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The U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), which has asked scientists and journals to redact key details in two explosive influenza papers, plans to call for a voluntary broader moratorium on the publication of similar studies while an international debate is held to discuss how the field should proceed.

If influenza researchers accept the idea, they would agree not to publish studies about the transmissibility of the H5N1 avian influenza strain in mammals and not to present data on such studies at scientific meetings.

NSABB chair Paul Keim of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff told ScienceInsider that the gravity of the situation demands a thorough international consultation about the risks and benefits of such studies before more results are made public. "This is an Asilomar moment," he says, referring to a 1975 meeting in Asilomar, California, where, after voluntarily halting research, scientists drew up safety guidelines for working with the then-nascent recombinant DNA technology. "We try to avoid calling it a moratorium, but that's what it would be."

After enduring more than 2 years of criticism that included evidence of contamination and misrepresentation of data, a Science paper that linked a mouse retrovirus to chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) today received its last rites: Editor-in-Chief Bruce Alberts issued a full retraction. The study's 13 authors in September signed a partial retraction after one of the three collaborating labs found that a contamination had marred its contribution, but they could not agree on the wording of the full retraction, so Alberts issued it without their approval. "Science has lost confidence in the Report and the validity of its conclusions," wrote Alberts in a rare "editorial" retraction, which appears in the 23 December issue of Science. "It is Science's opinion that a retraction signed by all the authors is unlikely to be forthcoming."

Researchers from the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease (WPI) in Reno, Nevada, led the controversial study, teaming up with investigators from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. As they reported online in the 8 October 2009 issue of Science, they found evidence of a mouse virus known as xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV) in the blood of 67% of the 101 CFS patients they analyzed. Alarmingly, 3.7% of controls also tested positive, leading to fears that XMRV could be widely contaminating the blood supply in many countries.

Soon after publication, researchers around the world began reporting that they could not find the virus in CFS patients. One group discovered that XMRV was likely created in laboratory experiments with mice that made an immortalized cell line to study prostate cancer, and another showed that variants of this line had evolved more than isolates of XMRV, exactly the opposite of what would be expected if the mouse virus truly infected humans and was subject to immune pressure. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services organized a nine-lab study to assess whether the blood supply was at risk from XMRV or related mouse retroviruses. This so-called Blood Working Group—which included the researchers from WPI and NCI who co-authored the original Science study using whatever assays they chose—reported online 22 September in Science that no one could reliably detect the virus in previously positive samples from patients.

Alberts says the Blood Working Group finding was the final straw that led Science to request the full retraction. "The blood group study to me was dramatic evidence of poor science," says Alberts. "It gave us absolutely no confidence in the ability of the major labs involved to do the assays. I find that enormously disturbing." NCI's Francis Ruscetti, a prominent retrovirologist and one of the co-authors, attempted to coordinate a retraction with his colleagues but a dispute arose over wording that suggested some of the findings in the original paper were still valid. "We tried to get all of the authors to agree, but it got endless," says Alberts. "The responsibility that Science magazine has to the scientific community is to make a strong statement that we don't think anything in that paper can be relied on."

Promising "disruptive progress," the engineering college at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, has named an associate dean for equity and inclusion to help it increase the number of students and faculty members from underrepresented groups.

The new position is part of a plan unveiled last week after a coalition of student groups demanded that Berkeley do a better job of attracting and retaining African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and women in engineering. The issue came to a head at a 21 November meeting of the college's executive committee, at which the students presented Dean Shankar Sastry with 13 recommendations to improve the college's abysmal track record and to address what they described as a hostile atmosphere toward women and minorities.

The new associate dean is Oscar Dubon, an associate professor of materials science and engineering. As chair of the college's committee on broadening participation, Dubon wrote a stinging letter last spring to Sastry taking the college to task for its lack of "a coherent recruitment and retention plan."

Dubon tells ScienceInsider that he was "surprised" by the dean's offer and that he took the job "only after I became satisfied with the college's commitment to disrupt the status quo." Dubon praised the "significant collective effort" by students in pressing the college to improve conditions for underrepresented minorities and said he benefited from programs to help minorities during his undergraduate and graduate training at UC Los Angeles and UC Berkeley, respectively. He assumes his position on 1 January.

The college's first step will be to improve its "yield"—the percentage of students who actually enroll after being admitted into either the undergraduate or graduate engineering program. Sastry believes that more money would make a big difference. "Fellowship support is the primary factor in improving yield" at the graduate level, he says. Winning over high school students is more complicated, he admits, and the college plans to try everything from overnight visits to summer research experiences. The plan also discusses various approaches to improving student retention rates, as well as a long-term strategy for recruiting more minority and female faculty members.

"I think it's a start," says Ryan Shelby, a graduate student in mechanical engineering and leader of the Coalition of Underrepresented Engineers, which spearheaded the campaign. "I am glad the COE [college of engineering] finally realizes that they have a serious problem." At the same time, Shelby says he's still trying to quantify the college's promise of "adequate staffing" and resources for diversity efforts and notes that "I don't know yet if Dubon is a figurehead or if he has real power." Dubon declined to discuss details of his new post until after taking office.

Embattled researcher Judy Mikovits lost an important round in court yesterday in a civil suit that her former employer filed against her over alleged "misappropriation" of laboratory notebooks and computer data.

Mikovits, who rose to fame in 2009 for a disputed study that linked a mouse retrovirus to chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), appears to have frustrated a Nevada judge, who asserted that she had "flouted" his order to return the disputed property to the complainant, the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease (WPI) in Reno. Mikovits, who is also facing related criminal charges for possessing stolen property, returned some of the notebooks and a laptop after being briefly jailed. But WPI filed an affidavit from a computer expert that said all the files had been recently deleted on the laptop. WPI attorney Ann Hall further asserts that Mikovits returned only 18 of the notebooks, withholding half a dozen more that include experiments done between 2006 and 2009. Mikovits's attorneys did not respond to interview requests.

After a flurry of motions were filed by each party, Judge Brent Adams in the Second Judicial District Court in Washoe County ruled in favor of WPI, which fired Mikovits in September for insubordination. In essence, the judge's "default judgment" rejected Mikovits's replies to the complaint and upheld all of WPI's claims, which include breach of contract and misappropriation of trade secrets. "It is so surprising," Hall says of the judge "striking" Mikovits's reply, noting that that the judge emphasized that he had never taken this action in his 22 years on the bench. Typically, judges offer a point-by-point ruling on the merit of a defendant's answers to a compliant. Mikovits attended the hearing but did not testify.

In court documents, Mikovits pled the Fifth Amendment, the right not to testify against yourself. Hall charges that the Fifth Amendment defense "was overly broad and kind of an abuse of the process."

Hall says it's unclear whether WPI will ever retrieve the property it seeks, and the civil case will now focus on damages. WPI has yet to tell the court the value of the property at issue, and no future court date has been set for the damages hearing.

Update, 22 December: Scott Freeman, Mikovits's attorney in her criminal case, says the ruling is "wonderful" when it comes to his defense against the charges levied against his client. "WPI wins not because they have a judge or jury decide the merits in their favor," says Freeman. "They win by default, literally. From a criminal defense analysis, there's never been adjudication on the merits." According to Freeman, the judge's frustration mostly had to do with Mikovits' civil attorney failing to meet specific deadlines.

Freeman predicts that attempts by WPI to retrieve substantial damages will not succeed. "Judy is not the Whittemores," he said, referring to Annette and Harvey Whittemore, who used some of their personal wealth to help start WPI. "She has no money. And you can't take water from a stone."

He says he's trying to have her criminal case dismissed. But even if he is not successful, Freeman says, "I'm very optimistic about her defense." If that trial goes forward, he expects it will take place near the beginning of spring.

PARIS— Triggered by the scandal over the diabetes drug Mediator, a law to reform how drugs are approved and regulated in France was adopted by the parliament here yesterday. Because of concerns over side effects, Mediator, or benfluorex, was withdrawn from France in November 2009 after 33 years on the market; several studies suggest it may have caused between 500 and 2000 deaths in France, mainly from heart valve damage. Under the new law, the French Health Products Safety Agency (AFSSAPS), which came under fire for its role in keeping Mediator on the market, is being overhauled and renamed the National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products (ANSM). Potential new drugs now have to be compared with existing approved ones, instead of just with placebos, if they are to be reimbursed under the public health insurance system, and pharmaceutical companies applying for a drug's approval must declare any links they have with outside organizations, physicians, and researchers or face criminal sanctions for failure to comply.

The new law has some critics. The socialist opposition voted against the final bill because its flaws outweighed the improvements to the initial draft, says Catherine Lemorton, a socialist parliamentarian from Toulouse in southern France. She welcomes that all approved medicines in France will be reviewed every 5 years even if they appear problem-free, and that all ANSM discussions on drugs will be videotaped and accessible online. The new law also contains a sales tax on medical drugs that should generate an estimated €150 million for government-directed physician training, but Lemorton regrets that drug makers don't have to pay more and will still be able to themselves sponsor medical educational classes at increasingly financially-strapped universities. And she is particularly angry that vaccine manufacturers will still be in charge of immunization campaigns. "I was outraged at a recent advertisement in the gossip magazine Voici, which showed a 14-year-old girl saying she had her uterus and would therefore be vaccinated against cervical* cancer," she told ScienceInsider. "It is up to the state to promote these campaigns."

Meanwhile, the Cour de Cassation, France's highest criminal and civil court of appeal, has rejected a request from Servier, Mediator's manufacturer, to group all the lawsuits brought by alleged victims into a single trial. This means that the first trial will open in the Paris suburb of Nanterre 6 February and that a verdict could be handed down by the end of 2012, says François Honnorat, a lawyer for 50 of the people suing Servier. So far a total of 200 people have filed suit, but more could follow. Up to 1.5 million people in France may have taken Mediator between 1995 and its withdrawal in November 2009, Honnorat notes. At that time, 250,000 were taking it.

Those filing the lawsuits have accused the manufacturer's founder, Jacques Servier, of aggravated deception for marketing the drug to overweight diabetic patients rather than as a straightforward appetite suppressant. Servier risks a maximum prison sentence of 4 years, but "could be liable for huge damages to the victims, and the company could lose its operating license," says Honnorat.

*The type of cancer Lemorton noted in her quote has been corrected.

Two groups of scientists who carried out highly controversial studies with the avian influenza virus H5N1 have reluctantly agreed to strike certain details from manuscripts describing their work after having been asked to do so by a U.S. biosecurity council. The as-yet unpublished papers, which are under review at Nature and Science, will be changed to minimize the risks that they could be misused by would-be bioterrorists.

But the stricken details may still be made available to influenza scientists who have a legitimate interest in knowing them under a new system the journals and U.S. government officials have been actively debating for some time.

The two papers have both been reviewed at length by the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSSAB), and both have been the subject of intense global media attention the past 2 months. They have also triggered debates among scientists, security experts, and officials within various branches of the U.S. government.

The studies show how certain mutations in H5N1's genome can make the virus more easily transmissible among ferrets, flu scientists' preferred animal model—and thus, also more dangerous to humans. An H5N1 strain that transmits well between people could trigger an influenza pandemic with potentially millions of casualties, scientists fear.

This morning, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a statement saying that NSABB has recommended to the authors and the journals that the manuscripts "not include the methodological and other details that could enable replication of the experiments by those who would seek to do harm."

In an embarrassing misstep, National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins sent his staff a triumphant memo this weekend heralding Congress's sign-off on a controversial new center aimed at speeding drug development. An hour later, Collins retracted the e-mail after realizing that President Barack Obama had not yet signed the bill into law.

It's the latest glitch in the saga of the proposed National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS). For the past year, scientists, lawmakers, and some NIH leaders have argued that Collins was ramming NCATS through without adequate discussion. Late last week, when a 2012 spending bill establishing NCATS headed from Congress to the president, Collins seemed to have won the battle. In an e-mail sent Saturday at 6:57 p.m. E.S.T. titled "Changes at NIH," he notes that the bill signed by the president that day will "formally establish" NCATS. "This is an important step forward in our efforts to speed the delivery of new drugs, diagnostics, and medical devices to patients."

"This is a signal moment for NIH," the e-mail continues, noting that it also involves the dismantling of another NIH component with a "rich history," the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR). Collins' plan to scrap NCRR without consulting the community fueled the NCATS controversy.

The e-mail goes on to say that NCAT's acting director will be Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, and its acting deputy director will be Kathy Hudson, Collins's NIH deputy director for science, outreach, and policy. Both will also remain in their current jobs.

At 8 p.m. Saturday, Collins sent another e-mail with the subject: "Correction: Please disregard the previous message." It explains that the bill signed by the president was a stop-gap spending measure until 23 December—not the 2012 spending bill. "Nothing is finalized until we have a signed bill. We apologize for any confusion." (The two memos first became public on the blog writedit.)

Egypt's oldest research institute caught fire during demonstrations in central Cairo on 18 December, destroying an unknown number of precious books and manuscripts. Shocked Egyptologists call the destruction a "tragedy," and are now trying to locate and salvage the research treasures.

The Institut d'Égypte was founded as a scientific research academy by Napoleon Bonaparte during his 1798 Egyptian campaign, an invasion which brought the country's ancient history to the attention of Western scholars. The collection includes at least 20,000 documents and books, many of which are irreplaceable. Among the books is a rare original copy of the Description de l'Egypt, the first extensive illustrated text on Egyptian antiquities, temples, and monuments.

When fighting broke out between protestors and police, the neoclassical building near Tahrir Square caught fire. Egyptian news reports say that protestors attempted to rescue manuscripts and books from the burning building, but were harassed and attacked by government soldiers.

Lisa Anderson, president of the American University in Cairo (AUC) which has a campus near the institute, says the Dar al-Kutub, the National Library and Archives, is leading a rescue effort by scholars, library specialists, and archivists. AUC is providing student and faculty volunteers and supplies from its own rare books library. "It is impossible at this point to estimate what is lost, since some books and other materials were rescued by private individuals, and we do not know where they are," she says. "Presumably they will begin appearing, either delivered to the Dar al-Kutub or in the used books markets, over the next weeks and months."

Anderson called the event "a terrible tragedy for the historiography of Egypt," adding that "the response of the scientific and scholarly community has been very heartening." Bernard Valero, the French minister of foreign affairs spokesperson, called the destruction a "cultural catastrophe" and urged the Egyptian government to begin an exhaustive and transparent investigation, in order to find and punish those responsible. He added that France would consider any request from Egypt to help rehabilitate the gutted institute.

Update, 3:25 p.m. E.S.T.: Late today in Cairo, Egyptian media said that more than 35,000 manuscripts and books had been rescued from the flames, although their condition remains unclear. Anderson expressed hope for the collection, which she characterized as "a wonderful, somewhat eccentric, irreplaceable archive of mostly 19th century history and geography—books, manuscripts, and maps."

When the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) crafts a regulatory standard—how much arsenic is safe in drinking water, for example—its staff members rely on scientific assessments of the chemical's toxicity. The quality of these agency reviews have been criticized by industry and on Capitol Hill—criticisms that were backed up earlier this year in a study by the National Academies' National Research Council (NRC). Now Congress has directed EPA to document improvements to the process and to ask the academies to review up to three of its toxicity assessments.

The chemical assessments, held in a database called the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS), can be quite controversial. EPA's assessment of formaldehyde, an important ingredient for the chemical industry, was so politically charged that Senator David Vitter (R-LA) in 2009 held up the confirmation of EPA's science adviser until the agency agreed to have an NRC expert panel evaluate the assessment. That review found technical problems, such as inadequate evidence for the conclusion that formaldehyde causes leukemia, as well as more general shortcomings in the clarity and transparency of the assessment. The panel made a host of recommendations, including standardizing descriptions of the strength of evidence and uncertainty.

The new requirements, described in a few paragraphs within a $915 billion 2012 spending bill for several federal agencies that the president is expected to sign tomorrow, directs EPA to adopt these recommendations. The agency is already taking steps toward that goal, says a spokesperson. "EPA continues to strengthen the Integrated Risk Information System Program (IRIS), as part of an effort to ensure that the best possible science is used to protect human health and the environment. EPA is enhancing this important program to be more responsive to the needs of the agency and its government partners."

Smithsonian Institution officials have taken a remarkable 180-degree turn and decided to cancel a controversial exhibit of shipwreck artifacts due to ethical concerns about how the artifacts were salvaged. The institution is also now strongly backing re-excavation of the original shipwreck, which lies off the coast of Indonesia, according to a 14 December press release from the Smithsonian.

Originally scheduled to open in 2012, Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds contains imperial-quality silver, gold, and ceramic artifacts salvaged from a 9th century ship, the Belitung. The exhibit has been dogged by controversy since last February. At the time several major American archaeological associations wrote to Smithsonian Institution Secretary Wayne Clough, charging that the excavator, a private German company called Seabed Explorations GbR, failed to meet crucial scientific standards while excavating a ship of international significance. The Belitung wreck "is one of the most important shipwrecks to be found in the last twenty years," says Filipe Castro, a nautical archaeologist at Texas A&M University in College Station.

The Smithsonian's startling about-face came after a meeting that its officials held on 8 and 9 December with a blue-ribbon advisory committee consisting of representatives from the U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; and other key agencies. Some archaeologists in attendance expected a stormy session, fearing that senior Smithsonian officials—including Julian Raby, the director of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, who had originally advocated strongly for the exhibit—planned to stick to their guns. But by lunchtime of the first day, the committee had reached a unanimous agreement, recommending cancelling the original exhibit and excavating the Belitung wreck scientifically with a team led by Southeast Asian scientists. "With the approval and involvement of the Indonesian authorities this can become an exemplary initiative in international collaboration," said Raby in the press release. "It can achieve multiple goals, and that is why it elicited consensus from the participants."

Blasted by media and scientists alike for their slow investigation into the hacker who stole a trove of e-mails from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia in 2009, police in the U.K. city of Norfolk have now taken a visible step in that investigation, apparently with some help from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). On Wednesday, investigators served British climate skeptic blogger Roger Tattersall with a search warrant and seized several computers and hard drives from his home in Yorkshire: two laptops and a router, Tattersall said in his blog, Tallbloke. The Tallbloke blog was among one of several climate skeptic blogs that received a link to 5000 of the alleged 220,000 purloined e-mails from a hacker known as FOIA2011 on 22 November.

A Norfolk police spokesperson declined to make anyone available for questions, but said in a statement that the search was "one line of enquiry for the investigation into the taking of data from the UEA that started in November 2009" and said that no arrests had been made. Tattersall himself is not a suspect, according to the statement.

The night before the seizures, Tattersall wrote on his blog, he received a notification from the blogging platform Wordpress that the company had been asked by the U.S. DOJ to retain records of "all stored communications" from Tattersall's blog and two others: the U.S.-based No Consensus blog, run by Jeff Id, and the Canadian blog Climate Audit, run by Steve McIntyre. The information included IP addresses, e-mail and phone communications, and credit card numbers of those associated with each site. Tattersall declined to comment about the police motivations, but told ScienceInsider that he is cooperating with the police since they won't find anything on his hard drives.

The start of construction of the €650 million SuperB particle collider in Italy has been delayed at least a year following difficulties in releasing project funding. Work on the tunnels for the facility's circular accelerator has been put back from the end of this year to the beginning of 2013, but project scientists say they are confident this will not impact plans to carry out its first collisions in 2016.

Some have expressed skepticism that SuperB will ever get built—with Italy remaining close to bankruptcy—and may take this as an early sign of a budget crisis. Marcello Giorgi of the University of Pisa, who is leading the project's technical design team, acknowledges that "everything is possible," including the axing of the project, but says that to date the government has given no signs it will cut research funding. "There is apparently no risk at the moment," he says.

To be built on the campus of the University of Rome Tor Vergata on the outskirts of the city, SuperB will accelerate beams of electrons and positrons inside two 1.2-kilometer-circumference rings and study the decay of particles such as B mesons and tau leptons that are produced when the beams collide. The pattern of these decays should help us to better understand why matter is so much more prevalent in the universe than antimatter, and could provide indirect evidence for the existence of new kinds of fundamental particle.

SuperB was approved by the Italian parliament in December 2010 as the flagship project in a new infrastructure program set up by the country's research ministry. To build the accelerator, the government said that it will provide €250 million with additional funding from Italy's Institute of Technology and National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), which is coordinating the project. The United States is chipping in with parts taken from the decommissioned PEP-II/BaBar "B-factory," and France and Russia may contribute, too. Running costs, which will make up at least €200 million of the €650 million budget, have yet to be approved.

Giorgi says that the first tranche of government money, worth €19 million, was expected to be available early this year. But prolonged negotiations involved in setting up the Cabibbo laboratory, which will house the collider, and a time-consuming bank transfer meant that the funds are only now ready to use, he says.

The official groundbreaking in the spring will signal the start of very basic tasks, such as building a road and putting up a fence around the site. Digging the tunnels for the accelerator, which will be located just a few meters below ground, will take longer because it will require identifying suitable companies to carry out the work through a bidding process at the European level. Giorgi claims, however, that this delay will not affect the switch-on date because machine construction can take place in parallel with the civil engineering.

Who did what? Lemaitre (left) says Hoffmann had little interest in the award-winning research.

Credit: EPFL; Nobel Foundation/CNRS Photo Library/Pascal Disdier

Once again, the 2011 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine is the subject of controversy. This time, the contribution of French immunologist Jules Hoffmann has been called into question in by Bruno Lemaitre, a scientist who worked at Hoffmann's lab in Strasbourg when the award-winning research was done in the 1990s. Last week, Lemaitre set up a special Web site, www.behinddiscoveries.com, on which he claims that he did virtually all of the research himself. Hoffmann took little interest in the work, Lemaitre says—but he claimed the credit once its importance became clear.

Reached by Science Insider this morning, Hoffmann declined to comment on the broadside because it "would not be elegant," except to say that he credited Lemaitre's contribution—along with many others—in his Nobel lecture last week in Stockholm, and that "I cannot feel any guilt at all."

Rather than a source of joy to the immunology field -- which was starting to feel ignored by the Nobel Committee -- the 2011 medicine Nobel has been a source of controversy. The untimely death of Ralph Steinman, and the resulting debate over whether he should still receive the award posthumously, initially dampened the celebration. Then last month, a letter in Nature, signed by 26 immunologists, lamented that the Nobel Committee didn't appropriately acknowledge the "seminal contributions of immunologists Charles A. Janeway Jr. (1943-2003) and Ruslan Medzhitov." Many scientists saw the letter as unspoken criticism of the Nobel Committee's choice to also honor Bruce Beutler of the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego. (There's been a long-running and sometimes bitter debate between supporters of Beutler and Medzhitov.)

Now, Lemaitre is questioning the merit of the third winner.

The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) has accepted recommendations from an outside review committee to curtail the use of chimpanzees in biomedical research.

"NIH will not issue any new awards for research involving chimpanzees until processes for implementing the recommendations are in place," said NIH Director Francis Collins at a press teleconference today.

Following a congressional inquiry, the NIH last year asked the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and National Research Council to form a committee to review the current and future need for chimpanzees in research. A 190-page report issued today, "Chimpanzees in Biomedical and Behavioral Research: Assessing the Necessity," received high praise from Collins, who described it as a "thoughtful and careful analysis" that he plans to act on immediately.

Science meets art. An image from "Hydrogeny," an exhibit at the Dublin Science Gallery about hydrogen.

DUBLIN—An edgy Irish center that seeks to merge art and science and get young people hooked on discovery and technology will get a chance to export its model globally. The Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin, which opened its doors here in 2008, has received a €1 million gift from Google.org—the software giant's philanthropic arm—to kick-start a network of eight similar centers around the globe.

Dublin's Science Gallery is different from most science centers in that it runs only temporary exhibitions, all of them free, and draws in artists and designers to explore scientific concepts. A group of 50 scientists, artists, engineers, technologists, and entrepreneurs brainstorms twice a year to come up with themes and ideas, which have included contagion, water, and the future of fashion. The formula has proven successful; the 18 exhibitions so far have drawn 800,000 visitors.

Google's donation is seed money, aimed at supporting a network of similar centers for the first 3 years. The plan is to launch two spinoffs by 2014; negotiations are underway with venues in London and Moscow, says Michael John Gorman, the founding director of the Dublin Science Gallery. But the ultimate goal is eight galleries worldwide by 2020, and Gorman has had talks with interested parties in Singapore and New York. Dublin can help with advice on everything from buildings, Web sites, staffing, and programming, Gorman says.

A fit of Congressional pique is giving researchers their first solid look at 2012 spending levels for two major science agencies—and the news appears to be relatively good for both the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Office of Science, with both in line to get small increases.

With little notice, the Republican leadership of the appropriations committee of the House of Representatives very early this morning (1 a.m. EST) posted to its Web site details of a $1 trillion package of spending bills that has been the subject of intense year-end negotiations with Senate Democrats.

Senate leaders, however, had refused to sign off on public release of the details of the so-called "omnibus" package—which provides funding for 10 departments and other government agencies—until they had worked out a compromise on a separate bill extending a payroll tax cut. But House Republicans apparently decided to move ahead anyway, releasing details of what appears to be the compromise package in order to allow the House to vote on the omnibus and increase political pressure on Senate Democrats to act.

People who volunteer for federally funded research both in this country and abroad are well-protected by federal ethics rules, a high-level expert panel has found. But there is room for improvement. The United States needs to do a better job of tracking human studies, the panel says, and it should consider creating a system to compensate injured volunteers.

That advice comes from a report issued today by the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. It began a probe last year after a historian revealed that in the late 1940s, U.S. researchers deliberately exposed more than 1300 Guatemalans to syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases to study the effects and possible treatments. President Barack Obama asked for a fact-finding investigation, which the commission completed in September; it found "unconscionable" ethical violations. The president also requested a review of whether research subjects today are adequately protected.

In the decades since the Guatemala studies, the United States and other authorities have imposed many standards and rules on the use of human subjects, the panel finds. In the United States, the 30-year-old federal Common Rule requires informed consent, independent ethics review, and the minimization of risks. The Common Rule also applies to the growing proportion of U.S.-funded trials conducted abroad, where most countries now have similar rules. As a result, "the commission is confident that what happened in Guatemala in the 1940s could not happen today," said commission chair Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania, in a press teleconference on Wednesday.

However, in its 104-page report (plus endnotes and appendices), the commission finds some gaps in transparency. When its staff members asked 18 U.S. agencies covered by the Common Rule to list the human studies they support, many could not easily provide the information. Even the National Institutes of Health (NIH)'s grants database can't readily be searched for only human research. And a federal database of drug trials, ClinicalTrials.gov, leaves out many early-stage (phase I) trials and behavioral and social science studies, according to the report, titled "Moral Science: Protecting Participants in Human Subjects Research."

The bioethics commission, which tallied 55,000 federally funded studies in 2010, says that federal agencies should be required to make public online basic information about each project—including a study's title, investigator, location, and funding.

Thirteen Democrats and one independent in the U.S. Senate are questioning last week's announcement by Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius that she would not allow over-the-counter sales of Plan B, the emergency contraceptive, to girls under 17.

Sebelius's decision went against the recommendation of the Food and Drug Administration, whose chief, Margaret Hamburg, said scientific evidence supported making Plan B available without a prescription. "We feel strongly that FDA regulations should be based on science," wrote Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) and others in a letter sent yesterday to Sebelius. They ask the secretary to "share with us your specific rationale and the scientific data you relied on for the decision to overrule the FDA recommendation."

The chair of the House of Representatives science committee doesn't think much of the investigations exonerating the scientists involved in the 2009 Climategate e-mail scandal. He also believes that climate scientists are driven by hopes of financial gain in producing reports that provide evidence for global warming.

Representative Ralph Hall (R-TX) doesn't do many interviews. So it was a coup when the National Journal's (NJ) Coral Davenport was able to get the 88-year-old legislator to answer several questions about his views on climate change as part of a 1 December story on how congressional Republicans are reluctant to answer even the most basic questions about where they stand on the issue.

Hall told National Journal that he's "pretty close" to the views of his fellow Texan, Governor Rick Perry, in feeling that climate science may be an idea hatched by scientists to garner federal funding for their research. And when NJ pointed to an article saying that nearly all climate researchers think human activity has led to global warming by increasing greenhouse gas emissions, Hall replied, "And they each get $5000 for every report like that they give out." (Read the full interview below).

Hall's comments were so provocative that ScienceInsider asked his aides for a more detailed explanation. And he obliged with a four-paragraph comment (see below).

After 5 years of tough negotiations, Congress has agreed to increase funding for two programs that try to turn scientific discoveries into profitable businesses by increasing how much 11 research agencies must contribute. University lobbyists object to the changes in the set-asides for these programs, arguing that the money would be better spent on funding more basic research. But opponents appear headed to defeat, as a final vote locking in a new spending formula could come as early as Thursday.

The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program was created in 1982 to give start-up companies a shot at competitively awarded research dollars. This year research agencies will spend a total of $2.3 billion on the program, which provides companies with nearly $1 million in two phases to get their technology ready for the marketplace. In 1992 a smaller relative, the Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program, was launched to target university start-ups; its budget this year amounts to $275 million.

Each agency that spends more than $100 million a year on research allocates 2.5% of its budget to the SBIR program, and 0.3% to STTR. Under the new legislation, the SBIR set-aside would rise in six steps to 3.2% by 2017, and the STTR allocation in three steps to 0.45%. By 2017, agencies would be spending an additional $750 million on the two programs. Because the allocation is proportionate to the agency's overall research budget, the Department of Defense is by far the biggest contributor, providing about half of the total funding. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) provides about a quarter, followed by the Department of Energy (DOE), NASA, and the National Science Foundation (NSF).