NPG.Nature.Volume.437.Issue.7060.October.2005.Ebook tAO

Volume 437 Number 7060 pp789-926
In this issue (6 October 2005)

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Editorials
Research Highlights
News
News Features
Business
Correspondence

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Books and Arts
Essay
News and Views
Brief Communications
Articles
Letters
Naturejobs
Futures

Editorials
Reaching for the Moon p789
Naive or not, NASA's next shot at landing on the Moon can succeed only if it is launched as a genuinely
international collaboration.
In need of rehab p789

The reputation of one of the world's most respected regulatory agencies is on the wane.
Welcome N a t u r e Ph ysics p790
The launch of a new Nature journal comes at an exciting time for physics.
Research Highlights
Research highlights p792
News
The 1918 flu virus is resurrected p794
The recreation of one of the deadliest diseases known could help us to prevent another pandemic. Or it
might trigger one, say critics. Andreas von Bubnoff investigates whether the benefits outweigh the risks.
Sidelines p796
Japan jumps towards personalized medicine p796
Desktop-device uses advanced DNA chip to analyse patient's blood.
David Cyranoski
Q marks the spot as ancient sculptures yield their origins p797
Hopes raised that discovery will save Mayan site from local destruction.
Alexandra Witze
Electric current captures top sperm p799
Technique leads to birth of healthy baby after other methods fail.
Carina Dennis
Australia mooted as dump for world's nuclear waste p799

Former prime minister suggests uranium by-products could subsidize environmental projects.
Carina Dennis
Physics prize puts spotlight on optics p800
Understanding quantum nature of light led to breakthroughs.
Jim Giles
California prepares to roll out stem-cell funding p800
Cash may soon be flowing despite legal challenges.
Rex Dalton
Gut feeling secures medical Nobel for Australian doctors p801
Microbiologists win for proving link between bacteria and stomach ulcers.
Alison Abbott
News in brief p802
News in Brief: Correction p803
News in Brief: Clarification p803

I

News Features
Ornithology: Flight of the navigators p804
The Arctic is a unique testing ground for studying how birds navigate long distances. Jane Qiu catches

up with an expedition to unravel the signals that help birds on their migrations.
American Chemical Society: Chemical reaction p807
The friction that arises when a scientific society aims both to serve its members and stay commercially
competitive is generating heat within the American Chemical Society. Emma Marris takes the society's
temperature.
Fetal-cell therapy: Paper chase p810
Thousands of patients are queueing to be treated by Hongyun Huang at his Beijing clinic. But no Western
journal editor seems willing to publish his research. David Cyranoski talks to the neurosurgeon whose
global reputation among the ailing hasn't swayed his peers.
Business
Innovation endgame p813
The commercial practices of some universities are quietly being transformed by an international chess
grandmaster, as Jim Giles reports.
Correspondence
Media should campaign on the basis of facts p814
Robert May
No evidence for Croatian race claims p814
Dragan Primorac
Katrina: don't blame the Bush administration p814
Stephen F. Larner

Katrina revealed need for reform. Let's not forget it p814
Alison Chaiken
Books and Arts
A secular religion p815
Should evolutionism be viewed as a modified descendant of Christianity?
John Hedley Brooke reviews The Evolution−Creation Struggle by Michael Ruse
The rise of the computer p816
Anthony Ralston reviews Electronic Brains: Stories from the Dawn of the Computer Age by Mike Hally
Exhibition: Lighting up the background p817
A philosopher's vision p817
Richard L. Gregory reviews Action in Perception by Alva Noë
Essay
A quantum recipe for life p819
Sixty years on, Erwin Schrödinger's prediction that quantum mechanics would solve the riddle of how life
started has not been fulfilled. But the appeal of using quantum theory to solve the mystery persists.
Paul Davies
News and Views
Microbiology: Loading the type III cannon p821
Many pathogenic bacteria possess a secretion machine that shoots noxious proteins into host cells. But
the ammunition is larger than the bore of the bacterial gun, so how is it fed into the machine?

Bill Blaylock and Olaf Schneewind
Astrophysics: Short-burst sources p822
Measurements of the X-ray afterglow of long -ray bursts largely clarified the origin of these bright
flashes of cosmic radiation. Their shorter-lived siblings are now beginning to divulge their secrets,
too.
Luigi Piro
Microbiology: Conspirators in blight p823
A fungus and a bacterium have been found in a symbiotic alliance that attacks rice plants. Rice feeds
more people than any other crop, but the significance of this finding extends beyond its potential
agricultural use.
Ian R. Sanders
50 & 100 years ago p824
Condensed-matter physics: Melted by mistakes p824
Two-dimensional polymers are potentially useful structures — if we could only understand their properties.
Observations of one polymer's intricate, two-stage, melting transition may help us do just that.
Edward J. Kramer
II

Ecology: Stars beneath the waves p826
David W. Sims

Palaeobiology: Sea change in sediments p826
Earth's oxygen levels increased slowly over a long and ill-defined transitional period around two billion
years ago. A microbial 'footprint' from this era provides biological evidence to complement existing
geological data.
David J. Des Marais
Obituary: Hermann Bondi (1919−2005) p828
Mathematician, cosmologist and public servant.
Leon Mestel
Brief Communications
Entomology: Asian honeybees parasitize the future dead p829
When a queen dies, unrelated workers seize the chance to move into her nest and lay their own eggs.
Piyamas Nanork, Jürgen Paar, Nadine C. Chapman, Siriwat Wongsiri and Benjamin P. Oldroyd
Seismology: Dynamic triggering of earthquakes p830
Joan Gomberg and Paul Johnson
Articles
Structure of the CED-4−CED-9 complex provides insights into programmed cell death in
Ca e n or h a bdit is e le ga n s p831
Nieng Yan, Jijie Chai, Eui Seung Lee, Lichuan Gu, Qun Liu, Jiaqing He, Jia-Wei Wu, David Kokel, Huilin
Li, Quan Hao, Ding Xue and Yigong Shi
Structural insight into antibiotic fosfomycin biosynthesis by a mononuclear iron enzyme

p838
Luke J. Higgins, Feng Yan, Pinghua Liu, Hung-wen Liu and Catherine L. Drennan
The afterglow of GRB 050709 and the nature of the short-hard
-ray bursts p845
D. B. Fox, D. A. Frail, P. A. Price, S. R. Kulkarni, E. Berger, T. Piran, A. M. Soderberg, S. B. Cenko,
P. B. Cameron, A. Gal-Yam, M. M. Kasliwal, D.-S. Moon, F. A. Harrison, E. Nakar, B. P. Schmidt, B. Penprase,
R. A. Chevalier, P. Kumar, K. Roth, D. Watson, B. L. Lee, S. Shectman, M. M. Phillips, M. Roth, P. J.
McCarthy, M. Rauch, L. Cowie, B. A. Peterson, J. Rich, N. Kawai, K. Aoki, G. Kosugi, T. Totani, H.-S.
Park, A. MacFadyen and K. C. Hurley
Letters
A short
-ray burst apparently associated with an elliptical galaxy at redshift z = 0.225
p851
N. Gehrels, C. L. Sarazin, P. T. O'Brien, B. Zhang, L. Barbier, S. D. Barthelmy, A. Blustin, D. N. Burrows,
J. Cannizzo, J. R. Cummings, M. Goad, S. T. Holland, C. P. Hurkett, J. A. Kennea, A. Levan, C. B. Markwardt,
K. O. Mason, P. Meszaros, M. Page, D. M. Palmer, E. Rol, T. Sakamoto, R. Willingale, L. Angelini, A.
Beardmore, P. T. Boyd, A. Breeveld, S. Campana, M. M. Chester, G. Chincarini, L. R. Cominsky, G. Cusumano,
M. de Pasquale, E. E. Fenimore, P. Giommi, C. Gronwall, D. Grupe, J. E. Hill, D. Hinshaw, J. Hjorth, D.
Hullinger, K. C. Hurley, S. Klose, S. Kobayashi, C. Kouveliotou, H. A. Krimm, V. Mangano, F. E. Marshall,
K. McGowan, A. Moretti, R. F. Mushotzky, K. Nakazawa, J. P. Norris, J. A. Nousek, J. P. Osborne, K. Page,

A. M. Parsons, S. Patel, M. Perri, T. Poole, P. Romano, P. W. A. Roming, S. Rosen, G. Sato, P. Schady,
A. P. Smale, J. Sollerman, R. Starling, M. Still, M. Suzuki, G. Tagliaferri, T. Takahashi, M. Tashiro,
J. Tueller, A. A. Wells, N. E. White and R. A. M. J. Wijers
Discovery of the short -ray burst GRB 050709 p855
J. S. Villasenor, D. Q. Lamb, G. R. Ricker, J.-L. Atteia, N. Kawai, N. Butler, Y. Nakagawa, J. G. Jernigan,
M. Boer, G. B. Crew, T. Q. Donaghy, J. Doty, E. E. Fenimore, M. Galassi, C. Graziani, K. Hurley, A. Levine,
F. Martel, M. Matsuoka, J.-F. Olive, G. Prigozhin, T. Sakamoto, Y. Shirasaki, M. Suzuki, T. Tamagawa,
R. Vanderspek, S. E. Woosley, A. Yoshida, J. Braga, R. Manchanda, G. Pizzichini, K. Takagishi and M.
Yamauchi
The optical afterglow of the short -ray burst GRB 050709 p859
Jens Hjorth, Darach Watson, Johan P. U. Fynbo, Paul A. Price, Brian L. Jensen, Uffe G. Jørgensen, Daniel
Kubas, Javier Gorosabel, Páll Jakobsson, Jesper Sollerman, Kristian Pedersen and Chryssa Kouveliotou
Microscopic artificial swimmers p862
Rémi Dreyfus, Jean Baudry, Marcus L. Roper, Marc Fermigier, Howard A. Stone and Jérôme Bibette
Biomarker evidence for green and purple sulphur bacteria in a stratified Palaeoproterozoic
sea p866
Jochen J. Brocks, Gordon D. Love, Roger E. Summons, Andrew H. Knoll, Graham A. Logan and Stephen A. Bowden
Nonlinear dynamics, granular media and dynamic earthquake triggering p871
Paul A. Johnson and Xiaoping Jia

III

Pterosaur diversity and faunal turnover in Cretaceous terrestrial ecosystems in China
p875
Xiaolin Wang, Alexander W. A. Kellner, Zhonghe Zhou and Diogenes de Almeida Campos
Trophic cascades across ecosystems p880
Tiffany M. Knight, Michael W. McCoy, Jonathan M. Chase, Krista A. McCoy and Robert D. Holt
Pathogenic fungus harbours endosymbiotic bacteria for toxin production p884
Laila P. Partida-Martinez and Christian Hertweck
Characterization of the 1918 influenza virus polymerase genes p889
Jeffery K. Taubenberger, Ann H. Reid, Raina M. Lourens, Ruixue Wang, Guozhong Jin and Thomas G. Fanning
I n vivo analysis of quiescent adult neural stem cells responding to Sonic hedgehog p894
Sohyun Ahn and Alexandra L. Joyner
Sex-specific peptides from exocrine glands stimulate mouse vomeronasal sensory
neurons p898
Hiroko Kimoto, Sachiko Haga, Koji Sato and Kazushige Touhara
STIM1 is a Ca2+ sensor that activates CRAC channels and migrates from the Ca2+ store to
the plasma membrane p902
Shenyuan L. Zhang, Ying Yu, Jack Roos, J. Ashot Kozak, Thomas J. Deerinck, Mark H. Ellisman, Kenneth A.
Stauderman and Michael D. Cahalan

Apolipoprotein-mediated pathways of lipid antigen presentation p906
Peter van den Elzen, Salil Garg, Luis León, Manfred Brigl, Elizabeth A. Leadbetter, Jenny E. Gumperz,
Chris C. Dascher, Tan-Yun Cheng, Frank M. Sacks, Petr A. Illarionov, Gurdyal S. Besra, Sally C. Kent,
D. Branch Moody and Michael B. Brenner
Chaperone release and unfolding of substrates in type III secretion p911
Yukihiro Akeda and Jorge E. Galán
Direct observation of steps in rotation of the bacterial flagellar motor p916
Yoshiyuki Sowa, Alexander D. Rowe, Mark C. Leake, Toshiharu Yakushi, Michio Homma, Akihiko Ishijima
and Richard M. Berry
Erratum: Deficiency of glu t a r e dox in 5 reveals Fe−S clusters are required for vertebrate
haem synthesis p920
Rebecca A. Wingert, Jenna L. Galloway, Bruce Barut, Helen Foott, Paula Fraenkel, Jennifer L. Axe, Gerhard
J. Weber, Kimberly Dooley, Alan J. Davidson, Bettina Schmid, Barry H. Paw, George C. Shaw, Paul Kingsley,
James Palis, Heidi Schubert, Opal Chen, Jerry Kaplan, The Tübingen 2000 Screen Consortium and Leonard
I. Zon
Naturejobs
Prospect
Out in the cold p921
Despite some programmes, minorities in US science remain under-represented
Paul Smaglik
Postdocs and Students
To do today p922
Moving research quickly forward to publication tops the pre-tenure 'to do' list. Kendall Powell ticks
off project management tips.
Kendall Powell
Career Views
Geoffrey West, president, Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico p924
Theoretical physicist aims to create ideal interdisciplinary environment
Virginia Gewin
Recruiters & Academia p924
Multitasking can lead to alternative career paths
Santa Jeremy Ono
Graduate Journal: A time to reconnect p924
Taking a break, setting priorities
Tobias Langenhan
Futures
Sandcastles: a dystopia p926
Caught up in a storm.
Kathryn Cramer

IV

Vol 437 | Issue no. 7060 | 6 October 2005

www.nature.com/nature

Reaching for the Moon
Naive or not, NASA’s next shot at landing on the Moon can succeed only if it is launched as a genuinely
international collaboration.
n 2018, according to a timetable announced last month, the
United States will send astronauts to the Moon for the first time
since 1972. Four people would stay on the lunar surface for up to
a week, having arrived in a new lander attached to a new crew transport launched by rockets derived from the space shuttle. Eventually
they would live for six months at a time in Antarctica-style outposts.
The estimated price tag to develop all this new hardware is $104
billion between now and the first landing. Or rather, the seventh
lunar landing as NASA likes to call it, to emphasize continuity with
the past. The goal this time is not just flags and footprints, not just
beating the Russians, but the beginning of humanity’s permanent
expansion into the Solar System. To even talk in such terms implies
a particular view of human progress that some find inspiring and
others dismiss as almost childish. In a time of war, hurricanes and
soaring energy prices, is shooting for the Moon optimism or hubris?
Either way, NASA seems to be set on this particular course.
Given that public opinion is divided on the subject, and that there’s
no real rush to return to the Moon, the space agency has a responsibility to execute the idea with as little waste as possible. That will
require a major change of tack at NASA, as well as bold new
approaches to both domestic and international politics.
On the domestic front, Congress needs to back off from the
parochial meddling that has long contributed to NASA’s inefficiency.
Senators from Texas and Florida, where key NASA centres are
located, are already trying to fend off cuts to the space shuttle and
space station that are needed to pay for the Moon missions. NASA
administrator Mike Griffin, who has an engineer’s instinct for efficiency, has said that NASA’s workforce will remain about the same
size as it is today. But the agency may need skills in new areas, and
the jobs may be in different congressional districts. Griffin needs the
freedom to make these decisions based on his practical needs, not on
political considerations.
Nor should the United States try to go it alone to the Moon. Japan
and India are taking their own first (robotic) steps in the same

I

direction in 2007, with scientific missions sent to lunar orbit. So is
China, which is also building up a modest capability to launch people
into space. Europe and Russia are making their own cautious plans
for lunar exploration as they watch NASA’s plans unfold.
All these partners are interested in building up their own domestic capabilities in space, so a certain amount of duplication of effort
is inevitable. But to every extent possible, the construction of a lunar
base should be an international venture that takes advantage of each
partner’s strengths and interests. Canada and Japan might emphasize robotics, for example. Russia builds reliable spacecraft and
rockets. A lunar programme should include no more overlap than
is required to ensure a back-up for essential technologies.
The International Space Station has hardly been an inspiring
model for such an enterprise.
“The construction of a
So far the coalition that is
lunar base should be an
building it has held together —
international venture that
but NASA’s partners in Europe,
Japan and Canada are still nertakes advantage of each
vous over whether the United
partner’s strengths.”
States will renege on its commitment to launch their modules. It is unclear, to put it mildly, that
any of the partners will get their money’s worth.
Building a permanent human presence away from Earth is a far
more daunting venture, and can’t be handled in the same way, with
a single memorandum of understanding between the international
partners. The collaboration will take place in many shapes and forms
over decades, and must, therefore, be truly collaborative in both spirit
and practice, in a way that the US-led space station has never been.
If we are to accept the high-minded premise that humanity is
poised to take its next evolutionary step, then the politics of the
Moon programme should be high-minded too. The alternative is to
admit that this is just another pork-barrel project. The onus remains
on Griffin, the Bush administration and their prospective international partners to show that it will be any more than that.
■

In need of rehab

conflicting pressures from watchdog groups and the pharmaceutical
industry on how it should handle drug approvals. In these circumstances, the agency needs a commissioner who can rise above the
political fray and convince the public that the FDA is in safe hands,
while taking a sophisticated and innovative approach to drug
approval. Unfortunately, there is little sign that it’s going to get one.
The reasons for Crawford’s departure, only two months after his
confirmation in the position by the Senate, remain murky. The timing
of the announcement — on a Friday afternoon as Hurricane Rita bore
down on the Gulf coast — bore all the hallmarks of an effort by the
Bush administration to bury the event (see Nature 437, 606; 2005).
To the surprise of the agency’s supporters and detractors alike, the

The reputation of one of the world’s most respected
regulatory agencies is on the wane.

T

he US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is in trouble.
Last month’s abrupt resignation of its commissioner, Lester
Crawford, leaves the agency again bereft of leadership as it
struggles to absorb the aftermath of last year’s traumatic withdrawal
of the painkiller Vioxx.
The Vioxx episode has left the agency in crisis, facing immense,

789
©2005 Nature Publishing Group

EDITORIALS

NATURE|Vol 437|6 October 2005

Bush administration announced that Crawford would be replaced on
an acting basis by Andrew von Eschenbach — who would also continue to serve as director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), a
massive research agency with a stake in some of the FDA’s toughest
regulatory decisions. Last Friday, von Eschenbach admitted that this
would be impossible, and said he would temporarily shelve his daily
duties at the NCI and excuse himself from some cancer-related activities at the FDA (see page 802).
Crawford’s record as acting and then permanent head of the FDA
was underwhelming. He had little public visibility and seemed reluctant to back up his own scientific advisers when their advice ran
counter to Bush administration doctrine, for example to make Plan B,
the morning-after contraceptive, available over-the-counter from
pharmacists (see Nature 437, 179; 2005). Now his departure is being
left wholly unexplained, prompting reports of financial conflicts, as
well as a bipartisan congressional investigation.
It is not clear that von Eschenbach can do much better. The 63year-old urology surgeon has exasperated NCI researchers by making
it a goal to end suffering and death from cancer by 2015 — an
improbable aim he describes as “within our grasp”. His public commitment to more rapid approval of experimental cancer treatments
also deserves close examination in the light of several drug withdrawals, for safety reasons, in the past year alone.
In his three years at the NCI, he has become known as a hands-off
manager who leaves the workings of bureaucracies under him largely

to subordinates. This is not the prescription for an agency that has
been rocked by serious crises and that now needs a leader with a firm
grasp of policy details that ultimately affect millions of lives.
Yet if past inattention is any indication, it seems likely that the
White House will leave von Eschenbach — a Bush family friend —
holding the fort at the FDA while it is preoccupied elsewhere. That
would leave an agency that has lacked a permanent head for most
of Bush’s presidency in limbo
“This is not the prescription
yet again. Three years ago, a
for an agency that has
government survey of 400 FDA
scientists found 18% of them
been rocked by serious
reporting that they “have been
crises and now needs a
pressured to approve or recomleader with a firm grasp
mend approval” for a drug
of policy details.”
“despite reservations about the
safety, efficacy or quality of the drug”. In the absence of firm leadership, scientists at the FDA’s headquarters in the Washington DC
suburbs will be left to do battle with ideologues such as Scott Gottlieb,
a 33-year-old physician and former Wall Street tipster who was
appointed in July as deputy commissioner for medical and scientific
affairs at the agency.
Perhaps the most worrying prospect is that of an agency left to drift
and further neglect under a stop-gap commissioner for another three
years, until Bush has served out his term. His administration needs to
find a well-qualified, permanent FDA commissioner — and soon. ■

Welcome Nature Physics

temperature superconductivity that physicists began to rediscover
the journal’s value. Over the succeeding two decades or so, Nature
has re-established itself as a prime physics outlet.
At the same time, the publishing habits of physicists have also
evolved. Preprint servers are now commonplace for some branches
of the subject, without damaging journals. The number of papers
published has grown by 3% per year, but there have been significant
shifts in regional output. Between 1981 and 2001, US research output
in physics fell by 1.5% (to 19,500 papers per year), Western Europe
saw research output grow by 56% (to 29,100 papers), and output in
Asia grew by 120% (to 22,500 papers). Within Asia, China saw its
output grow from 500 articles to 5,500, Japan’s grew by 67% to 11,000
and India saw a 40% increase to 2,100 papers.
Perhaps the most significant shifts are in the distribution of
the physics community over
“Experience has shown that
that period, with the number
launching sibling research
of PhDs in physics declining
markedly in the United States
journals strengthens
and Europe but increasing
Nature. More importantly,
dramatically in Asia. Nature
it stimulates the discipline.”
and its related journals have
always had internationalism as a key ingredient, and have reflected
regional growths in strength.
Experience has shown that launching sibling research journals
strengthens, rather than weakens, Nature. More importantly, it stimulates the discipline by providing greater exposure thanks to our
media and web strengths, and, above all, by providing healthy competition to established journals, to the benefit of authors and readers
everywhere. Nature Physics is set to follow this tradition.
■

The launch of a new Nature journal comes at an
exciting time for physics.

P

eople have stopped talking about ‘physics envy’. Time was when
other sciences were jealous of the prestige and funds attracted
by physics, and also of its success in capturing the imagination,
as it uncovered revolutionary ways of thinking about, and predicting, the constituents and governing principles of the Universe.
Nowadays, thanks to the allure of biology’s progress and benefits,
physics is just another discipline. But its decline in prominence
should not mislead. The next generation of particle accelerators
promises insights as deep as any of their predecessors, in particular
in understanding the origins of mass and the symmetries underlying
the laws of nature. The enduring conjugal relationship between
physics and mathematics continues to stimulate both. Understanding the behaviour of electrons and light within condensed matter
continues to yield not only surprises in understanding but also new
technologies. And physicists’ habit of thinking about the underlying
questions leads them still to speculate beyond the current limits of
experiment. Where does quantum mechanics fail? Is information a
more fundamental quantity than hitherto realized?
It is with the enduring enticement of these challenges in mind that
we welcome the launch this month of our sister publication Nature
Physics (www.nature.com/naturephysics). It is also an indicator of
success. After the Second World War, Nature ceased to be a vehicle
for the physics community. It was only after the advent of high790

©2005 Nature Publishing Group

Vol 437|6 October 2005

S. DOUGLAS

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS
Tundra and lightening
J. Geophys. Res. 110, G01004 (2005)

Global warming will cause parts of the Arctic
to absorb up to three-quarters more sunlight
than they do at present, say US researchers.
Climate scientists expect rising
temperatures to cause shrubs to grow in
Arctic areas that are covered in snow for much
of the year. This could increase warming,
because darker vegetation absorbs more solar
radiation than snow. So researchers from the
US Army Cold Regions Research and
Engineering Laboratory and Colorado State
University measured the radiation reflected
from different Arctic surfaces at five sites in
Alaska — the Niukluk River is shown here.
They estimate that a tundra-to-shrub
transition would cause an increase in
absorption of 69 to 75%, depending on
the latitude and time of year.

Conscious connections

a compound that inhibits proliferation in
breast-cancer cells and to identify its
enzyme target.

Science 309, 2228-2232 (2005)

Consciousness fades when we fall asleep, but
the brain remains active. Giulio Tononi and
his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin,
Madison, go some way to resolving this
paradox. Using equipment that allows the
human brain to be stimulated and monitored
at the same time, they show that during deep
non-rapid-eye-movement sleep, which
occurs at the beginning of the night, neuronal
firing in the brain is unable to spread across
the cortex. In contrast, effective connectivity
persists during quiet wakefulness; activity in
one cortical area is transmitted to other areas
of the brain.
DRUG DISCOVERY

Cravatt makes twin ties
Nature Biotechnol. doi:10.1038/nbt1149 (2005)

Drug developers screen libraries of small
molecules to find useful biological effects,
but it is not easy to identify these molecules’
targets. Small molecules often bind their
protein targets only weakly, making it hard
to isolate the complexes from living cells.
Benjamin Cravatt of the Scripps Research
Institute in La Jolla, California, and his coworkers get round this by adding a probe
containing two reactive groups to the
molecules that are to be screened. One
reactive group attaches to the protein when
the molecule binds, holding the two together.
The other reacts with a fluorescent label,
allowing the trapped protein to be identified.
The researchers used their method to find

MOLECULAR EVOLUTION

Sense and sensitivity
Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 102, 14338–14343 (2005)

ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR

Smells fishy
Nature Chem. Biol. doi:10.1038/nchembio739 (2005)

Researchers working on strategies to control
the invasive sea lamprey, Petromyzon marinus
(pictured), have characterized the chemicals
that act as a migratory cue for the creatures.
The larvae give off a pheromone that adults
detect at concentrations as low as a single
milligram in five Olympic-size swimming
pools of water. The chemical draws the adults
to suitable spawning sites upstream. Peter
Sorensen, Thomas Hoye and colleagues of
the University of Minnesota found three
components — the most active of which
is similar to the antibiotic compound
squalamine, produced by sharks.
The team hopes that a fake pheromone
could act as bait to help rid the North
American Great Lakes of these parasitic fish,
which arrived from the Atlantic a century ago.

792
©2005 Nature Publishing Group

Not all proteins evolve at the same rate, and
those that evolve most slowly are often also
those that are most highly expressed. Why?
Allan Drummond of the California
Institute of Technology in Pasadena and his
co-workers studied recent gene-chip data
from yeast. They verified that expression rate
is a good predictor of evolution rate for yeast
proteins, then used the genome-wide data to
compare explanations for rate variation. They
conclude that evolution rate varies because
highly expressed proteins incur translation
errors more often — so their folding
behaviour needs to be relatively insensitive.
Resilient sequences are rare, leaving little
opportunity for evolution to tinker with them.
PHYSICS

In phase
Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 127205; 127206; 127207 (2005)

As if superfluids weren’t strange enough,
quantum theory also predicts the existence of
supersolids — crystalline structures that, like
superfluids, will flow with zero viscosity.
Last year, researchers thought they might
have detected the phase in helium-4 (Nature
427, 225–227; 2004). Now three papers, from
groups in Europe, India and California,
describe a system that could create supersolids for study. They calculate that pouring
certain kinds of superfluid into an optical
lattice that holds the atoms in a triangular
pattern will force them into a supersolid
phase when the lattice is partially filled.

D. HANSEN

NEUROSCIENCE

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS

ACS

NATURE|Vol 437|6 October 2005

NANOTECHNOLOGY

Günter Theißen
University of Jena, Germany

Crystal balls
J. Am. Chem. Soc. doi:10.1021/ja051381p (2005)

Dog domestication inspires an
evolutionary biologist to reflect
on the evolution of complex life.

A steady stream of nanodroplets is pictured
(right) flowing through a microreactor
designed by a team led by Richard Mathies
of the University of California, Berkeley.
Unlike other systems, this set-up works
even at high temperatures, and was used to
create cadmium selenide nanocrystals at
temperatures between 240 and 300 ᑻC.
Precursors containing cadmium and selenium
are introduced into bubbles of octadecene
squirted into an inert carrier fluid. The size
of the bubbles, each just a few billionths of a
litre in volume, is controlled by varying the
injection rate of the liquids into the reactor.

CHEMISTRY

BACTERIOLOGY

Attack on anthrax

Hard to stomach

Angew. Chem. Int. Edn 44, 2–5 (2005)

ASTROPHYSICS

It was recently discovered that Bacillus
anthracis spores display a unique
carbohydrate on their surface. Because
vaccines made from synthetic carbohydrates
have shown some potential in treating other
diseases — including cancer and malaria
— this tetrasaccharide has piqued interest
as a candidate for a small-molecule
anthrax vaccine.
Daniel Werz and Peter Seeberger, both of
the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in
Zurich, report the first chemical synthesis
of this tetrasaccharide. They designed the
synthetic scheme so that it could be easily
tweaked to modify the carbohydrate’s
structure — meaning that, if necessary,
it should be easy to synthesize and test
analogues of the natural compound.

Peering into the past

SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY

Lancet 366, 1079–1084 (2005)

A virulent strain of the Clostridium difficile
bacterium that has emerged in hospitals in
Canada has been characterized by Michel
Warny of Acambis in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, and his colleagues.
Patients who have taken antibiotics to cure
another illness sometimes suffer as resistant
strains of the bacterium flourish in their gut.
Between 1991 and 2003, the number of people
killed by a C. difficile infection within a month
of its diagnosis increased from 4% to 13% in a
region of Quebec. Warny’s group identify the
epidemic strain as NAP1/027, and link its
virulence to elevated production of toxins.

Preprint astro-ph/0509303 at http://arxiv.org (2005)

The satellite telescope Swift is looking out for
the long gamma-ray bursts produced by the
violent deaths of stars. A good proportion of
these bursts should come from very early
stars, say Volker Bromm of the University of
Texas, Austin, and Abraham Loeb of Harvard
University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Using star formation rates, the researchers
calculate that about 10% of the bursts seen
by Swift will come from stars that exploded
during the first billion years of the
Universe’s existence.
They add that some of them may even come
from the first ever stars. Little is known about
these bodies, which are thought to have been
massive and metal-free. But to release a burst
of gamma rays, they would have to have
existed as binary systems in which one star
stripped away the outer layer of its dying mate.

JOURNAL CLUB

Flak jackets
J. Am. Chem. Soc. 127, 13213–13219 (2005)

No one could expect building a living cell
from scratch to be easy. But one difficult
hurdle has been overcome by Jack Szostak
and his co-workers at the Harvard Medical
School in Boston, Massachusetts.
The team is aiming to make ‘protocells’ by
filling vesicles made from fatty acids with
ribozymes, which combine genetic and
enzyme-like functions.
The problem has been that the metal ions
that ribozymes typically need to function
cause the fatty acids to precipitate. Now the
team has found that a mixture of myristoleic
acid and its glycerol ester will make vesicles
that are not only immune to metal-induced
precipitation, but are also permeable to
magnesium ions.

There are some who believe that
living organisms are so complex
that they must have been created
by an ‘intelligent designer’ —
arguably just another term for God.
Meanwhile, others argue that
evolutionary biology can already
fully explain how complex
organisms emerged.
In my view, clarifying how
complex organisms evolve remains
one of the greatest challenges of
biology. Rather than intelligent
design, however, we need more
intelligent research, such as that
presented by John Fondon and
Harold Garner (J. W. Fondon &
H. R. Garner Proc. Natl Acad. Sci.
USA 101, 18058–18063; 2004).
We have learned in recent
years that changes in the genes
that control the development of
organisms can bring about major
evolutionary transitions. But it
has not been clear how the
usually slow accumulation of
random mutations could account
for the fast and coordinated
morphological changes seen in
the fossil record.
Fondon and Gardner’s study
suggests a striking solution.
Their research links the differing
shapes of dog breeds to variation
in the number of repeats of
short DNA sequences in certain
developmental control genes.
Changes to repeat length occur
much more often than other
kinds of mutation, explaining
how evolution can sometimes be
very rapid. Also, the identified
repeats encode amino acids that,
ultimately, modulate the activity
of genes involved in limb and skull
development, explaining the
effects on morphology.
I am optimistic that the authors
have uncovered a crucial
mechanistic detail of how genes
link development to evolution.
I eagerly await further analyses
telling us whether this trick in dogs
also works in other organisms.
793

©2005 Nature Publishing Group

Vol 437|6 October 2005

SPECIAL REPORT

The 1918 flu virus
is resurrected
I

t is thought to have killed 50 million people,
and yet scientists have brought it back to
life. In this issue of Nature, scientists publish
an analysis of the full genome sequence of the
1918 human influenza virus. And in this
week’s Science, researchers describe how they
used that sequence to recreate the virus and
study its effects in mice.
Some scientists have already hailed the work
as giving unprecedented insight into the virus.
Working out how it arose and why it was so
deadly could help experts to spot the next
pandemic strain and to design appropriate
drugs and vaccines in time, they say.
But others have raised concerns that the
dangers of resurrecting the virus are just too
great. One biosecurity expert told Nature that
the risk that the recreated strain might escape
is so high, it is almost a certainty. And the publication of the full genome sequence gives any
rogue nation or bioterrorist group all the
information they need to make their own version of the virus.
Jeffery Taubenberger of the Armed Forces
Institute of Pathology in Rockville, Maryland,
is the lead author of the sequencing study. He
says the work was necessary and the risks were
low. The paper on page 889 gives details of the

HOW VIRULENT IS 1918 FLU?
50 times as many virus particles are
released from human lung cells a day after
infection with the 1918 virus as are released after
exposure to a contemporary strain called the
Texas virus.

13% of body weight is lost by mice
2 days after infection with 1918 flu; weight loss
is only transient in mice infected with the
Texas strain.

39,000 times more virus particles are
found in mouse lung tissue 4 days after infection
with 1918 flu than are found with the Texas virus.
All mice died within 6 days of infection
with 1918 flu; none died from the Texas strain.
794

final three genes; the sequences of the rest have
IMAGE
already been published.
The full sequence is strong evidence that the
UNAVAILABLE
1918 flu virus is derived wholly from an ancestor that originally infected birds. In contrast,
FOR COPYRIGHT
the viruses that caused the flu pandemics of
1957 and 1968 arose when human and avian
REASONS
flu viruses infected the same person at the
same time, allowing their genes to mix.
All eight of the genome segments from the
1918 virus differ in important ways from
other human flu sequences, suggesting that
none of the genome came from a strain that
had previously infected people. “It is the most
bird-like of all mammalian flu viruses,” says
Taubenberger.
‘Fresh air’ cures were used to fight flu
Pinpointing exactly which genetic mutain 1918, but reconstructing the virus
tions allowed the virus to jump to humans will
may lead to more effective treatments.
enable scientists to recognize other bird
viruses that could trigger a pandemic.
Taubenberger’s team has already identified 25 strains. They found that replacing the haemagchanges in the protein sequences of the 1918 glutinin gene, which helps the virus to enter
strain that have been present in subsequent cells, made it unable to kill mice. Replacing all
human flu viruses. These mutations are likely three of the polymerase genes, which allow the
to be particularly important, he says. One virus to replicate, significantly reduced its virsuch change, in the polymerase gene PB2, was ulence. The haemagglutinin gene is essential,
found in the virus isolated from the only says Tumpey. “But no single change or gene is
human fatality in a 2003 outbreak of H7N7 the answer,” adds Taubenberger. “It’s a combination effect.”
bird flu in the Netherlands.
Future research will involve
In the paper in Science (T. M. “They have
testing reconstructed viruses
Tumpey et al. 310, 77–80; constructed a virus
with and without certain muta2005), Terrence Tumpey at the that is perhaps the
tions, to see which are the most
Centers for Disease Control
important for virulence. Inforand Prevention (CDC) in most effective
mation from this type of study
Atlanta, Georgia, and his co- bioweapon known.”
will hopefully be of use in vacworkers have used Taubenberger’s sequence to recreate the complete cine and drug design, but so far the work is
more about obtaining a basic understanding of
1918 virus (see graphic).
When they used the strain to infect mice they the virus than any immediate health benefits.
The studies have been praised as groundfound it was extremely virulent, and after 4 days
had generated 39,000 times more virus parti- breaking. “It’s a landmark,” says Eddie Holmes,
cles in the animals’ lungs than a modern flu a virologist at Pennsylvania State University in
strain (see ‘How virulent is 1918 flu?’). “I didn’t University Park. “Not only is this the first time
expect it to be as lethal as it was,” says Tumpey. this has been done for any ancient pathogen,
The researchers compared the complete but it deals with the agent of the most impor1918 virus with strains in which some genes tant disease pandemic in human history.”
The team got permission to do the work
had been replaced by those of contemporary
© 2005 Nature Publishing Group

BETTMANN/CORBIS

The recreation of one of the deadliest diseases known could help us to
prevent another pandemic. Or it might trigger one, say critics. Andreas
von Bubnoff investigates whether the benefits outweigh the risks.

FISH PHEROMONES
MADE IN THE LAB
Lampreys could be lured
away from Great Lakes by
artificial chemicals.
www.nature.com/news

IMAGE
UNAVAILABLE
FOR COPYRIGHT
REASONS

from CDC head Julie Gerberding and
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, based
in Bethesda, Maryland.
But the studies have sparked fears among
other researchers. “There most definitely is reason for concern,” says Richard Ebright, a bacteriologist at Rutgers University in Piscataway,
New Jersey, who serves on biosecurity panels.
“Tumpey et al. have constructed, and provided
procedures for others to construct, a virus that
represents perhaps the most effective
bioweapons agent now known.”
“This would be extremely dangerous should
it escape, and there is a long history of things
escaping,” says Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a
molecular biologist and member of the Federation of American Scientists’ Working Group
on Biological Weapons. “What advantage is so
much greater than that risk?”
Ebright agrees that there is a significant risk,
“verging on inevitability”, of accidental release
of the virus into the human population, or of
theft by a “disgruntled, disturbed or extremist
laboratory employee”. And there is the danger
that a hostile nation might reconstruct its own
version of the virus, he says, pointing out that

any of these scenarios could result in a large
number of deaths.
Ebright also believes that using an enhanced
biosafety level-3 lab for the work was inadequate. If the researchers were going to do the
work at all, they should have used level 4, the
strictest biosafety condition, he says. This
requires experimenters to wear full body suits.
In 2003, he points out, a SARS virus escaped
accidentally from a level-3 lab in Singapore,
and in 2004 two further escapes occurred
from such labs in Beijing.
Tumpey counters that enhanced level 3,
which requires upper body suits and respirators, is safe enough. Disgruntled employees
aren’t a concern either, he says, because he is
the only one who works with the virus. The
few researchers with access to the lab undergo
extensive background checks, and retina and
fingerprint scans are used to prevent any
unauthorized entry to the lab.
He adds that even if the virus did escape, it
wouldn’t have the same consequences as the
1918 pandemic. Most people now have some
immunity to the 1918 virus because subsequent human flu viruses are in part derived
from it. And, in mice, regular flu vaccines and
drugs are at least partly effective against an
infection with reconstructed viruses that contain some of the genes from 1918 flu.

Publish and be damned?
The other potential threat comes from the
availability of the full genome sequence, which
has been put on the GenBank database — a
condition of the paper’s publication. Anyone
can order DNA to be made to a certain
sequence, points out Jonathan Tucker, a policy
analyst at the Center for Nonproliferation
Studies in Washington DC. There are currently
© 2005 Nature Publishing Group

no governmental controls on what sequences
can be used, says Tucker, although some DNA
synthesis companies now screen their orders
for pathogenic sequences. If someone wants to
reconstruct the virus, says Taubenberger, “the
technology is available”.
Philip Campbell, editor-in-chief of Nature,
says that although he did not seek advice on
whether to publish the work, he has done so
for previous flu-virulence and pathogen
genome papers. He says that the benefits
clearly outweigh the risks. Donald Kennedy,
editor-in-chief of Science, agrees about the
merits of publication. “I think we are going to
depend on this kind of knowledge,” he says.
The US National Science Advisory Board
for Biosecurity (NSABB) reached a similar
conclusion about both studies, after calling an
emergency meeting last week to consider the
risks. But, concerned about public fears, it
asked the authors of both papers to add a passage to the manuscripts stating that the work is
important for public health and was conducted safely.
Campbell says he is worried that government agencies will start seeking to be involved
in the publishing process. “We are happy to
cooperate with the NSABB to consider the
principles by which dual-use results can be
published responsibly,” he says. “But government bureaucracies and committees may push
to avoid perceived risks, at the potential
expense of benefits to public security.”
Taubenberger admits that there can be no
absolute guarantee of safety. “We are aware
that all technological advances could be misused,” he says. “But what we are trying to
understand is what happened in nature and
how to prevent another pandemic. In this case,
nature is the bioterrorist.”
■
795

R. & T. CHURCH/SPL

NEWS

NATURE|Vol 437|6 October 2005

NEWS

NATURE|Vol 437|6 October 2005

ON THE RECORD
Had the decision
been mine, we would
not have built the space
station we’re building
in the orbit we’re
building it in.

”

NASA administrator Michael Griffin
attacks the International Space Station.

AMANA

“

One to one: tailoring
prescriptions to patients’
genes could help to
reduce side effects.

Having a moon is
“just
inherently cool —
and it is something that
most self-respecting
planets have.

”

Astronomer Michael Brown talks
about the discovery of a moon orbiting
the Solar System’s ‘tenth planet’.
Source: USA Today, Caltech

SCORECARD
Dogs
Labradors with
osteoarthritis are the
focus of a study launched at the
University of Liverpool, UK.
Researchers will use magnetic
resonance imaging to track
disease progression in the dogs.
Nuclear safety
Ukrainian officials have
recovered 14 pieces of
nuclear fuel stolen from the nowdefunct Chernobyl power plant.
The rods, found in a plastic bag
near the plant’s perimeter, had
been missing for a decade.
Archaeology
Embarrassed Czech
archaeologists have
found that a statuette thought to
represent a fifth-century Persian
goddess came from a mould made
in 1968 by a local pensioner.

SIDELINES

NUMBER CRUNCH
60% of PhD-granting physics
departments in the United States
report visa problems for foreign
students returning after trips abroad.

48% of the physics departments
had at least one foreign student who
was denied entry or considerably
delayed by visa problems.

13% is the fall in the number of
first-year enrolments by foreign
graduate students in the United
States between 2000 and 2004.
Source: American Institute of Physics

Japan jumps towards
personalized medicine
TOKYO

Japanese companies say they have built a desktop machine that will allow doctors to assess
patients’ DNA from a single drop of blood, and
so tailor treatment to an individual’s genes.
The machine can deliver results within an
hour, they say, and will be on sale for 5 million
yen (US$44,000) by autumn 2006.
Safe dosage, effectiveness and side effects for
any given drug vary from patient to patient.
And determining which drug and dosage is
best for any given individual is a critical challenge facing healthcare specialists.
But the announcement about the Japanese
machine on 27 September came just a week
after scientists in the United Kingdom spoke
out against the hype surrounding personalized
medicine. A report produced by the Royal
Society warned that prescriptions tailored to a
patient’s genes are at least 15 to 20 years away.
The Japanese device was developed by the
genomics facility of the Institute of Chemical
and Physical Research (RIKEN) in Yokohama,
the printing company Toppan in Tokyo, and
the Kyoto-based maker of scientific equipment Shimadzu. Shimadzu’s Takaaki Sato,
who led Shimadzu’s development efforts, says
the key advance is a chip that analyses DNA in
a blood sample, thereby bypassing the timeconsuming DNA purification steps currently
needed.
Although Sato will not give further details,
he says that any health worker could use the
machine to test a drop of blood for a particular
genotype, and get a result in an hour. “Patients
do not want to wait a week or even a day for

796
©2005 Nature Publishing Group

results before being able to take a medicine,
especially if they have an infectious disease,”
says Sato.
According to RIKEN and Shimadzu, the
machine will first be tested on patients being
prescribed one of two medicines: an antibody
called irinotecan, which can cause hearing loss
in people with a certain mutation in their
mitochondrial DNA, and the anticoagulant
warfarin, which causes excessive bleeding in
some patients.
But there is scepticism over how useful the
device will be. David Weatherall of the
Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine at
the University of Oxford, UK, who worked on
the Royal Society report, says the metabolism
of warfarin is related to at least two genes
whose interaction is not understood. Other
factors, such as the patient’s age or additional
drugs being taken, also need to be considered,
he says.
“There is no way around these problems
except to test each drug independently in large
population studies, and to monitor all these
issues over several years,” he says. “There is still
a huge gap between the scientists who do this
kind of work and its application for practical
purposes.”
Sato admits that initially his machine will be
most useful for research. But judging from the
“unbelievable number of responses” received
since announcing the test, he says there is no
way that 15 years will pass before doctors are
using such devices for day-to-day diagnosis