Originally published by E&E News

Andrew Wheeler, the acting chief of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), yesterday fired a panel of scientific experts charged with assisting the agency's latest review of air quality standards for particulate matter. He also scrapped plans to form a similar advisory panel to aid in a recently launched assessment of the ground-level ozone limits.

Those steps, coupled with Wheeler's previously announced decision to concentrate authority in a seven-member committee made up mostly of his appointees, quickly sparked objections that the agency is intent on skewing the outcome of those reviews in favor of industry.

Originally published by E&E News

The United Nations climate report released this week had some stunning revelations, claiming that the 2020s could be one of humanity's last chances to avert devastating impacts.

But some say its authors were being too cautious.

When plant breeders want to improve crops, they turn to the diversity stored in gene banks around the world. But many of these critical storehouses, which hold seeds and other plant tissues, are in poor condition as a result of funding shortages. Now, the Crop Trust, a nonprofit based in Bonn, Germany, is aiming to help crop gene banks find firmer footing by providing a steadier source of cash. And today it announced its first award, a 5-year, renewable grant of $1.4 million annually, to the gene bank of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños, Philippines. 

“These crop collections are too important to the world to be left to uncertainty,” says Marie Haga, executive director of the Crop Trust, which was founded in 2004. “They can’t depend on budgets that go up and down.”

The trust is best known for its work on the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a storage facility dug into an Arctic mountain in Norway. It contains nearly 1 million samples of crop seeds gathered from gene banks over the world, kept in case disaster strikes. But the organization also has been quietly working to improve the ability of gene banks to conserve and distribute seeds, and helping the banks meet standards that qualify them for long-term funding from an endowment established by the trust.

China’s total spending on R&D rose a robust 12.3% last year to a record 1.76 trillion yuan ($254 billion), according to a government report released yesterday. Already second in the world in R&D spending behind the United States, China has narrowed the gap.

Figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) show that in 2012, China spent about 34% as much as the United States, a figure that rose to 44% in 2016, the most recent year for which data are available. In terms of purchasing power parity, however, China’s 2016 spending was equivalent to 88% of U.S. spending.

"The year-to-year growth in R&D spending indicates firm governmental and social support for making China a scientific power," says Xie Xuemei, a specialist in innovation economics at Shanghai University in China. "However, there is still a long way to go" to match the research capabilities of developed countries, she adds.

Rutgers University last month terminated a veteran cancer scientist in retaliation, the researcher says, for challenging a powerful principal investigator on the authorship of a paper apparently accepted for publication in Nature. The researcher is now deciding whether to appeal her dismissal in arbitration through her union or to sue Rutgers.

Xiaoqi Xie, 54, was fired on 28 September from a research job in the lab of Eileen White, deputy director and chief scientific officer at the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey in New Brunswick. Xie, who had conducted research at the institute since 2007 and has worked in White’s lab since 2011, was cited in her termination letter for failing to do her job “effectively,” for “conduct unbecoming” a faculty member, and for “serious violation” of university policies, namely her alleged failure on five occasions between May and early July to promptly euthanize more than 20 sick mice being used to study melanoma—charges she disputes. In the letter, Rutgers also accuses her of missing three meetings with her bosses.

The firing comes 6 months after Xie first challenged White’s decision to give another lab scientist sole first authorship on a paper, submitted in April to Nature and not yet published. That manuscript reveals a novel mechanism by which tumor growth is stunted when host animals are incapable of autophagy—the cell’s degrading and recycling of unneeded or damaged components. White is a leading authority on autophagy and has earned many scientific honors, including selection as an AAAS fellow. (AAAS is the publisher of ScienceInsider.)

The United Nations’s climate panel has moved the goal posts for limiting climate change, setting the world a staggering challenge. A report released yesterday in Incheon, South Korea, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says allowing the planet to warm by more than 1.5°C could have dire consequences, and that a speedy transformation of the world’s energy systems is needed to avoid breaching that limit, which is notably tighter than the target of 2°C cited in the Paris agreement of 2015. “Net [carbon dioxide] emissions at the global scale must reach zero by 2050,” said Valérie Masson-Delmotte, a climate scientist at France’s Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission in Paris and a key participant in drafting the report.

There is no time for delay, the report warns, a consensus drawn from thousands of scientific studies. The world has already warmed by about 1°C since preindustrial times, two-thirds of the way toward the new target. “We have to alter course immediately; no longer can we say the window for action will close soon—we’re here now,” Drew Shindell, an atmospheric scientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, wrote in an email to Science. Among other measures, the IPCC says, coal needs to be all but eliminated as a source of electricity, renewable power must be greatly expanded, and “negative-emissions” strategies that suck carbon dioxide (CO₂) out of the atmosphere need to be adopted on a large scale, particularly if emissions reductions are delayed.

Under pressure from island nations at risk from sea-level rise, the United Nations agreed during the Paris negotiations to ask the IPCC to investigate the impact of 1.5°C of global warming. In what IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee, a South Korean economist, called “a Herculean effort,” more than 90 authors and reviewers from 40 countries examined 6000 scientific publications. The resulting picture is urgent and alarming. Given accumulated emissions, the report says, “Global warming is likely to reach 1.5°C between 2030 and 2052.”

Last March, Anna Wexler was nearly 9 months pregnant with her first baby—and the timing could not have been worse. The postdoctoral researcher in medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania was a finalist for a prestigious National Institutes of Health (NIH) research award for young scientists. The competition required a 20-minute interview with a review panel at a Washington, D.C., hotel a few miles from the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland—just 9 days before her baby was due.

Wexler and her husband, a physician, packed their car with supplies for the drive south just in case the baby came on the way. Five days before the 12 March interview, her contractions began. By the third day of an unusually long labor, “I had pretty much given up” on making it to Washington, D.C., she says.

In the end, NIH allowed the sleep-deprived new mom to do the interview by web conference during the panel’s lunch break, 2 days after her son was born. And this week, Wexler learned that she is one of 11 winners of the Early Independence Awards (EIAs). The $400,000-dollar-a-year (with overhead costs), 5-year grant will allow her, just a year after she earned her Ph.D. in social science, to launch her own research group looking at social and ethical issues raised by direct-to-consumer and do-it-yourself medicine and science.

As the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) moves to overhaul how scientific studies can inform regulations, a U.S. Senate panel briefly became a stage for a decades-old scientific argument over the potential human health risks—or benefits—of low doses of toxins and radiation.

EPA’s so-called transparency proposal, released in draft form in April, is contentious because critics say it would bar regulators from considering a wide range of studies that are difficult to reproduce or rest on confidential data, including lengthy, large-scale human health studies involving subjects who were promised privacy. A less discussed provision of the proposal calls on regulators to consider alternatives to their longtime assumption that even small doses of toxins or radiation can pose threats to human health, and that those risks increase as the dose gets bigger—a concept called linear dose-response.

A scientist who champions an alternative to that model was one of three witnesses at yesterday’s hearing, held by a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Toxicologist Edward Calabrese of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, is known for promoting the controversial theory of hormesis—that small doses of toxic agents can be healthful. In 2011, Calabrese sparked outrage by alleging that Hermann Muller and Curt Stern, two researchers who laid the groundwork for modern limits on radiation exposure, had downplayed evidence that radiation was harmless at low levels.

It sounds like science fiction: A research program funded by the U.S. government plans to create virus-carrying insects that, released in vast numbers, could help crops fight threats such as pests, drought, or pollution. “Insect Allies,” as the $45 million, 4-year program is called, was launched in 2016 with little fanfare. But in a policy forum in this week’s issue of Science, five European researchers paint a far bleaker scenario. If successful, the technique could be used by malicious actors to help spread diseases to almost any crop species and devastate harvests, they say. The research may be a breach of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), the piece argues.

The paper is likely to touch off another round in the long-running debate about “dual-use research of concern,” scientific work that may have benefits but could also be used for nefarious means. Other recent examples of such science include the creation of a flu mutant better able to spread in mammals and the synthetic creation of the extinct horsepox virus, a cousin of the virus that causes smallpox.

Funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Virginia, Insect Allies aims to use insects such as aphids or whiteflies to infect crops with tailormade viruses that can deliver certain genes to mature plants; it’s essentially gene therapy for crops. The goal, DARPA says, is to find a new way to protect plants growing in the field from emerging threats. The approach would be faster and more flexible than developing new crop varieties in the laboratory, which can take years, says Blake Bextine, who manages the project at DARPA. The research is carried out by groups at Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) in University Park, The Ohio State University in Columbus, the University of Texas in Austin, and the Boyce Thompson Institute in Ithaca, New York.

Leon Lederman, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist and passionate advocate for science education who coined the term "the God particle," died today at age 96. His death was announced by Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, where he was director from 1978 to 1989.

Lederman and two colleagues shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988 for their discovery, 26 years earlier, that elusive particles called neutrinos come in more than one type. (Physicists now know that there are three types of neutrinos.) Later, Lederman headed the team that discovered a particle called the bottom quark. And he led Fermilab while it built its Tevatron collider, the world's highest energy atom smasher from 1983 to 2010.