As co-director of graduate affairs at the University of Chicago, Nancy Schwartz spent the past 4 years helping faculty members at 15 major research universities become better mentors. The project was supported by the National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN), a $23 million effort that the National Institutes of Health launched after discovering an embarrassing racial gap in who gets NIH grants.

Begun in 2014, NRMN was designed to scale up successful mentoring practices in the biomedical sciences. NIH officials hoped its efforts would boost the fortunes of minority applicants. But last summer, when NIH renewed the network for another 5 years, officials decided to spend most of the money on the science of mentoring, that is, testing different approaches to mentoring with a small, carefully chosen population. Barely 10% of NIH’s $50 million investment in phase two of NRMN is going to the type of services, including an online portal that provides one-stop shopping for a cornucopia of mentoring activities, that characterized first phase.

Schwartz’s project is a casualty of that shift in emphasis from service to research. And she is one of several researchers familiar with NRMN who wonder whether something will be lost as NIH remakes the program. “What’s wrong with more service?” she wonders. “Or at least a mix of both approaches?’”

Originally published by E&E News

In a stinging rebuke of the Trump administration’s handling of science, an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) advisory panel has found major shortcomings in the agency’s pursuit of key regulatory rollbacks.

The sharp criticism in the reports on four top deregulatory efforts is particularly notable given that the administration has selected the majority of the members of the Science Advisory Board (SAB).

He Jiankui, the Chinese researcher who stunned the world last year by announcing he had helped produce genetically edited babies, has been found guilty of conducting “illegal medical practices” and sentenced to 3 years in prison.

A court in Shenzhen found that He and two collaborators forged ethical review documents and misled doctors into unknowingly implanting gene-edited embryos into two women, according to Xinhua, China’s state-run press agency. One mother gave birth to twin girls in November 2018; it has not been made clear when the third baby was born. The court ruled that the three defendants had deliberately violated national regulations on biomedical research and medical ethics, and rashly applied gene-editing technology to human reproductive medicine.

All three pleaded guilty, according to Xinhua. The court also fined He, formerly of the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) and known as JK to friends and colleagues, 3 million Chinese yuan ($429,000). His collaborators were identified as Zhang Renli, of a medical institution in Guangdong province, and Qin Jinzhou, from a Shenzhen medical institution; Zhang received a 2-year prison sentence and was fined 1 million yuan, according to Xinhua, whereas Qin was given 18 months in prison with a 2-year reprieve, and a 500,000 yuan fine.

The computer scientist whom President Donald Trump picked this month as the next director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) has followed the path taken by an untold number of foreign-born researchers by seeking greater opportunities in the United States. If the Senate confirms him, as seems likely, 58-year-old, India-born Sethuraman Panchanathan will become not only the second NSF director of Asian American descent, but a living embodiment of how the international flow of talent has helped fuel U.S. leadership in global science.

Panchanathan, who goes by “Panch,” is executive vice president for research and chief innovation officer at Arizona State University (ASU), Tempe, where he has worked since 1997. A former chair of its computer science and engineering department, he founded the university’s school of computing and informatics and created and leads its center for cognitive ubiquitous computing, which combines artificial intelligence and machine learning to develop technologies to help those with disabilities.

“His star has kept rising,” says Subbarao Kambhampati, an ASU computer scientist and a longtime colleague and friend. “I think he’s got three or four jobs. But he has a crazy amount of energy, and he seems to like going full speed all the time.”

Prominent evolutionary biologist Alan Cooper has been fired as director of the University of Adelaide’s Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD), the university announced today. Cooper’s ouster followed multiple allegations of bullying, which led the university to launch a probe and suspend him in August. The university said in a statement that it terminated Cooper “for reasons of serious misconduct.”

Cooper rejects the charge of bullying. “I’ve occasionally been too blunt in my language and actions, and regret this—but it was never bullying,” he told Nature in this article published today. In an investigation published in August, Nature interviewed nine current and former co-workers of Cooper’s; four alleged that he bullied them and four more said they saw him bullying colleagues.

Island life isn’t for everyone, nor, it seems, for every wolf.

One year into a federal effort to restock the wolf population in Isle Royale National Park in Michigan’s Lake Superior, a pack of eight relocated from a nearby island appears to be thriving, while four of 11 wolves brought from the mainland have died. Another wolf voluntarily departed last winter, returning to Minnesota over an ice bridge.

The U.S. National Park Service (NPS) today released news of the most recent wolf deaths, and the emerging pattern is clear: Wolves relocated as a pack from Canada’s Michipicoten Island Provincial Park have so far been more successful on Isle Royale than wolves brought individually from either mainland Minnesota, Michigan, or Canada’s Ontario province.  The Michipicoten wolves’ provenance as a bonded group was likely crucial to the fact they have all survived so far in the new environment, says wildlife ecologist Rolf Peterson from Michigan Technological University in Houghton, who has studied Isle Royale wolves since 1971. “That’s about the only explanation I can think of,” to account for the difference in the wolves’ fates.

Federal research agencies will be under increased pressure to reduce their use of monkeys, dogs, and cats when President Donald Trump signs the final 2020 U.S. spending bill this week. Language pushed by animal advocacy groups will require the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to explore alternatives to the use of nonhuman primates, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to come up with a detailed plan for the reduction and retirement of its monkeys, and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to reduce or eliminate its use of cats, dogs, and monkeys within the next 5 years.

“This is the first time in history, to our knowledge, that Congress has set hard deadlines for the elimination and reduction of experiments on dogs, cats, and primates,” says Justin Goodman, vice president of the White Coat Waste Project, a Washington, D.C.–based group that worked with lawmakers to introduce the language. “The science has been there, the public sentiment has been there, and now there’s the political will to make these things happen.”

Matthew Bailey, president of the National Association for Biomedical Research in Washington, D.C., is concerned, however. “There is some language that could set a dangerous precedent for deciding how research in the U.S. should be conducted in the future,” he says. “This kind of language should raise serious questions and concerns about the role Congress plays in research.”

President Donald Trump has chosen a 58-year-old, Indian-born computing engineer and university administrator to be the next director of the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Trump today announced his intention to nominate Sethuraman Panchanathan to succeed France Córdova, whose 6-year term ends in spring 2020. Panchanathan, who uses the nickname “Panch,” is executive vice president and chief innovation officer at Arizona State University in Tempe. He is also a member of the National Science Board, NSF’s oversight body.

“The impending formal nomination of Dr. Panchanathan is a win for science in the Trump Administration and a win for America,” said Kelvin Droegemeier, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, in a statement. “I’d like to thank the outgoing NSF Director, Dr. France Córdova, for her tireless service in a variety of scientific leadership roles at home and abroad. Dr. Córdova has been an exceptional leader and will be leaving NSF in capable and effective hands.”

More than 125 scientific societies and journal publishers, as well as an influential U.S. senator, are urgently warning the Trump administration not to move forward with a rumored executive order that would make all papers produced by federally funded research immediately free to the public. In three separate letters, they argue such a move would be costly, could bankrupt many scientific societies that rely on income from journal subscriptions, and would harm the scientific enterprise.

The White House won’t comment on whether the administration is considering issuing an executive order that would change publishing rules, and society officials say they have learned no details—nor been asked for input. But if the murmuring is accurate, the order would represent a major change from current U.S. policy, which allows publishers to keep papers that report the results of federally funded studies behind a paywall for up to 1 year. That 2013 policy was the compromise result of a fierce battle between open-access advocates, who wanted free immediate public access to the fruits of federally funded research, and scientific societies and publishers, who argued such a policy would destroy a long-standing, subscription-based business model that has well served society and scientists.

The new letters restate that argument. “Going below the current 12 month ‘embargo’ would make it very difficult for most American publishers to invest in publishing these articles,” argues a letter to President Donald Trump released today by the Association of American Publishers in Washington, D.C., and signed by more than 125 research and publishing groups.

When complete, a vast nuclear physics complex being built near Darmstadt, Germany, should enable scientists to study why the universe is made of matter and not antimatter, and to test ion beams that might be used to treat cancer. First, however, countries funding the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) must cough up an extra €1 billion to complete the project, now estimated to cost €2.3 billion.

At a FAIR council meeting this month, officials said the German government is likely to pay its share of the extra money—about €700 million—but other member states could take longer. Some experts also worry the huge cash injection could mean that big science projects in Germany and elsewhere will suffer. “They will have to find the money somewhere,” says Lyn Evans, a particle physicist at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. “It is going to have an impact.”

FAIR is an ambitious extension of the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research being developed by a collaboration of eight European countries plus Russia and India. Originally due to cost €675 million and switch on in 2009, the project has since suffered from a series of price rises and delays. In response, partner countries agreed in 2015 to impose a cost cap, in 2005 prices, of just under €1.3 billion.