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Superstorm Sandy's intellectual cost
Anup Shah/naturepl.com
UPFRONT
Orang-utans have Ebola THEY are already the most severely endangered great apes. Now orang-utans may face yet another threat: Ebola virus, or something very like it. Bornean orang-utans have antibodies for all four African Ebola viruses and a similar virus called Marburg. That is bad news, as it is the first time any of these viruses has been seen outside Africa. Orang-utans are the only Asian great apes: the others hail from Africa. Forest clearance had left only 40,000 of the apes on Sumatra and Borneo, down from 60,000 a decade ago. While surveying wild mammals for H5N1 bird flu, Chairul Anwar Nidom of Airlangga University in Surabaya, Indonesia, collected blood from 353 apparently healthy wild orang-utans from Borneo. He tested the samples
for antibodies to several diseases. Sixty-five orang-utans carried antibodies that bound to proteins from one of the African Ebola species, or from Marburg (PLoS One, doi.org/jpk). In Africa, Ebola kills chimps and lowland gorillas, yet the orang-utans had survived. Five others coped with Reston, the Asian species of Ebola. Nidom says Reston Ebola kills cynomolgus macaques, but not rhesus macaques or humans. The African viruses may also be selective in their victims. Or perhaps the orang-utans had a harmless virus with similar proteins to African Ebola, says Thomas Geisbert of the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. Until the virus itself is found, no one can know for sure.
Courage rewarded
medical treatments and fraudulent scientific practices in China, and Simon Wessely of King’s College London. He received death threats and professional smears for offering people with chronic fatigue syndrome a psychiatric treatment at a time when a mouse leukaemia virus had been implicated as the cause. The virus link has since been discredited. Sile Lane of Sense About Science, the UK watchdog that combined with Nature to set up the award, said Wessely and Fang stood out as being “exceptional”.
–Who are you calling infected?–
Sandy hits science
“We have been lucky but our researchers have been reaching out to colleagues who have suffered losses” Cornell Medical College has cleared 1000 tanks to house the centre’s zebrafish, and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has promised to replace some of the lost mice. 4 | NewScientist | 10 November 2012
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
AS WELL as battering New York and much of the east coast (see page 6), superstorm Sandy has taken its toll on vital research and equipment. At New York University’s Medical Center almost 10,000 genetically engineered mice perished in the flooded cellars of the Smilow Research Center, destroying a decade’s worth of work into heart disease, cancer, autism and schizophrenia. “It’s an absolute tragedy any way you look at it,” says Gordon Fishell, head of a lab at the centre. Fishell said he had been overwhelmed by 43 offers of help from other labs to help replace and rebuild Smilow’s lost animals and equipment. Nearby Weill
“We were lucky to come through this better than some of our colleagues in the region, and our researchers have been reaching out to colleagues who did suffer losses,” says Dagnia Zeidlickis of CSHL. Even equipment designed to study the superstorm wasn’t spared. Of 28 radars in the coastal network stretching from North Carolina to Massachusetts, 17 were swept away by the storm. But project leader Scott Glenn, of Rutgers University in New Jersey, is hopeful that vital data on Sandy can be retrieved from the others.
DEATH threats and libel suits are not usually the stuff of a career in science. But this week two people who have faced violence and intimidation simply for trying to uphold scientific values became the first recipients of the John Maddox prize, an award that recognises exceptional courage and bravery in science anywhere in the world. The award was given to Shi-min Fang, a biochemist and freelance science journalist in Beijing, who faced attack after exposing bogus
Mars out of gas METHANE on Mars? Maybe not, according to the latest readings from NASA’s Curiosity rover. The robot’s search for the organic gas, the first to be carried out within Mars’s atmosphere, has essentially found nothing. Hints of methane have been swirling since 2003, when ground-based telescopes and a European orbiter detected its signatures on Mars. And in 2009, –Roving sniffer draws a blank– scientists using telescopes in
UPFRONT
Orang-utans have Ebola THEY are already the most severely endangered great apes. Now orang-utans may face yet another threat: Ebola virus, or something very like it. Bornean orang-utans have antibodies for all four African Ebola viruses and a similar virus called Marburg. That is bad news, as it is the first time any of these viruses has been seen outside Africa. Orang-utans are the only Asian great apes: the others hail from Africa. Forest clearance had left only 40,000 of the apes on Sumatra and Borneo, down from 60,000 a decade ago. While surveying wild mammals for H5N1 bird flu, Chairul Anwar Nidom of Airlangga University in Surabaya, Indonesia, collected blood from 353 apparently healthy wild orang-utans from Borneo. He tested the samples
for antibodies to several diseases. Sixty-five orang-utans carried antibodies that bound to proteins from one of the African Ebola species, or from Marburg (PLoS One, doi.org/jpk). In Africa, Ebola kills chimps and lowland gorillas, yet the orang-utans had survived. Five others coped with Reston, the Asian species of Ebola. Nidom says Reston Ebola kills cynomolgus macaques, but not rhesus macaques or humans. The African viruses may also be selective in their victims. Or perhaps the orang-utans had a harmless virus with similar proteins to African Ebola, says Thomas Geisbert of the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. Until the virus itself is found, no one can know for sure.
Courage rewarded
medical treatments and fraudulent scientific practices in China, and Simon Wessely of King’s College London. He received death threats and professional smears for offering people with chronic fatigue syndrome a psychiatric treatment at a time when a mouse leukaemia virus had been implicated as the cause. The virus link has since been discredited. Sile Lane of Sense About Science, the UK watchdog that combined with Nature to set up the award, said Wessely and Fang stood out as being “exceptional”.
–Who are you calling infected?–
Sandy hits science
“We have been lucky but our researchers have been reaching out to colleagues who have suffered losses” Cornell Medical College has cleared 1000 tanks to house the centre’s zebrafish, and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has promised to replace some of the lost mice. 4 | NewScientist | 10 November 2012
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
AS WELL as battering New York and much of the east coast (see page 6), superstorm Sandy has taken its toll on vital research and equipment. At New York University’s Medical Center almost 10,000 genetically engineered mice perished in the flooded cellars of the Smilow Research Center, destroying a decade’s worth of work into heart disease, cancer, autism and schizophrenia. “It’s an absolute tragedy any way you look at it,” says Gordon Fishell, head of a lab at the centre. Fishell said he had been overwhelmed by 43 offers of help from other labs to help replace and rebuild Smilow’s lost animals and equipment. Nearby Weill
“We were lucky to come through this better than some of our colleagues in the region, and our researchers have been reaching out to colleagues who did suffer losses,” says Dagnia Zeidlickis of CSHL. Even equipment designed to study the superstorm wasn’t spared. Of 28 radars in the coastal network stretching from North Carolina to Massachusetts, 17 were swept away by the storm. But project leader Scott Glenn, of Rutgers University in New Jersey, is hopeful that vital data on Sandy can be retrieved from the others.
DEATH threats and libel suits are not usually the stuff of a career in science. But this week two people who have faced violence and intimidation simply for trying to uphold scientific values became the first recipients of the John Maddox prize, an award that recognises exceptional courage and bravery in science anywhere in the world. The award was given to Shi-min Fang, a biochemist and freelance science journalist in Beijing, who faced attack after exposing bogus
Mars out of gas METHANE on Mars? Maybe not, according to the latest readings from NASA’s Curiosity rover. The robot’s search for the organic gas, the first to be carried out within Mars’s atmosphere, has essentially found nothing. Hints of methane have been swirling since 2003, when ground-based telescopes and a European orbiter detected its signatures on Mars. And in 2009, –Roving sniffer draws a blank– scientists using telescopes in