ScienceInsider

Epidemiologist Richard Besser, who until recently helped coordinate the nation's swine flu (H1N1) response as acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, will soon be reporting on the flu and other topics as senior health and medical editor at ABC News. The telegenic Besser, 49, had been regarded as a dark-horse contender for the CDC directorship, but lost out to former New York City health commissioner Thomas R. Frieden, who took control of the Atlanta-based agency in June.

—Robert Koenig

Newcastle University is standing behind its professor whose stem cell group had a paper retracted after a plagiarism charge. The paper, which described how sperm-like cells could be derived from human embryonic stem cells, was published online on 8 July by Stem Cells and Development. As ScienceInsider reported on Thursday, the journal’s editor, Graham Parker, retracted the paper on 21 July after it was discovered that several paragraphs in the introduction had been copied, without attribution, from a 2007 review article.

The paper’s corresponding author, Karim Nayernia, told ScienceInsider that the copied text was part of an old version of the paper, which the first author, a postdoc named Jae Ho Lee, mistakenly submitted. Nayernia says that as soon as he was made aware of the problem he sent Parker the correct version, without the copied text. He says that because the paper was published online before copy editing or proofreading, he and his colleagues did not realize their mistake. Nayernia says he initially received word that the journal had accepted the new draft.

Parker says, however, that “the available evidence does not substantiate the claim” of an accidental submission of the wrong manuscript. Therefore, he says, he decided to retract the paper, despite requests from Nayernia and Newcastle University to reconsider.

Newcastle University accepts Nayernia’s explanation. Late Tuesday, it released the following statement:

The appointment of geneticist Francis Collins to direct the National Institutes of Health could soon be a done deal. NIH-watchers in Washington, D.C., say that the Senate committee that handles this nomination will not hold a confirmation hearing, the forum where any controversies are usually aired. Instead, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) may send Collin's nomination—apparently unopposed—to the full Senate for an all-or-nothing "unanimous consent" vote sometime next week—the last chance before the Senate goes on August recess. A HELP committee spokesperson said that no hearing has been scheduled but declined to comment further.

—Jocelyn Kaiser

According to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food of Quebec (MAPAQ), the 2009 H1N1 influenza virus infected a herd of pigs in this Canadian province. This is only the third hog farm known to have become infected with the virus that is causing the swine flu pandemic in humans. A statement says a federal laboratory in Winnipeg identified the virus on 24 July.

An earlier infection of a Canadian pig herd in Alberta received intense attention because of the possibility that the virus isolated from the animals might help clear up questions about the origin of the pandemic. Genetic analyses of the human viruses could not find any close match with viruses currently circulating in pigs, suggesting that an ancestor of the 2009 H1N1 may have circulated in swine or other species undetected for many years. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) dismissed the idea that the Alberta pigs infected humans, insisting from the outset that it was “highly probable” that it was the other way around. But the genetic evidence has been confusing.

A CFIA spokesperson told ScienceInsider that it could not immediately address questions about the genetic sequence of the virus in the Quebec herd. Canadian media reports quote officials from MAPAQ saying this infection, too, likely is a case of the virus moving from humans to pigs, but there is no evidence of any humans with the disease interacting with the herd.

—Jon Cohen

At a meeting billed as “urgent” today in Atlanta, Georgia, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) recommended that the U.S. government launch a vaccine program against the 2009 H1N1 influenza virus.

The 15-member ACIP, which advises the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said that because there likely will be a limited amount of vaccine at the start of the traditional influenza season this fall, five groups of people should be put at the head of the line. In addition to people who have underlying conditions that put them at a greater risk of severe disease from the swine flu virus, the other top priority groups include pregnant women, everyone between 6 months and 24 years of age, people who live with infants under 6 months of age (who cannot be vaccinated themselves), and healthcare workers and emergency personnel.

A former employee at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Palo Alto, California, was arrested Monday for allegedly destroying at least 4000 protein crystal samples by removing them from cryogenic containers at the lab and leaving them out to thaw. Documents released by the FBI estimate it will cost $500,000 to reproduce and process the lost samples.

The FBI claims that Silvya Oommachen, 32, a former laboratory assistant, has admitted that she slipped into the lab on 18 July and emptied the containers, leaving behind three Post-it notes, the San Jose Mercury News reports:

She signed one as her alter ego "X Black” and in the others referred to a sexual act and the date and time the protein crystal samples were sabotaged, according to the affidavit.

Yesterday, the White House announced that it will nominate epidemiologist David Michaels to direct the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Department of Labor agency that sets worker safety standards. Michaels is a familiar face to observers of environmental health policy. As an official at the Department of Energy in the late 1990s, he uncovered documentation of health risks to nuclear weapons workers and crafted a compensation program. After moving to George Washington University in Washington, D.C., he joined other scientists in protesting the manipulation of science in the Bush Administration. Kudos for his nomination are piling up, but Michaels is not without critics.

—Jocelyn Kaiser

A Senate spending panel has matched President Barack Obama's request for funding for the National Institutes of Health in 2010—a $442 million boost to $31.8 billion. That slight 1.4% bump is less than half of the increase the House of Representatives approved last week. After the full committee and Senate approve the bill, it will be reconciled with the House version.

If the most important concerns for property are location, location, location, the top issues for energy are scale, scale, scale. The United States has a vast demand for energy—85% of it satisfied by fossil fuels, posing risks for the environment, national security, and the economy. But the sheer size of the energy sector makes it like an ocean liner: hard to change direction. That is why, according to a new report out today from the National Research Council, the United States can’t rely on just one rudder to make a course correction. Instead, it’s imperative that the country promote a wide portfolio of new energy technologies, ranging from energy efficient buildings and electric cars to sequestering carbon and new nuclear plants.

As part of that effort, the report’s authors argue for an array of large-scale demonstration projects on new energy technologies, such as capturing and sequestering carbon emissions from coal-fired electric plants, beginning as soon as possible. “The urgency of getting started on these demonstrations to clarify future deployment options cannot be overstated,” the report says.

Laurie Garrett, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York City, is a media consultant’s nightmare: She cuts to the chase and speaks bluntly. But then Garrett is, at her core, a journalist, and has only worn the policy wonk hat at CFR for the past 4 years.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and best-selling author, lately, Garrett has focused much of her attention on the swine flu pandemic. (Full disclosure: I am working with her to organize a Science/CFR-sponsored panel discussion about the pandemic.) Her dealings with the Obama Administration from the White House on down give her a unique perspective about several policy issues that have surfaced. She is also a member of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network, a network of think tanks, non-government organizations, and faith-based organizations that aims to strengthen U.S. efforts in developing countries, and she regularly interacts with top officials at the World Health Organization (WHO) and other parts of the United Nations.

In an interview with ScienceInsider last week, Garrett decried the Obama Administration’s failure to appoint a head for the little known Office of Global Health Affairs within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). This failure, she argues, has far-reaching consequences for the H1N1 pandemic and international relations in general. She particularly worried that the Administration has not squarely addressed the issue of H1N1 vaccine supply for the world, and urges the government to see the central role the United States could play in assuring that equity prevails. And Garrett said that she and many of her colleagues at MFAN had a “fantastic level of hope on a scale that I’d would put above ebullient regarding Obama’s election” that has begun to wane.