In a letter dated 14 May, the organization’s scientific review council, chaired by Phillip Sharp of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, criticize actions taken by the CPRIT management and Oversight Committee — actions which they say are “inconsistent” with statements by CPRIT’s executive director William Gimson defending the integrity of the Institute’s peer review system.  The letter also reiterates the council’s faith in Gilman. In his 8 May resignation letter, Gilman had expressed concerns about CPRIT maintaining a “functional peer review system”.

Gilman told Nature in an email that he believes both letters address “the same basic issues.”

Among the most damning of the council’s concerns is their assertion that they were not consulted about a $20 million ‘incubator’ award  — the largest ever made by CPRIT — that went to Rice University and the University of Texas’s MD Anderson Cancer Center both in Houston. Although the MD Anderson Center is slated to receive $18 million from the award, the council found their proposal too short (only 6.5 pages), too last-minute (it was approved three weeks after submission), and lacking in scientific detail.

“We will be viewed to have approved this award, and the failure to include us in the process calls into question our roles and the integrity of the review program in general. More importantly, this by-pass is inherently unfair to every scientist in Texas who participates in the CPRIT program,” the review council writes.

Incubator grants — to fund programs and services aimed at commercializing new products for cancer diagnosis, treatment, and prevention — are not defined by CPRIT as requiring scientific peer review. But, the council argues that the activities laid out in MD Anderson’s proposal sound like research. Additionally, “no product candidates were mentioned,” said the letter, “Nor is a company involved.” This marked the first time CPRIT has issued an award in this grant category.

“It is clear that the rules surrounding submission, evaluation, and funding of incubators must be clarified,” Gimson said in a statement. “It is my intent to address the concerns that have arisen about the commercialization review process by soliciting input from CPRIT’s stakeholders.”

The review council also criticizes CPRIT’s oversight committee for putting seven multi-investigator research applications that the review council recommended for funding on hold. The letter alleges this was done because of opposition from certain committee members to a significant amount of the funding going to UT Southwestern Medical School in Dallas where Gilman once served as Dean. The review council write that this amounts to an unfounded accusation of bias on the part of both the council and Gilman, which they “vigorously deny.”

Gimson said that the decision was due to timing and budget issues and confirmed that all seven projects are up for consideration at a meeting of the Oversight Committee scheduled for 26 July. In his resignation letter, Gilman suggests that he wants to remain in his role through the summer in part to prevent ”negative decisions” about funding from being made at the same meeting.

Fioraso, who is 57 years old, has had a diverse career. Starting out as a lecturer in English and economics, she took a post at the Grenoble city hall in 1979, and became a parliamentary assistant in 1983. In 1989, she took on a management role at the high-tech start-up Corys, where she worked on the safety of nuclear and coal-fired power plants. In 1995, she became head of the office of Grenoble’s deputy mayor, Michel Destot, and in the early 2000′s worked as a marketing executive for France Telecom in emerging social and health applications. Elected to parliament in 2007, she is also chief executive officer of Sem Minatec Entreprises, the business incubator wing of Minatec, the renowned Grenoble innovation campus for nanotechnology and electronics, which has some 2400 researchers, 1200 students and 600 industrial staff.

Fioraso is one of 17 women among the 34 ministers nominated to the new government. This parity, promised by Hollande, is a first for France. The new government may undergo a reshuffle after the upcoming parliamentary elections, however, the first round of which will be held on 10 June with the final round being held on 17 June. For the full government line-up see the newspaper Le Monde’s summary.

Other links: Fioraso’s blog and page at the National Assembly.

Nature’s Q&A’s with Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande in the run up to the presidential election – “A question of science.”

Posted on behalf of Katherine Rowland

Orbiting high above the Earth inside the International Space Station, an astronaut issued a grim report card on the state of the planet yesterday, describing current levels of resource consumption as 50 percent higher than the world can sustainably maintain.

In a recorded message, Andre Kuipers of the European Space Agency offered a unique view of the planet he circles 16 times each day. “From up here I can see humanity’s footprint, including forest fires, air pollution and erosion,” he said, launching the World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report for 2012.

The biennial audit, produced in collaboration with the Zoological Society of London and the Global Footprint Network, projects that by 2030 humanity will require the equivalent of two planets to sustain current levels of population growth and resource depletion. “We are living as if we have an extra planet at our disposal,” writes Jim Leape, director general of WWF International, in the report. “We are using 50 percent more resources than the Earth can provide, and unless we change course that number will grow very fast.”

The report monitored ecosystem health by tracking 9,000 populations of more than 2,600 species of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish. The findings indicate that global biodiversity had decreased by nearly 30 percent since 1970, and by as much as 60 percent in the tropics.

According to the report, the precipitous losses in tropical regions point to a “potentially catastrophic” gap between the ecological footprint of rich and poor nations. By the study’s measures, if everyone on the planet lived like an average person in the United States, four Earths would be required to replenish the annual demand on natural resources. The United States ranks as the country with the fifth-largest per-capita resource footprint, trailing Qatar, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates and Denmark.

And the disparity between rich and poor nations has been increasing, according to the report’s footprint index, which evaluates resource consumption in relation to biocapacity, or the ability to renew resources and absorb CO₂ emissions.

This trend is driven by high-income countries subsidizing their economic growth on the backs of developing nations, says engineer Gemma Cranston, lead scientist at the Global Footprint Network in Geneva. She argues that the consumption demands of rich nations encourage poor countries to plunder their resource wealth for export.

The report – the eighth of its kind – comes five weeks before the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro. Cranston says policy makers will there have an opportunity to forge a new trajectory for economic growth. “High-income countries can help low-income countries set up systems that allow for gains in social wellbeing that don’t come at the expense of ecological harm.”

But Colin Butfield, head of campaigns at WWF UK, is doubtful the summit will result in the level of international commitment necessary to halt “the alarming momentum of environmental damage”. Despite the international conventions signed since the original Rio Summit in 1992, biodiversity losses and CO₂emissions have accelerated. “20 years on and the overall direction of travel has gotten worse,” he says. “And that direction is pretty terrifying.”

Members of Montenegro’s unofficial science academy, the Doclean Academy of Sciences and Arts (DANU), got a nasty surprise this week.

In March, the country’s parliament had mandated that DANU should merge with the official academy, the Montenegrin Academy of Science and Arts (CANU), in an effort to unite the country’s scientific potential. The two academies have historically been divided along political and ideological lines.

But on Monday 14 May, only five out of twenty-nine DANU members were elected to CANU — and even those only as associate and foreign members.

DANU was established in 1998 as part of the Montenegrin national renaissances that led to its independence from Serbia in 2006. CANU was set up in 1971, when Montenegro was one of the republics in former Yugoslavia.

CANU members have opposed the merger — which effectively forces them to admit verified DANU members to their academy — arguing that it undermines their autonomy from government. CANU challenged the law at the constitutional court, and also instituted a new procedure which puts members of DANU through a rigorous selection process instead of simply admitting them, as the law mandates.

Both DANU and the government’s science ministry have deemed this new procedure illegal, and this case is also being fought in the constitutional court. DANU members will probably have to wait for rulings from both of these cases to know whether or not they can join the country’s official academy.

“Decisions made at the CANU assembly on 14 May will not be valid, because their procedures do not call for verification of DANU members, but instead an election of new members,” Milena Milunović, an aide at the science ministry told Pobjeda newspaper earlier this month. The ministry declined to comment further until the court ruling is out.

DANU issued a statement calling CANU’s most recent decision “illegitimate and against the law”. Meanwhile, CANU spokesperson Marina Vukičević told Nature that the election of DANU members was done according to a procedure laid down in the new law, and not according to CANU’s disputed new procedure, and is therefore legitimate.

The UK government is not going to reinstate its R&D Scoreboard, which analysed the R&D investment by the country’s top 1,000 research-active businesses and investment by the top 1,000 global companies in the UK. The last edition was produced in November 2010, but earlier this year the government considered reviving the annual report. According to the Campaign for Science and Engineering (CaSE), this has now been ruled out.

The decision has been met with disappointment. Imran Khan , director of CaSE, wrote on his blog, “When we’re trying to increase private-sector investment it’s important that we can see whether the Government’s strategy is working or not … we’re both surprised and disappointed that they have confirmed they won’t be reversing a hastily-taken and short-sighted decision.”

The scoreboard provided information on innovation across a wide range of sectors and allowed to UK to be compared to other countries. It provided a definitive and accurate measure of the state of R&D; its figures were almost never revised.

CaSE claims budgetary concerns are the reason the Scoreboard has been binned. Announcing the end in 2010, science minister David Willets blamed “unprecedented financial pressures“. The report cost around £410,000 to produce each year.

The UK has several other methods of measuring what businesses spend on R&D, though none are as rigorous as the Scoreboard. The bi-annual UK Innovation Survey is based on voluntary responses from businesses with 10 or more employees. The Business Enterprise Research and Development and Gross Domestic Expenditure on Research and Development surveys (BERD and GERD) are based on the responses of 4,600 businesses, and are submitted to the EU and OECD for comparisons with other countries.

Watch where you put your hands, because Roger Newport of the University of Nottingham knows how to fool a brain into thinking they have vanished. This sleight of mind is so compelling that it has officially been crowned the best illusion in the world.

“The illusions this year were particularly spectacular”, says Stephen Macknik, judge moderator for the 8thAnnual Best Illusion of the Year contest, which took place at the annual meeting of the Vision Sciences Society in Florida yesterday. The 10 best illusions from 59 entries were unveiled in a concert hall packed with vision scientists from across the globe, who voted for the final winners.