ScienceInsider

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.

by Martin Enserink

PARIS—Didier Chatenay is putting his money where his mouth is. To voice his opposition to a new bonus system in France that rewards scientific excellence, Chatenay, a top physicist at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) published an open letter on Monday, saying thanks, but no thanks to a pay hike of up to €15,000 per year.

French science and education minister Valérie Pécresse introduced the bonuses this summer as a way to reward the country's best researchers. Research agencies are currently working out details of the scheme, which would benefit roughly one in five scientists. But researchers' organizations like Sauvons la Recherche have dismissed the pay hikes as divisive; they want salary increases across the board, especially for young scientists.

Under proposed CNRS rules, Chatenay—who says he earns €4600 a month—would qualify automatically because he won the agency's Silver Medal in 1999. In his letter, addressed to CNRS top leadership, he stresses that one of the defining characteristics of the French academic world is that it awards "symbolic recognition devoid of any material benefits."

Scientists and policymakers are meeting in Cape Town, South Africa, this week as part of the international DIVERSITAS program of biodiversity science.

300 farmers in 60 locations across Benin have signed up as part of a program supported by the Canadian government to test and implement new farming strategies to cope with the effects of climate change.

As scientists urge the public to get shots against swine flu, voices on the political right and left are telling the public, for different reasons, not to take the vaccine.

The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation has attacked a federal panel's recommendations that genetic tests for diseases such as cancer should not be protected under patent law, … and the American Intellectual Property Law Association meets this week in Washington, D.C.

William Brown, former director of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has been named president of the Woods Hole Research Center.

The Institute of Medicine yesterday announced 65 new members and 5 new foreign associates. Most are prominent researchers in biomedicine and health, but the list also includes at least two attorneys and a health journalist.

(Photo credit http://www.flickr.com/photos/richardwest/ / CC BY 2.0)

by Elisabeth Pain

First impressions can be deceiving. The 2010 science budget the Spanish Science and Innovation Ministry presented to Parliament last week has now spread concern and uncertainty among the Spanish scientific community. In an open letter published a couple of days later in the national newspaper El País, 51 biomedical investigators declared their "enormous perplexity and confusion" at what some perceive as a breach of the government's pledge to promote science and a knowledge-based economy.

by Andrey Allakhverdov and Vladimir Pokrovsky

Last Friday, in the leading Moscow business newspaper Vedomosti, a letter addressed to Russia’s president and its prime minister and signed by more than 100 Russian researchers who permanently work abroad complained of “the disastrous situation in the Russian basic research,” noting extremely low levels of funding and a continuing massive brain drain. “We certainly hope to draw the attention of the political leadership of the country to the dangers of neglecting fundamental science and education,” says Andrei Starinets, a physicist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and an author of the letter. “It takes years before investments in fundamental science and education pay off. These issues therefore require strategic rather than tactical thinking.”

The letter hasn’t drawn any official response so far, but Russian officials this week boasted about their support of science, particularly a new program to lure back 100 expat researchers to work at least 2 months a year in a Russian research institute or university. “The process of return of researchers to Russia will become avalanche-like in the nearest future,” said the minister of science and education Andrey Fursenko at the Second International Nanotechnology Forum which has just closed in Moscow.