News of the Week
News Focus

News of the Week

SCIENCE PUBLISHING:
The UPSIDE of Good Behavior: Make Your Data Freely Available

Eliot Marshall

A report issued last week by the National Academy of Sciences decrees that the authors of published papers must support their claims by quickly and freely releasing data such as DNA sequences. Their goal, the authors say, is to get "universal adherence, without exception," to the idea that any scientist should have ready access to the data and materials needed to "verify or replicate" a published claim.

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COSMOLOGY:
MAP Glimpses Universe's Rambunctious Childhood

Charles Seife

WASHINGTON, D.C.--The clearest baby pictures of the universe have caught the moment at which the first stars blazed into life. The images, taken by a satellite and unveiled at NASA headquarters this week, surprised and delighted cosmologists by implying that the cosmos was swarming with activity much earlier than was previously thought.

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GENE THERAPY:
RAC Hears a Plea for Resuming Trials, Despite Cancer Risk

Jocelyn Kaiser

After learning more about the leukemias in two patients in a French gene-therapy trial, a U.S. review panel this week suggested that although it makes sense to keep this trial on hold, others might be allowed to resume. The panel also learned that a third patient in the French trial has a gene insertion like the one in the two who developed leukemia--although this child does not have leukemia.

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ASTRONOMY:
Institute Faulted on Attitudes Toward Women

Andrew Lawler

An independent panel set up in the wake of a recent exodus of women scientists from the Space Telescope Science Institute has concluded that its management style is dismissive and inhospitable to women, although it found no disparity in salary or lab space among men and women.

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RUSSIAN SCIENCE:
Academy Plucks Best Biophysicists From a Sea of Mediocrity

Andrei Allakhverdov and Vladimir Pokrovsky

MOSCOW--Last month, the Russian Academy of Sciences announced the winners of its first-ever competition for funds: 49 major grants to what it deemed to be the cream of Russia's biophysics labs. But the awards--each totaling $625,000 over 5 years--have drawn allegations of conflicts of interest, as more than half the grants went to labs in institutes whose chiefs ran the competition.

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RNA INTERFERENCE:
Mini RNA Molecules Shield Mouse Liver From Hepatitis

Jennifer Couzin

Shooting millions of tiny RNA molecules into a mouse's bloodstream can protect its liver from the ravages of hepatitis, a new study shows. It offers further hope that a novel approach to silencing troublesome genes will become a valuable disease-fighting tool. But the authors and others caution that the therapy must leap many hurdles before it can be safely applied to humans.

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EUROPEAN UNION RESEARCH:
Ethics Group Gives Qualified Nod to Placebos

Gretchen Vogel

BERLIN--A European ethics body has said that placebo-controlled trials can sometimes be justified in developing countries, even when proven treatments are available in wealthy countries. The statement departs from more stringent standards on placebos laid out in the Declaration of Helsinki, a document that sets worldwide standards for clinical research ethics.

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AGRICULTURE:
Study Shows Richer Harvests Owe Much to Climate

Erik Stokstad

A new study reported on page 1032 shows that a surprisingly high percentage of the improvement in crop yields seen over the last 2 decades in the United States was due not to farm management but to climate change. The finding suggests that food production in the United States may be more vulnerable to shifts in climate than was previously suspected, a fact that could affect global food security.

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News Focus

SPACE SHUTTLE:
Columbia Disaster Underscores the Risky Nature of Risk Analysis

Charles Seife

This month's breakup of the space shuttle Columbia, the second such catastrophe in 113 flights, suggests that NASA's most recent official risk estimate of 1 failure in 250 is off. Why can't NASA get it right? The answer lies in a field known as probabilistic risk assessment.

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MEDICINE:
Tracing the Steps of Metastasis, Cancer's Menacing Ballet

Jennifer Couzin

Recent studies have unexpectedly found that a constellation of molecular signals in cancer cells and the patient's own body steer tumor cells, bit by bit, from the primary site to a new, ideal home. Large-scale gene studies are suggesting fundamental differences between such metastatic cells and other cancer cells. Researchers are also taking a deeper look at electrifying similarities between embryonic and metastatic cells.

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MEDICINE:
A Clash Over Genes That Foretell Metastasis

Jennifer Couzin

Biologists who sift DNA for evidence of what causes cancer cells to become metastatic are torn between two camps. One holds that a fatal problem occurs relatively late, when so-called metastasis suppressor genes fail, allowing an existing tumor to spread. But a second group holds that metastasis is just the final step of well-studied processes of cell dysregulation.

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GENOMICS:
Tinker, Tailor: Can Venter Stitch Together a Genome From Scratch?

Carl Zimmer

J. Craig Venter plans to create microbes to cure the world's environmental woes. Whether he can even partially succeed is an open question. Obstacles range from determining which genes are essential to how to switch on a new genome.

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SPACE SHUTTLE:
After Columbia, a New NASA?

Andrew Lawler

Strong political backing and the promise of more money may help NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe fulfill a bold new vision to build a complement to the space shuttle, revolutionize space science missions, and create the steppingstones for human missions beyond Earth orbit. But first the agency must survive the current investigation of the tragic loss of the Columbia and its crew.

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SPACE SHUTTLE:
Disaster Sets Off Science Scramble

Andrew Lawler

The Columbia tragedy has grounded the fleet of U.S. space shuttles and halted construction of the international space station. But that leaves the station's crew temporarily available to perform other tasks, including more experiments, if space officials can figure out a way to get them what they need.

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