Obama budget seeks big boost for science

Europe seeks to double research budget

'This increase is not in any way disproportionate in the context of the 3 per cent objective requested of all member states by 2010,' says research commissioner Philippe Busquin. To achieve it he stresses the necessity of increasing research investment by private companies to the equivalent of 2 per cent of GDP and national public research budget increases up to 1 per cent of GDP. 'We expect to...

EU research budget boost

flee abroad, while none from outside Italy can penetrate the system. After various reforms and several rounds of decentralisation followed by recentralisation, the whole process may have to be reconstructed from scratch. " A recent bill passed last year intends to [...] promote meritocracy, " Calef adds, " but it is not very clear whether it can succeed. " This is a particularly sensitive area,...

Bush administration issued, and Obama administration seeks to rescind, 'conscience clause' regulation.

Obama's science boost

From the outset of his bid for the presidency, Barack Obama has promised to make sweeping changes in the areas of energy, science, and climate change; but few could have predicted a year ago how quickly these commitments would be realized and at what scale. By signing the economic stimulus package into law earlier this month, however, the new president has authorized enormous cash infusions int...

Big science, little science.

In the USA, where I live and work, it is well known that I have little love for structural genomics—the attempt to determine the structures of most or all of the proteins in an organism by some combination of high-throughput X-ray crystallo graphy, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and homology modelling. My reasons are a matter of public record: structural genomics is based on an assumpt...