Tag: science policy

In Times of Crisis, U.K. Government Should Listen to Its Scientists, Says Report

  • Venue: Science Magazine

LONDON—The British Government is too hesitant to ask the advice of its own scientific advisers and other scientists while preparing to deal with national emergencies. And the British public may end up paying for that reluctance, says a report published today by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee.

As it stands, in an emergency, Britain’s government relies on the advice of the Government Chief Scientific Adviser (GCSA), a post currently held by population biologist John Beddington, and on the guidelines laid out in the National Risk Assessment (NRA)—a Cabinet-drafted strategy for the most significant emergencies that the United Kingdom could face over the next 5 years. In extreme disasters, an additional authority is set up: the Scientific Advisory Groups for Emergencies whose members change depending on the nature of the crisis.

In reviewing two recent emergencies—the 2010 volcanic ash cloud, and the 2009-10 H1N1 influenza —the committee found that advice and instruction from both the government’s own advisers and from the wider scientific community was taken too late.

What’s more, they found that the government’s attitude to scientific advice is that it is “something to reach for once an emergency happens,” the committee says. Scientific advice is not considered from the start of the planning process, the committee says.

“The current approach smacks of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted,” said committee chair Andrew Miller in a statement. He calls for more evidence-based preparation for worst-case scenarios.

The committee cites the example of last year’s grounding of aircraft by volcanic ash from Iceland. It draws attention to a statement from the Geological Society that says, “Some earth scientists report that they have been warning government and others of the potential for major disruption due to Icelandic eruptions for a number of years, but feel that little notice has been taken of these warnings.” Had the government acted on such counsel, the committee believes that hundreds of millions of pounds could have been saved the following year.

Another chief concern was the uncertain role that GCSA played in the assessment of risks to the United Kingdom. When questioned by the committee, Beddington admitted that he was not aware of who would make the final decisions on what recommendations should be made to the government ahead of an emergency. Beddington also confirmed that until the volcanic ash incident, he hadn’t been involved in setting up any national risk assessments.

The problem more generally, say the parliamentarians, is a lack of scientific input into risk assessment. They highlight three future scenarios in which the government has taken insufficient account of scientists’ views: pandemic flu (much like the 2009-10 H1N1 influenza), disruption to infrastructure by space weather, and cybersecurity.

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Blood Sport: Anti-Doping Strategy Comes Into Its Own

  • Venue: Science Magazine

Last week, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), considered the world authority in sporting disputes, ruled in favor of the International Cycling Union in its doping case against the Italian cyclists Franco Pellizotti and Pietro Caucchioli. The two cyclists had been barred from riding competitively for 2 years (Pellizotti from May 2010, and Caucchioli from June 2009), but had appealed. Neither cyclist was caught with an illicit substance in blood or urine samples provided to doping officials. Instead, the charges were based on evidence collected as part of a new anti-doping program—the Athlete Biological Passport (ABP)—that builds biological profiles of athletes and detects suspicious changes in their blood. “It is a significant step in the global fight against doping in sport,” says David Howman, director general of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).

Below, ScienceInsider answers a few questions about how the ABP works, why scientists developed it, and where else biological passports might be used.

What is the Athlete Biological Passport?

Unlike previous anti-doping methods that looked for traces of performance-enhancing substances in athletes’ blood and urine, the ABP enables detection of changes in an athlete’s blood chemistry that could be a consequence of doping. The strategy depends on creating a blood profile, or passport, essentially a model predicting a person’s natural blood chemistry. Researchers factor in an athlete’s sex, age, ethnicity, and measurements, at different altitudes, of various properties of the individual’s blood, such as the concentration of oxygen-binding hemoglobin; reticulocytes (immature red blood cells); other red blood cells, which athletes sometimes increase by illegal blood transfusion; or presence of hormones such as Erythropoietin (EPO) and other substances. Once about five blood samples have been tested to establish a baseline, athletes who have abnormal readings in subsequent tests are flagged as doping cases.

This personalized approach is particularly important as some athletes naturally have odd blood chemistry that might suggest doping. Some for example, have high reticulocyte counts—2% of one’s red blood cells rather than the typical 1%. Reticulocyte counts are sensitive to blood doping and so are typically tested for by doping monitors. But the ABP approach looks for significant changes in reticulocyte counts, rather than at absolute numbers, and thus avoids flagging athletes with naturally elevated reticulocyte levels.

Once they have a passport, “athletes are tested three to 10 times a year,” says Neil Robinson of the Swiss Laboratory for Doping Analysis, who helped develop the ABP strategy and is involved in monitoring athletes’ profiles for irregularities. If any are spotted, the athlete’s profile is assessed by an international panel of three blood-doping specialists. If a unanimous agreement is reached by the panel that the blood chemistry can’t be natural, then the athlete can be suspended from competition.

Why was there a need for a new approach?

In the 1990s, international sports federations were struggling to combat the rising use of performance enhancing EPO, a hormone that controls the process by which red blood cells (erythrocytes) are produced. Athletes were using EPO to boost their overall red blood cell count, which increases endurance. At the time, there was no direct detection of exogenous EPO in urine. And so to combat EPO use, athletes were required to provide blood samples because many blood properties, such as levels of hemoglobin and hematocrit (the proportion of red blood cells that make up blood), are sensitive to the hormone’s stimulation. But, notes Robinson, “it was not long before athletes found new tricks [to evade detection]. … They could drink a lot, or inject isotonic saline.”

In 2000, as part of an anti-doping campaign inspired by that year’s Summer Olympic Games in Sydney, researchers began to look around for alternative testing methods. WADA convened a meeting of international sports federations and formed a consensus that the best solution was to establish a baseline profile of an athlete’s blood and monitor for variations.

In 2009, WADA approved the use of the ABP, which had been developed in the intervening years by Robinson and his colleagues Pierre-Edouard Sottas and Martial Saugy of the Swiss Laboratory for Doping Analysis.

Pellizotti and Caucchioli, the two Italian cyclists, are the first athletes whose charges under this new testing approach have reached CAS. The court’s rejection of the cyclists’ appeals appears to give the use of ABPs a major boost. “These decisions send a strong message to athletes who take the risk to cheat that they will ultimately be caught,” says WADA’s Howman.

But not everyone is convinced that ABPs are the full solution. Anti-doping agencies have suggested that ABP should work in tandem with traditional testing, which looks for disallowed substances in blood and urine. Former professional cyclist Floyd Landis, who was stripped of his 2006 Tour de France title after testing positive for doping, and who has since admitted that he used performance-enhancing drugs, has argued that athletes can still get around the biological passport system because it relies on catching fluctuations in blood profiles between time points. Landis raises the concern that riders can combine small doses of EPO with transfusions of their own blood to boost performance, while remaining undetectable to the ABP.

What’s the future for biological passports?

Robinson thinks it is likely that ABP’s will be used to evaluate doping in the 2012 Olympics, although he cautions that the International Olympic Committee has yet to confirm this. He does expect that it will be adopted for future Olympics, however.

The biological passport concept may have uses outside of sports. “This approach is extremely interesting for individualized medicine,” says Robinson. We don’t all react the same way when we take a drug. he points out. The idea behind the ABP is being extended to hospitals where doctors hope to use it to predict how patients might react to a new drug based on their sex, age, and ethnicity, as well on their blood profile, according to Robinson. He notes that patients in hospitals regularly have their blood work tested, but doctors don’t tend to pull this data together into any sort of record or profile. This wasted information could be used to refine treatment, he suggests. Robinson says he hopes to soon publish work on such medical biological passports.

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E.U. Commissioner Seeks ‘Clean Break’ From Past Research Funding Strategy

  • Venue: Science Magazine

LONDON—“Get focused and get united to get ahead.” Pinching words from U.S. President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, the European research, innovation and science commissioner, yesterday at the Royal Society laid out her vision for the future of European science and technology. Her words came 2 days before the European Commission presents a green paper on future European Union funding for research and innovation and much of Geoghegan-Quinn’s speech hinted at potentially radical changes ahead for the scientific community.

She reiterated her desire to simplify the E.U. bureaucracy facing researchers, but she also called for a “clean break” from the massive Framework Programmes (FP) that provide funding for multinational science collaborations. “We have now had seven Framework Programmes, but that does not mean that we should automatically move to Framework Programme number eight,” she said. Instead, Geoghegan-Quinn’s proposed a new funding device—dubbed the Common Strategic Framework, although there are plans to rename it something catchier—that would combine into one pot all FP funds and other money devoted to European Union research.

As part of this new framework, countries will receive additional funding to invest in their research infrastructure. Geoghegan-Quinn hopes that this additional funding will chiefly help the 10 newest countries to join the European Union, which have complained that despite access to European research funds, their lack of modern science facilities leaves them unable to keep domestic, or attract foreign, scientists.

The commissioner said that the new framework will also enable funding with the “scale and scope” to tackle the major challenges that European society will face in the coming years: energy, health and aging, food, and climate change and the environment. As part of this, Geoghegan-Quinn introduced plans for a new “Innovation Partnership,” that will focus on healthy aging and aim to add two active years to the lives of Europeans. It is hoped that this can be achieved through combining the efforts of researchers, pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and transport industries. Other innovation partnerships will be detailed down the road.

Geoghegan-Quinn’s speech here comes just a few days after the heads of state of the European Union dedicated an afternoon of one of their regular summits to discussing innovation, the main theme of the commissioner’s tenure so far. On 4 February in Brussels, the E.U. leaders pledged to finish establishing the “European Research Area” by 2014. That includes making it easier for researchers to move from one member country to the next-while keeping their pension benefits, for example. The summit also endorsed the idea of establishing E.U.-wide intellectual property rules and agreed to explore the possibility of an E.U.-wide venture capital fund.

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Foreign Scientists Will Move to Front of U.K. Visa Line

  • Venue: Science Magazine

Fleshing out the details of its controversial new immigration cap, the UK Border Agency announced today that it will give priority to scientists and engineers. This represents a partial victory for campaigners, including academics, charities, and a U.K. newspaper, which had called for abolition of the cap on skilled non-European Union workers because of concerns about the damaging effect it could have on Britain’s science.

The government’s original plan, announced last October, set a new annual limit on the number of skilled and highly skilled migrant visas for non-E.U. citizens—the new cap was set at 20,700 visas, down 7300 from previous years. To deal with a bottleneck in processing visas, there would also be a monthly quota of skilled migrant visas—4200 visas will be awarded in the first month, April, and then 1500 in all subsequent months. If monthly limits are reached, the applicants would be prioritized according to points that are earned for age, language skills, education, and previous earnings or career experience.

Scientists and engineers had decried the changes, noting that foreign postdoctoral researchers typically draw small salaries and would be at a disadvantage in obtaining visas. The new revisions, which have not yet passed Parliament, propose allocating more education-based points to scientists and engineers, announced Damian Green, the U.K. immigration minister. It is hoped that this change to the reform will bump up scientists ahead of other skilled workers in line to enter the United Kingdom.

Imran Khan, director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering (CaSE), which has led the lobbying against the caps, said: “I’m delighted that the government and the UK Border Agency in particular have listened and responded to our concerns.” According to CaSE, the new U.K. rules will mean that an applicant for a £23,000 job requiring a Ph.D. will have a better chance of getting a visa than will someone earning £74,000 but who did not have a Ph.D.-level job offer. “While we still disagree that a cap on scientists and engineers is something the government should implement, these proposals should mean that the U.K. can still bring in the necessary individuals from around the world,” says Khan.

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U.K. Neuroscientists Complain Funding Cut Penalizes Them for Success

  • Venue: Science Magazine

LONDON—At a briefing here today, the British Neuroscience Association (BNA) warned that a planned 20% cut in funding for neuroscience by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) will drive an estimated 100 researchers in the field from the United Kingdom and weaken the nation in a scientific discipline in which it has traditionally excelled. In a letter addressed to Tom Blundell, chair of the council of the BBSRC, which more than 100 neuroscientists put their name to, BNA protested the funding cut and called for its reconsideration.

In January, BBSRC revealed its plans to prioritize particular research disciplines that it believes will help address major challenges to future society. BBSRC’s favored themes include: food security, bioenergy and industrial biotechnology and basic bioscience underpinning health and wellbeing. The Council said that meant that neuroscience, which currently accounts for 13% of grant funding (amounting to £150 million), will receive less funding. BBSRC’s head Douglas Kell recently defended the cut in a blog post.

BNA says that BBSRC’s reprioritization smacks of a desperate measure to balance the books, and that the field of neuroscience is being penalized for being successful. British neuroscientists contend that they have a great track record, helping to explain brain illnesses such as motor neuron, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s diseases, and develop many important drugs such as Fluoxetine, the widely used antidepressant known as Prozac. Eli Lilly, a U.S.-based pharmaceutical company, found that neuroscience research in the south of England was the most cited globally.

David Nutt, a neuropsychopharmacologist at Imperial College London says that there has been no explanation by BBSRC for their dramatic change in strategy, and no consultation on these cuts. The effects will be felt immediately, he says. It just seems like an “arbitrary exclusion.” “I don’t know what to tell my PhD students … I don’t see jobs for them,” he remarks.

Duncan Banks, the director of BNA , argued that the BBSRC’s funding cut, amounting to about £4 million in spending on neuroscience, will particularly affect opportunities for young scientists, he explains.

BBSRC cuts come at a time when the funding for basic neuroscience in the United Kingdom is already threatened with a move by the Medical Research Council to fund more clinically relevant science, explains Colin Blakemore, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford and former head of the Medical Research Council. Yet one-third of global health issues are related to neurological problems, such as depression, pain, and the diseases of the aging brain. BNA points out that what really drives new treatments is basic research. Blakemore remarks, “Neuroscience remains one of the least understood areas of biology.” “An aging population should be very worried about cuts in neuroscience,” he says.

The strength of the U.K.’s basic research was what originally attracted pharmaceutical companies to the United Kingdom, notes Blakemore. Yet that attraction may be fading, especially in the neuroscience. Recent closures of many pharma-funded institutes working in the field of neuroscience—Pfizer, GSK, Astra Zenica, and Merck have all closed institutes in the last year—may also force neuroscientists out of the United Kingdom.

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London Superlab Gets Local Approval

  • Venue: Science Magazine

LONDON—Plans to build a £500 million medical research institute in the heart of London were approved yesterday by the key local development committee overseeing the location. The U.K. government hopes that the mammoth lab facility, construction of which should begin in the spring, will keep Britain at the forefront of global biomedical research. The approval by the Camden Town Council panel, on an 8-4 vote (with one abstention), came despite scores of registered objections, mostly by local people concerned about the loss of prime real estate previously earmarked for affordable housing.

The new facility, dubbed the UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation (UKCMRI), will have the capacity to house 1500 staff including 1250 scientists, and it is hoped that it will attract many early-career doctors, nurses, biologists, mathematicians, physicists, chemists, computer scientists, and engineers seeking to work in a multidisciplinary institution. The four founding research organizations behind the new center—the Medical Research Council (MRC), Wellcome Trust, Cancer Research UK (CRUK), and University College London—have all contributed substantially to the funding of the building, with both MRC’s National Institute for Medical Research and CRUK’s London Research Institute intending to close their existing facilities and sell off the land to fund the new lab, which will be next to the St. Pancras train station, which has connections to the rest of Europe.

In a statement today, Wellcome Trust Director Mark Walport welcomed the council approval, saying: “UKCMRI will be a world leading institute tackling the most challenging issues facing our health and wellbeing today.” The new development, he added, is “strategically positioned amidst the cluster of outstanding research and medical institutions in Camden and close to the international transport hub at King’s Cross and St. Pancras.”

The center, set to begin its work in 2016, has outlined a number of strategies to engage the public in its work and will provide educational benefits to schools locally and nationally. “We look forward to working closely with the Council and the local community to develop the Institute, which will complement the regeneration of the local area and bring to it tangible benefits,” Walport states.

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U.K. Opens New Visa Route for Foreign Scientists, But May Still Curtail Their Number

  • Venue: Science Magazine

The United Kingdom has finally begun revealing some of the details of its new immigration policies, although the information provided yesterday has done little to satisfy anxious universities, which are worried that their ability to hire foreign scientists will be greatly impeded.

In a statement to the House of Commons, the U.K.’s home secretary, Theresa May, described a new annual limit on the number of immigrants allowed from non-European Union countries. It will be set at 21,700—that’s a reduction from 28,000, which was the number of non-E.U. people who entered in 2009 under the immigration pathways known as skilled (Tier 2) and highly-skilled (Tier 1) workers. The government’s policy will include an amendment to Tier 1 that lets in 1000 of the 21,700 people under a new “exceptional talent” scheme; the government said this will apply to scientists, academics, and artists, although May provided no details on how people would qualify.

The new immigration plans will allow “Britain to remain competitive in the international jobs market, while ensuring migrant labor is not used as a substitute for those already looking for work in the U.K.”, May told members of the House of Commons.

onthly Tier 1 and Tier 2 visa allocations to universities introduced by the new U.K. government after it took power in May. Wendy Piatt, director general of the Russell Group, a collection of the U.K.’s largest research universities, said that it is unclear whether the numbers revealed yesterday are an improvement on the temporary caps, which the Russell Group viewed as limiting the U.K.’s ability to compete in the global market for academic talent. The University of Cambridge, a Russell group member, also issued a statement protesting May’s announcement:

The University of Cambridge cannot keep its place in the world rankings if it is prevented from recruiting the brightest and the best-regardless of nationality. The Government’s current visa quota proposals threaten our ability to recruit both the academic leaders of today and the exceptional young talent from which will grow the Nobel Prize winners of tomorrow.

The higher education lobbying group Universities UK had pushed hard to influence the government’s new policy and its chief executive, Nicola Dandridge, issued some modest praise for May’s plan, saying in a statement:

It is good that the government has listened to the arguments put forward by the research community about the need to ensure an appropriate route for people with exceptional talent in science and academia to enter the UK through the creation of a new route within Tier 1.

However, Dandridge expressed concern about how the government plans to define “exceptional talent,” pointing out that talent is difficult to measure. Dandridge says that her organization is keen to further discuss the immigration proposals with the government to clarify the details.

Imran Khan, director of the advocacy group Campaign for Science & Engineering (CaSE), echoed such concerns in a statement:

So far we’ve got exceptionally little detail on the ‘exceptional talent’ route. The UK needs to be attracting far more than 1000 of the world’s top scientists and engineers annually, so we hope this is just one piece of the puzzle – but it’s encouraging that scientists are finally ranked alongside footballers in getting due recognition from the Home Office.

In line with Prime Minister David Cameron’s campaign pledge to reduce net migration to the United Kingdom the tens of thousands by 2015—roughly 196,000 people entered in 2009—May also launched a consultation that will focus on changing the Tier 4 immigration pathway, which is known as a student route because it is predominately used by people coming to study at the undergraduate level in the United Kingdom. Tier 4 currently accounts for two-thirds of all immigrants entering the United Kingdom each year. Any restrictions on tier 4 could have an impact on the U.K. economy, universities have warned. The Russell Group has estimated that international students attending U.K. universities contribute, through their tuition fees and living expenditure, at least £5.4 billion to the U.K. economy annually.

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London’s Natural History Museum Delays Expedition

  • Venue: Science Magazine

London’s Natural History Museum (NHM) has suspended a month-long scientific expedition to a remote region of northern Paraguay in light of concern expressed by Paraguay’s government officials in a letter sent to museum officials. The letter mirrors fears raised last week by Iniciativa Amotocodie, a nongovernmental organization that represents indigenous peoples in Paraguay and has protested that scientists taking part in the expedition would run into the indigenous Ayoreo peoples who wish to have no contact with outsiders.

The expedition, which would have started this weekend, aims to explore an area called the Gran Chaco, a semiarid lowland sandwiched between the Andes and the Paraguay River that is a mecca for scientists interested in biodiversity. However, in a letter sent Friday to Richard Lane, scientific director of NHM, the director general of Paraguay’s Ministry of the Environment, Isabel Basualdo, asked for a suspension of the expedition until the concerns over contact with the Ayoreo peoples can be looked into. She writes: “The president of the Indigenous National Institute, whose responsibility it is to guarantee the rights of the indigenous population of Paraguay, warns that consent must be gained from the communities’ recognised leaders, who claim rights over the territory where such expedition will be made.” Basualdo goes on to say that in accordance with article 41 of the American Convention of Human Rights, a commission adopted in 1969 to protect the peoples of the Americas, the Paraguayan government has requested a cancellation of the expedition until such consent can be gained. But she also inidctates thet Paraguay is committed to the expedition and is working to resolve the problems as soon as possible.

The museum had been defending the expedition since the initial protest. (Here’s a video the museum posted of Lane discussing the matter). But in a statement yesterday, NHM said:

The Ministry for the Environment of Paraguay, one of our partners on the joint Natural History Museum and Paraguayan expedition to the Dry Chaco region, has decided to undertake further consultation with the Ayoreo people. The Natural History Museum supports this approach to ensure the community is properly informed and consulted. There will be a suspension of activities while this takes place. The concerns of the un-contacted people are extremely important to us. We will continue to take advice on these matters from the Paraguayan authorities. We hope that the issues can be resolved soon.

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