[naturenews] from [nature.com]
[naturenews]
Published online 4 September 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.886
News
Nations commit to share climate information
But proposed international service will face scientific and political hurdles.
Olive Heffernan
A global framework to supply on-demand climate predictions to governments, businesses or individuals is moving closer to reality.
Delegates representing 155 nations at the World Climate Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, agreed on 3 September that a body should be established to supply these 'climate services' to users ranging from national governments to individual farmers. The service would particularly help developing nations, for example, many of which lack access to the weather and climate observations needed to plan their global-warming adaptation strategies.
Over the next four months, an independent task force set up by World Meteorological Organization, which convened the conference, will work out how to make this vision a reality. An arduous 12-month consultation process with signatory nations will then follow.
"It's about time we got serious," says climatologist Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Arizona in Tucson. "We can save wealth and properties if we get climate information into the hands of decision-makers."
Big challenges
But a global climate service will face a host of scientific and political hurdles. Negotiating data collection and sharing among member states will be a big challenge, for example. "It has been a huge issue in the past to ensure that data are as fully as accessible as possible," says Tom Karl, director of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina.
Some countries are already baulking at the suggestion that they will need to supply the service with data, citing issues such as national security or commercial interests that would prevent disclosure. Martin Visbeck of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of Kiel in Germany, who chaired the conference's programme committee, explains that one option would be to allow "data of convenience tailored for specific purposes [to] be commercialized", while allowing "fundamental information to be freely available".
Climate scientists will also have to improve the quality of the climate projections that the service could provide. Today's global climate models predict how climate variables, such as temperature and rainfall, will change over the coming century at scales of several hundred kilometres. But scientists are hopeful that with further research they could bring that down to just tens of kilometres, covering timescales of a decade or less.
No guarantees
"In 10-15 years we may have climate forecasts like we now have weather forecasts," says Guy Brasseur, associate director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research's Earth and Sun System's Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. But others remain cautious. "People are experimenting in lots of different ways to improve seasonal to decadal predictions but there's no guarantee that it will be possible," says Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
Delegates also expressed concern that a global climate service could risk fostering unrealistic expectations in the end-users of the climate information. "We'll never be able to produce absolute predictions of what will happen," says Vicky Pope, head of climate-change advice at Britain's Met Office. "We are nervous about the uncertainties and errors associated with the models we are using — and that needs to be part of the message that gets out with climate services," adds climatologist Gerald Meehl, also of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
In the meantime, individual nations are charging ahead with their own climate-services centres. In July, Germany opened a centre in Hamburg, and the United States is also discussing plans for a national climate service (see 'US considers a national climate service').
[naturenews]
Published online 4 September 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/461157a
News
Ethics scrutiny needed for Chinese–European projects
Panel calls for joint advisory body to monitor research.
Daniel Cressey
Biomedical research collaborations between Europe and China need greater ethical oversight to combat unregulated stem-cell therapies and prevent the exploitation of clinical-trial participants. That's the message from a group of bioethics experts who are part of the Chinese–European BIONET project, a partnership set up to examine scientific collaborations between the regions. Over the past three years, it has run a series of workshops in China to produce a set of best-practice guidelines for scientists working in fields such as reproductive and regenerative medicine, stem-cell research and human-tissue biobanking.
The group's draft recommendations, presented at the final BIONET meeting in London on 2–4 September, include a call for a joint advisory body made up of experts from participating countries, to offer advice and monitor research practices. The body could be financed by funding agencies, research institutions and state authorities, BIONET suggests.
"We have no police force," says BIONET member Ole Döring, an ethicist at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies in Hamburg. "We are proposing that if you install a body that would supervise and provide guidance, just the fact it exists will help create transparency."
{“China is not the ‘Wild East’, it is not an ethics-free zone.”}
The BIONET expert group warns that legal, political, social and cultural differences between European nations and China can lead to "multiple standards and even to gaps in between governance regimes". BIONET coordinator Nikolas Rose, a sociologist at the BIOS centre at the London School of Economics, says that there is a pressing need to address such issues because "the number of Chinese scientists who are collaborating with European scientists is growing at a massive rate". A 2006 study by the consultancy Evidence, based in Leeds, UK, shows that the number of publications co-authored by researchers in China and the European Union rose from 1,320 to 4,568 between 1996 and 2005.
But Rose insists that the BIONET recommendations are not an attempt to force China to adopt Western research standards. "China is not the 'Wild East', it is not an ethics-free zone," he says.
The recommendations come less than a month after the China–UK Research Ethics (CURE) committee of the UK Medical Research Council (MRC) produced its own report on the subject, concluding that there is "comparatively little" inspection or review of compliance with research regulations in China. Qi Guoming, vice-chairman of the Chinese Medical Association and chairman of the medical ethics committee at the Chinese Ministry of Health, told the conference that the ministry was trying to come up with "more concrete regulations" for medical research, and that BIONET's recommendations could guide that process.
In May, for example, China toughened up its regulation of stem-cell therapies (see Nature 459, 146–147; 2009). But there are still more than 100 institutions in China that continue to charge patients thousands of dollars for unproven stem-cell treatments, says Qiu Renzong, a bioethicist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and co-chairman of the BIONET expert group.
BIONET's list of 30 recommendations includes establishing protocols to ensure that clinical trials of unproven therapies, such as stem-cell treatments, are not presented to patients as a cure. Research subjects should not be coerced into taking part in clinical trials, and all trial data should be published. BIONET also proposes that international ethical standards should be reflected by national regulation where possible, and that biobanks should ensure that any donors are fully informed about how their tissue will be used. The group adds that patients involved in clinical trials must have access to any beneficial therapies after the trials finish.
"Many of these recommendations reflect standards we would set for funding international collaboration," says Catherine Elliott, the MRC's head of clinical research support and ethics who coordinated the CURE report. "Some, however, would require much wider action and implementation than a single funder can provide." The new recommendations, she says, will trigger that wider discussion.
[naturenews]
Published online 4 September 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.886
News
Nations commit to share climate information
But proposed international service will face scientific and political hurdles.
Olive Heffernan
A global framework to supply on-demand climate predictions to governments, businesses or individuals is moving closer to reality.
Delegates representing 155 nations at the World Climate Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, agreed on 3 September that a body should be established to supply these 'climate services' to users ranging from national governments to individual farmers. The service would particularly help developing nations, for example, many of which lack access to the weather and climate observations needed to plan their global-warming adaptation strategies.
Over the next four months, an independent task force set up by World Meteorological Organization, which convened the conference, will work out how to make this vision a reality. An arduous 12-month consultation process with signatory nations will then follow.
"It's about time we got serious," says climatologist Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Arizona in Tucson. "We can save wealth and properties if we get climate information into the hands of decision-makers."
Big challenges
But a global climate service will face a host of scientific and political hurdles. Negotiating data collection and sharing among member states will be a big challenge, for example. "It has been a huge issue in the past to ensure that data are as fully as accessible as possible," says Tom Karl, director of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina.
Some countries are already baulking at the suggestion that they will need to supply the service with data, citing issues such as national security or commercial interests that would prevent disclosure. Martin Visbeck of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of Kiel in Germany, who chaired the conference's programme committee, explains that one option would be to allow "data of convenience tailored for specific purposes [to] be commercialized", while allowing "fundamental information to be freely available".
Climate scientists will also have to improve the quality of the climate projections that the service could provide. Today's global climate models predict how climate variables, such as temperature and rainfall, will change over the coming century at scales of several hundred kilometres. But scientists are hopeful that with further research they could bring that down to just tens of kilometres, covering timescales of a decade or less.
No guarantees
"In 10-15 years we may have climate forecasts like we now have weather forecasts," says Guy Brasseur, associate director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research's Earth and Sun System's Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. But others remain cautious. "People are experimenting in lots of different ways to improve seasonal to decadal predictions but there's no guarantee that it will be possible," says Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
Delegates also expressed concern that a global climate service could risk fostering unrealistic expectations in the end-users of the climate information. "We'll never be able to produce absolute predictions of what will happen," says Vicky Pope, head of climate-change advice at Britain's Met Office. "We are nervous about the uncertainties and errors associated with the models we are using — and that needs to be part of the message that gets out with climate services," adds climatologist Gerald Meehl, also of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
In the meantime, individual nations are charging ahead with their own climate-services centres. In July, Germany opened a centre in Hamburg, and the United States is also discussing plans for a national climate service (see 'US considers a national climate service').
[naturenews]
Published online 4 September 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/461157a
News
Ethics scrutiny needed for Chinese–European projects
Panel calls for joint advisory body to monitor research.
Daniel Cressey
Biomedical research collaborations between Europe and China need greater ethical oversight to combat unregulated stem-cell therapies and prevent the exploitation of clinical-trial participants. That's the message from a group of bioethics experts who are part of the Chinese–European BIONET project, a partnership set up to examine scientific collaborations between the regions. Over the past three years, it has run a series of workshops in China to produce a set of best-practice guidelines for scientists working in fields such as reproductive and regenerative medicine, stem-cell research and human-tissue biobanking.
The group's draft recommendations, presented at the final BIONET meeting in London on 2–4 September, include a call for a joint advisory body made up of experts from participating countries, to offer advice and monitor research practices. The body could be financed by funding agencies, research institutions and state authorities, BIONET suggests.
"We have no police force," says BIONET member Ole Döring, an ethicist at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies in Hamburg. "We are proposing that if you install a body that would supervise and provide guidance, just the fact it exists will help create transparency."
{“China is not the ‘Wild East’, it is not an ethics-free zone.”}
The BIONET expert group warns that legal, political, social and cultural differences between European nations and China can lead to "multiple standards and even to gaps in between governance regimes". BIONET coordinator Nikolas Rose, a sociologist at the BIOS centre at the London School of Economics, says that there is a pressing need to address such issues because "the number of Chinese scientists who are collaborating with European scientists is growing at a massive rate". A 2006 study by the consultancy Evidence, based in Leeds, UK, shows that the number of publications co-authored by researchers in China and the European Union rose from 1,320 to 4,568 between 1996 and 2005.
But Rose insists that the BIONET recommendations are not an attempt to force China to adopt Western research standards. "China is not the 'Wild East', it is not an ethics-free zone," he says.
The recommendations come less than a month after the China–UK Research Ethics (CURE) committee of the UK Medical Research Council (MRC) produced its own report on the subject, concluding that there is "comparatively little" inspection or review of compliance with research regulations in China. Qi Guoming, vice-chairman of the Chinese Medical Association and chairman of the medical ethics committee at the Chinese Ministry of Health, told the conference that the ministry was trying to come up with "more concrete regulations" for medical research, and that BIONET's recommendations could guide that process.
In May, for example, China toughened up its regulation of stem-cell therapies (see Nature 459, 146–147; 2009). But there are still more than 100 institutions in China that continue to charge patients thousands of dollars for unproven stem-cell treatments, says Qiu Renzong, a bioethicist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and co-chairman of the BIONET expert group.
BIONET's list of 30 recommendations includes establishing protocols to ensure that clinical trials of unproven therapies, such as stem-cell treatments, are not presented to patients as a cure. Research subjects should not be coerced into taking part in clinical trials, and all trial data should be published. BIONET also proposes that international ethical standards should be reflected by national regulation where possible, and that biobanks should ensure that any donors are fully informed about how their tissue will be used. The group adds that patients involved in clinical trials must have access to any beneficial therapies after the trials finish.
"Many of these recommendations reflect standards we would set for funding international collaboration," says Catherine Elliott, the MRC's head of clinical research support and ethics who coordinated the CURE report. "Some, however, would require much wider action and implementation than a single funder can provide." The new recommendations, she says, will trigger that wider discussion.
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