NATURE MEDICINE • VOLUME 6 • NUMBER 8 • AUGUST 2000 847

NEWS

He believes there may be some “iconic”value for the often-vilified Celera in sign-ing up a national government.

Observers say the subscription cost isway below the commercial price offered topharmaceutical companies and may evenundercut Celera’s reduced “academic”rate. NHMRC research committee chair-man, Warwick Anderson, praised Celera’s“public spirited” offer, which allows re-searchers with existing commercial ties tofulfill those obligations and still accessCelera information. Meanwhile, re-searchers without commercial partnershave to give Celera first appraisal of theirdiscoveries. “We will undoubtedly addfunction to [Celera’s] database, we’re guar-anteed an audience for what we find,”Wainwright says, meaning that Celera willlook closely at any data originating fromits databases.

The subscription provides access to theCelera Discovery System (which includestools for viewing and browsing), to thehuman genome database and to the mouseand annotated drosophila genomes, as wellas its SNP database.

Rada Rouse, Brisbane

After abandoning plans to establish its ownPh.D.-granting program (Nature Med. 5,1098; 1999), the US National Institutes ofHealth (NIH) will increase the number ofgraduate students undertaking doctoral re-search and working under university part-nerships in its laboratories. NIH will financethe research and students will be required tomatriculate in a university graduate school.According to Joan P. Schwartz, AssistantDirector of the NIH Office of IntramuralResearch, NIH will increase the number ofgraduate students from the current 145 toapproximately 300 within five years. “Ithink it’s going to change the atmosphere ofNIH very significantly,” says Schwartz.

The organization already has partnershipprograms in place with Duke, JohnsHopkins, the University of Maryland andGeorge Washington University. MaryDeLong, who was appointed as the new di-rector for the program on 17 July, adminis-tered a similar training program for JohnsHopkins University, is hoping to establishties with new universities.

NIH will begin advertising its partnershipprograms later this year, but already severaluniversities have expressed interest includ-ing Cambridge University in the UK. Somemedical schools hope to start M.D./Ph.D.courses in which students would transfer to

NIH for their Ph.D. research. According toSchwartz, students need not necessarily beenrolled at partnership universities in orderto come to NIH, but it seems likely, how-ever, that future students will come to NIHthrough applications handled by DeLong’soffice, ending the ad hoc arrangements thathave brought graduate students to NIH formore than 15 years.

Schwartz does not believe partnershipprograms will be seen as a way for NIH to

NIH expands graduate student training programs

Australian academic research buys into Celera

In the week that the completion of theworking draft of the human genome wasjointly announced by political leaders inthe United States and Britain, Australia be-came the first nation to sign a deal with theCelera Genomics Corporation to providethe country’s publicly funded researcherswith cut-price access to Celera databases.

Health Minister Michael Wooldridgepaid tribute to Australia’s National Health

and Medical Research Council(NHMRC), for moving so quicklyto sign the three-year agreement.Although full financial terms ofthe deal have not been disclosed,the NHMRC is known to haveprepaid a three-year subscription,which it aims to recoup by charg-ing an annual license fee ofaround US$4,000 to principal in-vestigators. However, the govern-ment’s commitment does not yetrepresent any extra money for re-search, as the first year of theCelera subscription will comefrom the NHMRC’s A$4.2 million

(US$2.4 million) medical genomics fund.NHMRC negotiator and deputy director

of Australia’s Institute for MolecularBioscience, Brandon Wainwright sealedthe deal with Celera. “This idea of a na-tional subscription to Celera had been bub-bling away for about a year but it got toboiling point obviously because Celeraknew the genome announcement wascoming,” Wainwright told Nature Medicine.

Comparison of number of genes in different organisms

compete with universities for graduate stu-dents. She says NIH is most interested in of-fering students opportunities in researchareas in which universities may not yet bevery strong, citing NIH’s bioinformaticsprogram and imaging research as examples.

NIH partnerships may also bring oppor-tunities for students interested in non-de-gree training programs. Under discussion isare training programs in technology trans-fer and public health for which participantswould receive a training certificate.

Tom Hollon, Bethesda

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Even before his much heralded, new cancer research institute has opened for business, Spanishoncologist Mariano Barbacid has been brought to the brink of resignation due to proposed bud-get cuts that would leave only enough money to complete building work on the National Centerof Cancer Research (CNIO) and virtually no funds to support research.

The Instituto de Salud Carlos III—the main national biomedical research funding agency oper-ated by the Ministry of Health (MoH)—had planned a 33% cut in baseline funding to CNIO, andBarbacid was notified that the overall budget for 2001 would probably not include a formerlyagreed increase of Ptas 1 billion (US$5.7 million). Barbacid’s resignation threat led Minister ofHealth Celia Villalobos to meet with Spain’s Prime Minister, José Maria Aznar, to seek a solution.Barbacid has now been reassured that the promised budget will be forthcoming.

The reasons behind the proposed funding freeze are not clear. Some feel that Villalobos, ap-pointed in May, is seeking short-term solutions to the problems of excessive healthcare expendi-ture on drugs. Villalobos told Nature Medicine that she is “exploring the possibility that the drugindustry could become an important source of funding for CNIO.” The center has already signeda major supporting agreement with Pfizer. Villalobos is also understood to be considering the in-troduction of an additional tax on prescription drugs to be devoted to biomedical research.

Xavier Bosch, Barcelona

Spanish oncology center under threat

© 2000 Nature America Inc. • http://medicine.nature.com©

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