ScienceInsider

Big vote among House democrats yesterday that saw Henry Waxman (D-CA) defeat John Dingell (D-MI) for the chairmanship of the powerful Energy and Commerce panel, the committee through which climate change legislation will pass. See our ScienceNow story for analysis...

The most prominent scientist in President-elect Barack Obama's transition team says that the group reviewing the White House science shop is under tight pressure to make suggestions for who should be the science adviser to the new president. Chemist Mario Molina told ScienceInsider in an interview that his four-person squad, inspecting the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, is expected  to provide transition staff with the names of qualified candidates as well as rationales for each "in a matter of weeks."

A Nobel prize–winning climate expert from the University of California, San Diego, Molina says the team is seeking candidates who follow "the sentiments of statements President-elect Obama said on the campaign." (In an October letter to the National Academies, Obama said he'd install an "exceptionally talented" science adviser at the level of assistant to the President. That's a higher status—and presumably more influence—than the current science adviser has.) Molina says his team will work to help hire a "high-level science adviser hopefully close to the Cabinet level ... but all we can do is make suggestions."

Molina and his colleagues on the review team, who include former Clinton administration officials Rosina Bierbaum and Tom Kalil and Federation of American Scientists staff member Michael Stebbins, will also provide policy guidance and "strategic ideas" to the transition staff on how to make them happen. Current White House science adviser Jack Marburger eliminated two deputy positions in the office in 2001, which some critics say reduced the clout of the science adviser's team. Molina says that was a mistake. He adds: "It's not just the number of people in the team but how effectively their input is integrated in the White House."

But Molina, who keeps a working laboratory in San Diego as well as a nonprofit environmental organization in Mexico City, says he is not interested in the science adviser spot. "I think I can be most effective outside the government," he says.

-- Eli Kintisch

France's leading state-run research university—the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie—has been on the prowl along the U.S. East Coast this week, looking to test its new liberty. Under a law that takes effect in January, UPMC will be one of 20 "autonomous" state schools that for the first time will control their own budgets, hire their own faculty, and—in theory—run their own labs. A new law pushed through last year by Nicolas Sarkozy, despite angry union protests, releases the schools from the education ministry. (Its researchers will no longer be in the pay of the civil service.) It's the first wave in a surge of reform that's supposed to liberate more than 80 French universities.

UPMC President Jean-Charles Pomerol says he can taste the freedom already, although taking control of UPMC's destiny may prove "a challenge." He and his retinue have been prospecting at Harvard and MIT in the Boston area, at NYU in New York, and at the University of Maryland and NIH in the D.C. area, trolling for partnerships and talking up the glories of la vie francaise.

In a new paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, neurologist Robert Green and health law specialist George Annas, both of Boston University, explore the political implications of presidential candidates' genes as factors in future elections. They imagine a world in which candidates' DNA is plucked from a stray hair they leave behind, and a genome scan used to reveal their risk of all sorts of diseases. A scan of President-elect Barack Obama or Senator John McCain's DNA wouldn't have given us much useful information, the two admit, because even though we've found loads of genetic variants, the significance of many is still iffy, and they tell us relatively little about whether or not someone will actually develop, say, heart disease or a psychiatric condition.  Still, the pair urge candidates not to release their DNA—but all it will take is one drop of saliva on a diner coffee mug before that DNA and its code could be made public.

—Jennifer Couzin

Five years ago, the U.S. Congress sent a shudder through the biomedical research community when lawmakers came close to pulling funding for four National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants on sexual behavior. The controversy widened when a conservative group circulated a list of about 200 grants on sex- and AIDS-related topics and NIH scrambled to defend the research. The brouhaha is back in the news this week thanks to a survey published in PLoS Medicine of how 82 of these researchers responded. Sociologist Joanna Kempner of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, found that half changed wording in their grants to avoid scrutiny, for example changing "sex workers" to "women at risk."

Although Kempner calls this "self-censorship," many of these reseachers weren't acting entirely on their own—they were urged to whitewash their abstracts by frantic NIH officials so that critics wouldn't find them in NIH's grants database. One implication is that it is now harder for fellow researchers to look up what NIH is funding on, say, needle exchange. Also troubling is that about a quarter of the survey respondents stopped studying certain topics.

—Jocelyn Kaiser 

The United Kingdom is the big winner—and women are the major losers—in the first round of grants for "advanced scientists" awarded by the European Research Council (ERC). The final results, released earlier this month, show that U.K. institutions will host 21% of the 275 grants, worth up to €3.5 million each and reserved for well-established scientists. That puts the United Kingdom well ahead of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy.

Somewhat embarrassingly, women made up only 14% of the applicants and will receive only 12% of the grants. "That was very disappointing to all of us," ERC Vice-President Helga Nowotny told ScienceInsider this morning. But she notes that the outcome reflects the low number of female full professors in Europe. ERC is considering remedies, Nowotny says, such as asking review panels to give candidates with unconventional career tracks special consideration and encouraging more women to apply. Still, she adds, "We cannot and will not undertake affirmative action."

There's a reason for that. ERC has been adamant that it wants a break with the E.U. tradition of sharing the wealth more or less fairly. Here, it's all about excellence--so tough luck for those countries (Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Slovenia, Slovakia, and the three Baltic states) that didn't bag a single grant. If ERC started favoring women now, it might come under pressure to take affirmative action for lagging nations as well—and that is about the last thing it wants to do.

—Martin Enserink

Expect no letup in the investigation of U.S. biomedical researchers who violate conflict-of-interest regulations. So says Senator Chuck Grassley (R–IA), who’s been hammering scientists who receive pay from drug companies but fail to comply with U.S. rules requiring them to report such outside income. In a conversation on 19 November, Grassley told Science that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) needs to be more aggressive about getting the universities and researchers it funds to disclose consulting income. The Iowa lawmaker is concerned that NIH's plan to revise the reporting rules is an excuse for inaction. That could take a couple of years, Grassley says. "They can change [the rules] if they want to, but ... they've got plenty of leverage with just yanking back grants," he says.

One institution has already suffered that fate—Emory University in Atlanta, which had an NIH grant suspended after Grassley’s inquiry identified a psychiatry department chair who had allegedly not properly reported some income. Grassley staffers say that some universities—such as Stanford in Palo Alto, California—have told investigators that they have seen no significant lapses. But a Harvard University inquiry is “ongoing,” Senate aides say—and likely to make news again.

—Eliot Marshall and Jocelyn Kaiser

In the U.K. today, The Guardian's front page blares "NHS medical research plan threatens patient privacy." The story centers on a proposal to allow researchers to mine National Health Service (NHS) records to identify people with specific medical conditions who might consider a clinical trial. That's disturbing to the chair of an NHS watchdog group, says the paper:

It would result in patients receiving a letter from a stranger who knew their most intimate medical secrets, which would be regarded by many as a breach of trust by doctors who are supposed to keep information confidential. It raises the prospect of a letter being opened by a relative, which could cause embarrassment.

Harry Cayton, who is about to take over as chairman of the National Information Governance Board for Health and Social Care, the new watchdog on use of NHS data, said the proposal is "ethically unacceptable".

He said: "There is pressure from researchers and from the prime minister to beef up UK research. They think of it as boosting UK Research plc. They want a mechanism by which people's clinical records could be accessed for the purposes of inviting them to take part in research, which at the moment is not allowed. I think that would be a backward step.

"It would be saying there is a public interest in research that is so great that it overrides consent and confidentiality. That is not a proposition that holds up."

The proposal comes a few months after a U.K. report that outlined some of the pro and cons of data sharing.

—John Travis