University of Nebraska would become the first such state institution in the country to impose limits on stem cell research that go beyond what state and federal laws allow, university officials say.

For weeks, the Nebraska board of regents has been the focus of a fierce campaign by opponents of embryonic stem cell research, most recently by a flood of e-mail and telephone calls, a petition drive and radio advertisements.

Nebraska law already prohibits state funding of research on non-Bush-approved lines.

by Jocelyn Kaiser

The National Institutes of Health is again being taken to task for doing too little to manage researchers' potential conflicts of interest, such as consulting for drug companies. This time federal investigators say NIH should tighten up rules that now give faculty with NIH funding too much leeway in what they must report.

The criticism comes from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Inspector General (IG), which in 2008 found that NIH wasn't paying enough attention to how its grantee institutions manage conflicts of interest. In a follow-on report dated 18 November, the IG has now examined the information that 41 grantee institutions filed with NIH in 2006 as well as documents kept by the institutions, such as disclosure forms. The most common conflict it found was equity ownership—111 of 165 researchers had equity such as stock in a company, and six had equity valued at more than $100,000.