Author: Jennifer Carpenter
Nosing Out a Smell Gene
- Venue: Science Magazine
The discovery was somewhat happenchance. It began when neurobiologist Frank Zufall of Saarland University in Homburg, Germany, was contacted by pain researcher John Wood of University College London and geneticist Geoffrey Woods of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. Wood and Woods had been studying three people with an inability to feel pain. In 2006, they found that all had mutations in a gene that codes for a sodium channel called Nav1.7 that is involved in the firing of neurons. The researchers also noticed that the volunteers reported having no sense of smell. When the duo created mice with similar mutations, the pups were free of pain, but they also had difficulty smelling; they seemed unable to pick up the odor of their mother’s teats to suckle, for example.
To investigate how the lack of these channels causes anosmia, Zufall and his team studied the genetically engineered mice. They discovered that although neurons in the rodents’ noses respond to different odors, they were unable to transmit these signals to the olfactory bulb, the region at the front of the brain that processes smell.
The researchers also confirmed that the mice couldn’t smell. In a series of experiments, the rodents didn’t avoid the smell of predators, nor did they retrieve their pups when they were scattered around their cage, the researchers report online today in Nature. “This behavior supports that fact that the mice aren’t smelling,” says Lisa Stowers, a neurobiologist at The Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California, who studies olfaction.
Zufall hopes to turn up more genes underlying anosmia by encouraging doctors to carry out a smell test in patients who present with neurological problems. Peter Mombaerts, an olfaction neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt, Germany, agrees that this would be a good approach. “It is a very cheap test,” he says, but he cautions that few doctors currently do it, even though smell can be an important indicator of neurological disease. For example, in Alzheimer’s patients, smell is often one of the first things to deteriorate.
The number of people that are anosmic from birth is likely quite small, says Mombaerts, but by better understanding how olfactory signals are disrupted in people born with this condition, researchers hope to gain insight into why many more develop it later in life.
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Workplace climate a major factor in why women leave engineering, report finds
- Venue: Science Magazine
The survey — aimed at trying to understand why 20% of engineering school graduates but only 11% of practicing engineers are women — asked women in engineering jobs and those who had left the field about their job experience, training and development opportunities, and work climate.
Of those who left (1086 women):
- Nearly half said they left because of working conditions; they report experiencing too much travel, low salaries, and a lack of personal advancement.
- One-third report leaving because of the work culture; including treatment by boss or supervisors, and more generally a lack of female-friendly culture in the workplace.
- Independently of those categories, 25% of the respondents reported leaving their jobs to spend more time with their family.
Of those who stayed (2099 women):
- Most say that they have supportive supervisors and co-workers.
- Women who report that they are undermined by their co-workers and work in cultures characterized by condescending, patronizing treatment are the least committed to staying.
- Women who report that they are overworked both at home and work, and who were treated in a condescending manner, report experiencing considerable work-life conflict.
The report, published by the Project on Women Engineers’ Retention (POWER), was careful to underscore that there was no difference between groups in their interests, confidence in their abilities, nor in their expectations of positive outcomes from performing a task.
The report’s authors, Nadya A. Fouad and Romila Singh, of the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, suggest that organizations and companies must find ways to better recognize positive contributions from women in engineering, root out undermining behaviors in the workplace, and foster an environment where colleagues and supervisors support women. Fouad and Singh suggest that changing the workplace environment could be done through formal mentoring programs and by providing forums for informal mentoring.
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Profile: Jon Heras, Seeing Is Believing
- Venue: Science Magazine
The cold sea fogs of Scotland have inspired many artists, but as a boy Jonathan Heras saw instead the North Sea oil fields and the prosperity they brought to his hometown of Aberdeen. So he became an engineer, earning a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. But today, he makes his living as a graphic artist, and although his art is not inspired by Scotland’s scenery, his renderings of science are no less vivid than its raw and boisterous coast.
“Getting things to look authentic is the real trick. You need to add dirt and imperfections”. — Jonathan Heras
From the science behind the Large Hadron Collider experiment at CERN, the European particle physics lab; to the construction of the Bloodhound SSC, a car capable of speeds above 1000 miles per hour; to a portrait of a microscopic bacteriophage that recently received an honorable mention in Science magazine’s Visualization Challenge, Heras’s illustrations and animations depict a wide range of scientific concepts.
Heras, now 30, first explored animation in his early 20s when he and a university friend, Ivan Vallejo, directed a satirical stop-motion movie called The Polos of Death. Recorded on location in a college dorm room, the film features the action figure Boba Fett, from Star Wars, battling to the death a tribe of bloodthirsty Polos — a peppermint sweet — set to a soundtrack of Burt Bacharach and the Bee Gees. The film was “just a bit of fun,” Heras says, but he enjoyed the process of animation because it required him to be meticulous — a skill he seems to possess naturally and one he came to rely on during his Ph.D.
During his graduate studies in Cambridge’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, Heras looked at the flow patterns of liquid and gas through a catalytic converter using magnetic resonance imaging. His research subject proved difficult to convey to an audience at conferences, so Heras made short animated films of his flow-pattern data. “People don’t always remember what you are doing in terms of your research, but they do seem to remember you as the guy with the flashy animation,” he says, laughing.
Heras found his graduate work “quite frustrating,” he says. “The graphics were much more rewarding.” And so in his spare time he took on side projects that relied on his creative hobby. In one project, he was commissioned to make a safety video for his department. “We were surprised at how sophisticated a film he turned out,” says Mick Mantle, a chemist at Cambridge. “It became compulsory viewing for all new engineering students.” Heras “was a very, very bright student,” Mantle says, “but he preferred the image analyses side of things.”
In spring 2006, a few months from the end of his Ph.D., Heras set up as a freelance illustrator under the name Equinox Graphics, specializing in scientific visualizations. “Working from home was quite a struggle; you find that you work all sorts of crazy hours. I often watched TV at 5 in the morning because that was when I was up and working.”
Within 3 years he had enough work to need help, so he enlisted the animation skills of his friend James Waldmeyer, whom he knew from his undergraduate days. In 2009, he and Waldmeyer moved out of Heras’s spare room and into new premises on the outskirts of Cambridge. Heras still likes his home comforts, though, and sometimes works in his slippers.
Heras’s work relies on large amounts of computer processing power. He splits his workload across a network of 10 computers; even so, a frame of animation can take an hour to process. “If you have 25 frames per second and a minute of animation, it quickly adds up,” he says. The cost of all that computing power adds up too, and that affects his bottom line. “I know I could definitely earn more as a chemical engineer, but I wouldn’t have the job satisfaction I have,” he says.
Heras believes that keeping his work varied is key to staying successful. “It would be easy to just churn out many of the same images, tweaked to suit a particular client, … but this would be boring.” Instead, Heras picks projects he knows little about. He has animated a BMX trick that explains the basic physics of flying through the air on a bike (for the 100th anniversary celebration of Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis papers in 2005); a short documentary for the European Space Agency’s mission to orbit the sun with a satellite; a clip of an operation in which a device was inserted into a human vein to prevent a serious blood clot; and many more.
Heras’s first step toward creating an image is to learn as much as possible about the subject. “We start by researching on Wikipedia, and then we go to more detailed and accurate sources to fine-tune our understanding,” he explains. “We try to make [the] gulf of knowledge between us and the scientists as small as possible.” Heras and his partner come up with ideas and then meet with the client. Once they agree on the scope of the work, the real work begins. “Some of the images take a week to create,” he says.
Heras says he relies on what he already knows about science. However, the work requires some artistic license. All illustrators have to make these sorts of calls, he explains: “filling in the colors, the textures, the speeds that things move.” Heras cites the award-winning animation called The Inner Life of the Cell, made by Harvard University to take its biology students on a journey through a cell’s microscopic world. “It’s an amazing visual,” Heras says, but the space inside a real cell “is jam-packed with all sorts of things that are buzzing around. … It is not this vacuous space where you can see everything clearly,” as it is in the video. The video’s illustrators chose to simplify the cell so that viewers could more easily see what’s going on. Sometimes, he says, such editorial decisions are necessary, but they can be hard to make.
On the other hand, scientific illustrators must always be careful to make sure things don’t look too clean and pure, Heras says. “Getting things to look authentic is the real trick,” he says. “You need to add dirt and imperfections.” Knowing how to do that takes time, especially if you are self-taught. Heras says he picked up tips like these — indeed, most of what he knows about the craft — by reading blogs and online forums.
After so many years of formal education, earning a living from skills learned online and picked up in a college dorm room might seem strange. He says he still hasn’t completely convinced his parents that his career choice is a good one. But he hopes that in time they’ll come around, since he’s making a living and creating interesting things. Just as in his illustrations, seeing is believing.
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In Times of Crisis, U.K. Government Should Listen to Its Scientists, Says Report
- Venue: Science Magazine
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
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
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
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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