Misconduct office cuts backlog of alleged cases under review

washington

The US government office charged with investigating and ruling on alleged misconduct by government-funded scientists has cut its case backlog to a record low, says a report released last week. The Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Research Integrity (ORI) said that at the end of 1996, it had 48 misconduct cases formally under review and was studying allegations in 13 more.

“This is a tremendous improvement,” ORI's annual report for 1996 says. It says that when the office began its work in 1992, it had a backlog of 70 cases and more than 600 unresolved allegations. In 1996, the office received 196 new allegations of misconduct, of which 62 were assessed in depth to decide whether an investigation should be launched. Of these, 80 per cent were resolved within the calendar year, with an average processing time of 29 days.

France plans reforms for grandes écoles

paris

Claude Allègre, the French minister of national education, research and technology, is planning to reform the renowned grandes écoles to improve links with universities in research, teaching and student mobility.

Allègre has set up a commission to propose reforms, chaired by Jacques Attali, a former adviser to the late President François Mitterrand, and a product himself of the grandes écoles . The commission includes university and industry leaders, and leading researchers such as the geneticist Axel Kahn, and Georges Charpak, the 1992 Nobel prizewinner in physics.

Although the cream of students admitted to the grandes écoles generally enjoy much better facilities than their university counterparts, the universities have a stronger research base. Allègre has criticized the lack of a technology base in the grandes écoles as being partly responsible for what he claims is a lack of innovation among the élite who go on to run France's large enterprises.

FDA law aims to speed up drug approval

washington

After three years of contentious efforts to change the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), congressional supporters saw their labours succeed last week when President Bill Clinton signed into law the FDA Modernization Act of 1997, the most significant change in FDA procedures in more than 30 years.

The law, which aims to speed the approval of new drugs and medical devices, may also make access to experimental therapies easier for sick patients while FDA approvals are pending. To speed approval times, companies will be allowed to hire third parties to review mainly low-risk medical devices. Clinton said that the law means that the FDA “wins the gold medal for leading the way into the future”. But critics say it will expose patients to risky drugs and devices that are given speedy approval for the financial gain of their makers.

‘NIH should stipulate mentoring for women’

washington

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) should require principal investigators (PIs) to foster the development of female scientists as a condition of receiving funding, a conference on NIH research on women's health recommended last week. “Mentoring should be a mandatory component of every funded PI award for an R01 grant,” the draft recommendations from the conference state. “NIH would provide a stipend for the mentoring.”

The three-day conference in Bethesda, Maryland, was sponsored by the NIH Office of Research on Women's Health. The mentoring recommendation was compiled by a working group on career issues. At present NIH does not require investigators on standard R01 grants to offer career support to female co-investigators.

Imperial College plans departmental merger

london

Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine in London is merging its departments of geology and Earth resources engineering and its Centre for Environmental Technology into a single teaching and research unit, to be known as the T. H. Huxley School of Environment, Earth Science and Engineering.

According to Sir Ronald Oxburgh, rector of Imperial, the school “will develop new areas of activity that were previously inhibited by the interdepartmental boundaries”. The school will come into existence on 1 January, and Oxburgh intends to nominate John Beddington, currently head of the Centre for Environmental Technology, as its first director.

Russian minister rejects call to delay reforms

moscow

Russia's science minister Vladimir Bulgak has rejected a demand from trade unions to postpone for a year or so his plans for the reform of Russian science, which are likely to lead to wide job losses.

The unions had asked that the reforms, which are due to be presented to the cabinet early next month, should be held back for further discussion. But Bulgak, who is a vice-prime minister, confirmed that the government intends to press ahead. Speaking at the House of Government in Moscow last week, he said a detailed reform programme would be drawn up at the beginning of next year, and the results made public in March.

Bulgak said that the aim of the reforms would be to adapt the country's scientific efforts to the current state of its economy. “Science is an evergreen tree, but it has some branches which are already dead and should be cut off,” he said. Bulgak added that certain organizations were likely to lose the right to use the word “scientific” in their titles.

Biotech and genetics consultation planned

london

John Battle, Britain's minister for science, energy and industry, has confirmed plans to stage a nation-wide public consultation on the impact of recent advances in biotechnology and human genetics (see Nature 389, 222; 1997 ). “These developments offer hope,” he said on Monday (24 November). “But they also raise difficult ethical questions, and there is a real fear that technological advances are outstripping our capacity to handle them.”

Battle has promised that the government will host a number of “public events” next summer. No decisions have yet been taken on what form these will take, although possibilities are said to include ‘consensus conferences’ and ‘deliberative polling’ intended to measure shifts in attitudes among those provided with an opportunity to gather and discuss information on particular developments.

Synchrotron lab formally opened in Brazil

são paulo

Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso has officially inaugurated a long-anticipated federal laboratory, the National Synchrotron Light Laboratory. Initially planned more than a decade ago, the laboratory has been completed at a cost of US$70 million.

The laboratory, whose first beamlines opened last summer, is described as “the largest civilian scientific project ever developed in Brazil”. It was designed by Brazilian researchers, and houses a 1.37 GeV electron storage ring that acts as a radiation source for applications in materials research.

Correction

The photograph accompanying last week's story on Australian universities and described as being of Roderick West, the chair of a recent review of higher education, was in fact David Kemp, the new minister for employment, education and training. We apologize for the confusion.