Feb
16
16
Sarah Everts
ETH Data Manipulation Report Posted On-line
Posted by Sarah Everts on February 16, 2010 in Uncategorized
Last fall, chemist Peter Chen voluntarily resigned from his post as the vice president for research at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zürich, (ETH) following a report from a scientific board of inquiry–that Chen had himself requested–which found that data from his lab published a decade ago in two peer-reviewed papers and a doctoral thesis had been falsified.
The university announced the board of inquiry’s results in September 2009 but it was prevented from releasing the full report publically by a court order from the graduate student involved. According to a post today on the ETH website: “The Court has now ruled, in an initial decision taken at the end of December 2009, that ETH Zurich may in principle publish the export report but only in such an anonymised form “that no conclusions can be drawn about the dissertation or the identity of the complainant”.”
You have to go to the university’s German site to access the report. The blacked out lines are actually multicolor and here is the legend: Blue = PhD Student, green = molecule 1, yellow = molecule 2, black = miscellaneous, red and grey = additional members of the research group.
The basic conclusion from the board of inquiry: “The only credible explanation is manipulation of the data.” They finger the graduate student and vindicate Chen.
Some parts of the 22-page document are dry, but in general it is well-written and shows a measured and comprehensive analysis by the scientific board of inquiry. It also gives insight into how such investigations proceed…
Blame It On The Brain(s) Behind The ACIEs Puns
Feb
11
11
Posted by Sarah Everts on February 11, 2010 in Chemistry is Everywhere, Ripped From the Pages, Where is C&EN?
So. My breaking point came a few weeks ago when I read one of ACIE’s genius abstract caption titles, “Just another Mannich Monday.” After laughing out loud, I proceeded to hum the cheesy tune by the Bangles, loudly, from C&EN’s rooftop Berlin office, for three days. From here until perpetuity, the lyrics “I can’t be late because I guess I just won’t get paid” will remind me of Mannich-derived, stereoselective, one-pot syntheses of “spirocycles, 1-aminoindanes, and 5,6-fused azabicycles that have a quaternary carbon center.”
Yeah yeah. I know I’m not the first to grin, groan, or comment about the puns, pop references, and general goofiness ACIE puts into its online abstracts. Many a blogger (Derek Lowe, Excimer, “Phil,” and Chiral Jones ) have also, um, “admired” ACIE’s ability to bring Shakespeare (“Double, double, no toil and trouble”), Star Trek (“Beam me up,” twice), the X-files (”The truth is out there“), and the disembodied voice from the London Underground (“Mind the gap”) into the world of chemistry. The journal has even gotten pretty risqué of late with “Metal ménage à trois” and “Balls galore!”
But Mannich Monday followed soon on the heels of the caption “The Write Stuff,” which permitted the New Kids On The Block hit–(oh yes, here’s the video)–to breach my consciousness for the first time in 20 years—a particularly traumatic reminder of the boy band phenomenon.
So much so, that I had to meet the evil mastermind behind it all.
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Chemist Rumored To Be Next Boss Of France’s CNRS
Jan
15
15
Posted by Sarah Everts on January 15, 2010 in Chemistry in the News
According to the French newspaper Le Monde, France’s prestigious National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) might soon have chemist Alain Fuchs as its new director general-president. Neither the CNRS communications office nor the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research are confirming the Fuchs appointment, stating that they will make an official announcement next Wednesday. Fuchs is also declining to speak to the media at the moment.
Fuchs is a physical chemist who leads a molecular simulation group at Chimie Paris Tech, and is also the university’s director. Chimie Paris Tech is part of a distinguished and influential group of higher learning institutions in France called “écoles nationales supérieures.” According to Le Monde, a mathematician named Antoine Petit and a cryptologist named Jacques Stern were also considered for the CNRS position.
Whoever gets the job will be responsible for 26,000 permanent CNRS staff and a budget of 3 billion Euros ($4.3 billion). That person will also be at the helm of an organization in transition: The French government is splitting the CNRS into 10 institutes by subject. For example the institute of chemistry will be separate from the institutes of physics and biological sciences.
The new CNRS director general-president will be kept busy: The relationship between President Nicholas Sarkozy’s government and French scientists (including those from CNRS) has been rocky. Some of the government’s proposed reforms to the CNRS and to universities have brought thousands of scientists out of their labs and into the streets in protest.
Fake medicine
Jan
4
4
Posted by Sarah Everts on January 4, 2010 in Chemistry in the News, Ripped From the Pages
A counterfeit drug manufacturing lab in Colombia
As I was doing interviews for an article on fake pharmaceuticals, Paul Newton told me a story that I am unlikely to forget. Newton is a doctor in Laos who is involved in several projects to track down counterfeit malaria drugs in Southeast Asia and Africa; he’s also a doctor at a Wellcome Trust-funded hospital that is associated with tropical medicine at the University of Oxford.
We were talking about the fact that nobody knows exactly how many fake drugs are consumed around the world, but it’s pretty clear that the problem is greater in developing countries where there is less funding for regulation and/or policing. (The WHO estimates that markets in industrialized countries such as the U.S. and many parts of the E.U. have no more than about 1% counterfeits. In developing nations, some 10-50% of pills are guesstimated to be bogus.)
“Counterfeiters have killed with impunity,” Newton said. He went on to tell me that people sometimes spend what little money they have to unwittingly buy fakes, and then have succumbed to otherwise curable diseases because the medicines have not worked. “A Burmese patient died a few years ago of malaria having clearly taken fake artesunate,” a malaria drug, Newton said. “When he was admitted with malaria all the signs were that he should recover rapidly but then he deteriorated and died of cerebral malaria very tragically,” Newton added. The man’s community was so upset that people in “the village where the patient came from took all the medicine he had been taking from the shop. They burned it in a bonfire in the village in a spontaneous protest,” Newton told me.
It’s stories like these that have motivated the WHO to team up with INTERPOL to form an international anticounterfeiting task force called IMPACT (International Medical Products Anti-Counterfeiting Taskforce). Drug counterfeiters pull in a–guesstimated again–$75 billion per year. According to many who follow pharmaceutical counterfeiting, hard drug traffickers are now turning to the business of making bogus medicines because the profit margin is better and the penalties are softer… than for say, cocaine or heroin. The IMPACT taskforce has just a couple of full-time staff members, which seems rather small for the challenge of coordinating the international fight against fake medicines. Yet IMPACT has brought down counterfeiting operations in Southeast Asia, Tanzania, Uganda and in Nigeria. Here’s a catch of bogus drugs, courtesy of IMPACT:
Fake meds in nabbed in Tanzania and Uganda
Here is an example of the storage conditions for fake medicines found in Kenya, also courtesy of IMPACT:
Storage of counterfeit drugs in Mombasa
And last but not least, here’s a shot of manufacturing facilities for a counterfeit ring tracked down in China. Photo courtesy of Pfizer’s David Shore:
Fake drugs, made in China
Even though it may seem like counterfeiting is on the rise, Newton pointed out to me that the business of making fake medicines is as old as remedies themselves. Around 1500 BC, an Egyptian queen called Hatshepsut got so fed up with the quality of herbal medicines she was exposed to, that she led an expedition herself to get good quality medicines in the land of Punt, near current day Somalia. More recently, in the 1600s, quinine-containing Cinchona bark imported to Europe from South America as treatment for malaria was adulterated “at such an enormous scale that the public gave up on the medicine because it seems not to work,” Newton adds.
More Falling Walls
Nov
10
10
Posted by Sarah Everts on November 10, 2009 in Chemistry is Everywhere, Uncategorized, Where is C&EN?
Before heading to last evening’s rainy celebration of the Berlin Wall’s collapse at the city’s historical Brandenburg Gate–which featured a symbolic toppling of 1000 painted, wall-like dominoes, statements by various political dignitaries (Merkel, Clinton, Brown, Gorbachev, Sarkozy, Medvedev, etc), and performances by Placido Domingo and Jon Bon Jovi–I spent the day at a conference called Falling Walls, which was organized by the Einstein Foundation.
Taking place in a renovated water pumping station in the middle of the former so-called death strip, the no-mans land that abutted the Berlin Wall, a variety of top researchers from the sciences and humanities described the “walls” which were falling or which needed to fall in their area of research. The organizers had also managed to book German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is a scientist-turned-politician from the former GDR (more below). Although no late-breaking new discoveries were announced, the conference provided a fascinating overview of research in a real potpourri of great topics: vaccines for neglected diseases like malaria and TB, three-dimensional televisions, how to make concrete less polluting, and how researchers are cracking the secrets of ancient civilizations , the origin of Homo sapiens. We also heard from Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the director general of CERN, about the Large Hadron Collider (which will hopefully start pumping out data one of these days) and from Norbert Holtkamp, who heads Iter, the fusion energy transnational research organization that originated during a 1985 conversation between Gorbachev and Reagan.
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20 Years After The Berlin Wall Fell
Nov
8
8
Posted by Sarah Everts on November 8, 2009 in Chemistry is Everywhere, Ripped From the Pages, Where is C&EN?
A remaining section of the Berlin Wall
C&EN Berlin’s office is about a block-and-a-half from where the Berlin Wall used to stand, on the former Communist, East side (known as the German Democratic Republic, or GDR). When I get out the wrong subway stop exit, I have to retrace my steps across the infamous death strip–a no-man’s land just before the wall to the West–where people were shot dead trying to escape. Just down the road, one of the few remaining stretches the Wall has been left standing. Where the Wall has been torn down, a double brick strip in the pavement demarcates its former path. Even after two years in the neighborhood, I am amazed and sobered by how easy it is for me to pop over to the West, to buy some printer toner or to pick up lunch supplies at a nearby supermarket.
In this week’s issue, I’ve got an article about what it was like for GDR chemists who worked behind the wall. I talk to researchers who describe what it was like to be surveilled by the Stasi, the East German spy service, or what life was like after their supervisor escaped to the West. One chemist I spoke to named Christoph Naumann escaped by foot from Hungary to the former Yugoslavia and then to West Germany.
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German Scandal: Paying For The PhD Title
Aug
26
26
Posted by Sarah Everts on August 26, 2009 in Education
If you’re a wannabe doctoral student, picking a good topic and supervisor is a pretty important thing, but would you pay thousands of Euros for this?
Germany’s academic community is being rocked by investigations by the city of Cologne’s public prosecutor into a now insolvent consulting firm that connected students with professors at fees of up to €20,000. Professors taking in the students would receive €4,000 for their open door policy–a double payment for supervisory services already being compensated for by their academic salaries.
Now the public prosecutor is investigating over a hundred lecturers, instructors and professors from all over Germany, and from a wide spectrum of disciplines, under suspicions that they received bribes to accept and then graduate possibly undeserving students. According to der Spiegel, it’s the latest investigation in to the consulting firm, (Institut für Wissenschaftsberatung or Institute for Academic Consultancy), whose managing director was sentenced last year to three and a half years in prison for bribing a University of Hannover law professor.
Annette Schavan, Germany’s minister of education, said publically on Sunday that if the accusations are verified to be true, Germany’s academic credibility could be damaged. Um, yeah.
Der Spiegel has got a good piece on the whole bribing backstory here…
Hat tip: Chemistry World
From Fake Pharmaceuticals To Serbian Sausages—Ah, IUPAC
Aug
4
4
Posted by Sarah Everts on August 4, 2009 in Chemistry and Food, Uncategorized, Where is C&EN?
Yesterday at the IUPAC conference in Glasgow, I was reminded of a fascinating but disturbing factoid: that Viagra and the appetite suppressant sibutramine are among some of the common ingredients snuck into counterfeit drugs and herbal remedies from the UK to China. That is, when an “active” ingredient of any type is added. There are lots of cases of plain old talc pills. Or fakes with really nefarious additions, like heavy metals or diethylene glycol–which has caused deaths from the USA to Bangladesh.
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Catch You Next Year, Lindau
Jul
3
3
Posted by Sarah Everts on July 3, 2009 in Where is C&EN?
Lindau conference delegates spent their last day on the the pretty island of Mainau, which has lots of flowers and a castle. We got there on this weird bullet-like ferry that had some goofy balloon molecules for decoration inside. Anybody want to guess what molecules they were trying to represent?
The ferry
Weird balloon molecule decoration
Sustainable Panels
Jul
3
3
Posted by Sarah Everts on July 3, 2009 in Where is C&EN?
I have a friend who says that humans have only really achieved sustainability in the sustainability panels we put together. I wouldn’t go that far, but I have been to quite a few…
Today, we all nearly expired sitting out in the noon sun for nearly two hours, listening to the Lindau conference’s panel about climate change and sustainability, which featured some of the usual suspects in these debates (such as the IPCC’s Rajendra Pachauri and the controversial writer Bjørn Lomborg). Also present: other Nobel Laureates (Molina, Schrock), climate scientist Thomas Stocker and a rep from the German government, lover of solar technology. The Economist’s science editor Geoff Carr moderated.
The sweltering discussion took place on an island called Mainau. (It’s got a castle. Stay tuned for photos of the strange bullet-like ferry we took from Lindau to Mainau, and the boat’s decorative balloon molecules.)
So panel members mostly stuck to their typical mantras: Pachauri: the world is growing unsustainably and we need to do something about climate change. Lomborg: climate change is an issue, but we have other more pressing world problems than climate change to solve, such as world health. Molina: The planet is facing irreversible threats; we have to invest in new renewable energy technologies and cut consumption. Cornelia Quennet-Thielen (from the German Ministry for Education and Science): One million new jobs in the solar energy sectors means renewable energy can help the economy. Schrock: There are many renewable energy problems that chemistry can solve.
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