2005, year of the rooster: stem cells, avian flu and China

2005 was a year of high drama in science - and high stakes in its financing, licensing and management. Herewith, a selection of some of the top quotes, and top stories, of the year, compiled by Science|Business.

"I didn't think they would be at this stage for decades, let alone within a year."
Gerald Schatten of the University of Pittsburgh, to CBS News on 19 May. Schatten was a collaborator and sometimes-co-author of Hwang Woo-suk, whose May 2005 report of extraordinary progress in stem-cell production galvanized the scientific world. Turns out Schatten, who at the time was expressing admiration for Hwang, was more right than he knew.

"Some of the companies on AIM need to clean up their tarnished images."
Michael Elias, Kennet Venture Partners, in Science|Business Oct. 27. The stunning success of London's Alternative Investment Market during 2005 heartened many technology entrepreneurs, who flocked to it for new capital. But it also prompted some fears that it might be another bubble waiting to burst - particularly if its relatively light regulation leads to a crash.

"Silicon Fen could not happen under the new policy."
Mike Clark, of the Campaign for Academic Freedom, on a change in intellectual-property rules at the University of Cambridge. In December the university adopted a policy to make more Cambridge discoveries belong to the university rather than to the individual researchers. The old system had been unusual in the global academic world – but also, its defenders claimed, one reason why Cambridge became the most vibrant incubator for spin-outs and licensing deals in Europe.

"There are fewer kids applying for science and engineering. Yet that's the one job where the future lies."
Andrew Herbert, director of Microsoft Research Ltd., in Cambridge, UK, in an interview with Science|Business. New data emerged in 2005 that dramatized a mounting problem for R&D-based industries: a labour shortage. On the one hand, the OECD reported a drop of 30% to 50% in university graduates in some physical sciences over the past decade. And several governments announced programs to help fill the gap by recruiting more women to the field. Still, R&D managers at Microsoft and other tech giants complain that recruitment is now one of their top headaches.

"Part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought. . . . You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes."
President Bush, on Intelligent Design, to Texas news editors Aug. 1 (reported in the Washington Post.)

"We should stick to teaching science in science classes - that's best for our students, and best for the long-term scientific and economic strength of our nation."
Alan I. Leshner, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and executive publisher of the journal Science, after a US court overruled a Pennsylvania school board’s school curriculum requiring the teaching of Intelligent Design alongside evolution. Not since the Scopes "monkey trial" of 1925, when an American schoolteacher was tried for teaching Darwinism in Tennessee, has evolution been so hot a political topic in the U.S.

"If these trends in the EU and China continue, China will be spending the same amount of GDP on research as the EU in 2010 - about 2.2%."
Jan Potočnik, EU research commissioner, to BBC News on 20 July. Anybody remember the Lisbon Agenda? There, in a meeting a few years ago, EU leaders took a pledge to boost R&D spending by 2010 to 3% of GDP. Fat lot of good that has done. While business spending on R&D continues to rise, public-sector spending at universities and other research establishments has stagnated in many EU nations.

"It is impossible to say for sure whether another pandemic will arise, whether it will involve H5N1, and, if it does, when it will happen or whether it will be mild or severe.  The H5N1 virus could mutate in a way that caused a severe pandemic next year or a mild epidemic in a decade or two.  Or it could evolve in a way that rendered it harmless, and a pandemic could arise from an entirely different virus subtype." 
US Congressional Budget Office, report of 8 December. Fears of a global avian-flu pandemic led many governments to stockpile anti-viral drugs, and pump millions into new vaccine technologies. That made 2005 a bumper year for some pharmaceutical companies and immunotherapy start-ups, which found a pot of government gold thrust upon them.