sciencemag.org SCIENCEPHOTO: EASTCOTT MOMATIUK/GETTY IMAGESHuge study offers DNA counseling
BIOMEDICINE | The U.S. National
Institutes of Health’s All of Us study,
which will explore genetic links to ill-
nesses, on 21 August selected a company
to offer counseling to the planned 1 mil-
lion participants. Study volunteers can
request their DNA test results for ancestry
and genetic risks of certain diseases and
drug reactions—an unusual step for a
research study. The counseling company,
Color, of Burlingame, California, will
counsel participants by phone to help
them understand how the findings could
affect their health care; counselors will
provide in-depth sessions for the esti-
mated 3% of study subjects with genes
that significantly raise the risk of cancer
and other diseases.Germany seals open-access deal
PUBLISHING | A consortium of more than
700 German research institutions and
libraries last week announced an agree-
ment with publisher Springer Nature
that gives member institutions online
access to most of its scholarly journals
while making all papers authored by their
researchers in those journals immediately
free to read. The 3-year agreement with
the consortium, called Project DEAL, is
the largest national deal of this kind to
date. But it doesn’t include Nature or its
sister journals, which now have no open-
access option for authors. The “publish
and read” agreement gives member
institutions full access to content in 2500
other Springer Nature journals, including
archives back to 1997. Charges are based
not on subscriptions, but on a fee per
research article, paid by the consortium
institutions, for the estimated 13,
papers published annually in those jour-
nals by scholars based in Germany. Project
DEAL reached a similar agreement with
publisher Wiley in February but remains
at an impasse in its attempt to reach
one with Elsevier, the world’s largest sci-
entific publisher.‘Polypill’ yields positive results
CLINICAL RESEARCH | A large study of
taking a daily “polypill” shows it slashes
the rate of heart attacks by half. However,
experts are divided on the ethics of
distributing the pills prophylactically
to healthy people over age 50 without a
prescription, as some advocates suggest.
Taking a polypill—a capsule containing
aspirin, two blood-pressure drugs, and a
cholesterol-lowering statin—drasticallyN
ations this week agreed to monitor trade in giraffes and their body
parts to help conserve the species, now deemed vulnerable to ex-
tinction. From 1985 to 2015, the wild giraffe population shrank by
about 40% to approximately 68,000 adults. The declines were es-
pecially sharp in eastern and Central Africa where giraffes’ savanna
and forest habitat has been turned into farms and the animals are
poached for meat; most trophy hunting of giraffes happens in southern
Africa, where populations have been increasing. Environmental groups
welcomed the new monitoring requirement, enacted by the Convention
on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora
at its meet ing in Geneva, Switzerland, as data are sparse. The only figures
on trade in giraffe parts show that about 40,000—including hides, carved
bones, and hunting trophies such as mounted heads—were brought into
the United States from 2006 to 2015.IN BRIEF
CONSERVATIONGiraffe trade to be tracked
NEWS
A giraffe calf at Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya represents a new generation.844 30 AUGUST 2019 • VOL 365 ISSUE 6456Edited by Jeffrey BrainardPublished by AAAS