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ROME—An unprecedented government effort to shore up the quality of Italian science by reviewing the work of individual scientists and institutions has triggered a firestorm of protest. Critics say the government review, coordinated by the National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes (ANVUR) at the Ministry of Education, University and Research is using flawed criteria and will do little to reward the best Italian scientists.

The issue has been furiously debated on an online forum called Return On Academic Research (ROARS) in recent months, and has led to official protests by several scientific and legal associations, including the Mathematics Union and the Association of Psychologists. But the government is going ahead with the scheme anyway.

In 2011, ANVUR started pushing back nepotism, still rife in the Italian academic world, and rewarding excellence. The agency evaluates individual researchers, who, if they meet certain criteria, can get a government stamp of approval that allows them to apply for higher academic positions; it also rates universities and public institutions, who can expect to get more funding if they are among the best. But the criteria used are too crude, scientists say. "It's like judging the bottles in a wine contest by the labels only without tasting their content," says Alberto Baccini, a professor of political economics at the University of Siena.

Alan Alda

Credit: Courtesy of Random House

What is time? And how would you explain it to an 11-year-old? That's the question actor Alan Alda has posed to scientists in the second Flame Challenge—so named because the question in last year's competition was, "What is a flame?" The challenge aims to spur scientists to think about how they can better communicate with the public. Scientists have until 1 March to submit their answers, which will be judged by 11-year-olds around the world. Organizers will announce the winner at the World Science Festival in New York City on 1 June.

Alda, 76, made his name in the 1970s when he played wisecracking army doctor Hawkeye Pierce in the hit television series M*A*S*H. Over the years, he has become fascinated with science. From 1993 until 2005, he hosted Scientific American Frontiers, a documentary series that ran on public television. From 2001 to 2002, he played famed theoretical physicist Richard Feynman in the Broadway play QED. And in 2009, he helped found the Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University in New York, which is running the Flame Challenge. Alda took some time—whatever that may be—to chat with Science Insider about his passion for science, the nature of clocks, and discerning eyes of 11-year-olds.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Q: You obviously have a passion for science. Where does that come from?

A.A.: I have no idea. As a kid, I always thought of myself as an amateur inventor. When I was 6, I would go around the house mixing things together to see what would happen. Luckily, I never mixed anything that would explode.

The latest results from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) released yesterday show that fourth- and eighth-grade students from Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea have retained—and in some cases widened—their lead over the rest of the 63 countries that took the TIMSS tests in 2011. The scientists who manage this quadrennial exercise say that a big reason why East Asian countries continue to lead the rest of the world is their ability to implement necessary improvements in their school systems.

"Revolutionary results require revolutionary changes," says Michael Martin, co-director of the International Study Center at Boston College that administered TIMSS and PIRLS, a similar test of reading and literacy skills. Those changes are more likely to occur, he says, in countries that have a centralized education system and can move quickly to embrace the latest thinking on how to improve schooling.

"In Singapore, they are constantly revising their curriculum and helping teachers integrate those changes into their classroom," Martin says. "In contrast, the United States agonizes over what the curriculum should be and how to implement it. And by the time we have decided what to do, it's time to revise the curriculum again."

Good as gold? This informed consent form for the study did not specify that the rice was genetically modified. The China CDC says parents only saw the signature page of the six-page form, which did not mention golden rice either.

SHANGHAI, CHINA—An official investigation in China has come down hard on a controversial U.S.-funded study in which Chinese schoolchildren were fed genetically modified (GM) rice. In a statement last week, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC) in Beijing said the trial, which finished 4 years ago but was only published in August, violated ethical rules. The study's three China-based authors have been removed from their posts, while parents of the children who participated have been offered generous financial compensation.

The statement also accuses Tang Guangwen of Tufts University in Boston, the corresponding author of the study, of violating Chinese regulations and importing the rice into China without proper approvals.

"This is an alarm bell for biotech scientists on the importance of strictly following ethical and other regulations on research," wrote Huang Jikun, director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy in Beijing, in an e-mail to ScienceInsider. But Adrian Dubock, who was not directly involved in the work but who is a Switzerland-based manager for the Golden Rice Project, which promotes the development of the engineered crop, believes most of the charges to be baseless.

The managers of the National Ignition Facility (NIF), a giant laser fusion lab in California, have admitted to Congress that they don't understand why the $3.5 billion machine is not working. And they cannot guarantee that it will ever work.

"At present, it is too early to assess whether or not ignition can be achieved at the National Ignition Facility," wrote Thomas P. D'Agostino, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in a report requested by Congress that was submitted last week.

NIF, which started operation in 2009 at the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), attempts to create a burning fusion plasma—the same process that powers the stars—by blasting a small capsule of hydrogen fuel with a powerful laser. At the time, managers confidently predicted that they would be able to achieve ignition—a self-sustaining fusion burn that produces more energy than the laser pulse that sparked it—by 30 September 2012.

Marine scientist Jane Lubchenco, the head of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), announced today that she will leave that job at the end of February. She plans to "return to my family and academia" in Oregon, she said in a message to NOAA staff members.

Lubchenco was one of President Barack Obama's first scientific appointments, and her joint Senate confirmation hearing with presidential science adviser John Holdren gave the position an unusually high profile. In October, Lubchenco had suggested that she might like to stay on the job if Obama won reelection.

But in today's message, Lubchenco hinted that the decision to leave was influenced in part by the strain of trying to maintain a bicoastal family life; her husband, marine scientist Bruce Menge, remained at Oregon State University after Lubchenco took the job in 2009. "[W]onderful as Skype is for staying in touch, it is not a viable long-term arrangement!" she wrote.

CPRIT's newly appointed chief scientific officer, Margaret Kripke.

Credit: CPRIT

The tumult continues at Texas's troubled $3 billion state cancer research agency. Yesterday, the institute's executive director, William Gimson, submitted a letter of resignation. The same day, the agency announced that it has found a new chief scientific officer to replace the Nobel laureate who resigned earlier this year in protest over the agency's peer review procedures.

Gimson, who has led the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) for the past 3 years, explains in his letter that because of the past 8 months of controversy, he has "been placed in a situation where I feel I can no longer be effective." He is leaving "in the hope that my fellow CPRIT workers will finally be able to get back to what is important." If the board accepts his resignation, he will stay on until 17 January, he wrote.

Newly appointed chief scientific officer Margaret Kripke, a professor emeritus of immunology at the University of Texas (UT) MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, assured reporters in a press call today that she wants to restore the "really terrific" peer review system set up by her predecessor, Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Alfred Gilman. At the same time, when she joins CPRIT in January, Kripke intends to "broaden" CPRIT's portfolio to include more translational research and studies on prevention.

Flying high. Physicist Stephen Hawking, shown here aboard NASA's "vomit comet" aircraft in 2007, has won a $3 million prize.

Credit: NASA/Wikimedia

For the second time this year, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, who made his fortune in Silicon Valley, has showered millions of dollars on prominent physicists through his brainchild, the Fundamental Physics Prize. And whereas the first round of awards sparked controversy, this time the winners are, if anything, a bit predictable, other researchers say.

Stephen Hawking, the famed British theorist who predicted that black holes would radiate, receives one of the two $3 million prizes announced today. The second goes to seven physicists whose efforts helped unearth the long-sought Higgs boson, which was discovered in July at the world's biggest atom-smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European particle physics lab, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland.

The CERN seven include: Lyn Evans of Imperial College London, who led construction of the LHC; Fabiola Gianotti of CERN, who serves as spokesperson for the 3000 scientists working with the massive ATLAS particle detector; and Joseph Incandela of the University of California (UC), Santa Barbara, who serves as spokesperson for the 3000 scientists working with the CMS particle detector. In July, the CMS and ATLAS teams independently reported that they had seen a particle that appears to be the Higgs boson. Also sharing the award are Peter Jenni of CERN, the former ATLAS spokesperson, and Guido Tonelli of the University of Pisa in Italy, Tejinder Virdee of Imperial College London, and Michel Della Negra of Imperial College London, all former CMS spokespersons.

Before the hunt. Hunters last week killed a radio-collared female wolf (832F, right), that had been part of a study of packs in Yellowstone National Park since she was a pup. Her brother, 755M (left), is still alive. Hunters have killed an estimated 8% of Yellowstone's wolves this year, leaving about 81.

Credit: Courtesy of Doug McLaughlin

A wolf that researchers in Yellowstone National Park have followed since she was born 6 years ago, and was unusually popular with visitors and photographers, was shot last week by a hunter in Wyoming. The wolf, known to the park's wolf researchers as 832F, was wearing a radio collar, like several others that have died in this season's wolf hunt. She was also the third—and last—of the projects' wolves outfitted with a specialized GPS collar that collected data every 30 minutes, allowing the scientists' to track her movements in fine detail. The GPS data are important to understanding the effect of wolves on the park's elk population, says Douglas Smith, a wildlife biologist and the wolf project's leader. "We don't have any wolves with these GPS collars now," Smith says.

Beyond the loss of the GPS data, the death of 832F affects the project's study in other ways, Smith adds. The project, which is partly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, is designed to understand the natural life cycle of wolves unexploited by humans. But this season alone, hunters have shot seven wolves—including 832F—that primarily used the park, and were part of the study.

Because 832F was the alpha, or breeding, female in the Lamar Canyon Pack, her death is also likely to have "important social impacts" on the park's wolves, Smith says. Wolves in the park do attack and kill one another, and in some of these cases, the alpha female has died—an event that can lead to the pack's break-up. 832F had joined with two brothers, 754M and 755M, to form the Lamar Canyon Pack, and almost immediately began drawing attention to herself, Smith says. "She was probably the park's most famous wolf, very popular with wolf-watchers, because she was odd. Usually the males are the best hunters and killers. But she went against the norm. She was the best hunter in her pack, and was clearly in charge. She killed many elk, and ran roughshod over those two brothers."

BRUSSELS—The European Union is finally poised to get a unified patent system after decades of vain attempts. Today, ministers in charge of competitiveness issues endorsed a legal package to create the unitary patent, which will provide uniform legal protection in 25 European countries. Researchers and companies worldwide will be able to apply for a cheaper, simpler, single patent from 2014 onwards, E.U. leaders claim. But the file has several hoops to jump through before it can be fully rolled out.

At present, the European Patent Office in Munich, Germany, handles bundle patent filings in up to 38 countries through a series of national procedures. In contrast, the new regime will provide a genuine one-stop shop, cutting down on both costs and red tape. According to the European Commission, the price tag for a patent could drop from about €36000 now to about €6400. After a transition period of up to 12 years, during which machine translation technology will be perfected, patenting costs could fall further to under €5000.

These estimated costs remain higher than those of the U.S. patent, which are about €1850 ($2390). But E.U. leaders hope the single patent will be more attractive for inventors than the existing regime, which could help Europe catch up on its global competitors. In 2011, about 224,000 patents were granted in the United States and 172,000 in China, compared with just 62,000 in Europe.

The biotech giant Amgen will purchase deCODE Genetics, the pioneering Icelandic genetics company, for $415 million, the two companies announced today. deCODE Genetics CEO Kári Stefánsson will remain in place and pledges that the company will continue its high-profile research to make connections between genetic variations and disease.

The sale is the latest turn in the road for deCODE, which Stefánsson founded in 1996 with the intention of creating a DNA database of the whole Icelandic population and mining it for genetic markers linked to common diseases. The company never received legal approval for such a national database. But more than 140,000 volunteers agreed to allow the company to combine their medical and DNA information with Iceland's genealogy database.

deCODE has since churned out papers in top journals on its genetics discoveries. But the company struggled to turn a profit from its diagnostic tests and drug development efforts. Three years ago, deCODE declared bankruptcy, then reemerged after an investment consortium bought some of its assets.

Whole effort. The United Kingdom will sequence the whole genomes of 100,000 people with cancer and rare diseases.

Credit: U.S. Department of Energy/Office of Biological and Environmental Research

With genetic technology advancing quickly, the prime minister of the United Kingdom announced today an ambitious plan to fully sequence the genomes of 100,000 Britons with cancer and rare diseases. Although many countries are touting their efforts to decode their citizens' DNA in the name of treating and curing disease, the new project is unusual because it will decode entire genomes, not just parts of them.

Prime Minister David Cameron said in a statement that the government's National Health Service (NHS) has earmarked £100 million, or about $160 million, to the effort. The money is part of £600 million ($965 million) announced last week for research in the coming years. The sequencing is expected to take 3 to 5 years.

The effort joins many sequencing projects and biobanks across Europe and beyond. In March, the United Kingdom officially opened its biobank of 500,000 people, which includes health information and blood samples. In February, Norway announced plans to sequence tumor genomes of 1000 cancer patients.

Social psychologists may be unified in their condemnation of fraudster Diederik Stapel, but some are very unhappy about the exhaustive investigation report about his case that appeared on 28 November. A scathing statement issued on Saturday by the Executive Committee of the European Association of Social Psychology (EASP) describes some of the report's broader conclusions as an "attack" on the entire discipline.

The three committees that wrote the report, led by Willem Levelt of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, looked well beyond Stapel to investigate how his massive fraud—which tainted at least 55 papers and 10 doctoral theses—could have gone unnoticed by co-authors, colleagues, reviewers, and journal editors for years.

The reports contains caveats, for instance when it says that it is "unable to make any statement" about social psychology as a whole. But then it goes on to do just that, the EASP statement says, for example, by stating that "far more than was originally assumed, there are certain aspects of the discipline itself that should be deemed undesirable or even incorrect from the perspective of academic standards and scientific integrity."

In the trenches. Stephen Meltzer fell just short of his goal on a petition to boost NIH funding.

Credit: Courtesy of Stephen Meltzer and Johns Hopkins University

Frightened by the possibility of massive cuts to domestic spending starting next month, U.S. scientific societies have spent months urging their members to help make the case for federally funded research.

One physician-scientist who heeded the call is Stephen Meltzer, a gastroenterologist and cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. But after devoting 2 months to gathering signatures for an electronic petition—and sending out enough e-mails to develop a severe case of tendonitis in his right arm—Meltzer says he's been treated like a pariah by his scientific peers. In fact, he harbors serious doubts about the community's willingness to support grassroots lobbying efforts like his.

The story begins in February, when Meltzer participated in a teleconference with White House science officials. The call was designed to whip up support among the research community for the 2013 budget that President Barack Obama had just submitted to Congress. (It's still pending.) And Meltzer, whose research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for 3 decades, was eager to hear from presidential science adviser John Holdren.

Planting seeds. New White House report calls for boosting U.S. spending on agricultural research.

Credit: U.S. Department of Agriculture

The United States should boost by $700 million its annual spending on agricultural research, shift public resources away from fields that are already getting private sector support, and award more funds through competitive grants, concludes a report released today by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).

"[O]ur Nation's agricultural research enterprise is not prepared to meet the challenges that U.S. agriculture faces in the 21st century" for two main reasons, concludes the report, which was requested earlier this year by officials at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

One is that the government distributes too little of the roughly $4 billion it spends annually on agricultural research through competitions among scientists, "which fails to adequately encourage innovation." In part, that's because Congress typically dictates how and where agencies—primarily USDA—should spend the money. To shake things up, the report recommends that Congress nearly double USDA's annual budget for competitive funding of extramural research at universities. That growth, from $265 million to $500 million per year, would be in line with a long-term plan lawmakers approved in 2008. The report also calls for roughly doubling, to $250 million, the National Science Foundation's budget for agriculture-related basic science.

Drilling down. A review of a controversial University of Texas report on the gas drilling technique known as fracking found inadequate oversight of conflict of interest issues.

Credit: U.S. Department of Energy

The University of Texas (UT), Austin, is getting a hard lesson in what can go wrong if you fail to spot and disclose a potential conflict of interest. UT has been clobbered with a tough outside review, made public yesterday by Provost Steven Leslie, of blunders in a controversial study on the use of hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas, known as "fracking."

That study, released in draft form early this year by UT's Energy Institute, suggested that the environmental risks of fracking are minimal, but it turned out to have a serious flaw: No one had ever asked the principal investigator on the internal university grant—former U.S. Geological Survey chief Charles Groat—if he had a conflict of interest. It turned out that Groat was a paid board member of an energy firm that conducts fracking—sparking a controversy that has led to his departure from UT and changes in the university's conflict-of-interest practices.

When the fracking study came out in February at a meeting of AAAS (the publisher of ScienceInsider), critics charged that it was unbalanced because it appeared to downplay the technology's environmental risks. Later, a nonprofit group in Buffalo, New York, the Public Accountability Initiative, investigated and found that Groat was a paid board member of the Plains Exploration & Production Co. of Houston, Texas, which uses fracking to extract gas. Questioned about this, Groat acknowledged the industry job but said it didn't seem "relevant" to disclose because he had not written or edited any part of the fracking study.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced yesterday that it will pour up to $500 million over 10 years into an initiative to encourage more minority scientists to pursue research as a career and to bolster their chances of winning a grant.

The agency is responding to a study published in Science in 2011 that found that African American researchers are much less likely to receive grant funding from NIH than are white scientists with a similar research record. In June, a working group of NIH's Advisory Committee to the Director (ACD) responded to the study by urging steps to get more minority students into the training pipeline, improve mentoring, and address possible bias in peer review.

To do that, NIH plans to launch a program of undergraduate scholarships and research experiences called Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD). It will give about 150 new undergraduate students per year (for total of 600 students) up to 2-year tuition scholarships, research experiences in summer and after college, and possibly graduate loan repayment, NIH deputy director Lawrence Tabak explained yesterday to ACD.

NIH already spends about $135 million a year on programs at institutions with highly diverse populations. BUILD, which will run alongside those programs, is more "holistic," Tabak says.

Sally Rockey, NIH deputy director for extramural research

Credit: NIH

Reacting to a steep rise in the number of young biomedical scientists seeking scarce academic jobs, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) plans to launch programs to prepare scientists for nonacademic careers, move students through their Ph.D.s faster, and bolster the pay of postdocs.

NIH officials announced these plans yesterday at a meeting of NIH's Advisory Committee to the Director (ACD). It is a response to a report in June on the U.S. biomedical workforce co-chaired by Princeton University President Shirley Tilghman, who believes NIH is training too many young scientists in a system that she calls "dysfunctional." The report itself did not recommend imposing any ceiling on graduate training, however, and report co-chair Sally Rockey, NIH deputy director for extramural research, said yesterday that "we did not say we should reduce the numbers" of scientists being trained because that would require a modeling study. But NIH agrees that training needs to be improved, she noted.

Toward that end, Rockey said NIH is planning to take the following steps:

• Launch a grants program for institutions to develop "innovative approaches" to complement traditional research training, for example, by preparing young scientists for careers in industry or science policy. NIH expects to fund up to 50 grants over the next 2 years in what Rockey called the "centerpiece" of NIH's efforts.

Building a foundation. California's stem cell agency has funded new facilities, providing $50 million for the Lorry I. Lokey Stem Cell Research Building at Stanford University, for example.

Credit: All Rights Reserved by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Mark Tuschman

A review released today by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) praises the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) as a "bold social innovation" that provided a creative new source of funding that has turned the state into an international hub of stem cell research. But the IOM panel authoring the report also concluded that the funding agency’s organization and governance is not optimal. The review suggests changes to help CIRM maximize its impact, ensure its long-term sustainability, and improve its credibility in the eyes of the public.

CIRM was created by a 2004 ballot initiative, Proposition 71, that committed the state to raise $3 billion for stem cell research through bond sales. So far, CIRM has spent or committed roughly $1.8 billion, including $271 million in seed money for new research facilities. The funding body has had many ups and downs in its first 8 years. Many scientists credit it with providing a safe harbor for embryonic stem cell research, which has often come under political attack, and boosting stem cell research more broadly. Yet, consumer watchdog groups and others in the state are impatient for the stem cell treatments that they feel they were promised during the Prop. 71 campaign and have misgivings about the amount of money being poured into research in years when California has endured a dire financial crisis.

The IOM panel, which CIRM requested and for which it paid IOM $700,000, was not asked to decide whether the money has been well spent. Rather, the panel was charged with evaluating CIRM’s organization and policies, and suggesting improvements.

One long-standing sore point among CIRM critics is that many members of its 29-member governing board, the Independent Citizens’ Oversight Committee (ICOC), represent institutions that have benefitted from CIRM funding, creating at least the appearance of a conflict of interest. The IOM panel took note of this as well and recommended that ICOC members should not be allowed to sit on the committees that review grants. CIRM’s credibility with the public would also be helped by including on ICOC and various working groups more scientists and patient advocates without ties to institutions funded by CIRM, and by taking other measures to address potential conflicts of interest, the panel said.

Grads going global. NSF Director Subra Suresh announced an expansion to NSF's Graduate Research Fellowship Program to provide more international research experience to its fellows.

Credit: National Science Foundation

As many as 400 U.S. graduate students will be able to work abroad in 2014 under a new program at the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Yesterday, NSF officials unveiled the Graduate Research Opportunities Worldwide (GROW) program as part of a celebration of the 60th anniversary of its Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). Launched in 1952 as the agency's flagship effort to strengthen U.S. graduate training in the sciences, GRFP has funded more than 46,500 budding scientists, including 40 eventual Nobel Prize winners.

The GROW program is intended to address the increasingly international scope of research, said NSF Director Subra Suresh. "Global enterprise doesn't have any borders," he said. "Innovation doesn't have any borders. Funding doesn't have any borders."

To that end, NSF will offer all GRFP fellows—both current and future—the opportunity to apply for a GROW award. These awards will give research fellows $5000 to pay for travel and relocation expenses to one of eight partner nations: Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, France, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore. Federal science agencies in those host nations will pay research fellows a living allowance and cover research costs for between 3 and 12 months. NSF expects the first year of the GROW program to cost $2 million, with the money coming from the agency's Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Graduate Education.