Colin Macilwain, Washington US climate-change activists are up in armsagain. But for once it is not against the fos-sil-fuel lobby. This time the focus of theirire is one of their strongest supporters —the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

One of the main organizations workingfor cuts in US greenhouse-gas emissions, thePew Center has issued a statement sayingthat the emissions targets set by the 1997Kyoto Protocol are unrealistic and will even-tually have to be renegotiated. EileenClaussen, the centre’s president and formerchief negotiator on climate change issues atthe US state department, says that “fewnational governments” will reach their tar-gets for 2008–12.

“There is nothing wrong with ambitioustargets, but they have to be grounded in reali-ty,” Claussen said in remarks delivered pri-vately in London last month, and repeatedpublicly in Washington last week at a meet-ing of scientists and economists who advisethe Pew Center.

“The targets in the Kyoto Protocol cannotand will not be met on the establishedtimetable in the United States and else-where,” said Claussen. “By adhering to un-realistic targets that will be very difficult, ifnot impossible to meet, we provide the Pro-tocol’s opponents with additional ammuni-tion in their efforts to shoot the treaty down.”

The Pew Center was established in 1998by the Pew Charitable Trusts to educate thepublic on climate-change issues and toencourage reductions in greenhouse-gasemissions. It operates in partnership with agroup called the Business EnvironmentalLeadership Council, which includes Boeingand DuPont, but receives no financial support from it.

Claussen still believes that “the good qual-ities of the Kyoto Protocol vastly outweigh itsflaws” and she wants negotiators, who willmeet in The Hague this November to finalizethe protocol, to implement firm rules on howthe treaty will operate before consideringrevisions to the targets. “If, after ensuring thatthe framework reflects these priorities, weneed to renegotiate the targets or timetables— and I suspect we will — then so be it.”

The remarks were welcomed by someclimatologists at the Washington meeting.“I agree with everything she said,” says TomWigley, senior scientist at the National Cen-ter for Atmospheric Research at Boulder,Colorado. “The targets are too much, toosoon. She is echoing what many economistsbelieve, that a more moderate approach is

news

NATURE | VOL 406 | 27 JULY 2000 | www.nature.com 333

going to be a much better approach.”But Claussen’s blunt characterization of

the targets has alarmed environmentalgroups, who believe that the Kyoto Protocolis the main driving force for global action bygovernments and industry to cut emissions.

Claussen’s pessimism is not shared, at leastin public, by other groups who support action

Emissions targets ‘unrealistic’says US climate change body

A small matterPhysicists find the‘final’ fundamentalparticle

p334

In tuneClinton and Blair sayGM regulation mustbe ‘science based’

p335

Ethical researchNew code proposedfor collaborativeresearch projects

p337

Head startNeurobionicinstitute unveiledin Hanover

p339

Declan ButlerBritain’s Wellcome Trust announced lastweek that it is contributing £8.8 million($13.4 million) to Ensembl, the decentralizedannotation project for the human genome.

The funding, over five years, is a vote ofconfidence for Ensembl’s vision of sequenceannotation being distributed across multiplecomputer servers worldwide, rather than in acentralized server such as GenBank.

A joint venture between the SangerCentre and the European BioinformaticsInstitute, both at Hinxton near Cambridge,Ensembl aims to provide a single referencemap of the human genome on to whichparticipating scientists can anchor‘annotations’ describing the predictedfunction and structure of gene sequences.

This Distributed Sequence AnnotationSystem (DAS), which is being developed by

Lincoln Stein, a bioinformatician at ColdSpring Harbor Laboratory in New York, willbe rolled out next month at the InternationalConference on Intelligent Systems forMolecular Biology in La Jolla, California.

A software ‘plug-in’ will then be madeavailable to allow users to zoom in on anypart of the genome. As well as accessingdetails on the DNA sequence, together withauthor information, they will be able tocompare apparent contradictions betweendifferent third-party annotations. Theresults will be returned in standard formatsfrom all participating DAS servers, so thatthe graphics and displays look the same.

The first two DAS servers to join thescheme will be at Ensembl and the OakRidge National Laboratory in Tennessee. ■

➧ http://www.ensembl.org/

➧ http://stein.cshl.org/das/

Ensembl gets a Wellcome boost

High and dry: avoiding droughts like this one in Florida could require achievable emissions targets.

RO

BE

RT

KIN

G/N

EW

SMA

KE

RS

▲

© 2000 Macmillan Magazines Ltd

Paul Smaglik, Washington Anyone who has recently applied for a USpatent — particularly in high-tech fields orbiotechnology — will have waited a longtime to learn of their request’s fate. A con-gressman is now proposing to address thisproblem by allowing the United StatesPatent and Trademark Office (USPTO) tokeep all the fees that it raises.

The move would help to increase thenumber of examiners — without this, warnsthe office, the backlog of applications is likelyto grow even longer. Applications haveincreased by 12% in the past year alone, andthe time for processing each one has grownfrom 18 months in 1995 to 26 months now.

Up to now, the patent office has alwayshanded over a portion of its income to thegovernment. But the precise percentage hasvaried, creating difficulties with long-termhiring commitments.

In the next financial year, which begins inOctober, the USPTO expects to take in about$1.2 billion. But the House, Senate and Presi-dent Bill Clinton’s administration disagree

over how much the agency should keep. TheHouse is suggesting $905 million, whereasthe Senate last week voted to allow it to retainall but $33 million; the president’s budgetcalls for the USPTO to give up $113 million.

Representative Howard Coble (Republi-can, North Carolina) has put forward a billthat would allow the USPTO to spend every-thing it earns. The administration has notcommented on this proposal. But in a letterto Coble earlier this summer, USPTO com-missioner Todd Dickinson warned of direconsequences if the House’s budget wereadopted, as the office would have to impose ahiring freeze and reduce overtime.

Demand for patents is especially heavy ingenomics, where there is already a backlog of20,000 applications for patents on genes, saysLila Feisee, a spokesperson for the Biotech-nology Industry Organization.

Analysing these applications requiresmore people and better software, addsFeisee, a former USPTO examiner. “There’ssuch an outcry over gene patents now that it’simportant to do it right,” she says. ■

to cut carbon emissions.“We’re making a lotof progress here,” says Dan Lashof, head of the climate-changeprogramme at the Nat-ural Resources DefenseCouncil, pointing torecent bipartisan calls inthe Congress for reduc-tions in power-plantemissions.

Jennifer Morgan, director of theWorld Wildlife Fund’s climate-changecampaign, also believes the Kyoto Proto-col can work. “We should be focusing ona domestic plan to meet the targets, noton changing them,” she says.

But the Global Climate Coalition, theindustry group that has opposed bind-ing action to cut carbon emissions, saidthat Claussen’s statements bore outits early warnings about the Kyoto Proto-col. “We agree with her that the targetsare simply unrealistic,” says ConnieHolmes, chair of the coalition’s board.“In the last three years, they have becomemore unrealistic — and not just for theUnited States.” ■

➧ http://www.pewclimate.org/media/

transcript_riia.html

news

334 NATURE | VOL 406 | 27 JULY 2000 | www.nature.com

Proposal for US patent officecould help cut waiting time

Physicists celebrate detection of elusive ‘final’ particleColin Macilwain, WashingtonHigh-energy physicists are declaring ‘fullhouse’ after detecting the last remainingbasic building block of matter predicted bythe Standard Model. A team at Fermilaboutside Chicago has seen the elusive tauneutrino for the first time.

The DONUT (Direct Observation of theNu Tau) team of 54 physicists from theUnited States, Japan, South Korea and Greeceannounced last week that they had found thekinked, millimetre-long decay tracks of fourtau leptons — produced when an ironnucleus and a tau neutrino collide — afteranalysing millions of such possible events.

The Standard Model of fundamentalparticles and their interactions predicts theexistence of 12 ‘fermions’— the basicbuilding blocks of matter — and four ‘vectorbosons’, which carry force. The tau neutrino,which belongs to a class of fermions calledleptons, was the last to evade detection.

“Finding the tau neutrino is veryimportant and exciting,” says Martin Perl ofStanford University, California, who wonthe 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics for hisdiscovery of the tau lepton. “DONUT wasnot an easy experiment, and now it opens awhole new world. We might have a chance oflearning more about all other particles.”

In particular, the finding may assist theburgeoning field of neutrino physics. Earlyresults from the SuperKamiokandeexperiment in Japan suggest that neutrinosmay have mass (see Nature 391, 123; 1998).To test this, physicists in Japan, Europe andthe United States are planning experimentsto observe the oscillation of one type ofneutrino to another.

The DONUT experiment began in 1997,by sending a high-energy proton beam fromFermilab’s main particle accelerator, theTevatron, into a block of tungsten.

Researchers filtered a beam of neutrinos outof the resulting mêlée, and this was passedthrough a target of iron sandwiched withlayers of emulsion.

The DONUT team identified 1,000events of interest and took the emulsionplates, which work like three-dimensionalphotographic film, to Nagoya University inJapan for analysis. “It was the proverbialneedle in a haystack,” says Fermilab’s ByronLundberg, spokesman for the experiment.

High-energy physicists are nowswitching their attention to the Higgsmechanism, an extension to the StandardModel, which explains how particles acquiremass. This involves exchanges of a particlecalled the Higgs boson, the search for whichwill resume at a revamped Tevatron nextyear. CERN, the European Laboratory forParticle Physics near Geneva, will join thehunt in 2005 with its Large Hadron Collider.

Meanwhile, some researchers are excitedby ‘supersymmetry’, a theory outside theStandard Model. This predicts that everyfermion has a supersymmetric bosoncounterpart, and vice versa. Experiments atCERN’s Large Electron–Positron colliderhave hinted at a counterpart to the bottomquark — although previous hints haveturned out to be statistical fluctuations. ■

Claussen: targetsfor emissionsmust be realistic.

DONUT delight: spokesman Lundberg describesdiscovery as ‘the proverbial needle in a haystack’.

PE

W C

EN

TE

RFN

AL

© 2000 Macmillan Magazines Ltd