INSIGHTS

Meeting of the minds: Send your stories THE PATH FROM Gila monster venom to

the diabetes medication Exenatide runs through an American Diabetes Association meeting in 1996. There, Department of Veterans Affairs researcher, endocrinologist, and Golden Goose Award winner Dr. John Eng presented results on how a compound in Gila monster venom affects insulin production, catching the attention of a small biotechnology company, Amylin Pharmaceuticals. After receiving U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval in 2005, the resulting drug Exenatide is now used by millions of people to manage Type 2 diabetes. The story of Dr. Eng and Amylin is just one of many—spanning all science and technology disciplines—that exemplify the important role of conferences in advancing science, developing the next generation of scientific talent, and bringing new technologies and potential cures to the benefit of society. In 2012, the White House Office of Management and Budget instituted new government-wide regulations (1) that substantially cut spending on conference participation and travel and require the senior leadership to review agency-wide conference costs that exceed $100,000, with more stringent requirements for costs in excess of $500,000. At current prices for travel and lodging, this would cover the cost of only a few hundred attendees, whereas the Departments of Defense and Energy each employ over 100,000 scientists and engineers either directly or as contractors. The U.S. Congress has further limited travel to international conferences to 50 employees per agency for most agencies. In response, federal agencies have developed costly tracking and approval systems, and approvals now often require more than a dozen signatures. Under these new restrictive regulations, members of the scientific community employed by federal agencies have been subject to approval processes that have ballooned from weeks to as much as 9 months, and some scientists and engineers are now choosing not to request travel at all. The Government Accountability Office (2) and White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (3) have shown that 148

community, not fancy junkets. So today, we and our colleagues are reaching out to ask for your help. Tell us about a collaboration that started at a conference and led to an exciting new discovery, or how an interaction at a conference was critical to your career as a young scientist or engineer. Because current regulations affect federal employees and contractors most, we especially encourage stories that involve collaborations with colleagues at national labs or research institutes. Submit your experiences at www.aaas.org/yourstory (5).

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Edited by Jennifer Sills

this has led to reductions in conference participation among these colleagues, to the detriment of science as a whole. This is why we and our colleagues in the science and technology community recently wrote a letter to the U.S. Congress expressing our deep concerns about the stifling impacts of these policies on science and engineering, and encouraging them to act (4). The letter was signed by more than 100 organizations and institutions that collectively represent and support millions of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians. We hear from policy-makers in Congress and regulators at federal agencies that current problems stem, in part, from a lack of understanding of why scientific and technical conferences are important parts of the work of each and every member of our

James F. Albaugh,1* Joseph R. Haywood,2 James A. Jefferies,3 Toyohiko Yatagai4 1

President, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Reston, VA 20191, USA. 2President, Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, Bethesda, MD 20814, USA. 3President,

ONLINE BUZZ

Recommending women

I

n her Editorial “Give women an even chance” (8 May, p. 611), Marcia McNutt urges those writing recommendations to search their letters for biased descriptions of women, such as “nice,” “humble,” and “able to balance research and parenthood.” In the comments section, some readers lauded McNutt’s warnings, whereas others felt they were misguided. Excerpts from their comments are below. Read the full comments, and add your own, at http://comments. sciencemag.org/content/10.1126/science.aac4767. A selection of your thoughts: …It is so striking how the expectations for women differ from those for men, and can so easily place them at a disadvantage in the science career pipeline. Mary Ann McCabe

…Thank you for pointing out that this bias is held equally by women and men. We can hardly expect men to understand the importance of shedding this bias if women do not. Lorraine Albritton …it would be a simple thing to translate “nice,” for example, to more grant-relevant language such as “is a good mentor in the lab, finds the time to assist others, and elevates the work of those around her.” Amanda Siegel …we should acknowledge that bias cuts both ways. An overemphasis on brilliance, creativity, hard work, insightfulness, and leadership, at the expense of humility, kindness, and friendliness, will select for a distinct personality in the next generation of scientists (a personality that I’m not certain I would want to associate with)…. Felix Vajdos …It is unrealistic to expect referees to write unbiased letters of recommendation. It is up to committees to use such letters carefully. Maria Hötzel

sciencemag.org SCIENCE

10 JULY 2015 • VOL 349 ISSUE 6244

Published by AAAS

PHOTO: © LEONARDO PATRIZI/ISTOCKPHOTO.COM

LET TERS

IEEE-USA, Washington, DC 20036, USA. 4President, SPIE, Bellingham, WA 98227-0010, USA. *Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]

1 Department of Physics, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR 72701, USA. 2CMPMS Department, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY 119735000, USA.

*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected] REFERENCES AND NOTES

1. Executive Office of the President, Office of Management and Budget M-12-12, “Promoting Efficient Spending to Support Agency Operations” (www.whitehouse.gov/sites/ default/files/omb/memoranda/2012/m-12-12.pdf). 2. U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Defense science and technology: Further DOD and DOE actions needed to provide timely conference decisions and analyze risks from changes in participation,” GAO Highlights (2015); www.gao.gov/assets/670/668845.pdf. 3. L. Rein, “How the federal travel crackdown hits scientists especially hard,” Washington Post, 25 March 2015; www.washingtonpost. com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2015/03/25/ the-white-house-asked-federal-scientists-how-bad-itscrackdown-on-travel-is-the-answer-bad/. 4. Letter to Senate Appropriations Committee (www.aaas. org/sites/default/files/SApprops%20S%26T%20 Conference%20Travel%20Letter.pdf). 5. AAAS, publisher of Science, led the above-referenced letter to the U.S. Congress and is also hosting the story collection.

Reviewing Einstein THE NEWS ARTICLE “Einstein eschews

peer review” (E. Conover, special issue on General Relativity, 6 March, p. 1092) told the story of Einstein’s withdrawal of a paper from the Physical Review in 1936 after he received a critical anonymous review. As an update to the story recently noted (1), one of us (D.K.) has written extensively on the subject. Here, we provide more information about how Howard Percy Robertson was identified. As of the mid-1990s, the editors of the Physical Review did not have records old enough to provide information about the referee’s identity. Einstein himself provided a clue: He acknowledged the helpful advice of Robertson in the published version of the paper. Robertson’s documents at the Caltech archive (2) include a letter written by Robertson to John T. Tate Sr., the theneditor of Physical Review, which strongly suggested that Robertson was the referee (though naturally, Robertson did not reveal as much to Einstein). In 2005, M.B., then editor-in-chief of the American Physical Society, realized the significance for Einstein scholars of a recently discovered early log book of the Physical Review. The log book included records on all papers submitted to the journal in the 1930s, including confirmation that Robertson was the referee of Einstein and Rosen’s 1936 submission. The information could be made public because, after 69 years, none of those involved were still living. New materials have since been deposited in Robertson’s Caltech archive, including the entire exchange between Robertson and Tate (2, 3). Daniel Kennefick1* and Martin Blume2

REFERENCES AND NOTES

1. The update states, “Research by Daniel Kennefick of the University of Arkansas uncovered the historical events detailed in this anecdote. You can read the whole story in his article in the September 2005 issue of Physics Today http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/ physicstoday/article/58/9/10.1063/1.2117822 2. H. P. Robertson papers, Caltech archives, box 7, folders 12 and 13; finding aid available at www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ ark:/13030/kt3s2026qn/dsc/#c02-1.2.10.2.2. 3. D. Kennefick, Traveling at the Speed of Thought: Einstein and the Quest for Gravitational Waves (Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, NJ, 2007).

TECHNICAL COMMENT ABSTRACTS Comment on “Asymmetric syntheses of sceptrin and massadine and evidence for biosynthetic enantiodivergence” David H. Sherman, Sachiko Tsukamoto, Robert M. Williams

Ma et al. (Reports, 10 October 2014, p. 219) report asymmetric syntheses of sceptrin and massadine and, through a stereochemical reassignment, claim to “uncover enantiodivergence as a new biosynthetic paradigm for natural products.” We challenge and clarify this claim with relevant examples from the literature of this well-known phenomenon of enantiodivergent congener biosynthesis within the same producing organism. Full text at http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science. aaa9349

Response to Comment on “Asymmetric syntheses of sceptrin and massadine and evidence for biosynthetic enantiodivergence” Zhiqiang Ma, Xiaolei Wang, Xiao Wang, Rodrigo A. Rodriguez, Curtis E. Moore, Shuanhu Gao, Xianghui Tan, Yuyong Ma, Arnold L. Rheingold, Phil S. Baran, Chuo Chen

Sherman et al. commented on the precedence of enantiodivergence, listing a number of congeneric natural products with opposite chirality. However, these “congeners” are not derived from enantiodivergent biosyntheses. Instead, they are antipodes arising from separate enantiomeric biosyntheses. A distinct feature of the biosynthesis of the cyclic pyrrole-imidazole dimers is the production of antipodal congeners without the corresponding enantiomers. Full text at http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science. aaa9626

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