Science - USA (2022-05-27)

SCIENCE science.org

PHOTO: GABRIEL POPKIN

from the area’s rich deposits in the

early 1800s, identifying the first known

ichthyosaur and England’s first pterosaur.

Her contributions were long overlooked,

but in 2018, local resident Evie Swire,

then 10 years old, and her mother Anya

Pearson launched the “Mary Anning

Rocks” project to raise funds for a statue

to commemorate Anning. Recognition

for Anning grew after the 2020 release

of the film Ammonite, starring Kate

Winslet. Swire’s project eventually raised

more than £100,000 for the statue, which

depicts Anning with hammer and fossil

in hand, overlooking the cliffs that still

attract fossil hunters today.

Accuser loses defamation suit

#METOO | A judge in Peru this week ruled

against archeologist Marcela Poirier in a

defamation lawsuit brought by Luis Jaime

Castillo Butters, a prominent Peruvian

archaeologist she accused of sexual

harassment. Poirier was sentenced to a

$48,400 fine and a suspended jail sen-

tence of 1 year and 8 months as a result of

allegations she made on Facebook. A 2020

investigation by Castillo Butters’s institu-

tion, the Pontifical Catholic University

of Peru, found evidence of sexual harass-

ment but didn’t sanction him, saying

the harassment predated formal rules

prohibiting it. The National Academy of

Sciences ousted him in 2021 after Poirier

filed a complaint with the organization.

She plans to appeal the judge’s decision,

which her supporters say is a blow to the

#MeToo movement in Latin America.

NIH sets up antiviral centers

D R U G D E V E L O PMENT | The National Institute

of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)

last week awarded $577 million to establish

nine U.S. antiviral drug discovery centers.

The centers, all led by academic institu-

tions, will focus on creating antivirals

targeting SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses

with pandemic potential. Targets could

include: filoviruses such as Ebola and

Marburg; flaviviruses, which cause yel-

low fever and Zika; and mosquito-born

togaviruses. The new effort aims to

identify novel molecular targets essential

to viruses’ ability to attack the body and

then find small-molecule oral medica-

tions that directly block these targets,

NIAID’s director, Anthony Fauci, said

in an 18 May press release. Recipients

include the Scripps Research Institute; the

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill;

Emory University; and the University of

California, San Francisco.

ECOLOGY

Is a tree in Chile the world’s oldest?

A

famous conifer in Chile could be the world’s oldest tree, according to a scien-

tist’s claim that has drawn skepticism from others. Alerce trees are long-lived,

with one documented stump holding 3622 annual growth rings. That ranks

second to bristlecone pines, whose oldest known living specimen resides in

California and has 4853 rings. But a towering alerce in Alerce Costero National

Park could be about 5500 years old, estimates environmental scientist Jonathan

Barichivich of the Climate and Environmental Sciences Laboratory in Paris. In

unpublished work, he paired a partial count of the tree’s growth rings with statisti-

cal modeling to calculate that the alerce has an 80% probability of being more than

5000 years old. Some tree-age experts say the method seems promising, but others

insist the only way to accurately date a tree is to count every ring.

27 MAY 2022 • VOL 376 ISSUE 6596 901