Trick question. They are related because I am posting YouTube videos on those topics here. Just a little YouTube humor to help everyone get through the week. Warning – the evolution one is truly over the top and might offend a few so click on it with caution.
EnlightenUp The Film
Dawkins Rap
Well, I signed up for emails from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, hoping to apply for some of their trillions of dollars to do a little bit of research.
And I got an email today I would like to share, since, well, they said I should share it. And here it is ..
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is now accepting grant proposals for Grand Challenges Explorations, a US$100 million initiative to help scientists pursue innovative ideas for solving major global health problems.
Grant proposals are being accepted online at www.gcgh.org/explorations until May 30, 2008, on the following topics:
— Creating new ways to protect against infectious diseases
— Creating drugs or delivery systems that limit the emergence of resistance
— Creating new ways to prevent or cure HIV infection
— Exploring the basis for latency in TBInitial grants will be $100,000 each, and projects showing success will have the opportunity to receive additional funding of $1 million or more. Full descriptions of the topics and application instructions are available at www.gcgh.org/explorations.
We are looking forward to receiving innovative ideas from scientists around the world and from all scientific disciplines. If you don’t submit a proposal yourself, we hope you will forward this message to someone else who might be interested.
Thank you for your commitment to solving the world’s greatest health challenges.
###
Bill & Melinda Gates FoundationGuided by the belief that every life has equal value, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation works to reduce inequities and improve lives around the world. In developing countries, it focuses on improving health, reducing extreme poverty, and increasing access to technology in public libraries. In the United States, the foundation seeks to ensure that all people have access to a great education and to technology in public libraries. In its local region, it focuses on improving the lives of low-income families. Based in Seattle, the foundation is led by CEO Patty Stonesifer and Co-chairs William H. Gates Sr., Bill Gates, and Melinda French Gates.
Just got an email announcing a new issue of Davis Life Magazine which I meant to post about here previously. It is a nice little web magazine about, well, life in Davis.
UPDATE – FAKE SCIENCE NEWS HERE.
Recently, there has been a lot of talk around the web about brain doping … that is, using some sort of drug to enhance intelligence or intellectual performance in some way. For example see
A key question is – is brain doping bad? I am not so sure. However, NIH apparently thinks otherwise. NIH has just announced the formation of the World Anti Brain Doping Authority in conjunction with the ever so annoying World Anti Doping Authority. For more information see http://wabda.org and I attach the announcement below. Apparently, they are working on making a list of banned drugs and punishment for misuse for anyone funded by NIH. I have also heard they will be doing drug testing to new grant awardees. Lovely.
What is funny is this so fits in with the new top down style at the NIH. Forget about the individual scientist and the need for independence and creativity. There are so many rules about everything now that I think I will just seek out funds from other agencies.
See also other bloggers writing about this:
Here is the announcement:
NIH Announces New Initiatives to Fight the Use of Brain Enhancing Drugs by Scientists
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) today announced three new initiatives to fight the use of brain enhancing drugs by scientists. The new initiatives are (1) the creation of the NIH Anti-Brain Doping Advisory Group (NABDAG), a new trans-NIH committee, (2) a collaboration with the World Anti-Doping Authority (WADA) and the European Commission to create the World Anti-Brain Doping Authority (WABDA) and (3) the adoption by the NIH of the World Anti-Brain Doping Code – a set of regulations on the use of brain enhancing drugs among scientists.
“These new initiatives are designed to level the playing field among scientist in terms of intellectual activities,” said NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D. “These three activities are designed to get NIH ahead of the curve in terms of performance enhancing drug use among scientists.”
NABDAG will serve to coordinate activities across different NIH agencies in terms of regulating the use of brain enhancing drugs. The trans-NIH group will be directed by internationally renowned doping authority Jonathan Davis, Ph.D., current director of research at WADA.
“The priority of NABDAG will be to seek out input from the scientific community and from within NIH,” Davis said. “The availability of tremendous expertise and the remarkable infrastructure at NIH will make our activities more robust and will allow us to tackle questions about brain doping that were not possible to address in the past. For example, new testing procedures will need to be developed and we will be able to bring the entire NIH infrastructure to this task.”
While “doping” is now accepted as a problem among athletes, it is less widely known that so-celled “brain doping” has been affecting the competitive balance in scientific research as well. It is for this reason that NIH is collaborating with the World Anti-Doping Authority (WADA), which has led the fight against doping in athletics, to create the World Anti Brain Doping Authority (WABDA). “Because brain doping is not just an American problem,” said Richard Pound, the current Director of WADA and acting Director of WABDA until a permanent head can be found, “we are working with the European Union’s research funding agency, the European Commission Research, to make sure WABDA is effective.
NABDAG will be established within the NIH Office of Intramural Research and administered by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Additional support for the center will come from the NIH Office of the Director, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the Center for Scientific Review (CSR). The research activities of NABDAG will take place on the NIH Bethesda campus. An additional focus of NABDAG will be to provide training opportunities for students and established scientists from developing countries and from minority groups in the United States.
Together with WABDA, NABDAG will work to develop the international rules for the use of performance enhancing drugs among scientists as well as testing and punishment procedures. Most importantly they will administer the World Anti Brain-Doping Code, a set of uniform anti-brain doping rules. The NIH and European Commission have formally adopted this Code for the conduct of all scientists which receive funding in any form (intramural or extramural) from these agencies. The Code includes regulations on which drugs are prohibited, what the recommended testing procedures should be, and what the punishments should be for positive tests. More information on the WABDA Code can be found at http://wabda.org/. We note that the implementation will include testing of all NIH funded scientists both at the time they receive funding as well as at random times during the course of working on an NIH funded project. Testing will also be implemented at all NIH-funded or NIH-hosted events such as conferences and workshops and at grant review panels.
NIMH, NIDA, and CSR are among the 27 institutes and centers at the NIH, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services. The NIMH mission is to reduce the burden of mental and behavioral disorders through research on mind, brain, and behavior. More information is available at the NIMH website http://www.nimh.nih.gov. The National Institute on Drug Abuse is a component of the National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIDA supports most of the world’s research on the health aspects of drug abuse and addiction. The Institute carries out a large variety of programs to ensure the rapid dissemination of research information to inform policy and improve practice. Fact sheets on the health effects of drugs of abuse and further information on NIDA research can be found on the NIDA web site at http://www.drugabuse.gov. The Center for Scientific Review organizes the peer review groups that evaluate the majority of grant applications submitted to the National Institutes of Health. CSR recruits about 18,000 outside scientific experts each year for its review groups. CSR also receives all NIH and many Public Health Service grant applications — about 80,000 a year — and assigns them to the appropriate NIH Institutes and Centers and PHS agencies. CSR’s primary goal is to see that NIH applications receive fair, independent, expert, and timely reviews that are free from inappropriate influences so NIH can fund the most promising research. For more information, visit http://www.csr.nih.gov.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) — The Nation’s Medical Research Agency — includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It is the primary federal agency for conducting and supporting basic, clinical and translational medical research, and it investigates the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit http://www.nih.gov.
Just a quick one here. I was reminded recently about an interesting publication about metagenomics education in which some people might be interested. It is by Anne Jurkowski, Ann Reid and Jay Lebov and was published in a journal called CBE Life Sciences Education. This journal, though not fully Open Access is freely available online.
I think the article is a useful callto arms for educators to get ahead of the curve and to start thinking about ways to teach metagenomics BEFORE it becomes an old field (i.e, while it is hot, and who knows how long that will last).
Well, the News is abuzz with discussion of a controversy involving lung cancer studies that were funded by tobacco associated money (e.g., see MSNBC and TIME and the NY Times). The issue is that apparently the source of the money was hidden through some sort of laundering of the money through a foundation.
As many readers know, I am a bit obsessed with open access to scientific research publications. This here is a case where the need for openness goes well beyond publications. Here there is a need for openness about funding and conflicts of interest and the roles of all participants. In this case, I am not sure what could have been done by the journals involved to vet the funding of the project more carefully. But nevertheless, science in general can be severely hurt whenever there are cases of even the appearance of conflict of interest. I do believe that open access journals help in this in that anyone, anywhere, can look at the publication as well as the descriptions of the funding sources and the authors contributions. The more eyes we have on research products, the more likely problems will be discovered and (possibly) the less likely it will be to happen again.
Way to go Amanda Plunkett – featured on the UC Davis front page and in the UC Davis Magazine.
Well, the new NIH policy is not perfect, but it is a good first step. And I must say, I got a tingle of excitement when I got this email from the UC Davis Administration:
March 20, 2008
I am writing to alert you to a new requirement for investigators who receive funding from the NIH. Under the Consolidated Appropriation Act of 2008, the NIH will require that all NIH-funded investigators submit or arrange for the submission of an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts accepted for publication to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central. PubMed Central (PMC) is the NIH’s publicly-accessible, digital archive of full-text, peer-reviewed journal articles. This new law requires manuscripts to be made publicly available via PMC no later than 12 months after the official date of publication. Please note:
1. This requirement applies to all peer-reviewed articles that arise, in whole or in part, from direct costs funded by NIH, or from work of NIH staff, that are accepted for publication on or after April 7, 2008.
2. UC Davis investigators are responsible for ensuring that any publishing or copyright agreements concerning submitted articles fully comply with this requirement. To satisfy this obligation, UC Davis investigators should enclose a copy of the one-page letter prepared by the UC Office of the President with any articles submitted to publishers for possible publication either at the time the article is submitted or with the publication agreement. The subject letter is available at: http://www.ucop.edu/raohome/cgmemos/08-05a.pdf).
3. The final, peer-reviewed manuscript submitted to PMC must include all graphics and supplemental material that are associated with the article.
4. Beginning May 25, 2008, anyone submitting an application, proposal or progress report to the NIH is also required to include the PMC reference number when citing applicable articles arising from NIH-funded research. This requirement applies to proposals submitted to the NIH for the May 25, 2008 due date, as well as subsequent due dates.
5. Certain publishers have agreed to automatically submit articles to PMC on behalf of the authors. The list of these publishers can be accessed at http://publicaccess.nih.gov/submit_process_journals.htm
Even if a publisher is on this list, UC Davis investigators should verify that their published articles will be submitted to PMC in compliance with the law. If the publisher is not on the list, UC Davis investigators are responsible for submitting their articles to PMC and verifying receipt of the article.
6. Failure to comply with this policy may jeopardize future NIH funding.
Additional information about this law is available at http://publicaccess.nih.gov. Also, the UC Davis Library can provide further assistance to investigators. Please see http://www.lib.ucdavis.edu/dept/hsl/resources/other/nihmandate/ or contact the Library’s sciences department heads:
Everyone must read, immediately, Pharyngula now.
PZ Myers writes about how he was expelled from the movie Expelled (a pro Intelligent Design movie). And the best part – Richard Dawkins was allowed in …
Just a little post here — if you are interested in Metagenomics, or Bioenergy or Microbes, consider going to the JGI Users Meeting March 26-28. Speakers include at least one Nobel Laureate (Steve Chu) as well as Mitch Sogin, Jill Banfield, Terry Hazen, and many others.
Jonathan Eisen's Lab 