Cloud Hosting

NIH Director Francis Collins Announces Plans to Step Down

Francis Collins announced on Oct. 5 that he will resign as director of the National Institutes of Health by the end of the year and return to his laboratory at NIHs National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). President Obama originally picked Collins as director in 2009 and, after being retained by Presidents Trump and Biden, he now ranks among the longest-serving science agency heads of the last half-century. During his tenure, Congress increased NIHs budget from $30 billion to $43billion and the agency launched a number of major research initiatives, including the BRAIN Initiative to study how the brain functions, the All Of Us Research Program to gather health data from a million-person cohort, and the Cancer Moonshot that Biden spearheaded when he was vice president. Previously, as NHGRI director from 1993 to 2008, Collins oversaw federally funded work on the Human Genome Project, which led President Bush to award him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007.

Most recently, Collins led NIHs response to the COVID-19 pandemic and developed plans for a new Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. In addition, he has overseen efforts to expand the diversity of the researchers NIH funds, crack down on sexual harassment at NIH-funded institutions, and uncover researchers who have not properly disclosed connections to foreign institutions, leading dozens to resign or be fired. According to the Washington Post, Collins considered resigning last year when Trump contravened researchers views on COVID-19. In a statement last week, Collins said heis stepping aside now in the belief that no single person should serve in the position too long. Calling Collins one of the most important scientists of our time, Biden remarked in his own statement, I will miss the counsel, expertise, and good humor of a brilliant mind and dear friend.

At a House Science Committee hearing last week, National Science Foundation Inspector General Allison Lerner stated that suspected cases of undue foreign influence on NSF grantees now comprise 63% of her offices investigative portfolio. Lerner said the workload growth began in late 2017 after her office became aware of issues associated with grantees participating in talent recruitment programs sponsored by foreign entities. In her written testimony, Lerner indicated that as of this August NSF had recovered $7.9 million in grant funds after taking action against 23 grantees. According to reporting by the journal Science, all but one of the cases involved researchers with ties to China, and based on the offices overall caseload, it perhaps has around 80 active investigations related to foreign influence. NSF Chief of Research Security Strategy and Policy Rebecca Spyke Keiser stated this summer that another reason for the increase is that around 2016 the Chinese government began allowing participants in its talent recruitment programs to participate on a part-time rather than full-time basis, remarking, That was when we also saw many of these programs start to not be disclosed and an uptick in number of people subscribing to the programs. Lerner testified that her office has become overwhelmed by allegations of grantee wrongdoing that it has received from NSF, from academic institutions, and from other law enforcement entities. She suggested that a doubling of her offices current investigative staff of 20 is warranted to handle the caseload.

On Oct. 7, the Central Intelligence Agency announced it has formed a Transnational and Technology Mission Center focused on new and emerging technologies, economic security, climate change, and global health. In addition, it has created a chief technology officer position and launched a Technology Fellows program that will bring outside experts into the CIA for one-to-two-year terms. The moves build on CIAs creation of a federal laboratory last year and a digital innovation directorate in 2015. Alongside the new technology center, the agency has also created a China Mission Center that will unify its activities related to the country. In a statement, CIA Director William Burns said the center will strengthen our collective work on the most important geopolitical threat we face in the 21st Century, an increasingly adversarial Chinese government.

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy held a summit on Oct. 5 on quantum industry and society with representatives of more than 20 companies developing quantum technologies. Participantsincluded Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, IBM, Intel, Honeywell, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, HRL, and Goldman Sachs, as well as a number of smaller companies focused specifically on quantum technology. In conjunction with the event, OSTP released an interagency report that highlights how foreign nationals comprise about half of U.S. university graduates in fields related to quantum information science and technology (QIST). The report states there is currently significant unmet demand for talent at all levels of the QIST workforce and notes long lead times are required to expand the domestic workforce in these fields. Accordingly, it calls for efforts to better attract and retain foreign-born talent while simultaneously expanding the domestic workforce. The summit is the latest in a series OSTP has held in recent years on QIST.

Last week, the interagency National Science and Technology Council released a blueprint for a national strategic computing reserve that would be tapped into during emergencies. The concept is motivated in large part by lessons learned from the COVID-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium, which was stood up to provide pandemic researchers with priority access to federal and non-federal supercomputing resources. Noting that the ad hoc creation of the consortium diverted resources from existing research projects and significantly increased the workloads of the personnel involved, the blueprint outlines structures needed to ensure computing resources and expertise can be rapidly mobilized while minimizing disruptions to the broader research ecosystem. It recommends establishing a program office that would develop partnerships with resource providers and coordinate the allocation of resources to users. The office would also determine specific activation criteria for future crises and coordinate annual training exercises to demonstrate readiness for a variety of potential disasters. The blueprint estimates the office would require an annual budget of $2 million and that the necessary cyberinfrastructure platform for allocating resources would require an additional $2 million per year. It also indicates federal agencies would have to expand their existing computing capacity, suggesting that 20% of additional resource capacity in the steady state is necessary to ensure adequate resources for future emergencies.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology released a report last week analyzing causes of an incident in February in which the agencys research reactor released radiation into the surrounding facility. Several workers received elevated radiation doses as a result of the incident, albeit within regulatory limits, and the reactor has been shut down since then, depriving researchers of a facility that supports almost half of U.S.-based neutron-scattering research. According to NISTs analysis, reactor operators did not fully secure one of the reactors 30 fuel elements during a routine refueling operation and then failed to properly perform follow-up checks. NIST traces the errors to the departure of personnel who had long experience with refueling the reactor and to deficiencies in refueling procedures and the training of new operators that were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. A triennial National Academies review of the reactor facility in 2018 did not identify increased staff turnover as a risk for the reactor facility. The next such review is currently underway. NIST cannot restart the reactor until the Nuclear Regulatory Commission completes its own review of the incident and NISTs corrective actions.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory announced last week that the proposed upgrade to itsMatter in Extreme Conditions instrument has received approval from the Department of Energy to begin preliminary design work, a milestone known as Critical Decision 1. The upgrade involves building a new underground cavern that will couple the X-ray laser beam from SLACs Linac Coherent Light Source-II with a short-pulse petawatt laser as well as a second, lower-energy long-pulse laser, enabling study of new regimes of hot dense plasmas. DOE initiated the project in response to a 2017 National Academies report that spotlighted how the U.S. lags internationally in capabilities for laser research at the highest powers currently achievable. As of this spring, the estimated cost range for the upgrade was $234 million to $372 million with a target of completing the project by 2028. SLAC is pursuing the project in partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Lab and the University of Rochesters Laboratory for Laser Energetics.

The White House announced federal agencies release of23climate change adaptation plans last week that respond to a Jan. 27 executive order by President Biden. Preparedness actions identified in the plans primarily revolve around protecting federal facilities and activities, with some agencies also outlining research and services aimed at mitigating climate change impacts. For instance, the Department of Energys plan states that over the next year all department sites will conduct climate vulnerability assessments, and it outlines departmental efforts to provide climate-adaptation tools anddevelop climate-resilient technologies. The Commerce Departments plan outlines activities such as the provision of climate information by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the development of forward-looking building standards by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The Department of the Interiors plan focuses on efforts across agencies to examine threats, such as those related to wildfire and water supplies, and to develop climate-sensitive resource management strategies.

Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann, and Giorgio Parisi were jointly awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences last week for their work on complex systems. Half of the award was given to Manabe and Hasselmann for the physical modelling of Earths climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming, marking the first time the physics prize has gone to advances in climate science. Working at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in the 1960s, Manabe developed a numerical model of energy in the atmosphere that enabled sound quantitative predictions of future warming. A decade later, at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany, Hasselmann created a stochastic climate model that added fluctuations due to weather, paving the way for the attribution of weather events to climate change. The other half of the prize was awarded for Parisis mathematical solution to the spin-glass problem, which bears on the complex organization of magnetic spins in certain materials but has also found applications in fields such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and biology.

Read more:

The Week of October 11, 2021 - FYI: Science Policy News