Amanda Haag,LondonScientists from North America andEurope took to the skies this week totrack the movement of giant massesof polluted air.

During the six-week study, a tag team of five aircraft will followparcels of air pollution as they travelfrom the east coast of the UnitedStates over the Atlantic towardsEurope. An international team ofsome 100 scientists will pick apart the collected data.

Their mission: to understand thechemical interactions that take placeas ozone-forming pollutants fromfactory smokestacks and car exhaustsin the United States hitch a ride toEurope on prevailing winds — a journeythat takes about four days.

The International Consortium forAtmospheric Research on Transport andTransformation (ICARTT) is launching the project to discover how atmosphericpollutants such as aerosols, free radicals and ozone behave chemically as they aretransported from one continent to the next— and how they affect climate change andhealth issues.

The pollution that the researchers are

studying builds up over an area coveringNew York, Washington DC and Bostonduring periods of still weather throughoutthe year. When the weather changes, thismass of air moves from the lower part of theatmosphere to the upper atmosphere. Windsthen push the air mass over to Europe. Thelump tends to break up as it crosses theAtlantic, but scientists hope to track at leastone parcel of pollution that holds together.

The aircraft will measure the size ofaerosol particles and the chemical

constituents of the invisible cloud,using weather forecasts, models andmeasurements to stay on track.

Similarly equipped planes havebeen used in the past to study smallsections of the journey, but nosustained mission has successfullytracked the pollution right across the Atlantic.

Satellites have been used tomonitor air transport over theAtlantic, but cannot be used to pickup on the details of the chemistry.

The multimillion-dollar studymay one day help to shape globalatmospheric policies, according to the team behind the project.Pollution isn’t just a local problem,

says its lead UK scientist, Alastair Lewis,an atmospheric chemist from the Universityof Leeds. Dust blows from Africa to NorthAmerica, and Europe’s smog may be causedin part by pollutants from the United States.

During the 2003 summer heatwave,there were about 2,000 more deaths thanusual in Britain, some 21–38% of whichwere attributable to heightened atmosphericpollution (J. R. Stedman Atmos. Environ. 38,1087–1090; 2004). “Disentangling where itcame from is very tricky,” says Lewis. ■

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282 NATURE | VOL 430 |15 JULY 2004 | www.nature.com/nature

Institute doomed by loss of interest in basics

Flying labs aim to track pollution across the Atlantic

David Cyranoski,TokyoEighteen years ago, it was a shining exampleof industry-sponsored science in Japan. Butthe Biomolecular Engineering ResearchInstitute (BERI) in Osaka is to close nextyear, despite its scientific success.

The institute’s plight reflects the widerfate of industry-sponsored science in Japanover the past 20 years. The once bountifulwell of private-sector support for basicresearch has dried up, as grand corporateambitions have shrunk in more austere anduncertain times.

Founded in 1986 as the Protein Engineer-ing Research Institute, it was funded by theindustry ministry and 18 companies.Its mis-sion was to develop basic science that wouldunderpin drug development. It now has anannual budget of ¥1.1 billion (US$10 mil-lion) and some 70 researchers.

Over the years BERI,as it became in 1995,has notched up important findings, particu-larly in the analysis of protein structures such as the glutamate receptor, which playsan important role in the nervous system (N. Kunishima et al. Nature 407, 971–977;2000). “BERI researchers put out outstand-ing papers one after the other,”says Shigeyuki

Yokoyama, director of the protein group atthe Genomic Sciences Center in Yokohama.“They really led Japan in the early days ofprotein structure analysis.”

But in April, the institute’s board oftrustees, which includes representatives ofthe remaining nine companies that provide30% of BERI’s funding, decided to drop their support. Chairman Tadashi Hirata,chief executive of drug company KyowaHakko, refused to comment on the reasonsfor the decision.

“BERI has been very productive,” saysMitsuru Takeshita, head of the biotechnol-ogy division in the economic ministry’s New Energy and Industrial TechnologyDevelopment Organization, which providesthe other 70%.“The problem is not whetherBERI has been putting out results — which ithas. Rather it is an internal organizationalproblem.The closing is very regrettable.”

The institute’s director, KosukeMorikawa, says that BERI is closing becausethe gap between scientific discovery andindustrial application is too large for spon-sors to justify the cost. “From a research perspective we have been extremely success-ful and we have also trained many of the

leaders of industrial science,”says Morikawa.“But the companies have not retained muchinterest.”

BERI’s method of studying proteins one-by-one is also out of step with the movetowards industrial-scale approaches such asthe Protein 3000 project, Japan’s effort tosolve the structure of 3,000 molecules.“Groups around the world are finding that abigger scale is better,” says Yokoyama, whosegroup is leading the project.

Morikawa says he has courted patronswho might be able to support the institute,but so far has had no success. When he askedHirata what to do, he says he was told torelaunch BERI as a small business. “I don’thave the connections or knowledge to dothat,”he points out.

BERI’s researchers may struggle to findemployment at a time when Japan is trying to introduce more intense competition,with greater emphasis on industrial involve-ment in basic research (see Nature 429,207–221;2004).Judging from the experienceof BERI, which Morikawa envisioned as a model for such involvement, it will be achallenge for research institutions to meetthese goals. ■

Plane truth: NASA’s DC-8 forms part of a fact-finding fleet.

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