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 Eli Kintisch

On 18 December, the last day of the Copenhagen climate meeting, what will President Barack Obama tell the world that the United States is prepared to do?

With a month to go, that's the challenge. We already know Copenhagen won't have legally binding agreements, but how the nations of the world use the meeting to tee up negotiations in 2010 will determine whether the event will be deemed a barely marginal success or a total repudiation of the U.N. approach.

Today Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao raised the stakes in a Joint Agreement they signed. And they put a big onus on the U.S. Senate to come up with numbers for its emissions cuts goals. Hu and Obama said in their statement that "an agreed outcome in Copenhagen" should:

include emission reduction targets of developed countries and nationally appropriate mitigation actions of developing countries.

The word "targets" on 18 December would mean actual commitments to emissions cuts. Getting them would be a pretty good accomplishment for the meeting, especially with organizers lowering expectations by the day. The hope was that the U.S. Senate would have passed its version of the climate bill by then, so Obama's negotiators could have real legislated targets to bring to the table in December.

That's not going to happen. The next best thing is Obama's challenge: coming up with a number from Congress with some credibility, with a month to go. Here's how it might go down.

by Martin Enserink

European companies are laggards in spending on research and development—but a new report offers a few upward trends. E.U. companies' R&D grew by 8.1% in 2008, ahead of the United States (5.7% growth) and Japan (4.4%) according to the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard, an annual list compiled by the European Commission. Although the United States still spends more in the sectors that depend most on R&D (pharma, biotech, and information and communication technology), Europe is leading in the up-and-coming alternative energy sector.

The most impressive statistics don't come from the European Union or the United States, however, but from China, where corporate R&D grew by 40% last year, and from India, with 27.3% growth.

Some caveats are in order when reading the Scoreboard.

A U.S. delegation of top nongovernmental policy and science officials is visiting Cuba to discuss research and science policy.

The animal rights group PETA says it will file complaints today with the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Department of Agriculture over alleged mistreatment of research animals at the University of Utah. The Salt Lake Tribune reports that a PETA "undercover investigator" shot hundreds of hours of video inside biomedical research labs at the university while employed there as an animal-support technician earlier this year.

A lunchtime seminar supported by the International Food Policy Research Institute will celebrate "millions fed" as a result of international agricultural aid and development. 

The Vatican has presented the results of a 5-day meeting of scientists and theologians on the search for extraterrestrial life.

The outrage among scientists over the firing of U.K. drug policy adviser David Nutt continues to bubble. Thursday, Martin Rees, the president of the Royal Society, offered his first thoughts on the matter, saying:

Scientific advisers are not there to rubber-stamp policies. Advice should reach ministers before decisions are taken; and when ministers want to reject it, they should discuss it first. Where government does reject scientific evidence, it must explain why openly.

And today, a quickly formed group of leading U.K. scientists, including Rees and former Royal Society President Robert May, call on their government (UKStatement.pdf) to endorse the following "Principles for the Treatment of Independent Scientific Advice":

by Eli Kintisch

In the U.K. newspaper The Guardian today, Home Secretary Alan Johnson defended the firing of drug adviser David Nutt:

Professor Nutt is indeed a reputable scientist whose views on drugs policy are well known. However, his role as my principal adviser was to (unsurprisingly) present advice. It is the job of the government to decide policy.

Professor Nutt was not sacked for his views, which I respect but disagree with (as does Professor Robin Murray, who wrote in your newspaper on Friday).

He was asked to go because he cannot be both a government adviser and a campaigner against government policy. This principle is well understood and long established.

Nature has an interview with Nutt.

(Update 4pm: Scientists on the U.K.’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs have begun to resign in protest)

by John Travis

Illicit drugs, science and politics can be a volatile mix, no doubt. So it's not a total surprise that David Nutt, a respected psychopharmacologist at the Bristol outpost of Imperial College London, was canned today as the U.K. top drug advisor. His downfall was a paper in which Nutt argued that ecstasy and other drugs caused less harm than alcohol, although the researcher had clashed before with the government's drug policies.

Phil Willis, Chairman of the House of Commons science and technology committee, has already released a statement noting he asked the Home Secretary "for clarification as to why the distinguished scientist Sir David Nutt has been removed of duties as Chair of Advisory Council on Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) at a time when independent scientific advice to government is essential. It is disturbing if an independent scientist should be removed for reporting sound scientific advice."

by John Bohannon

The conservative Austrian government has nominated its science minister, Johannes Hahn, 52, for the top job in European science policy, that of Commissioner for Research. Hahn has been dogged by criticisms from some scientists in his own country for limp research funding and a failed attempt to pull Austria out of CERN.

Hahn, who earned a Ph.D. in philosophy, has worked both in the gambling industry and in local politics. Since Austria’s ruling Christian-democratic party, ÖVP, tapped him as science minister 3 years ago, he has proven himself hard-working and tenacious, says Stefan Bernhardt, head press officer for the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). “There was a big shake-up of the government last year and most ministers lost their jobs. Hahn was one of the few to keep his.” Media reports today suggested that Hahn's nomination is the result of a political compromise.

by Martin Enserink

A "distinguished scientist"—and for the first time not a civil servant—will become the next head of the European Research Council. ScienceInsider has learned that the European Commission will announce on Thursday that it has heeded the advice of an independent review panel that recommended putting a scientist in charge of the ERC, the E.U's funding agency for basic research. ERC has a €7.5 billion budget to spend on frontier research through 2013.

ScienceInsider has obtained a copy of the European Commission's official response to the review panel's report. In it, the Commission also promises to lighten the paperwork for peer reviewers—some of which the panel had called "completely abusive"—and to reimburse their expenses more promptly.

A key target in the panel's harshly worded review, published in July, was the managerial dichotomy at the ERC. A Scientific Council, made up of volunteers and chaired by Imperial College London biologist Fotis Kafatos, sets the ERC's scientific agenda. But day-to-day-management is in the hands of civil servants at the Executive Agency in Brussels, which is controlled by the European Commission. The two clash frequently.

by John Travis

LONDON—A call for more money for agricultural science and greater attention to soil management and irrigation schemes? With recommendations such as those in a new report on how to address the world's growing demand for food, it’s not a complete surprise that most of the press attending a briefing yesterday at the U.K.’s Royal Society quickly turned their attention to the report’s embrace of genetically modified (GM) crops, an ongoing source of controversy here. "No technology should be ruled out," says David Baulcombe, the University of Cambridge plant biologist and Royal Society Fellow who chaired the study.

In its primary recommendation, the report calls on the U.K. to inject an extra £50 million to £100 million annually over the next decade into agricultural research that could help boost the world's food production by 50% by 2050. Baulcombe notes that he and his co-authors reviewed analyses conducted by others and concluded that food production would need to rise between 25% and 100% over the coming decades. They reject the notion that simply reducing waste and improving distribution can solve future food shortages. “Yes, we do need more food,” Baulcombe says. “We can’t sit back and rely on what we've got.”

At the briefing, Baulcombe tried to keep the focus on the report’s call for developing crop management techniques that are more efficient and sustainable. He, for example, highlighted a “push-pull” strategy of pest management used to grow maize in Africa. In this scheme, maize is surrounded by a border of grass that is intended to lure destructive moths to lay their eggs away from the crop, and another crop that the moths dislike is interspersed among the maize. “By growing different plants together, one can grow the crops sustainably,” says Baulcombe.

But stoked by an inflammatory Daily Telegraph story earlier this week previewing the report (“Britain will starve without GM crops, says major report”), the reporters at the briefing showed little interest in such matters and zeroed in on the panel’s call for “genetic improvement” of crops, through conventional plant breeding and, more controversially, direct modification of crop genomes.