US Government Funding Research Articles

ORI findings of scientific misconduct in clinical trials and publicly funded research, 1992–2002

Since 1992 the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) had reviewed investigations of scientific misconduct in research funded by the US Public Health Service (PHS). ORI defined scientific misconduct as "fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, or other practices that seriously deviate from those that are commonly accepted within the scientific community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research". The purpose of this study was to summarize the findings and administrative actions reported in ORI notices of scientific misconduct in clinical trials occurring between May 1992 and 2002. Findings of misconduct were gathered from publicly available sources: the ORI annual reports and the NIH Guide to Grants and Contracts. Clinical trials accounted for 17 (13%) of the 136 investigations that resulted in findings of scientific misconduct, and they were noted in 12 (11%) of the 113 brief reports of investigations closed with findings of no scientific misconduct. In clinical trials, the most severe sanction, debarment from US Government funding, was applied in six (35%) of the cases of misconduct compared to 79 (66%) of 119 cases from all other types of research combined. Of individuals cited for misconduct in clinical trials, three (18%) held doctorates in contrast to 81 (68%) in other types of research. In clinical trials, junior employees may bear the burden of sanction for scientific misconduct. The most frequently applied sanction was the requirement that a plan of supervision of the sanctioned employees accompany any future application for funding which would include them. This imposition of sanction on an individual employee does not address possible causes of misconduct which may be inherent in the overall pattern of leadership, training and supervision in the trial. Furthermore, the definition of misconduct, as interpreted by the Departmental Appeals Board, excludes carelessness and other poor research practices that may lead to dissemination of more incorrect data than misconduct.

The politics of productivity and the politics of anti-communism: American and European labour in the Cold War

The ‘politics of productivity’, an attempt to raise levels of industrial productivity in Europe by transcending class conflict and creating a consensus in society for economic growth, was a prominent element in Marshall Plan thinking. It constituted a central focus of the European Recovery Program's labour programme administered by American trade union officials who staffed the Marshall Plan's Labor Division. This programme was initially supported by the American Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), until hostility to collective bargaining in the local business community, combined with the unwillingness of senior Marshall Plan administrators to insist on collective bargaining as the price of receiving American assistance, blighted the project. This contribution contrasts the CIO's initial support for the productivity programme with the American Federation of Labour's (AFL) more direct strategy of combating communism at the level of organization and propaganda. It concludes by describing how the competing claims of these two American labour organizations for US government funding became a significant factor in American labour's conduct of Cold War politics.

DAML+OIL: an ontology language for the Semantic Web

By all measures, the Web is enormous and growing at a staggering rate, which has made it increasingly difficult-and important-for both people and programs to have quick and accurate access to Web information and services. The Semantic Web offers a solution, capturing and exploiting the meaning of terms to transform the Web from a platform that focuses on presenting information, to a platform that focuses on understanding and reasoning with information. To support Semantic Web development, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched the DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) initiative to fund research in languages, tools, infrastructure, and applications that make Web content more accessible and understandable. Although the US government funds DAML, several organizations-including US and European businesses and universities, and international consortia such as the World Wide Web Consortium-have contributed to work on issues related to DAML's development and deployment. We focus on DAML's current markup language, DAML+OIL, which is a proposed starting point for the W3C's Semantic Web Activity's Ontology Web Language (OWL). We introduce DAML+OIL syntax and usage through a set of examples, drawn from a wine knowledge base used to teach novices how to build ontologies.

Doing what comes ‘naturally’

The chances are that you, or someone close to you, uses a form of complementary medicine or alternative therapy. The extraordinary growth in the popularity of such approaches raises the question of why they tend to receive only scant coverage in TiPS and related titles. This neglect has mainly been due to the paucity of research reports on these topics appearing in the mainstream journals. But now one institution is aiming to change that situation. In a packed Symposium at last month's Experimental Biology Meeting in Orlando, Stephen Straus, Director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), issued a call to arms to biomedical researchers. NCCAM is already funding several research centres and multicentre trials, but with a research allocation of $89.1 m for 2001, Straus emphasized their desire to see more proposals. US Government funding for research on these topics has increased 50-fold in the past decade. In addition to distributing these new research funds, NCCAM is spearheading changes such as the inclusion, from February, of articles relating to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) on PubMed. Next on the agenda is the thorny issue of how to raise industrial interest in backing CAM research, given the lack of market incentives. An NCCAM-sponsored Colloquium on the topic, to be held on 14 May 2001 in Washington DC, should at least get the interested parties talking. AS

Superconductivity in the USA

This review presents a summary and explanation of US governmentfunding for superconductivity over the past decade. It further describesunique federal programmes that are designed to stimulate industrialproductivity in new technologies and that have accounted for unspecifiedamounts of additional R&D funding for superconductivity to commercialenterprises. Finally, several examples are given of major governmentprogrammes, of industrial programmes and of one rather large universityprogramme.