Science is moving faster than ever, but support for that research "is under greater threat than it has ever been" because of the sequester, said Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, on Hardball with Chris Matthews last week. In the segment below, Collins also noted that the US spends about $200 billion to care for people with dementia, but only $500 million on dementia research — and that is now being cut 5 percent by the sequester.

However, Collins said his greatest worry is how such spending cuts will affect young scientists. "They are looking at this landscape in the United States and going, 'Well, maybe there's not a career here for me,'" he said. Those researchers, he said, may find another career or move to another country with better research support.

HT: DrugMonkey

Three researchers at New York University School of Medicine have been charged with taking bribes in exchange for sharing private details about their work with a Chinese medical imaging company and research institute supported by the Chinese government, the New York Times reports.

The Times writes that after the US National Institutes of Health awarded a grant to Yudong Zhu, an associate professor of radiology at the school, to support his MRI technology research, Zhu recruited Xing Yang and Ye Li as research engineers. However, they also received tuition, rent, and other financial support from an executive at a Chinese imaging company who is also associated with the government-supported institute there, the Times notes.

Zhu has also been charged with falsifying records.

It's "a case of inviting and paying for foxes in the henhouse," the federal prosecutor says.

The Associated Press adds that an internal review at NYU uncovered the issue, and that Li told NYU administrators that he received thousands of dollars from the Chinese institute for work on an MRI project. According to prosecutors, Zhu also admitted receiving about $500,000, the Times says.

Zhu and Yang have been released on bond, while Li is thought to have left the country, the Times reports.

The increasingly competitive funding atmosphere "breeds unethical behavior," writes James Hicks, a physiologist at the University of California, Irvine, in an opinion piece at The Scientist.

Hicks charts funding success rates at the US National Institutes of Health versus the number of retracted papers and says that "we have reached such a threshold: when only around 20 percent of grants are funded, the numbers of retractions skyrockets."

At his blog, Drug Monkey says the chart appears "truthy." However, "[n]obody knows if increased retraction rates over time are being observed because fraud is up or because detection is up," he says, adding that "since NIH grant success rates have likewise been plummeting as a function of Fiscal Year, the relationship is confounded."

Richard Van Noorden ‏at Spare Thoughts offers a different chart that examines NIH success rate versus retracted papers, but that divvies the data up by total retracted publications, retracted publication from the US, and retracted publication supported by NIH or the Public Health Service.

"You will see that there is little correlation between NIH success rates and retracted US publications or retracted papers with PHS support/NIH extramural support," Van Noorden writes, though he notes that there is a correlation between success rate and total retracted publications.

"[W]e probably won't find out until, say, 2015, whether squeezed NIH success rates in 2011 and 2012 led to a higher number of retracted NIH-funded or US (or even world) papers," he adds. "So maybe we'll find out that it did. I'm not holding my breath."

A California team has garnered evidence implicating the research organism Xenopus laevis (the South African clawed frog) in the presence of the frog fungal pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatis in California. As they reported in PLOS One, investigators surveyed more than 200 archived frog samples by real-time PCR, including 178 samples collected in Africa between 1871 and 2000 and almost two dozen more collected in California between 2001 and 2010. The group found DNA from the Bd fungus in eight samples overall, with the earliest appearing in a 1934 sample from Kenya. Three of 23 California samples also carried the fungus. "If wild Xenopus appeared in California decades ago, during the 1970s … then by strong inference and supported by the findings reported here," they write, "introduction of Bd into this geographical area could have occurred in part via Bd infected Xenopus laevis."

Mycoplasma pneumoniae may turn up in the upper respiratory tracts children who aren't suffering from respiratory tract infections, according to a study in PLOS Medicine. Researchers from Erasmus MC and elsewhere used real-time PCR to test upper respiratory tract samples from 321 children with infections and 405 children without. Some 21 percent of asymptomatic children tested positive for M. pneumoniae DNA, compared to around 16 percent of those with documented infections, suggesting that the presence of M. pneumoniae alone may not necessarily herald infection. In follow-up experiments involving 202 more children, around 56 percent carried DNA from other bacterial or viral pathogens, too, both in the respiratory tract infection and asymptomatic groups.

The University of Würzburg's Cynthia Sharma and colleagues undertook a transcriptomics-based analysis of the gastroenteritis-causing bacterial species Campylobacter jejuni — work they describe in PLOS Genetics. The team used its so-called differential RNA sequencing strategy to sequence and compare the transcriptomes of four C. jejuni isolates (three from humans and one from a chicken), applying a new method to automatically annotate transcription start sites in each. "Overall," they write, "our study provides new insights into strain-specific transcriptome organization and [small RNAs], and reveals genes that could modulate phenotypic variation among strains despite high conservation at the DNA level."

The Natural History Museum in Washington, DC, is chipping away at its goal to collect and store five million bits of tissue in what will be the world's largest museum-based biorepository, Joseph Stromberg writes in the latest issue of Smithsonian magazine. The collection effort is part of a multi-institution movement called the Global Genome Initiative to amass and genomically analyze samples representing the Earth's biodiversity.

An exhibition opening this June at the museum, "Genome: Unlocking Life's Code," is presenting the project and its potential to the public, Stromberg writes. Currently, the museum has amassed 200,000 samples in 20 gleaming, supercooled steel drums, but the goal is to collect a total of five million samples from animals, plants, fungi, protists, and bacteria.

The specimens — unlike the plethora of other taxidermied, pickled, and mummified biological bits and pieces in the museum's collection — are slated for initial DNA barcoding to confirm their species, and then for eventual genome sequencing.

According to Stromberg, the barcoding portion of the project has already yielded surprising results. For instance, 25 new fish species were found in a tenth of a square mile area off of Curaçao.

Beyond a basic catalog of life and an understanding of the physiology and evolutionary history of the Earth's multitudes, the project may also someday function as a seed bank, Stromberg writes, either preserving a genetic record of animals and plants or potentially even providing the building blocks to restore extinct species in some futuristic Jurassic Park scenario.

A group of scientists, journal editors, and research funders have signed a statement, dubbed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, that calls for changes to how Journal Impact Factors are used to judge scientific research. In the statement, the group notes that the Journal Impact Factor was designed by Thomson Reuters to help librarians determine which journals to buy, not to measure the quality of scientific articles.

"The impact factor, a number calculated annually for each scientific journal based on the average number of times its articles have been referenced in other articles, was never intended to be used to evaluate individual scientists, but rather as a measure of journal quality," adds Bruce Alberts, the editor-in-chief of Science, in an editorial. "However, it has been increasingly misused in this way, with scientists now being ranked by weighting each of their publications according to the impact factor of the journal in which it appeared."

Instead, the DORA statement offers alternatives to using impact factors to assess research quality, arguing against their use "as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist's contributions, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions."

For example, the statement suggests that funding agencies and institutions be clear about how they evaluate scientific productivity and to consider the full range of scientific output like software or datasets in their funding or hiring decisions. In addition, it suggests that journals limit their use of impact factors as a promotional tool and use a variety of metrics like h-index, Eigen factor, and others instead that it says give a better representation of journal performance.

"We, the scientific community, are to blame — we created this mess, this perception that if you don't publish in Cell, Nature, or Science, you won't get a job," says Stefano Bertuzzi, the executive director of the American Society for Cell Biology, the group that organized the statement, tells the Nature News Blog. "The time is right for the scientific community to take control of this issue."

The Nature News Blog adds that its parent, Nature Publishing Group, did not sign the statement. Philip Campbell, the editor-in-chief of Nature, says that journals in the Nature Publishing Group have run a number of editorials criticizing the use of Journal Impact Factors, "but the draft statement contained many specific elements, some of which were too sweeping for me or my colleagues to sign up to," he tells Nature News Blog.

Other editorials in favor of the move ran in eLife and Molecular Biology of the Cell.