Archive for 2011

No year is free of scientific scandal, but 2011 saw some particularly high-profile cases. In October, prominent psychologist Diederik Stapel was fired by Tilburg University in the Netherlands after an investigation committee found extensive fraud in his work. Three months earlier, evolutionary psychologist Marc Hauser resigned from Harvard University following last year's misconduct findings, but while the US Office of Research Integrity continues to investigate the case, exact details of what he did remain remarkably scant. The scandal involving cancer geneticist Anil Potti, who resigned from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, in 2010, reached new heights in September, when patients enrolled in clinical trials based on his science brought a lawsuit against the university and the scientists involved, claiming that they had been harmed. And November saw the dramatic arrest and brief jailing of Judy Mikovits, prominent for her work (now partially retracted) linking chronic fatigue syndrome to a virus.

Dutch social psychologist Diederik Stapel had been called one of the ‘bright thrusting young stars’ of the field before his career imploded this autumn over fraudulent research. In prominent studies that explored prejudices and stereotypes, Stapel didn’t just fudge data, he fabricated entire experiments — seemingly for much of his career, according to a preliminary report issued on 31 October by the three university committees investigating his work. They are still sifting through data from approximately 150 published papers to catalogue Stapel’s misdeeds for a final report to be issued next year.

In my personal opinion, the pressure to perform has gone up so much in all the fields including science; even the greatest thinkers tend to slip down the wrong path. In my short research career so far, I have personally known so many bright guys forging data just to keep their job or funding. It’s time for the researchers as well as funding agencies to sit and analyze this situation. If the same trend continues, a day will come where we wont be able to find even a single passionate scientist.

A greenhouse gas (sometimes abbreviated GHG) is a gas in an atmosphere that absorbs and emits radiation within the thermal infrared range. The primary greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere are water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the burning of fossil fuels has contributed to the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. These gases affect the temperature of the Earth; without them, Earth's surface would be on average about 33 °C (59 °F) colder than at present. Well, this is in simple terms what we call now global warming. USA probably is one of the highly polluted country and a major contributor to global warming.

Lisa Jackson became the head of Enivironmental Protection Agency of USA in the year 2009. A chemical engineer turned public servant, Jackson issued a scientific assessment formally declaring that greenhouse gases pose a threat to human health and welfare. That ruling set the stage for the EPA to regulate greenhouse- gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. The ruling has led to a series of decisions that have provoked the anger of the Republicans. The Republican Congress has fought these efforts, arguing that pollution regulations cost jobs and resources at a time when the country is short of both. As of November, by Jackson’s count, Republicans had brought more than 170 attacks on basic environmental protections up for vote this year, although none of their efforts to weaken existing regulations was successful. Jackson has testified before Congress 11 times this year.

The Obama administration has worked with auto- mobile makers over the past three years to establish fuel-efficiency and greenhouse-gas-emissions standards, the president’s signature environmental achievement thus far. The EPA has also begun rolling out requirements for major industrial facilities and, despite delays, is preparing to issue the first-ever greenhouse-gas standard for US power plants and refineries. Jackson’s EPA has also targeted smog-forming pollutants as well as mercury and other toxic chemicals from industrial facilities and power plants. In October, the agency announced plans to regulate the waste water generated by shale-gas development, which involves injecting water and chemicals at high pressure into gas-bearing rocks, an activity that many fear could pollute groundwater resources.

We have been living in an industrial town for years. I don’t know how seriously we take these environmental issues. If we don’t, then its high time we do!!! The least we can do is protect our trees. Inturn they protect our environment.
“Every time I have some moment on a seashore, or in the mountains, or sometimes in a quiet forest, I think this is why the environment has to be preserved” – Bill Bradley

Life is mostly composed of the elements carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, and phosphorus. Although these six elements make up nucleic acids, proteins, and lipids and thus the bulk of living matter, it is theoretically possible that some other elements in the periodic table could serve the same functions. Phosporous is an integral part of DNA structure. If you remove Phosporous from a living organism there will be no DNA and so no life.In 2010, a group from California claimed to have found bacteria that could incorporate arsenic into their DNA in place of phosphorus (Felisa Wolfe-Simon, Science, 2010). If true, the finding showed that life could be supported by a form of biochemistry radically different from the one we know.

This year Rosie Redfield, a Canadian microbiologist wanted to take up this question again and she started putting her results everyday on her blog. But Redfield’s blog entry on the paper pulled no punches. “Basically, it doesn’t present ANY convincing evidence that arsenic has been incorporated into DNA,” she wrote. Redfield kicked off a frenzy of criticism of the ‘arsenic-life’ paper in the blogosphere and the media. In June, Science published eight critiques of the paper. The result has been a fascinating story of open science unfolding over the year. Redfield’s blog has become a virtual lab meeting, in which scientists from around the world help to troubleshoot her attempts to grow and study the GFAJ-1 bacteria — the strain isolated by Felisa Wolfe-Simon, lead author of the Science paper. For months, Redfield could not get the GFAJ-1 bacteria to grow reproducibly on a medium containing arsenic. Finally, in November, the bacteria took off. Redfield now plans to check whether they have incorporated arsenic into their DNA, but it will take even more work to show that they can survive without any phosphorus.

I just checked her blog this morning. She is still waiting for the DNA analysis results. If these bacteria have indeed replaced phosphorous with arsenic, we will witness another revolution in the field of biochemistry. Probably, bigger than the one, which happened after the discovery of structure of DNA by Watson and Crick during the 1950s.

"கற்றது கை மண் அளவு - கல்லாதது உலகளவு"