SCIENCE sciencemag.org 21 DECEMBER 2018 • VOL 362 ISSUE 6421 1353BRAZILIAN SCIENCE GUTTED
The fiery death of Brazil’s 200-year-old National Museum in Rio de Janeiro was
painfully symbolic of what many researchers fear is a looming demise of Brazilian
science. The museum burned down on the night of 2 September, following years
of underfunding and neglect by authorities. Public funds for science in most of
the country have followed a similar trajectory. The budget of the federal science
ministry shrank by more than 50 % in the past 5 years, and an additional 10 % cut
is expected for 2019 , despite scientists’ many appeals to legislators in Brasília.
Fears deepened after the October election of far-right congressman Jair
Bolsonaro as the next president of Brazil. Although he promises to triple the rate of
investment in science, technology, and innovation to 3 % of gross domestic product
in the next 4 years—something many analysts say is not feasible—the former army
captain is at odds with scientists on several issues. He has threatened to pull Brazil
out of the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change and vowed to reduce funding
for federal universities, where much of Brazil’s science is conducted, claiming that
Brazilian academia is dominated by “left ideology” and that many universities in
Brazil represent “wasted money.” —Herton EscobarAN ETHICALLY FRAUGHT GENE-EDITING CLAIM
Humanity rewriting its own genetic code is no small feat. At another time, under
different circumstances, germline gene editing might well have a shot at becoming
Science’s Breakthrough of the Year. But a Chinese researcher’s claim in November
that he had created twin baby girls resistant to HIV using the gene-editing technique
CRISPR doesn’t qualify for that distinction.
Among scientists and ethicists, a consensus has emerged about the conditions
under which such work might be acceptable in the future: if it is the only way to help
parents conceive a healthy baby, if scientists have done everything possible to show
the technique is safe, if the study has undergone careful ethical vetting, and if it is
carried out transparently.
He Jiankui of the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen,
China, appears to have met none of those criteria. As Science went to press, He had
not published his findings, and there was no proof that two babies were born with
altered genes for a protein exploited by HIV. It’s unclear whether the edits would truly
shield Lulu and Nana from HIV infection, or why the
potential benefits were worth the risks given that
other, proven methods exist to prevent HIV infection
and the girls were not facing an unusually high risk
of exposure to the virus. The study’s ethical review
seems murky at best, the work was shrouded in
secrecy—a planned public relations campaign fell
apart after a news leak—and He broke an interna-
tional consensus on germline experiments as well
as, it seems, Chinese regulations. Because of those
many shortcomings, his claim counts as one of the
science breakdowns of 2 018. —Martin Enserinkflooding, there are storms: This year
brought no reprieve from 2017 ’s block-
buster hurricanes. Like Harvey, which
devastated Houston, Texas, last year, this
year’s Hurricane Florence exhibited many
telltale signs of global warming’s influ-
ence: It intensified rapidly and dawdled
over land, drowning the North Carolina
coast with unprecedented rainfall.
Those effects don’t stop at U.S. shores. Su-
per Typhoon Mangkhut, the year’s strongest
storm, battered the Philippines, triggering
landslides and killing at least 66 people. In
the United Kingdom, human-driven warm-
ing has made debilitating summer heat
waves 30 times more likely; by midcentury,
such heat will grip the island once every
2 years. A similar heat wave in Canada this
year killed more than 90 people. The recent
spike in sea level, now at 3. 9 millimeters a
year, has put Pacific Island nations on edge,
and studies this year suggested wave-driven
overwash could make many of those islands
uninhabitable within decades.
In October, the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change, a United Nations–
sponsored group that includes hundreds of
the world’s leading climate scientists, re-
leased a grim look at the effects of a global
temperature increase just 1. 5 °C above pre-
industrial levels—not much more than the
1 °C the planet has already warmed. Among
the findings: After another half-degree of
warming, many of the world’s coral reefs
would be doomed. In some regions, drown-
ing rains and scorching heat waves would
grow more severe. Arctic sea ice would
rapidly retreat. And holding the tempera-
ture increase to that level would require
a stark drop in carbon emissions, along
with steps to actively remove CO 2 from the
atmosphere, the report said.
“We reach 1 .5° by 2040. We’ve only got
2 or 3 decades,” says Myles Allen, one of the
report’s lead authors and a climate dynami-
cist at the University of Oxford in the United
Kingdom. Perhaps it’s still theoretically pos-
sible, Duffy adds. “But to meet the goal, [the
world] needs to change now. And I don’t see
that happening.”
Even when global warming recaptures the
world’s attention, the problem will not be
easy to solve. The world needs to weigh the
costs and benefits of keeping the warming
to 1 .5°C rather than 2°C or higher, Allen
says. “Politically the conversation has to
move from now to how much a burden we
impose on the next generation,” he says. But
Don Wuebbles, an atmospheric scientist
at the University of Illinois in Urbana
and a lead author of the National Climate
Assessment, says the burden is already
heavy. “I’ve been through Paradise,” he says,
“which no longer exists.” —Paul VoosenIn vitro fertilization, the first step
in gene editing.Brazil’s National Museum, following a devastating fire.IM
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