News of the Week
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News of the Week

BIOMEDICAL ETHICS:
Penn Report, Agency Heads Home In on Clinical Research

Eliot Marshall

Last week, clinical researchers began to find out what the consequences of the death of a teenager last fall in a gene therapy experiment at the University of Pennsylvania would be for Penn--and for national policy. Several federal agencies put forward proposals for sharply increasing the surveillance of human trials, especially those involving the use of viral carriers in gene therapy. And Penn, which has been in the hot seat for several investigations, announced a more rigorous system for approving and monitoring the use of human subjects that could add significantly to the cost of some types of academic research.

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DEVELOPMENT:
Brain Cells Reveal Surprising Versatility

Gretchen Vogel

When a team of scientists reported last year that stem cells from the brains of adult mice could become functional blood cells, many scientists were intrigued, if a bit skeptical. Now, these versatile cells have shown even more surprising abilities: When injected into embryos, it seems, they can develop into nearly every type of tissue in the body. The work, described on page 1660, leaves a number of questions open. Even so, scientists are amazed at the cells' apparent flexibility.

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MATHEMATICS:
Statistical Physicists Phase Out a Dream

Barry Cipra

Physicists have long sought an exact mathematical solution to the Ising model, a powerful tool for studying phase transitions--the abrupt changes of state that occur, for instance, when ice melts or cooling iron becomes magnetic--because it would provide much more information about such still-mysterious transitions. Now a theoretical computer scientist has proved that the Ising model--at least in its most general, three-dimensional form--belongs to a class of problems that theorists believe will remain unsolved forever.

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WOMEN'S HEALTH:
Reports See Progress, Problems, in Trials

Laura Helmuth

Ten years after its scathing report on the National Institutes of Health's failure to include women in clinical research, the General Accounting Office has concluded that the NIH is doing much better. Women are clearly taking part in clinical studies--in even greater numbers than men. And the amount of money devoted to diseases, such as breast cancer and depression, that disproportionately afflict women has risen steadily, outpacing increases in the NIH's overall budget. But NIH-supported researchers aren't always putting their data on women subjects to use.

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VACCINE DEVELOPMENT:
Radical Steps Urged to Help Underserved

Martin Enserink

BETHESDA, MARYLAND--For years, researchers working on vaccines against the world's major scourges have pleaded for more funding, political attention, and greater involvement from the pharmaceutical industry. Now their cause has been embraced by politicians around the world, and industry leaders have promised to do what they can. And last week, a broad group of researchers, big-pharma CEOs, and public health experts met at Clinton's request to discuss the main obstacles on the road to new vaccines for AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis.

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QUANTUM PHYSICS:
Furtive Glances Trigger Radioactive Decay

Charles Seife

Common sense says you can't keep an atom's nucleus from decaying simply by looking at it. Quantum mechanics says you can. Now two Israeli physicists have come up with a way in which watching a nucleus might make it decay faster.

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NSF REAUTHORIZATION:
Closed Ethics Case Sparks Dueling Bills

Jeffrey Mervis

A 2-year-old case of financial impropriety by a former National Science Foundation senior staffer has turned the reauthorization of NSF's programs, a process normally carried out with little fanfare, into a battleground. The dispute pits the chair of the House Science Committee, James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), against Nick Smith (R-MI), chair of the panel's basic research subcommittee. Caught in the crossfire is NSF Director Rita Colwell, who needs both men as allies in the annual fight for federal dollars.

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BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH:
Patients Help Track Down Disease Gene

Elizabeth Pennisi

A patient advocacy group called PXE International has helped three research teams pinpoint the identity of the gene for pseudoxanthoma elasticum (PXE), a rare inherited disorder. Two labs report their results in the June issue of Nature Genetics; the third group published its findings in the 23 May Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. All the researchers say that having a group of families willing to work with them was critical to their success.

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OCEANS POLICY:
Clinton to Expand Marine Reserve Areas

David Malakoff

President Bill Clinton on 26 May ordered federal agencies to develop an expansive new network of marine reserves in U.S. waters. The move came a few days after The Pew Charitable Trusts established a high-profile oceans commission that supporters hope will energize efforts to study and protect the sea. Adding to the bounty, federal officials also announced that they will shift shipping lanes away from environmentally sensitive areas off California, while researchers began an ambitious effort to count all forms of marine life (see p. 1575).

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ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE:
Stephen Straus's Impossible Job

Erik Stokstad

Alternative medicine--loosely defined as treatments and practices not commonly taught in medical schools, not generally used in hospitals, or covered by insurance companies--is big business. Scientific rigor is sorely needed in this enormously popular but largely unscrutinized field. Now Stephen Straus, who was recruited last fall to head up the National Institutes of Health's new National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, is facing what may be a superhuman task: evaluating unconventional treatments--and pleasing both believers and skeptics.

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ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE:
Bastions of Tradition Adapt to Alternative Medicine

Eliot Marshall

Fueled by popular interest, alternative medicine is gaining ground at scores of universities; now deans want to add it to the curriculum. But in some institutions, traditional faculty members have raised vocal objections to what they see as an erosion of standards in pursuit of easy cash.

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MOUSE GENETICS:
Australian 'Ranch' Gears Up to Mass-Produce Mutant Mice

Elizabeth Finkel

CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA--Chris Goodnow, an immunologist here at the Australian National University, is using the latest technology and sequencing data to advance research on recessive mutations that cause adult-onset diseases. The plan is to generate mouse mutants on a massive scale in order to help assign functions to the genes being identified by the Human Genome Project. Because mouse genes are thought to do the same thing as their human counterparts, scientists hope to translate the knowledge into clinical studies.

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MARINE CENSUS:
Grants Kick Off Ambitious Count of All Ocean Life

David Malakoff

Last week a proposed "Census of Marine Life" took a big step toward reality when eight research groups were awarded $3.7 million to develop model Internet atlases that display everything from the distribution of squids to the DNA sequences of tiny zooplankton. The projects kick off what could become a 10-year, billion-dollar effort to use everything from dip nets to airborne lasers to enumerate and map marine life. Although some environmentalists worry that identifying hidden populations could unintentionally hasten their exploitation, researchers say that the potential conservation benefits outweigh the risk.

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NAZI RESEARCH:
Reopening the Darkest Chapter in German Science

Robert Koenig

BERLIN--As historians dig up disturbing new details about the complicity of German researchers in Nazi-era crimes, officials are calling for full disclosure of the tainted past of leading scientific institutions. Last month, a meeting, sponsored by the country's main science granting agency, was held here on "Interactions, Continuities, and Inconsistencies From the Late Empire to the Early German Federal Republic/Democratic Republic." And new evidence suggests that the cover-up of certain Nazi-era abuses, and the postwar scientific community's embrace of dozens of tainted researchers, was more widespread than previously imagined.

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ECOLOGY:
Mount St. Helens, Revisited

Richard A. Lovett

The devastating eruption of Mount St. Helens has transformed scientific thinking about the nature of volcanoes and how ecosystems recover from them. At a meeting here commemorating the 20th anniversary of the explosion, researchers discussed how their previous ideas about the huge debris avalanches and lava domes that sometimes accompany volcanic eruptions have been overturned. They also described the unexpectedly rapid recovery of the ecosystem and how it was driven by two previously overlooked forces: random chance and leftovers from the preblast landscape.

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