ScienceInsider

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