Editorial-22 May 2005

 

 

 

 

 

Is CSIRO's Hyping of Scientific Effort a Service to the Scientists Really Doing the Work?

And those Flagships?

 

On April 5, 2005 CSIRO issued a media release regarding work being done at the Divisions of Marine Research and Plant Industry under the umbrella of the Food Futures Flagship. The media release indicated that a number of others made important contributions and the Flagship concept was instrumental in achieving success.

 

 

DHA = docosahexaenoic acid a highly unsaturated long chain fatty acid

 

The media release was picked up by a number of rural papers and broadcast by ABC on its country network. But by far the most extensive coverage was in an article by Rosslyn Beeby in the Saturday April 9, 2005 issue of the Canberra Times. The reader was told, A year after CSIRO's $20 million Food Futures flagship was launched in Canberra one of its scientific team has achieved a world-first breakthrough using gene technology to breed plants that produce omega-3 oils.

 

In fact other teams, principally one led by the UK's University of Bristol and another at Institut für Allgemeine Botanik, Universität Hamburg had previously published. In May last year researchers at UK's Bristol University together with others from Dundee, Bath and Oxford reported in Nature: Biotechnology having introduced three genes involved in converting polyunsaturated fatty acids into long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (LC-PUFAS) in Arabidopsis thaliana and that "significant amounts of n-3 LC-PUFAs were produced by the "hybrid".

 

 

What is new and is worthwhile is that the CSIRO team had got Arabidopsis to synthesise the fatty acid DHA which was not reported by the Bristol University led group and had increased the amount of long chain polyunsaturated fatty acid synthesised.

 

But neither CSIRO's media release nor Ms Beeby made mention of the work done previously by others and which contributed useful knowledge to CSIRO's scientists on which to build.

 

Furthermore, neither Beeby nor the media release referred to any scientific publication of the CSIRO work (peer reviewed or non peer reviewed) by the CSIRO scientists. So was this "science by press release" something which tends to be frowned on and in fact is not countenanced by a number of top international scientific journals. 

 

From events over the past week this in fact appears to be the case.

 

Whereas the media release from CSIRO's Food Futures Flagship was released on April 5 and Rosslyn Beeby's feature article was in the April 9 issue of the Canberra Times, the manuscript of the scientific publication was received by the journal to eventually publish it as a "Rapid Communication" on April 14, 2005. It was accepted for publication on April 29, 2005 and then published on May 18, 2005.

 

The Journal?

 

CSIRO Publishing's Functional Plant Biology (2005, 32, 473-479)

 

 

In short the media announcement was nine days before the paper was received by the journal, 24 days before it was accepted, and one and a half months before publication in the CSIRO journal.

 

That media release states, "Dr Lee [ Bruce Lee, Director of the CSIRO Food Futures Flagship] says that this discovery is an example of the successful collaboration of multi-disciplinary science drawing together CSIRO's expertise across the different CSIRO divisions of Plant Industry, Marine Research, Health Sciences & Nutrition, Entomology, Livestock Industries, and Food Science Australia (a joint venture of CSIRO and the Victorian Government)."

 

But only researchers from the CSIRO divisions of Marine Research and Plant Industry authored the paper while acknowledgements are given to seven individuals for "expert technical assistance", presumably also members of those divisions.

 

Make no mistake, it's a substantial piece of work and is a worthwhile addition following on the work by Qi, et al. published in Nature: Biotechnology and Abbadi, et al. in The Plant Cell, 2004. And the papers of these and other predecessors are fully referenced and acknowledged in the CSIRO paper.

 

Did it really take a $20 million Flagship to get scientists from two CSIRO divisions to collaborate? The Bristol led group had four collaborating institutions from Dundee to Bath with nary a "Flagship" is site.

 

Dr Garrett's Flagships appear to be an odd amalgam of hokum and pressgang to which Australia's government continues to be committed. The nation's industrial research is not being well served by the increasingly demoralised Organisation while its research for the public good is being brought to its knees.

 

 

Alex Reisner

The Funneled Web