ScienceInsider

by Martin Enserink

PARIS—France's collective brainpower may be headed for a massive boost in the government's long-awaited economic stimulus plan. A panel chaired by two former prime ministers recommends spending more than €20 billion on boosting research, higher education, innovation, and technology. The plan would also give the 5-year-old National Research Agency (ANR), whose €800 million budget has been flat for several years, considerably more clout.

After months of study and testimony by more than 200 witnesses, the panel, chaired by former French prime ministers Alain Juppé and Michel Rocard, presented its report to French President Nicolas Sarkozy yesterday. In total, it recommends a €35 billion "investment in the future," €22 billion of which is to be borrowed on the financial markets—which is why the plan is also known as the Big Loan.

Noting that France is lagging in international rankings of scientific output and fails to turn science into business, the group says that investing in knowledge should be the top priority. The panel’s spending proposals include:

by Dennis Normile

TOKYO—Nothing rouses a research community like a threat to its funding, as could be seen this week here in Japan after a task force recommended deep cuts (subs req) in the Ministry of Education's budget for fiscal year 2010. Grass-roots efforts have sprung up to defend individual projects, while community leaders are asserting the importance of research to Japan's future.

The Government Revitalization Unit was set up by the newly elected Democratic Party to identify wasteful spending in the budget requests for the year beginning next April so that money can be steered toward social programs. Three working groups are in the midst of a 9-day review, with just an hour or so allowed for discussion of each line item. One of the three working groups reviewed 40 projects and spending categories in the education ministry's budget during hearings on 13 and 17 November. Few were spared. Based on just a partial list of the projects carried in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, the task force recommended cuts running up to $3 billion, equivalent to more than 10% of the education ministry's research-related spending this year.

But backers of targeted projects are fighting back.

by Daniel Clery

The scientific and engineering team building the ITER fusion reactor was hoping for a green light today for its final design, schedule, and cost estimate, but given the project has a pricetag in the billions of euros it was never going to be that easy. Because of nagging concerns over the construction schedule of the reactor, the ITER council, which represents the seven international partners in the project—China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia, and the United States—did not give the expected rubber stamp to the thousands of pages of documents that fully define the project. 

ITER is an experimental reactor that aims to show that nuclear fusion, the power source of the sun and stars, could be used practically to generate energy on earth. A site has been cleared at Cadarache in southern France for construction, and ITER staff have been racing for months to get the full documentation, known as the project baseline, ready for the 18–19 November council meeting at their headquarters. But some council members voiced concern that the schedule, which aimed for the reactor to be running by 2018, was not realistic and that there was too high a risk that some part of the immensely complicated worldwide manufacturing effort would go wrong.

Delays invariably mean increased costs and the council is already concerned over current cost estimates which, sources says, may be as high as twice what partners signed up to at the start of the project in 2006. So the council has now sent ITER staff away for 3 months to better nail down the risks, both technical and organizational, involved in the schedule. Staff must consult with the agencies run by each partner that will order the reactor components to be made, and with the companies that will make them. The council has asked ITER directors to come back in February with an earliest possible date when the reactor could start, if everything were to go right, and a latest possible start date. Discussion of the controversial cost estimates appears to have been put aside until the schedule has been resolved.

by Jeffrey Mervis

Has science become a one-party issue in Congress?

A coalition of university organizations with a new Web site touting the benefits to the country from the $21 billion being spent on basic research via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) hopes that the answer is no. But the absence of Republicans from the dias at today's Capitol Hill event was a reminder that not a single House of Representatives Republican voted for the Recovery Act back in February because of fears that the $787 billion stimulus package would break the bank.

by Jeffrey Mervis

Senator Tom Coburn (R–OK) finally got his long-awaited roll-call vote last night to strip out political science research from the 2010 budget of the National Science Foundation. And while his amendment was soundly defeated, 36 to 62, it wasn't strictly a party-line vote. Five moderate Democrats—Senators Max Baucus of Montana, Evan Bayh of Indiana, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, and Jim Webb of Virginia—apparently agree with Coburn's argument that NSF, with a budget of $6.9 billion, is "wasting" federal dollars by spending $9 million a year to support research in the field.

"I have no way to explain it," says Michael Brintnall, executive director of the American Political Science Association, which has been following the issue closely. "We'd never heard that they had any concerns about funding this type of research."

The amendment came as the Senate cleared a $65-billion spending bill that funds multiple agencies, including NSF, NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The next step is to resolve differences between its version and the one passed this summer by the House of Representatives. Congress has completed work on only four of 12 spending bills for the fiscal year that began on 1 October. The rest of the government is covered by a continuing resolution, holding spending at 2009 levels, that expires on 18 December.

by Erik Stokstad

Congress wants the Department of Interior to figure out what it doesn't know about Arctic ecosystems in order to better plan for oil and gas exploration. Tucked into a House-Senate conference report (pdf) for the fiscal year 2010 Interior/Environment spending bill is language (after the jump) suggesting that the DOI's Mineral Management Service get an independent assessment (i.e. by the National Research Council) of data gaps about the biodiversity and functioning of coastal and marine ecosystems. There's no money provided.

Conservationists are happy about the call, but realistic. "They're only identifying the gaps, not filling them," says Stan Senner of Ocean Conservancy in Washington, D.C. "We can all acknowledge the need for more science guide all the decisions" that will need to be made about development.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/artic/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

by Jocelyn Kaiser

The results are in for National Institutes of Health's much-discussed Challenge Grants, and the news is only slightly better than expected: The agency funded 840 projects, which puts the portion of the mind boggling 20,000-plus applications funded at around 4%. That's abysmal compared with the usual NIH grant success rate of around 20%. But it beats the 1%–2% (200–400 grants) that NIH originally said it would fund.

The data come from a preliminary report on how NIH spent the first half of its $10.4 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The tally comes to 12,788 grants funded for $4.35 billion in 2009. (Contracts add another $379 million.) Grant categories include previously reviewed proposals that just missed the cutoff for funding from NIH's regular budget, as well as extensions of existing projects (supplements and revisions). The dollar breakdown (see chart): $1.51 billion (34.7%) to administrative supplements, $1.43 billion (32.9%) to previously reviewed applications,  $1.15 billion (26.4%) to stimulus competitions, $218 million (5%) to competing revisions, and $45 million (1%) to summer supplements.

The Department of Energy and EPA are partnering to fix the broken Energy Star Program.

Senate Judiciary Chair Patrick Leahy (D–VT) wants to work with Majority Leader Harry Reid (D–NV) to schedule debate on the stalled patent reform bill before the end of the year.

Johns Hopkins University tops NSF's R&D rankings for 2006–08.

NIH Director Francis Collins has been named by Pope Benedict XVI to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

For the second straight running of the DOE's Solar Decathlon, a German team has brought home the gold.

A budget crunch at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory has led the lab to cancel its yearly open house to the public.

by Jeffrey Mervis

Senator Tom Coburn (R–OK) has long been a critic of the National Science Foundation's funding of the political and social sciences, believing that the research it supports is more political than scientific. But the conservative Republican couldn't have picked a worse time to make his argument.

On Tuesday, Coburn proposed eliminating from NSF's 2010 budget the $9 million a year that NSF spends on political science within its $240-million-a-year directorate for social, behavioral, and economic sciences. Coburn singled out a study of campaign rhetoric to accuse NSF of paying for the obvious. "We know why politicians make vague statements," he thundered. "Because they don’t want to get pinned down. But most important, they want to get reelected or elected." He was equally dismissive of research that he described as asking "why people are for or against military conflicts." As he put it, "for us to send money to study something that stupid … is beyond me."

But Senator Barbara Mikulski (D–MD), chair of the spending panel that sets NSF's budget, was well-prepared to defend the $6.5 billion agency. "I wish to bring to [Coburn's] attention the fact that Dr. Elinor Ostrom, who just won the Nobel Prize for economics, is a political scientist. She has received most of her funding from NSF—28 grants since 1974." Mikulski also defended a joint program with the Department of Defense in which NSF just awarded $8 million in grants to study the social science dimensions of national security, conflicts, and cooperation. "If one of those studies helps one policymaker make one decision to save one Marine, [then] I think it is worth the 8 million bucks."

Coburn admits that his cause is doomed—"I do not have any illusions about what is going to happen"—and his amendment is not expected to be taken up next week when the Senate resumes debate on the spending bill. But Mikulski wasn't in a forgiving mood. "I don't like targeting an individual science area … or trivializing academic research," she said. "The National Science Foundation and our other scientific institutions must go where no thought has gone before. That is the point of discovery."

by Eli Kintisch

Ocean-research advocates are rallying the troops today to build opposition to a proposed $172 million cut from the 2010 budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as part of debate on the $65 billion Commerce, Justice, and Science spending bill for next year. Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R) and three other Republicans have proposed cutting that money from the NOAA operating account and using it to fund the "State Criminal Alien Assistance Program," which the Obama Administration wants to slash from the budget next year. The program provides federal funds to state and local jails to help them pay for detention of criminals who are undocumented immigrants, and the Obama Administration said it would save $400 million by cutting it from the federal budget.