ScienceInsider

The $6 billion National Science Foundation usually flies under the radar here in Washington, D.C., but a kerfuffle involving Internet pornography has angered hard-charging senator Charles Grassley (R-IA). And that's got fans of NSF worried.

…according to Beryl Lieff Benderly, to help young students who want to pursue scientific careers get ahead and thereby bolster America's stature as a research powerhouse. Politicians who want to boost American researchers may focus on federal money for science, but she says it's an overhaul of the basic research system in the United States that's needed. There have got to be jobs available for students when they leave universities with Ph.D.s, she says, and the current hierarchical system of basic research labs based in universities isn't cutting it:

Instead of depending for labor on a constant stream of cheap, temporary students and postdoc “trainees,” labs need to establish many long-term positions that offer workers a realistic income commensurate with their education and experience as well as opportunities for advancement within predictable career tracks. A model that many experts favor is staffing labs primarily with bachelors- or masters-level career technicians and PhD-level permanent staff scientists while using much smaller percentages of grad students and postdocs.

Because these new-style labs would not depend on student labor, they would not need to be in universities. ... Janelia Farm. the Howard Hughes Research Institute’s innovative new research facility in Ashburn, Virginia, eschews university-style hierarchy and places a strong emphasis on employing long-term PhD staff scientists.

—Eli Kintisch

Seven so-called neglected diseases just became a little less neglected. This morning, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced a new $34 million grant in support of a global network that aims to slash rates of easily treatable infectious diseases that affect as many as 1.4 billion poor people.

While research and treatment budgets for HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis have exploded in recent years, many lesser-known tropical diseases have not gotten nearly the same attention—even though their collective disease burden is just as high or higher, and cheap, effective drugs exist for the seven most common ones, says Peter Hotez, president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences in Washington, D.C., and one of the founders of the Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases.

Part of the grant, announced today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, will be used to help drum up more financial support for the network, Hotez says, while the rest will go to scaling up treatment of the seven infectious diseases in developing countries. The septet includes ascariasis, hookworm, lymphatic filariasis, onchocerciasis, schistosomiasis, trachoma, and trichuriasis.

—Martin Enserink

Great poetic find by the New York Times's Kenneth Chang. It's a touching counterpoint, 2 days after writer John Updike passed away, to the news that the NASA Spirit rover on Mars is starting to suffer mysterious bouts of amnesia.

—Eli Kintisch

Researchers funded by Genome Canada, Canada’s preeminent funding body for large-scale genomics and proteomics research, are reacting with shock to news that the Canadian government is withdrawing funding from the 9-year-old organization. The government says the organization can rely on last year's money.

“This is extremely serious,” says Anthony James Pawson, a University of Toronto-based cell biologist who won the $550,000 Kyoto Prize in 2008 for his work on cell communication through signaling proteins, which has been praised for establishing one of the basic paradigms of signal transduction.

Since 2000, the research body has received about $600 million from the Canadian government and has matched that in cofunding. Genome Canada had expected about $100 million from the government for the year ahead. The cut to the genomics budget comes as Canada scales back research funding amid a budget crisis.

Instead, the government has offered nothing. "It's like we fell between the chairs," says the organization’s president, Martin Godbout.

While President Obama says he's reaching out to Iran and his Iranian counterpart is responding with bombast, the outlook for scientific diplomacy with Iran is growing chillier than ever. Two Iranian medical researchers, Arash and Kamiar Alaei, both highly respected for their work combating HIV/AIDS, have been sentenced by Iran's Revolutionary Court to 6 years and 3 years in prison, respectively. Their charge? International academic collaboration which, according to the Iranian government, is intended to foment a "velvet revolution." The lead editorial in today's issue of Nature calls on Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to make good on his promise, made last year at Columbia University, to support international academic collaboration. The sentence comes just a month after Glenn Schweitzer, director of Eurasian programs at the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, was detained and interrogated while visiting Tehran to build collaborations in the medical sciences.

The Alaei brothers are only the latest Iranian academics targeted by their own government in a crackdown that began when Ahmadinejad came to power in 2005. As in other cases, it is alleged that solitary confinement and torture are being used by the Iranian government to extract confessions. The Alaei brothers have 20 days to appeal the verdict. The organization Physicians for Human Rights is calling on the academic community to take action.

—John Bohannon

(Update, January 30, from Peter Witzler, Physicians for Human Rights: "We have shifted strategy to target Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. We launched a new action yesterday.")

California marine scientists have encountered some rough seas lately, following the state finance department's decision last month to freeze all funding derived from the sale of bonds. That decision was a response to the state's dismal financial situation: A projected $40 billion budget deficit and sinking credit rating have scuttled the state's ability to sell bonds to raise capital for projects that include freeway repairs and library construction. Thanks to several conservation-minded propositions passed by California voters in recent years, these bond-funded projects include dozens of studies aimed at documenting and protecting the state's natural resources.

Researchers were ordered to stop work immediately, says Rikk Kvitek of California State University, Monterey Bay, a principal investigator on a $20 million sea-floor mapping program funded by the state (see above.)  A major goal of the project is to create high-resolution digital maps to aid in establishing a statewide network of marine protected areas. "We had a 200-foot vessel that was collecting data along the north coast" when the stop-work order came through on 18 December, Kvitek says. "On the 19th, they had to just go into port." Kvitek has managed to find temporary funding so that 15 students and staff members in his lab can keep working on data analysis, but he says that money will last only 2 or 3 months.

Officials at Los Alamos National Laboratory announced today that they are investigating a mysterious case of beryllium contamination. Recent tests revealed that a storage building contained high levels of beryllium dust, which if inhaled can cause people to become especially sensitive to further exposure and eventually lead to lung disease. Officials could not pin down when the contamination occurred because the building, which has not been used for beryllium processing for many years, was last given a clean bill of health in 2001. Laboratory officials are notifying 1800 people who since that time either worked in or visited the building, in a part of the lab called Technical Area 41.

The Senate yesterday released its markup of the massive stimulus package, an $825 billion spending and tax bill meant to revitalize the U.S. economy. As with the draft released by the House of Representatives, the Senate package includes billions for federal scientific research. In many cases, the level of funding for research and related activities differs quite a bit from what the House wants. Here’s a first cut at the overall numbers, ranked roughly by increasing disparity. The House was voting today on amendments to its bill and is expected to pass it today or tomorrow; the Senate will then pass its bill. The two sides are hoping to pass a stimulus package by 16 February, President's Day.

Stay tuned for further analysis agency-by-agency. Links to past coverage below, with agencies apart from NIH after the jump.

National Institutes of Health
House: $3.5 billion (includes $1.5 billion for extramural research, over 2 years, $1.5 billion for extramural facilities, and $500 million for on-campus buildings.)

Senate: $3.5 billion ($2.7 billion split between director's office and the institutes, $500 million for on-campus buildings, and $300 million for extramural instrumentation.)

Canadian scientists are afraid that the government's decision to cut funding to the main source of research grants will trigger a new brain drain to the United States.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper unveiled a budget yesterday aimed at pulling the country out of the global recession. Although reducing funding to three government councils that provide grants to scientists, the budget includes $1.62 billion over 2 years to retrofit aging academic buildings as part of a $10 billion investment in all manner of infrastructure. But scientists say that the economic stimulus package moving quickly through the U.S. Congress provides so much support for research that Canadian scientists once again will be tempted to cross the border, offsetting gains made over the past decade as a result of faculty-recruitment programs.