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Upfront–

media, while a quarter said they would not be allowed to publish results that contradicted the agency’s official line . Researchers were often pressured not to publicly discuss issues linked to climate change, such as the coastal erosion caused by rising sea levels. The EPA did not respondto a request for comment.

But the survey does note some small victories for free speech. When one researcher was barred from talking about climate change at a conference, the meeting’s organisers told the EPA that they would hold a 20-minute silence in place of the missing talk. The agency reversed its decision.

IT’S not looking good for artificial blood, once hailed as the solution to shortages of donated blood. Dismal results coming in from clinical trials of blood substitutes are prompting calls for ongoing trials to be suspended.

Charles Natanson of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, analysed trials of the five main blood substitutes used when real blood was not available. He found that patients were 30 per cent more likely to die

MANY individual scientists at the US Environmental Protection Agency have dared to complain about political meddling in their work. Now we know just how widespread the censorship of science has become at the agency.

The Union of Concerned Scientists, a lobby group based in Washington DC, surveyed 1583 EPA scientists and found that many feel unable to speak openly for fear of retaliation from senior officials appointed by the Bush administration.

Over half said they were not allowed to talk freely with the

The image of biofuels is rapidly

tarnishing. Already under fire for

displacing food production and tropical

forests, they are now charged with

marginalising poor rural women.

In a report published on 21 April,

the UN Food and Agriculture Organization

concludes that women subsistence

farmers will be evicted to make way

for huge biofuel plantations. The most

vulnerable women already suffer

extreme inequalities in African, Asian

and Caribbean countries. These same

countries are now hoping to cash in on

the growing demand for biofuels in rich

western countries.

“These women don’t have access

to land, or the land they do occupy is

owned by men,” says report author,

Yianna Lambrou. “So if the men decide

BIOFUEL BLUESto set up a biofuel plant, the women

would simply be evicted.” That would

push them onto marginal land barely

capable of supporting crops, and also

deny them easy access to water, as

biofuel production would have first

claim on the supply.

Even if jobs are on offer at a biofuel

plant, they’ll go mainly to men, and any

women employed will receive lower

wages for the same job, Lambrou says.

He believes that governments need

to plan in advance to prevent these

problems either by helping women

form cooperatives to raise capital for

their own biofuel plantations, or by

experimenting with combining

smaller-scale biofuel production with

the methods of subsistence farming

already in use in the area.

ALVA

RO LE

IVA/

PAN

OS

–Can’t be beat–

MIC

HAE

L BUH

OLZE

R/RE

UTER

S

–Bearing the brunt–

Seen to work EPA censorship

Bad blood

6 | NewScientist | 3 May 2008 www.newscientist.com

GENE therapy may finally be living up to its promise. Injecting “repair genes” into the eyes of six people with a hereditary visual impairment has improved the vision of four of them.

This week, two independent teams announced the results of gene therapy trials in people with Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA), a rare, debilitating disease which causes retinal cells to die off gradually from an early age.

One of the people treated found his sight improved to the point where he could navigate an obstacle course in dim light – a task that had been a struggle before the treatment – while the vision of three others “improved noticeably”.

Equally important, the

treatment, introduced to the eye during surgery using a disabled virus, proved to be safe. An immune response to the virus had been a problem in some previous gene therapy trials, but there was

little sign of this in the latest two studies. And the virus was confined to eye (New England Journal of Medicine, DOI: 10.1056/nejmoa0802315 and 10.1056/nejmoa0802268).

“This is really an exciting result for gene therapy as a field,” says Katherine High of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in Philadelphia, who led one of the teams.

Both High and the other team, led by Robin Ali of University College London, treated patients with a defect in a gene called RPE65.They inserted a working copy of RPE65 into the patients’ retinalcells, kicking them back into action.

“Inserting a working copy of the gene into retinal cells kicked them back into action”