US and Europe set up risk-assessment panel for GM crops

Munich

US President Bill Clinton and Romano Prodi, the president of the European Commission, last week agreed to set up a panel of US and European scientists to address the possible environmental and health risks posed by genetically modified (GM) crops and other organisms.

The plan, announced at a summit in Lisbon, comes amid growing concern about a trade war between the United States and the European Union (EU) over GM products. US companies are concerned that European distrust of GM food could lead to import restrictions.

An EU spokesperson says that the panel's first priority will be to develop risk-assessment methods that all partners accept. A standard method is essential, she says, to provide hard scientific evidence of any potential risks. Details about the composition of the panel, and when it is expected to begin work, have yet to be announced.

US laser report will not be ready until September

Washington

The US Department of Energy last week missed a 1 June deadline to furnish Congress with a full prediction of the cost and schedule for the National Ignition Facility (NIF), the troubled laser project under construction at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California (see Nature 401, 101; 1999). In a memo sent to Congress on the day that the response was due, General Tom Giaconda, acting deputy administrator for defence programmes, said that a final cost and schedule will not be ready until mid- September.

An appropriations bill passed last year had also told the department to provide costs for closing down the project, but Giaconda declined to do so. The US administration is preparing a budget amendment that will provide an additional $95 million to support NIF construction during 2001, with two-thirds of the money being diverted from other work at Lawrence Livermore and the rest from nuclear weapons research at other laboratories. It says its best current estimate is that the project will cost $2.1 billion to build, compared with the original estimate of $1.2 billion.

UN secretary-general puts faith in science

New York

Annan: seeking a lead from science. Credit: AP

Kofi Annan, the secretary-general of the United Nations (UN), this week issued a statement emphasizing the need for “sound scientific information” to address the world's environmental problems. Such information, he said, was “the only basis for effective policy,” but he admitted that “large gaps in our knowledge remain”.

In his statement, issued on World Environment Day, Annan said that “unsustainable practices remain deeply embedded in the fabric of our daily lives”, and that “we are failing to invest enough in alternative technologies”. Two weeks ago, Annan gave his support for a new initiative, the InterAcademy Council, designed to offer scientific advice to bodies such as the UN (see Nature 405, 268; 2000).

France invests in electronic encryption technology

Paris

The French ministry of research last week launched a national programme to boost research in electronic encryption. The FF7 million (US$1 million) programme will be led by Jacques Stern, director of the department of computer science at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, and a former head of the French computing firm Bull.

The programme will be advised by a 12-member commission drawn from the country's national research agencies, industry — including the telecommunications giant France Telecom — and a representative of the ministry of foreign affairs. The first 12 projects will favour young scientists, and research that involves the training of French scientists abroad — a call for proposals will go out this month.

Researcher sued over potential cancer drug

Washington

Abbott Laboratories is suing cancer researcher Judah Folkman of Children's Hospital in Boston, over the intellectual property rights to part of a potential angiogenesis inhibitor. Angiogenesis inhibitors are considered valuable to cancer researchers and pharmaceutical companies because they could cut off a tumour's blood supply, thus starving it.

Folkman and his group have attracted considerable media attention during the past few years over two such putative inhibitors — endostatin and angiostatin (see Nature 393, 104 ; 1998). The dispute centres on who can claim credit for a portion of a protein, kringle 5, that may have angiogenesis-inhibiting properties.

In a complaint filed in US District Court in Boston, Abbott claims that Folkman “fraudulently” filed a patent claim on kringle 5. Folkman told the Boston Globe that: “The dispute comes down to Children's Hospital wanting to protect its patent rights and Abbott wanting to avoid paying any royalties.”

New Zealand climbs aboard South African telescope

Sydney

New Zealand astronomers, frustrated by their limited viewing facilities — one small observatory at the University of Canterbury with a modest 1-m and two 60-cm telescopes — are celebrating their acceptance last week into the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) project.

SALT is building a 10-m telescope, the largest in the Southern Hemisphere, with German, Polish and US funding (see Nature 402, 452; 1999). New Zealand will now contribute US$1.3 million in cash and kind. The latter will be the design and building of a high-resolution spectrograph, a field in which the country's physicists excel.

Compton falls to Earth out of harm's way

Washington

The US space agency NASA has brought the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory (CGRO) safely down into the Pacific Ocean. Safety concerns had led NASA to de-orbit CGRO in a remote region as, if a second of its three gyroscopes had failed, the satellite's uncontrolled re-entry would have posed a 1/1,000 risk of loss of human life.

Weighing around 15,000 kg, the observatory was one of the heaviest spacecraft ever launched, and pieces as large as one tonne were expected to survive re-entry. The observatory had exceeded its mission period by four years and made an important contribution to our knowledge and understanding of gamma-ray astronomy (see Nature 405, 504– 506; 2000).

Venter and Wilson give prize money to charity

Washington

Craig Venter, president of Celera Genomics in Rockville, Maryland, has announced that he will donate his portion of the 2000 King Faisal International Prize of Science to The Institute of Genomic Research (TIGR), the non-profit research institution he founded. TIGR will put the $100,000 toward sequencing the genome of Theileria parva, a protozoon transmitted by ticks that causes a leukaemia-like disease in cattle.

Venter split the $200,000 prize with Edward Wilson, honorary curator in entomology of Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology and Pulitzer-prizewinning co-author of The Ants (Springer, 1990). Wilson is giving his portion of the prize to the E. O. Wilson Foundation, which will support biodiversity research.