Nominations:

White House Taps Former Genome Chief Francis Collins as NIH Director

Jocelyn Kaiser

President Barack Obama's announcement last week that he had chosen Francis Collins to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH) did not come as a big surprise. But it ended months of speculation and ignited a volley of flattering remarks from researchers and biomedical groups. The former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute is known as a skilled administrator and excellent communicator, although he does have his critics. Some question his support of "big biology" in the genome project portfolio—with timetables and planned targets—and some are concerned about his outspoken Christian faith. He raised eyebrows, for example, when he recently launched a Web site, BioLogos, expanding on his 2006 book explaining how he reconciles his faith with the science of evolution (see sidebar). Biomedical scientists are pleased, however, to have a permanent leader at NIH, which has been run by an acting director, Raynard Kington, since October.

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Nominations:

Questions About the Language of God

Jocelyn Kaiser

Although many scientists say geneticist Francis Collins will make a superb director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), not everyone is celebrating. A discussion about whether Collins's very public religious views will influence his leadership of NIH played out on blogs early this spring and again in the past week. There seems to be little evidence for such worries, but they persist.

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Obama Nominee:

Geophysicist McNutt Named to Lead U.S. Geological Survey

Richard A. Kerr

Even before she was officially nominated last week to be the next director of the U.S. Geological Survey, Marcia McNutt, president and CEO of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, was already angling for broader responsibilities. After her prospective boss, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, told her that he hoped to elevate science throughout the department, McNutt replied: "Then why don't you make the director of the Geological Survey your science adviser?"

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Ancient DNA:

Sequencing Neandertal Mitochondrial Genomes by the Half-Dozen

Elizabeth Pennisi

Fourteen years ago, sequencing just a few hundred bases of mitochondrial DNA from a Neandertal drew applause worldwide. Ancient DNA studies have come a long way since then. On page 318 of this week's issue of Science, researchers describe using a new technique to decipher the entire mitochondrial genomes from five of these extinct humans. These genomes show relatively little genetic diversity among Neandertals scattered across Europe and Russia. By the group's calculations, this diversity translates into the equivalent of at most 3500 breeding Neandertal females, or up to 7000 including males, lower than previous rough estimates of about 10,000. With relatively few individuals, the species may have been more vulnerable to extinction from climate change or competition from our ancestors, the researchers say.

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India:

Lunar Survey Spacecraft Develops an Attitude Problem

Pallava Bagla

India's first moon probe, Chandrayaan-1, has suffered a critical malfunction that jeopardizes the remainder of the mission. According to the Indian Space Research Organization, Chandrayaan-1 achieved all of its mission objectives before the malfunction was detected in May; some foreign scientists with instruments aboard Chandrayaan-1 concur that the probe performed well. But the spacecraft, which entered lunar orbit last November, can no longer orient itself with high precision.

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ScienceNOW.org:

From Science's Online Daily News Site

Science's online daily news site, ScienceNOW, this week exonerated birds as the source of the 1918 flu pandemic, showed how cats manipulate their owners and swearing eases pain, and described flexible fibers that act like cameras, among other stories.

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Archaeology:

Roundup of Utah Collectors Stirs a Debate on Enforcement

Keith Kloor^*

Last month, 16 residents of Blanding, Utah, were arrested and accused of stealing prehistoric Indian artifacts from public and tribal lands. The crackdown was the culmination of a 2.5-year-old undercover investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of the Interior that netted 24 alleged looters in the archaeology-rich Four Corners region. The case has aroused strong passions among Southwestern archaeologists, prompting many to take sides on how best to cure pothunters of their destructive urge. Some strongly support the federal action; others take a jaundiced view of the heavy-handed police tactics and argue that such an approach will not deter determined looters, especially those who come from communities where a subculture of "pothunting" stubbornly persists.

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ScienceInsider:

From the Science Policy Blog

ScienceInsider this week reported on congressional appropriators' approval of nearly all of the president's $4.94 billion request for the Department of Energy's Office of Science, as well as their skepticism about Energy Secretary Steven Chu's plan to fund eight large energy research centers, and other stories.

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Insulin Resistance:

Prosperity's Plague

Gary Taubes

Insulin resistance is the thread that runs through many chronic afflictions of modern times—obesity, heart disease, and, most conspicuously, type 2 diabetes. All are entangled with diet, and all are linked causally to a dysfunctional response to insulin, the hormone that orchestrates the body's use and storage of nutrients. Elucidating the causes of insulin resistance is one of the most critical endeavors in modern medicine, and two competing theories have now gained wide support. One is that cells essentially become poisoned by fat. This lipotoxicity or lipid overload hypothesis holds that normal processes break down when fat (adipose) tissue cannot store excess fat, and fat accumulates inappropriately in muscle and liver cells. The main rival to this idea, the inflammation hypothesis, holds that as fat cells increase in size with the accumulation of fat, they release inflammatory cytokines and molecules known as adipokines. It's these molecules, so this theory goes, that cause insulin resistance elsewhere in the body. Researchers are now confident that these inflammatory mechanisms play some role in insulin resistance. But they still can't say for sure whether those roles are causal.

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U.S. Space Program:

Can Bolden Banish NASA Blues?

Andrew Lawler^*

Next week marks 40 years since NASA first put men on the moon. But trepidation about the space agency's future is dampening celebration of that milestone achievement. The biggest question facing NASA is whether the 2004 vision of President George W. Bush to return humans to the moon by 2020 and then on to Mars is still alive. During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised to build a large new rocket that can put humans back on the lunar surface, and at last week's confirmation hearing for Charles Bolden Jr., President Obama's choice to lead the agency, Bolden told senators that is still in the cards.

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Solar System Evolution:

Shifting Orbits Gave Solar System A Big Shakeup, Model Suggests

Richard A. Kerr

Planetary scientists are finding that the four outermost planets of our solar system haven't always been orbiting where they are today. They've moved, some a considerable distance outward. The most catastrophic scenario for such planet migration, dubbed the Nice model (after the French city), has been gaining ground of late. It envisions the great reshuffling as a brief, violent affair that not only put the outer planets where they are today but also created the Kuiper belt of small icy bodies beyond Neptune, gave the planets scores of oddly orbiting moons, and bombarded the solar system with a rain of asteroids and comets so fierce that it would have cooked all but the deepest subterranean life on early Earth. The latest support for the Nice model, a new explanation for primitive-looking asteroids, appears this week in Nature. But the model has more hurdles to clear, such as explaining why the innermost planets—Earth and its neighbors—weren't reshuffled as well.

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