The Koyal Group InfoMag: Nobel winners
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<strong>Nobel</strong> <strong>winners</strong> for discoveries on cellular vesicle transport speak<br />
out at ASCB in New Orleans, <strong>The</strong> <strong>Koyal</strong> <strong>Group</strong> <strong>InfoMag</strong><br />
Sciencecodex.com<br />
NEW ORLEANS, LA—DECEMBER 12, 2013—<strong>The</strong>y are coming to New Orleans to talk science with their<br />
fellow members of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) on Monday, December 16, but the ASCB<br />
<strong>winners</strong> of the 2013 <strong>Nobel</strong> Prize in Medicine, Randy Schekman, PhD, and James Rothman, PhD, are<br />
speaking out on controversial issues they believe threaten American science and American society.<br />
On Saturday in Stockholm, Rothman of Yale University closed his <strong>Nobel</strong> lecture with a warning that<br />
"brutal cuts" in federal research funding are destroying American competitiveness in science. On Tuesday<br />
in an opinion column published in the British newspaper, <strong>The</strong> Guardian, Schekman of the University of<br />
California, Berkeley, said that the world's three leading scientific journals—Cell, Nature, and Science—are<br />
warping science for their own commercial purposes. Calling them "luxury" journals, Schekman wrote,<br />
"<strong>The</strong>se journals aggressively curate their brands, in ways more conducive to selling subscriptions than to<br />
stimulating the most important research."<br />
Longtime ASCB members, Schekman and Rothman won the 2013 <strong>Nobel</strong> Prize in Physiology or Medicine<br />
for their discoveries of how molecules move through the cell in vesicles and fuse to target membranes in<br />
a process known as "trafficking." Schekman who was ASCB President in 1999 and Rothman who has been<br />
an ASCB member since 1982 will share their joint prize of roughly $1.2 million US with Thomas Südhof of<br />
Stanford University for their work on the machinery regulating vesicles in the cell as they move along<br />
cytoskeletal roadways, delivering cargoes to different parts of the cell. This basic work was a huge boost<br />
for researchers studying conditions such as diabetes and neurodegeneration.<br />
Both men are concerned that the work for which they won their <strong>Nobel</strong>s would be much more difficult in<br />
the future because of an climate of budget cutbacks and branded scientific publications. Schekman has<br />
been particularly critical of "journal impact factors" or JIFs, a statistical measure of how often a journal is<br />
cited in other papers, as "a deeply flawed measure" that is damaging scientific integrity. JIFs have become<br />
the widely accepted measure for scientific hiring, advancement, and funding, Schekman wrote, despite<br />
their well-known flaws.<br />
<strong>The</strong> JIF became a major issue at last year's ASCB Annual Meeting when a group of scientists and journal<br />
editors drew up the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), calling for scientists to<br />
turn their backs on JIFs and find new measures of individual research value. This week, just six months<br />
after the DORA petition was first posted publicly, the number of scientists and scholars including many<br />
from the social sciences and the humanities who have signed DORA passed the 10,000 signature mark. An<br />
additional 423 scientific and scholarly organizations have also signed. Schekman, a former president of<br />
the ASCB and an early DORA supporter, is expected to expand on the DORA premise in his address to the<br />
cell biologists on Monday night.<br />
"When we first talked about the ideas that became DORA last year in San Francisco, none of us thought<br />
that it would explode like this," said Stefano Bertuzzi, the Executive Director of the ASCB. "As cell<br />
biologists, we thought it was our issue but now the 10,000 plus signatures for DORA so far prove that JIFs<br />
are seen as serious threat in many fields of science and scholarship. This is not just egghead, ivory tower<br />
stuff. What comes out of our labs and our universities is the power that drives our future economy.<br />
Research will make or break our future health. DORA is not about footnotes. It's about keeping research<br />
honest and vital."
Bertuzzi continued, "<strong>The</strong> ASCB is delighted to have two of our own—Randy and Jim—coming from<br />
Stockholm to New Orleans to use their new fame to stand up for critical issues like budget cuts and<br />
DORA."<br />
In his <strong>Nobel</strong> lecture last Saturday, Rothman of Yale University pointed out that the science of<br />
biochemistry which undergirded his <strong>Nobel</strong>-winning research on how cells package and deliver vital<br />
secretions such as insulin was developed around the turn of the last century in Germany. <strong>The</strong> Nazis<br />
destroyed that scientific culture in a matter of years, driving many of the best biochemists to the U.S.<br />
where it took root and blossomed, Rothman said. It gave the US an unquestioned scientific leadership<br />
form World War II to recent. "Now that culture stands deeply threatened by brutal cuts in support for<br />
basic research," Rothman said. "And it can go away."<br />
Both Schekman and Rothman are longtime members of the ASCB, the world's largest society of cell<br />
science researchers whose basic discoveries have driven advances in modern medicine and<br />
pharmacology. <strong>The</strong>y will address many of the 6,000 attendees at the ASCB Annual Meeting at a special<br />
<strong>Nobel</strong> session in the Great Hall of the New Orleans Morial Convention Center at 6:00 pm CST, on Monday<br />
night.