July 1, 2009

German Research Institute Accuses MIT, UMass, and Whitehead of Wrongdoing on Patent

A prestigious German research institute has sued three American academic institutions — the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and the University of Massachusetts at Worcester — in a case that accuses the three of improperly claiming rights to inventions that belong to the German institute.

While it is not uncommon for academic organizations to get embroiled in disputes over invention rights when faculty members from several institutions have collaborated on research, as these organizations’ researchers did in the 1990s, such disagreements usually are resolved without a court fight.

The case revolves around two groups of inventions related to RNA interference. Patent rights to one group of inventions belong solely to the German institution, the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science. Rights to the other group of inventions are shared among the four institutions.

According to the lawsuit, filed last week in state court in Boston, Whitehead and the other defendants have “misappropriated inventions owned by Max Planck and misrepresented those inventions as their own.” Max Planck says that by seeking to have those invention rights considered as part of the patent jointly owned by all four academic institutions, the three defendants are undermining the chances that Max Planck will be awarded a patent for the inventions that it owns solely.

By prior arrangement, the parties agreed that Whitehead would be responsible for obtaining patents on the jointly owned inventions, the lawsuit says.

The technology-transfer arm of Max Planck and a company based in Cambridge, Mass., that has licensed rights to both sets of inventions, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals Inc., have joined the German institute in the suit.

The lawsuit asks the court to order Whitehead to stop its pursuit of patents on the jointly owned inventions. It also seeks an undetermined amount in damages. —Goldie Blumenstyk

Layoffs and Restructuring Hit Harvard U. Press

Harvard University Press, one of the most prestigious scholarly publishers, has done away with seven positions as the university as a whole faces hard times. The lost jobs include three in marketing, one in sales, one in design, and two in editorial, according to William P. Sisler, the press’s director. The editorial layoffs did not include acquisitions editors, Mr. Sisler said, “and did not affect the composition of the list.”

The layoffs are part of a broader, institution-wide purge of jobs at Harvard, which eliminated 275 positions in late June, with more downsizing to come. The poor economy played a part in the layoffs at the press, but Mr. Sisler said that his shop had been rethinking its strategies and structure before the downturn.

“Even before the economy really began to tank last fall, we were already engaged in planning for the changed and changing publishing environment,” Mr. Sisler wrote in an e-mail message to The Chronicle. “Then the bad stuff hit, the university saw its endowment drop, and our small segment of that obviously dropped as well, sales decreased, etc., etc., and the change process was expedited.”

In a sign of how book marketing has changed, the restructuring hit the press’s publicity operation hardest. “We have reconstituted the group formerly known as publicists into ‘media specialists’ to reflect the fact that much of the activity of getting books exposed has moved on to the Web and into social media,” Mr. Sisler said. —Jennifer Howard

Cancer Researcher at U. of Chicago Wins $500,000 Genetics Prize

Janet Davison Rowley has won this year’s Gruber Prize in genetics for research that has “revolutionized how cancer is understood and treated,” the Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation, which presents the prize, announced today.

Dr. Rowley, whose research is believed to have established cancer as a genetic disease, is the Blum-Riese distinguished service professor at the University of Chicago. She will receive the $500,000 prize in October at the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics, in Honolulu.

Viewed as a leader in cancer cytogenetics and molecular oncology, Dr. Rowley was among the few scientists in the 1960s who believed chromosomal aberrations caused tumors. Her discoveries since then have also uncovered mutated genes in leukemia and lymphoma cells, which help transform normal cells into cancerous ones. Thanks to her research, new techniques have been developed to identify DNA damage within cells. The methods offer a more precise diagnosis as well as a more effective treatment.

The Gruber International Prize Program awards prizes annually in cosmology, genetics, neuroscience, justice, and women’s rights. —Erica R. Hendry

June 27, 2009

2 U. of Arizona Graduate Students Are Freed on Bail in Brazil

Two graduate students from the University of Arizona were among a group of researchers arrested in Brazil on suspicion of “unauthorized mineral prospecting.” The group was freed on bail late Thursday, the Associated Press reported.

The geosciences students were identified as Mark Andrew Tress and Michael Matthew McGlue. Along with a third American, Kelly Michael Wendt, they were collecting sediment cores from the bottoms of lakes and wetlands in southwestern Brazil as part of climate research. The group was working in conjunction with the University of the State of São Paulo. Two Brazilian scientists were also arrested.

The Americans posted bail of $2,550 and surrendered their passports. A Brazilian police spokesman said the men were in the country on tourist visas.

Arizona’s spokesman, Johnny Cruz, said, “The university has been in frequent contact with the students’ attorney and families and is providing support that enabled them to be released and to return home as soon as possible.” —Don Troop

June 24, 2009

Senator Grassley Demands Answers From Medical Schools on Ethics Policies

Washington — For any medical schools that haven’t finished their ethics homework, a Republican senator is handing out an extra writing assignment.

The American Medical Student Association and the Pew Prescription Project last week announced the results of their annual survey on conflict-of-interest rules, giving 45 of 149 medical schools a grade of A or B for their policies governing pharmaceutical-industry interactions with their faculty members and students.

But 23 schools contacted for the survey didn’t reply, and Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, is now going after them. Mr. Grassley wrote today to the 23 schools, saying he wants them to provide his office, by July 15, with the same information on their ethics policies that they did not provide to the American Medical Student Association.

“Disclosure of those ties would help to build confidence that there’s nothing to hide,” the senator said in a written statement.

Officials at some of the schools listed by the student association as not cooperating have already said, however, that it was apparently just a misunderstanding.

“It was like a homework assignment we never got,” Michael L. Good, interim dean of the College of Medicine at the University of Florida, told The Gainesville Sun. “But it’s not like we’ve been ignoring the subject,” Dr. Good said, noting that the medical school has a longstanding policy on potential conflicts of interest that just went through an update.

In addition to the University of Florida, the schools cited by Mr. Grassley are the Arizona College of Osteopathic Medicine, Edward Via Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine, Medical College of Georgia School of Medicine, Northeastern Ohio University College of Medicine, Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine, Tulane University School of Medicine, University of Nevada School of Medicine, Albany Medical College, Chicago College of Osteopathic Medicine, Dartmouth Medical School, Howard University College of Medicine, Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine, Louisiana State University School of Medicine-New Orleans, Meharry Medical College, Morehouse School of Medicine, New York College of Osteopathic Medicine of the New York Institute of Technology, Ponce School of Medicine, San Juan Bautista School Of Medicine, State University of New York at Buffalo School of Medicine, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey-New Jersey Medical School, and University of South Carolina School of Medicine. —Paul Basken

Northwestern U. Professor to Receive $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize

A Northwestern University professor will be awarded the Lemelson-MIT Prize for his work in the field of nanotechnology.

Chad Mirkin, a professor of materials science and engineering, chemistry, and medicine, and director of the university’s International Institute for Nanotechnology, has been credited with creating a method to better identify and test molecules that indicate early warning signs of disease.

Mr. Mirkin will receive the $500,000 award at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this week.

In April, he was invited to join President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. —Marc Beja

June 23, 2009

Lawmakers May Seek More Federal Money for Public Universities

Washington — Four years after a federal study panel gave Congress a wish list for assisting American research universities, a group of leading lawmakers has decided it may not have gone far enough.

The lawmakers, including the chairmen of the House and Senate science panels, are asking the National Academies to compile the “top 10 actions that Congress, state governments, research universities, and others could take” to maintain the quality of American research universities and ensure their role in American economic growth.

“We are concerned that they are at risk,” the four lawmakers said, citing both the steadily improving quality of foreign universities and the declining level of state support for public universities in the United States.

The lawmakers included Rep. Bart Gordon of Tennessee, chairman of the House science committee, and Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, chairwoman of the Senate subcommittee that handles science appropriations. The others were Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Republican of Tennessee and a former U.S. education secretary, and Rep. Ralph Hall of Texas, the top Republican on the House science committee.

They described their request as a bid for a follow-up to the “Gathering Storm” report of 2005, in which a National Academies committee assembled a list of the 20 most important improvements that Congress could make in federal support for research and education.

The recommendations included doubling federal spending on the physical sciences over seven years. Congress has taken steps in that direction, approving a $21.5-billion jump in federal research-and-development spending in an economic-stimulus measure enacted this year.

And President Obama last month proposed a $30.9-billion budget for the National Institutes of Health for the 2010 fiscal year, setting a baseline 4.7 percent higher than the agency’s final budget under President Bush, in 2008.

The request Monday by the lawmakers was sparked in part by a letter in February to Senator Alexander from Robert M. Berdahl, president of the Association of American Universities, who said the government needed to address a “growing imbalance between public and private research universities.”

“Such an initiative should target a limited number of institutions in each state, the flagship campuses,” Mr. Berdahl said. “To succeed, it would need to provide additional federal resources, supplementing and leveraging state support rather than supplanting it.” —Paul Basken

June 22, 2009

Several U. of Wisconsin Medical-School Professors Accepted Large Corporate Payments

Thomas A. Zdeblick, an orthopedic surgeon, apparently isn’t the only doctor at the University of Wisconsin who has been collecting a substantial outside income from medical companies.

A tally by the Journal Sentinel of Milwaukee has now found that Dr. Zdeblick had at least six colleagues at the Wisconsin medical school who have also been receiving six-figure payments from makers of pharmaceuticals and medical devices.

The newspaper reported in January that Dr. Zdeblick received more than $19-million from Medtronic, the medical device-maker, from 2003 to 2007. That led University of Wisconsin officials to declare that their policy of requiring doctors to state only whether they were collecting more than $20,000 a year from outside sources — without declaring the actual figure — wasn’t sufficient to guard against possible abuses.

Such payments aren’t illegal, though critics, including U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, a Republican of Iowa, have questioned whether large payments to doctors might improperly influence their decisions in patient research and patient treatment.

The new cases at the University of Wisconsin described by the Journal Sentinel include Paul A. Anderson, a professor of orthopedic surgery who was paid $150,000 by Medtronic for eight days of work as a consultant; Ben K. Graf, an associate professor of orthopedic surgery who collected $770,000 in royalties from the medical-device manufacturer Smith & Nephew; and Clifford B. Tribus, an associate professor of orthopedic surgery who was paid $310,000 for royalties and 15 days of work as a speaker and consultant for Stryker Spine, another device company. —Paul Basken

June 19, 2009

House Approves Budget Measure With Science Money

Washington — The U.S. House of Representatives, in passing its first budget bill for the coming fiscal year, has approved a 12-percent increase for a collection of agencies that includes NASA and other federal science programs.

The appropriations bill, worth a total of $64.4-billion for the Commerce and Justice Departments as well as science agencies, was approved yesterday in the House, after a full day of voting on amendments, by a final tally of 259 to 157, CongressDaily reported. The funds are for the 2010 fiscal year, which begins on October 1.

Republicans had offered more than 100 amendments, most of them aimed at reducing spending, The Hill reported. —Paul Basken

June 18, 2009

Science Publisher Suggests It Played Along With Hoax

Bentham Science Publishers, as it watches editors quit in protest of lax peer-review standards, is contending that it agreed to publish a specious research report by a Cornell University graduate student because it was trying to trap the perpetrator.

Mahmood Alam, Bentham’s director of publications, initially told The Chronicle he wasn’t aware of the case in which Bentham’s Open Information Science Journal accepted the computer-generated charade, submitted under a false name by Philip M. Davis, a doctoral student in communications at Cornell.

Mr. Alam subsequently told New Scientist, however, that Bentham, an open-access publisher, had recognized the hoax and tried to track its perpetrator “by pretending the article had been accepted for publication when in fact it was not.”

Meanwhile, Bambang Parmanto, an assistant professor of health-information management at the University of Pittsburgh, resigned as editor in chief of the Open Information Science Journal, saying he was no longer satisfied that Bentham was properly enforcing peer review. Mr. Parmanto told The Times of London, however, that he believes Mr. Davis also behaved unethically.

Another editor who resigned, Marc A. Williams, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Rochester, isn’t accepting the explanations. Mr. Williams quit the editorial board of a different Bentham journal, saying the company’s actions set “a poor example and a discreditable precedent.”

Mr. Alam’s assertion that Bentham had merely pretended to accept Mr. Davis’s submission “is clearly a fabrication” designed “to restore faith in a flawed system,” Mr. Williams said.

“That all being said, I firmly believe in the open-access model,” Mr. Williams told The Chronicle. “This system has hitherto proven to be workable and efficient. In my opinion it is a tried and trusted mechanism with otherwise-sound peer review and ethical integrity. It is without question the way forward for widespread and prompt dissemination of scientific data and information.” —Paul Basken