Is youth waste on the young… scientists? That’s the provocative question Catherine Beaudry from the Ecole Poloytechnique de Montréal, Canada, posed on Saturday morning on day three of the AAAS.

The Vancouver Convention Centre, where the AAAS is taking place, plays host to the digital orca, made of glowing plastic cubes

She ran us through her work looking at the contributions Canadian scientists make in nanotechnology and biotechnology throughout their careers and if they’re at their most productive when they’re young. Or do they mature like a fine wine to produce their best work? She notes that since the turn of the 19th century, the age of Nobel laureates has been going up at a rate of 1.6 years per decade. Is this an indicator that scientists are doing their best work later? Obviously, it’s difficult to control for all the different factors that can affect a researcher’s output over the course of their career, such as their position in the community, the grants they manage to secure and the network they build up around them. But she says that the work of younger scientists has more impact on their field but older researchers do tend to be more productive. She does note a more worrying trend though. In the US, the age at which a researcher secures their first National Institutes of Health grant where they are the principal investigator has gone up from 34 in the 1970s to 42 in 2004. If young scientists make the most important breakthroughs in their field, choking off the number in charge of their own projects can only be bad for science as a whole.

Next up, peer review was under the microscope. Is it still relevant in today’s world of electronic communications, pre-prints and open source critiques? The panel certainly thought so. Linda Miller, who has been an editor at both Science and Nature, and is now at the New York University Langone Medical Center, says that the vast majority of authors still think the traditional peer review process improves their work. But she does note that a current of change of sweeping the peer review world. Researchers are less happy with the process going on behind closed doors, reflecting a trend in wider society for greater transparency in decision making. Questions were asked as to whether open peer review – where manuscripts are posted online and reviewers names are comments are known to all – could be the next big thing. There’s certainly advantages, as everything is open and above board, but how could a younger researcher criticise a more established one without damaging their career? The panel feared that it could create a new system of patronage. Miller says that whatever happens, when change comes it could be ‘cataclysmic’. ‘Remember, eight year olds today will become the CEOs of tomorrow,’ she says.

After lunch, Tessa Holyoake, at the University of Glasgow, UK, had an talk on autophagy – the process of breaking down and recycling subcellular components – as a new drug target. The university is now involved in a clinical trial looking at whether an inhibitor of autophagy – the antimalarial hydroxychloroquine – can work synergistically with conventional therapies for chronic myeloid leukaemia. The cell studies look good and the group are putting together more powerful autophagy inhibitors that they hope will be effective in treating cancer.

The day rounded off with a fascinating look at the nanomaterial of the future – nanocellulose. These fibres can be extracted from cellulose and they are as strong as Kevlar and have some interesting properties that mean they could be used in all sorts of applications from batteries, to bioplastics and electronics. And the big advantage of nanocellulose is its abundance. Theodore Wegner, from the US Department of Agriculture Forest Service, says that it should be possible to cheaply extract millions of tons of the nanomaterial from wood. He adds that another advantage of nanocellulose is that it doesn’t appear to have any of the toxicity issues that dog other nanomaterials like carbon nanotubes.

Patrick Walter

                  

Source:
http://prospect.rsc.org/blogs/cw/?feed=rss2