The Science–Celera deal:incident or trend?The draft version of the human genomewas presented last spring as a joint effortof the public sequencing consortium andof Craig Venter’s biotech company Celera.Now, both Celera and the consortium areto publish their achievements in Scienceand Nature, respectively. The consortiumwill continue to make its data freelyavailable, whereas Celera has struck acontroversial deal with Science on thisissue. Their data will not be availablethrough a publicly accessible databasesuch as GenBank but, instead, directlythrough Celera’s own database. To enter,companies have to sign that they will not commercialize or redistribute the data, and academic scientists also have tolive with limitations on how the data canbe downloaded and used. Ewan Irmy ofthe European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) commented to Elsevier’s BioMedNet: ‘For molecular biologists, the agreementwith Celera is livable. It’s decent. Forbioinformatics, it’s saying: I’m sorry, we’re not going to be able to supportbioinformatics in the public arena.’ Irmyalso said that colleagues reported to himthat the rice genome sequence data, madepublic by biotech company Monsanto, wasof limited use to bioinformaticists as well.Since Science’s decision was made public,general concern and discontent has been expressed in the pages of bothScience and Nature as well as in thegeneral press. J.d.B.

Michigan’s tobacco payoutsfund science programsThe US State of Michigan has awarded the first grants from tobacco settlementrevenue to support life-science researchwithin the state. The State of Michigan Life Sciences Corridor awarded the grants from a fund of $1 billion from thestate’s tobacco lawsuit settlement. The Life Sciences Corridor was created to invest in and promote life-sciencesresearch and business development. Key facilities being funded include theMichigan Proteome Consortium and The Michigan Center for BiologicalInformation. The program plans to award $50 million annually for 20 years to universities, research institutes and biotechnology companiesin the state. D.S.

Women and scienceIt’s common knowledge that women areremarkably underrepresented in the higher echelons of academic science. As undergraduates and graduate students in biological sciences, womenand men are equally represented, andfemale postdocs are not a rare species,but the major hurdle seems to come when selection gets toughest – out of thepostdoc treadmill and into groupleadership. One might posit that the lowpercentage of women with fullprofessorship is an echo of a male-dominated past, but, if the predictions

are right, the situation will stay as it is.Take for instance the recent results of the Dutch Innovation Impulse programgranted by The Netherlands Organizationfor Scientific Research (NWO). ThisEUR750 000 science-career booster gives young scientists time and money to build their own research group, andtherefore awardees represent the futuregeneration of professors. NWO published data showing that a meager 30 out of 154 applicants for this goldenopportunity were women, and thesituation looked even worse afterselection: only 4 out of 43 of the rewarded grants were for women. Given that women occupy presently only seven percent of full professorshipsin The Netherlands, it seems clear thatthis proportion won’t rise in the nearfuture. J.d.B.

UK parliament votes in favourof stem cell researchOn 17 December 2000, the lower House of Parliament in the UK voted by366 to 174 in favour of modifying theexisting Human Fertilization andEmbryology Act to allow scientificresearch using human embryonic stem cells. The law change is backed by both the Royal Society andthe Wellcome Trust and was alsorecommended by the Government’s chief medical officer Liam Donaldson. The UK’s upper House of Parliament, the House of Lords, approved the changes on 22 January. Similar legislative changes will be considered for the US in 2001. The US Government issued guidelines last year allowing the federal funding of research usingpluripotent stem cells. Both UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and former US President Bill Clinton are strongsupporters of stem cell research. D.S.

TRENDS in Cell Biology Vol.11 No.3 March 2001

http://tcb.trends.com 0962-8924/01/$ – see front matter © 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

111News&Comment

This month’s ‘In brief’ articles

were written by

Jan de Boer

(deboer@mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk),

Sean Lawler

(seanyboyoboy@hotmail.com)

and David Stephens

(david.stephens@EMBL-Heidelberg.de).

US NIH funding increaseThe US Congress and former-President Bill Clinton’s administration agreed abudget at the end of 2000 for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) thatwill give the research agency a $2.5billion increase in funding for the 2001fiscal year, which began on 1 October2000. The 14% increase is the thirdsubstantial increase for the agency in as many years and keeps the NIH oncourse to double its budget over fiveyears. Such increases are less likely for 2002 owing to the slowing USeconomy. The impact of the new Bushadministration on science funding policy is also currently unclear. D.S.