News of the Week
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News of the Week

GENE THERAPY:
What to Do When Clear Success Comes With an Unclear Risk?

Eliot Marshall

An expert panel, meeting in an emergency session last week, urged the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to lift a hold it had placed on three gene therapy trials after a patient treated with gene therapy in France developed cancer. The panel made the recommendation after concluding that the cancer was almost certainly caused by the gene therapy.

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NSF BUDGET:
Panel Prescribes Study to Treat Growing Pains

Jeffrey Mervis

Last week a U.S. House spending panel approved a 13% increase for the National Science Foundation (NSF), putting it on course to double its budget in 5 years. But the committee, concerned that the agency might not be ready to handle such an infusion, asked an outside group of management experts to delve into how NSF does its business. The review is expected to question some well-worn practices at the 52-year-old agency, including borrowing many of its managers from academia.

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NASA BUDGET:
Plans for Pluto and Hubble Gain in Congress

Andrew Lawler

Last week, a U.S. House spending panel agreed to a Senate plan to continue funding the $488 million mission to Pluto. The bill also increases funding to explore Mars, asks NASA to consider extending the life of the Hubble Space Telescope, and chides the agency for backing away from materials science research on the space station.

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BIOLOGICAL AND CHEMICAL WARFARE:
Secret Weapons Tests' Details Revealed

Martin Enserink

Documents released last week by the Pentagon about secret biological and chemical weapons tests have fueled the anger of veterans who say they were used as unwitting guinea pigs. But biological and chemical arms experts say that there are no major revelations in the documents--although they do illustrate the vast scope of the U.S. chemical and biological warfare program at the height of the Cold War.

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POWER TOOLS:
Into Painless Piercing? Try It With Microwaves

Mark Sincell

Researchers report on page 587 of this issue that they have developed a drill that uses microwave energy to excavate solids. The new microwave-powered drill suffers from none of the problems that plague mechanical drills. It is silent, steady, and dust-free, and the bits almost never wear out.

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FISHERIES SCIENCE:
Miscue Raises Doubts About Survey Data

David Malakoff

A misrigged trawling net has brought a haul of problems for the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS). The faulty net has been used for the past 2 years in NMFS surveys of Atlantic fish populations, which help regulators set catch limits for cod and other important species. Now, some commercial fishers and members of Congress want the government to delay controversial catch restrictions that they say might be based on flawed data.

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SWEDISH RESEARCH:
New Stem Cell Fund Raises Hackles

Gretchen Vogel

A tidy sum of money gift-wrapped for stem cell research has sparked recriminations and soul-searching in Sweden, a country at the vanguard of the hot young field. Several prominent scientists have charged that a new 75 million Swedish kronor ($8.1 million) stem cell fund has subverted the country's rigorous peer-review process by awarding large amounts of money to teams with sparse track records that have jumped on the stem cell bandwagon.

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News Focus

GLACIOLOGY:
Ice Man: Lonnie Thompson Scales the Peaks for Science

Kevin Krajick

QUELCCAYA ICE CAP, PERU--Glaciologist Lonnie Thompson cores ice from the world's loftiest glaciers, seeking to retrieve precious records of ancient climate before they melt away. Last year Thompson--whom colleagues have called "the closest living thing to Indiana Jones"--made headlines by observing that the famous snows of Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro might be gone by 2015. Now he is on a mission, racing through expeditions to Asia, South America, and Alaska to retrieve endangered samples.

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CANCER DRUGS:
Smart Weapons Prove Tough to Design

Jennifer Couzin

Data from several clinical trials of Iressa, an experimental drug in a new class of targeted cancer therapies, have been inconsistent, and some have been flatly disappointing. Even so, on 24 September, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Oncology Drug Advisory Committee voted 11 to 3 to recommend that the agency approve the drug to treat a common form of lung cancer, known as non-small-cell lung cancer. The agency now has less than 6 months to decide whether to allow Iressa on the market, and the lobbying has been intense.

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NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSIOLOGY OR MEDICINE:
Tiny Worm Takes a Star Turn

Jean Marx

Three researchers who pioneered the use of the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism have won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine: Sydney Brenner of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies; H. Robert Horvitz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and John Sulston of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.

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NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS:
Neutrino Traps and X-ray Eyes

Charles Seife

Half of this year's Nobel Prize in physics went to Ray Davis of the University of Pennsylvania and Masatoshi Koshiba of the University of Tokyo for using neutrinos to gain insight into the cosmos. The other half went to Riccardo Giacconi of Associated Universities Inc. for a 4-decade-long effort to view the universe with x-ray spectacles.

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NOBEL PRIZE IN CHEMISTRY:
Mastering Macromolecules

Adrian Cho and Dennis Normile

Half of this year's Nobel Prize in chemistry went to John Fenn of Virginia Commonwealth University and Koichi Tanaka of Shimadzu Corp., who independently developed techniques to ionize large molecules such as proteins. Kurt Wüthrich of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology received the other half for developing nuclear magnetic resonance techniques that reveal the molecules' shapes.

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NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS:
Lab-Based Researchers Earn Prize in Economics

Constance Holden

The $1.1 million Nobel Prize in economics will be shared by Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University, who has integrated psychology into economic theory, and Vernon Smith of George Mason University, who has turned economics into an experimental science.

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SECURITY AND SCIENCE:
Researchers See Progress in Finding the Right Balance

David Malakoff

Last week, barely a year after 11 September and the subsequent anthrax mail attacks, the House Science Committee convened a hearing to explore the proper balance between science and security. And a panel of government and academic leaders suggested that the country might be close to finding a new equilibrium point in this chronic debate.

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