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Yesterday, California voters soundly defeated five ballot measures intended to help right the state's wobbly finances. The vote is a rebuke to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and state legislators, who in February cobbled together a mix of caps on state spending, extensions on temporary tax hikes, earmarks to offset cuts to education, and other measures in an attempt to close the state's projected $21 billion budget deficit. The outcome also portends more pain for the state's cash-strapped university system.

The National Institutes of Health, a bastion of basic research, is making a foray into developing drugs. NIH leaders today announced a $120 million, 5-year plan to set up a drug development service center at the agency. The center's chemists and toxicologists will modify promising compounds until they're ready to be tested in people. The focus will be on rare and neglected diseases.

Nineteen professional societies and labor organizations launched a national campaign today to protect the white-collar work force against political interference. The coalition, called Professionals for the Public Interest, held a press conference this morning to unveil a Web site and promote an essay contest intended to highlight egregious examples of such interference—and how they were thwarted.

The group was formed 2 years ago amid concerns that the Bush Administration was compromising professional job standards and distorting the results of research carried out by employees or outside advisory panels. The group also hopes to protect those who try to blow the whistle on illegal or unethical behavior within the federal government, including science agencies such as NSF and NIH. "The ability to do the job right matters to professionals—and to everyone they serve," says Paul Almeida, president of the Department for Professional Employees within the AFL-CIO. The 19 organizations include the American Chemical Society, IEEE-USA, and AAAS (which publishes ScienceInsider).

—Jeffrey Mervis

Mexico’s Ministry of Health regularly posts informative, detailed graphs of its outbreak that have received little prime-time exposure. Even if you don’t read Spanish, you can glean loads of tidbits from the charts. On 15 May, for example, a graph that shows the accumulation of confirmed cases by date of the onset of symptoms indicates that cases peaked on April 26. The curves suggest that the outbreak there has waned, as Mexican health officials there have asserted (though there may be detection bias because of factors like processing older samples first). Note, too, that the graph has 34 cases that were symptomatic before 1 April, the date of a much ballyhooed “patient zero” from La Gloria, Veracruz. Other charts show the breakdown of confirmed cases by age, gender, and states, as well as the frequency of specific symptoms.

—Jon Cohen

Image Credit: Ministry of Health, Mexico

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Effect Measure, a spirited and popular blog written by anonymous public health scientists/practitioners, has an entertaining riff about the confusion over whether to call the swine flu outbreak a pandemic. “The argument boils down to this,” write the Effect Measure’s editors, who call themselves the Reveres (after Paul Revere, a member of the first U.S. board of health). “We shouldn't call a pandemic a pandemic, because people might misunderstand that this means it's a pandemic.”

—Jon Cohen

Add 2 months to the timetable for producing a vaccine against the virus causing the swine flu outbreak, says an advisory group to the World Health Organization (WHO).

It may be mid-July before manufacturers have the appropriate “seed stock” to start making the vaccine against the new A (H1N1), according to a report posted online today from a WHO working group on vaccines that met via teleconference on 14 May. The report says a crude form of the seed stock likely will be ready by the end of the month, but 1 to 2 weeks of testing in animals will be required. Manufacturers typically need 1 to 2 months more to find the fastest growing strains that will produce the most surface proteins from the virus, which are the main ingredients in a vaccine. The group warned that moving too quickly “could result in starting vaccine production with strains of lower growth potential,” as happened with a strain of H5N1, the bird flu virus. “Using a poorly growing A (H1N1) virus could reduce global supplies of A (H1N1) vaccine,” the group warned.

Austria will remain a member of CERN. Yesterday, Austrian chancellor Werner Faymann overruled his science minister, Johannes Hahn, and said that Austria would not pull out of the European particle physics center near Geneva at the end of 2010, as Hahn had asserted on 7 May. Faymann said he didn't want to damage Austria's reputation as a reliable partner in international collaborations, but there appear to be other factors involved in the U-turn.

Today's Independent, among others, has a nice account of a contentious academic debate among the United Kingdom's geographers, which has culminated in a vote by Royal Geographical Society members to not support large-scale scientific expeditions.

Michael McCarthy writes:

More than 300 fellows and members of the Royal Geographical Society crowded into a lecture theatre at the society's elegant Kensington headquarters, to argue over a controversial call for the RGS to resume the big scientific expeditions for which it was once a byword, and which have now been abandoned.

But after a passionate two-hour debate behind closed doors, which involved some of Britain's leading explorers, including the Arctic adventurer Pen Hadow and the pioneer of rainforest studies Robin Hanbury-Tenison, the motion was defeated.

The argument had been seen as a fight for the soul of the RGS, between those who felt that large-scale exploration should still be its true purpose, and those who felt that times had changed, and it should now be an essentially academic institution.

More than 4000 of the society's 10,000-plus members cast a ballot, and the motion to restore major expeditions was defeated 61.3% to 38.7%.

—John Travis

The phasing system for pandemic influenza needs fixing, representatives of several countries told Margaret Chan, director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), at the World Health Assembly meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, today.

On 29 April, WHO announced a phase 5 alert about the swine flu outbreak, one level short of a full-scale pandemic. But the alert has yet to move to phase 6 because WHO says no country outside of North America has experienced spread of the new H1N1 virus in a community. Critics have noted that this phasing system does not take into account the severity of the disease, and that the definitions of “community spread” are not clear. At a “high-level consultation,” representatives from member countries said they wanted a more “nuanced” system, WHO spokesperson Thomas Abraham told ScienceInsider, that took severity of disease and other factors into account.

Former astronaut Charles Bolden is expected to be named the next administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as early as today, according to press reports over the weekend. A veteran of four space shuttle missions in the 1980s and '90s, Bolden retired as a major general in the Marine Corps in 2004. He has since worked as a lobbyist for the aerospace community. If nominated and confirmed, Bolden will be the first African American to lead NASA. He is scheduled to meet with President Barack Obama for an interview today. Stay tuned.

—Yudhijit Bhattacharjee