South African leader relents in storm over HIV drugs for women

Cape Town

South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki, seems to have backed down from his controversial stand against the use of drugs to combat HIV.

Mbeki had previously allowed the drug nevirapine to be made available to only a small number of pregnant women with the virus. Nevirapine reduces the risk of mother-to-child transmission of HIV, but Mbeki had argued that its side-effects outweigh its benefits — a claim that is denied by experts. Pressure has mounted on the government over the past 12 months. Public-health groups launched legal challenges to the government last August, and Mbeki's predecessor, Nelson Mandela, has publicly criticized the policy.

Health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang announced last week that nevirapine will be made available to pregnant women in all state hospitals by the end of the year. The therapy will also be provided to rape victims with immediate effect.

University misconduct probe backs under-fire researcher

Sydney

The University of New South Wales has found no evidence to support allegations that one of its researchers committed scientific fraud and mismanaged funds.

The university found itself in the spotlight earlier this month when one of its researchers — immunologist Bruce Hall, head of the Division of Medicine at Liverpool Hospital in Sydney — was accused of misappropriating research funds, fabricating data, bullying colleagues and wrongfully including or deleting the names of authors on papers. The allegations, made by three members of Hall's lab, had been under investigation by the university since last year, but came to national attention after the complainants' case was broadcast on an Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio programme.

The university's report, released on 18 April, found no evidence of fraud or mismanagement of funds, but did note errors in scientific reporting and attribution of authorship, as well as inadequacies in communication and workplace behaviour. The report also identified several unresolved issues relating to scientific misconduct and fraud which will now be examined by an independent external enquiry.

Celera leaves genomic jewel to sister outfit

Washington

Celera Genomics, the company behind the privately funded human genome sequence, this week further distanced itself from its original mission of being a commercial provider of genetic information. Applera, Celera's parent company, is shifting the sales and marketing of the genomics database to another of its companies — Applied Biosystems of Foster City, California.

Celera Genomics is now focusing on drug discovery — one of the reasons for the recent departure of its president, Craig Venter. Kathy Ordoñez, currently president of Celera Diagnostics, will take over from him. Ordoñez joined Celera in 2000 after several years in the pharmaceutical industry.

Celera Genomics' database has recently become profitable, but industry experts have speculated about the long-term viability of a commercial genomics database, as public databases provide similar information. DoubleTwist, a Californian company that provided tools to view annotated version of the genome, went out of business last month (see Nature 416, 357; 2002).

Protein predictor bags role as political point of contact

Sydney

Thomas Barlow, a molecular biologist, has been appointed as science adviser to the Australian science minister, Brendan Nelson.

Barlow studied protein-structure prediction and small-molecule drug design at the University of Oxford before moving to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he developed microarray data visualization tools. He will now be the federal government's point of contact for science bodies and agencies across the country, and, Nelson says, will “ensure that the voice of science is heard loud and clearly in my office”.

Barlow's top priorities will be the review of the higher-education sector and methods for prioritizing research.

Japan's scientists fear revolution in schools

Tokyo

Moves by Japanese education officials to ease the pressure on the country's children have forced evolution off the national school curriculum.

The subject will no longer be included in the middle-school curriculum for 12–15-year-olds, and will be optional for 15–18-year-olds in high schools. Maths and other sciences are also being scaled back, as the total number of hours spent in classes is cut. Officials say that reducing the workload will increase the creativity of students, and will stimulate interest in increasingly unpopular science subjects.

But scientists fear that the ministry is underestimating evolution's significance. “Without evolutionary theory, the effort to sequence the genome will only give you a catalogue,” wrote Mariko Hasegawa, an evolutionary biologist at Waseda University in Tokyo, in an editorial in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper last week. The education ministry has denied rumours — which have been seized upon by private schools — that the new, relaxed mathematics curriculum will approximate π as 3 rather 3.14.

Smallpox precautions spark 'cash for contract' storm

London

British politicians are probing the government's decision to award a £32-million (US$46.3-million) contract to supply smallpox vaccine to a company whose chief recently donated £50,000 to the ruling Labour party.

The government denies that the donation influenced its decision and says the company, Powderject Pharmaceuticals of Oxford, is the only one that can supply the Lister strain of vaccine quickly enough. A spokesperson for the Department of Health says that it requested this strain of vaccine because it was the one used in Britain before the disease was eradicated in 1980.

Politicians on both sides have requested more information, and the opposition Conservative party has demanded an inquiry. One of the crucial questions, according to Labour's Ian Gibson, chairman of the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee, is why the government is only considering the Lister strain. The US government recently asked another British pharmaceutical company, Cambridge-based Acambis, to supply 92 million doses of a vaccine known as the New York City Board of Health strain. Virologists say that there is little difference between the two vaccines.