news20091225nn3

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 24 December 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.1162
News
Whatever happened to ...?
Nature looks back on a selection of last year's news stories to find out what happened next.
Alison Abbott , Geoff Brumfiel , Elie Dolgin , Eric Hand , Katharine Sanderson , Richard Van Noorden & Meredith Wadman

CONTINUED FROM newsnn2

{{L'Aquila is slowly recovering from the April earthquake.}
G. Melino}

The May G8 meeting, transferred from northern Italy to L'Aquila after the earthquake, brought no long-term benefit, according to Paola Inverardi, dean of science at the university. But a web initiative offering the historic town as an open laboratory for the testing of new scientific ideas during reconstruction has led to a series of grant applications to the European Union for interdisciplinary projects, she says, such as the development of three-dimensional modelling of scene representation which can be automatically extended and maintained.

The Gran Sasso National Laboratory is also organizing a joint graduate school in particle physics with the science faculty.

Butterfly paper bust-up

In August, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published a paper online by Donald Williamson, a retired zoologist at the University of Liverpool, UK, reporting that ancient butterflies accidentally mated with worm-like animals to give rise to caterpillars. The study — which was 'communicated' by Lynn Margulis, of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, via a soon-to-be-obsolete submission route that allows academy members to manage the peer review of a colleague's manuscript — was held up from print publication for more than two months after PNAS editor-in-chief Randy Schekman raised questions about the review process (see 'Row at US journal widens').

The paper eventually appeared in print in the issue of 24 November, but not alone. It was accompanied by a short challenge from an invertebrate zoologist and a rebuttal from Williamson. The issue also included a four-page report by two evolutionary biologists, who disputed Williamson's hypothesis on the basis of published genome size data. In response to this second affront, Williamson prepared a brief response but, earlier this month, Schekman declined to publish it.

Two other PNAS studies linked to Margulis also got caught up in controversy. One, which Margulis co-authored, was eventually published in November, but another, which Margulis communicated, was questioned by a member of the academy's board after three anonymous reviewers recommended acceptance. The paper is still awaiting a final decision.

Margulis maintains that Williamson's and the other papers are scientifically sound and are only being censured because they don't adhere to Darwinian orthodoxy. "We don't ask anyone to accept Williamson's ideas — only to evaluate them on the basis of science and scholarship, not knee-jerk prejudice," says Margulis, who is threatening to bring the PNAS editorial board before the Academy's advocacy committee if the final paper is rejected.

Orbiting Carbon Observatory plan re-emerges after splashdown

On 24 February, a payload shroud stayed stuck to a Taurus booster rocket, and NASA's US$280 million Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) crashed into the sea, dashing the hopes of scientists who wanted to use the satellite to measure sources and sinks of atmospheric carbon dioxide (see 'Climate researchers in a spin after satellite loss').

But in a funding bill for 2010, the US Congress ordered $50 million to be spent on an OCO replacement — enough to re-start the programme (see 'Budget win for climate probe').

However, only about half of the money from Congress is new — the rest must be gleaned from other NASA Earth science accounts. Moreover, NASA's budget is likely to be flat or trimmed in the coming years — and demands for the agency to launch other Earth-monitoring satellites continue undiminished.

Fall-out from funding crisis

What has become of two scientists struggling to keep their labs alive in tight funding times, who were profiled by Nature in February (see 'Closing Arguments')?

Darcy Kelley, 61, a neuroscientist at Columbia University in New York, got desperately needed money at the eleventh hour. On 1 March, she received the first dollars of a new R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health. It is worth $250,000 a year for four years. She is now ramping up the project — a study of the neural basis of social communication in the frog Xenopus.

"I was never in despair," says Kelley, who is currently interviewing postdocs and is considering hiring a lab technician. "But it is very hard to function without any money. So now I have money and now I'm functioning. It makes a huge difference."

For example, says Kelley, "I was able to meet my animal-care costs, so I don't have to clean frogs any more. It's not bad to clean the frogs for a while, but at some point it keeps you from being productive."

The other scientist who was profiled, Jill Rafael-Fortney, 40, works with mouse models of muscular dystrophy at Ohio State University in Columbus. She declined an interview request.

And finally… Rampant rabbits

In November we reported that artificial and fully functional penises had been built and grafted onto male rabbits whose penises had been surgically removed. The fake penises were built by stripping donor rabbit erectile tissue of cells, leaving behind a scaffold of collagen onto which the rabbits' own muscle and skin cells were grown. The work was done by Anthony Atala at Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Those penises were successfully used to do what male rabbits do best — impregnate female rabbits (see 'Engineered penis raises reproduction hopes').

Since then Atala has presented preliminary, as yet unpublished, results at the Materials Research Society meeting in Boston, Massachusetts in December hinting that his team has successfully constructed and implanted an artificial uterus in an animal which subsequently conceived and carried a pup to full term.