News in perspective

Upfront–

FRUSTRATED by their

government’s position on the

environment, climate change and

stem cell research, a group of US

scientists have decided to take

matters into their own hands and

actively promote the election of a

president in 2008 who is more

receptive to science.

Scientists and Engineers

for America plunged into politics

last week with the aim of

campaigning for particular

candidates, starting with the

2006 mid-term elections.

SEA says that “scientists and

engineers have a right, indeed an

obligation, to enter the political

debate when the nation’s leaders

systematically ignore scientific

evidence and analysis.”

SEA’s main targets will be the

Bush administration and the

Republican leadership, says

executive director Mike Brown.

“[They] are the source of a lot of

the problems we’ve identified.”

So far, the pitch has struck a

responsive chord. Within days of

the group being announced on

27 September, nearly 2500 people

had signed up as members. SEA’s

advisory board includes two of

Bill Clinton’s former science

advisers – John Gibbons and Neal

Lane – and eight Nobel laureates.

QUICK off the mark or what? It’s

less than 10 years since the latest

winners of the medicine Nobel

discovered how to “silence” genes

with RNA. Now they are walking

away with gold medals and a

share of $1.37 million.

On Monday, Andrew Fire from

Stanford University in California

and Craig Mello from the

University of Massachusetts in

Worcester won their laurels for

working out how to use double-

stranded RNA molecules to

control the flow of genetic

information. RNA interference

(RNAi), as the technique is known,

has revolutionised molecular

biology.

Crucially, the discovery makes

it possible to work out the

function of a gene by watching

what happens when you prevent

it being expressed. In medicine,

RNAi should allow disease-

causing genes to be silenced.

“They were the first to really

describe the fact that this was a

double-stranded RNA mediated

phenomenon,” says John Rossi of

Beckman Research Institute of the

City of Hope, Duarte, California.

Work on plants in the early 1990s

had hinted at a complex

interaction between RNA and

gene expression, but no one knew

what the mechanism was. “The

plant work was very poorly

understood, so I am really happy

they got the award, it is good for

the entire field.”

“Science is a group effort,” says

Fire. “Any prize recognition

should go to the many scientists

who have made individual

contributions, and to the spirit of

scientific community.”

IT SEEMS obvious, but selling

fewer guns stems the supply of

weapons to criminals.

Seven years ago Badger

Outdoors, a gun shop in West

Milwaukee, Wisconsin, stopped

selling $70 handguns, known as

“Saturday night specials”, after a

government study revealed it was

the nation’s leading supplier of

guns that were later recovered

from criminals. Now, follow-up

research shows that the move

singlehandedly reduced the

The sale of a huge cache of ivory is due to

be given the go-ahead this week, in only

the second legal sale since CITES banned

the trade in 1989.

At the time of going to press, the

Convention on International Trade in

Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and

Flora was expected to approve the

shipment of 60 tonnes of ivory from

Botswana, Namibia and South Africa for

sale in Geneva on Wednesday. CITES is

confident it will be able to gauge

whether the sale stimulates poaching, as

its Monitoring of Illegal Killing of

Elephants (MIKE) programme – designed

to analyse poaching levels in Africa and

Asia – is now up and running.

Japan expects to be granted the right

to buy the cache at the same meeting

because it has set up stringent national

regulations designed to quash any illegal

trade in ivory. It is thought China’s

request will be turned down because it

has yet to stamp out its illegal trade.

Much of the ivory came from

elephants that died of natural causes or

in culls, or that was confiscated from

poachers. “The money they get back will

have to be put into conservation,” says

Peter Stephenson, who heads WWF

International’s Geneva-based Africa

Programme. Also, because the sale is a

one-off rather than a reopening of

trade, Stephenson does not believe it

will boost the incidence of poaching.

Any countries wishing to sell more

ivory will have to put in a fresh

application, and the sale will need to be

done under the aegis of MIKE to show it

did not encourage poaching.

TUSK SALE A BOON FOR ELEPHANTS

MAR

TYN

COLB

ECK/

OSF

LES S

TONE

/ZUM

A/EY

EVIN

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“They discovered a fundamental mechanism for controlling gene activity”

6 | NewScientist | 7 October 2006 www.newscientist.com

Nobel knockout Vote for science

Straight shooters

–Not the criminal’s choice–

–Poachers beware–

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60 SECONDS

US wins biotech dispute

After eight years of wrangling,

a trade dispute between the US and

Europe over genetically modified

crops has reached a conclusion. In a

ruling issued on 29 September, the

World Trade Organization broadly

backed claims by the US, Canada and

Argentina that in 1998 Europe illegally

introduced a moratorium on approvals

of GM crops.

Martian Spirit intact

The Mars rover Spirit has survived

the planet’s winter. NASA announced

on 29 September that the rover’s solar

power rose to around 296 watt-hours

this week, up from a winter low of

275 watt-hours on 18 August. NASA has

uploaded new software to Spirit and

says the rover is operating well.

Record ozone hole

The ozone hole over the South Pole

reached record proportions on

2 October. The European Space Agency’s

Envisat satellite found that the hole

was big enough to hold 40 million

tonnes of ozone, exceeding the

previous record of 39 million tonnes

set in 2000. The hole is typically biggest

in September and persists until

November or December.

No creationism please

Christians and atheists joined forces

last week to urge the British

government to prevent creationism

infiltrating school science classes. The

UK Christian think tank Ekklesia and

the British Humanist Association

wrote a joint letter to the Department

for Education and Skills after an

anti-evolution group distributed

materials to UK schools.

Egg payments nixed

Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor

of California, signed in a law on

26 September forbidding researchers

from paying women to donate eggs for

embryonic stem cell research. The law

also makes it compulsory to warn

donors of potential risks and to acquire

written and oral consent beforehand.

obese people as in drug addicts

craving their next fix (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, DOI:

10.1073/pnas.0601977103). “They can’t

suppress their craving,” says Wang.

Perhaps, therefore, it is not

surprising that yet another appetite-

suppressing drug has failed to deliver.

MK-0557 is designed to block a hunger

signal that the stomach delivers to

neuropeptide receptors in the brain.

Although people did lose weight while

taking the drug, it wasn’t enough to

make a meaningful difference Cell Metabolism (vol 4, p 275).

GEORGE SMOOT will be relieved.

From now on he’ll be known as a

Nobel laureate, rather than the

man responsible for saying “if you

are a religious person it’s like

seeing the face of God”, when

describing ripples in the radiation

left over from the big bang.

On Tuesday, Smoot, of the

University of California, Berkeley,

and John Mather of NASA’s

Goddard Space Flight Center in

Greenbelt, Maryland, were

awarded the physics Nobel for

their work on the cosmic

microwave background (CMB),

the afterglow of the big bang. The

Nobel prize committee credited

Mather with being “the true

driving force” behind COBE,

NASA’s Cosmic Background

Explorer satellite. Mather was also

in charge of the instrument that

confirmed the elegant fit between

the theoretical curve for “black

body” radiation at a temperature

of 2.7 kelvin, and the CMB – thus

proving that the universe is a

near-perfect black body.

Smoot was responsible for the

other significant experiment on

COBE, which mapped the tiny

temperature variations in the

CMB in different directions. These

are a result of fluctuations in the

density of the early universe,

which were amplified by gravity

to give rise to stars and galaxies.

IT SOUNDED too good to be true –

and it was. When the Chinese

news agency Xinhua announced

on 29 September that researchers

had initiated thermonuclear

fusion in a brand-new reactor,

news organisations worldwide ran

with the story. “During the

experiment, deuterium and

tritium atoms were forced

together at a temperature of 100

million Celsius,” Xinhua reported.

There was just one problem:

nothing of the kind took place.

“The reports were totally wrong,”

Jiangang Li, director of the Institute

of Plasma Physics in Hefei, Anhui

province, told New Scientist. The

Chinese researchers had, for the

first time, managed to inject a

plasma of ionised hydrogen into

the Experimental Advanced

Superconducting Tokamak (EAST),

a doughnut-shaped machine

designed to confine super-hot

plasmas magnetically, and the

plasma sustained currents of

250,000 amps for up to 3 seconds.

But no attempt was made to

introduce deuterium or tritium

into the plasma, so no fusion can

have occurred.

Not everyone swallowed the

stories. “I didn’t believe the

online reports,” says Chris

Carpenter at the Joint European

Torus (JET) fusion research centre

in the UK. “Fusion is always

something that causes a lot of

media hype because people really

want it to happen.”

No wonder appetite-suppressants don’t

work. It turns out that obese people are

as addicted to food as junkies are to

their drugs.

Gene-Jack Wang at the Brookhaven

National Laboratory in Upton, New York,

and his colleagues scanned the brains

of seven obese people who had had

electrodes implanted in their stomachs

to trigger the nerves involved in

digestion and fool them into thinking

they were full.

The scans revealed that the same

areas of a brain region called the

hippocampus were activated in the

supply of new guns to criminals

in the city by 44 per cent.

While the shop was selling the

handguns, it took 90 days on

average before police confiscated

them from criminals. Now that the

store’s cheapest gun costs $350,

the average period is five and a half

years, says Milton “Mick” Beatovic,

the store’s co-owner.

“Almost exactly to the date of

the change in sales practices, we

saw virtually no more of these

junk guns being recovered from

criminals,” says Daniel Webster of

Johns Hopkins University in

Baltimore, Maryland, who led the

new research, published in the

Journal of Urban Health (DOI:

10.1007/s11524-006-9073-2).

“Fusion always causes a lot of media hype because people really want it to happen”

GETT

Y

–Feeding a habit–

www.newscientist.com 7 October 2006 | NewScientist | 7

In the beginning

Fusion frenzy

AND FOR MY NEXT FIX…

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