212 18 JANUARY 2019 • VOL 363 ISSUE 6424 sciencemag.org SCIENCEpower to “allocate resources, both human
and financial,” Collinge says, and the firings
were a breach of that agreement.
Battelle, however, has said Collinge could
not have hiring and firing authority be-
cause she is not an employee of the non-
profit. And Patrick Jarvis, Battelle’s senior
vice president of marketing and commu-
nications, says a management change was
needed as NEON shifts from construction
to operation.
“Since we are shifting our focus, we de-
cided to streamline our management struc-
ture to use our funds most efficiently,” Jarvis
told Science. He says soil scientist Eugene
Kelly, who spent a year as NEON’s top sci-
entist during the transition to Battelle, has
agreed to return in an acting capacity until
a permanent observatory director is hired.
The new head will have “a free hand” in
deciding how to reconstitute any advisory
structure, Jarvis adds.
Restoring the committee is crucial, some
former members of NEON’s advisory panel
say. STEAC was “the primary means of com-
munication and guidance between the sci-
entific community and NEON,” they note
in their letter. “These [advisory] structures
must be able to tell an organization what
it may not want to hear, without fear of re-
taliation,” they write. That independence
was lacking, say former STEAC members,
because the panel reported to Battelle,
not to NSF—a relationship that appears
to be unique among the many large fa-
cilities that NSF has funded and operates
through contractors.
How NSF responds to the latest crisis will
be key to NEON’s future. But its reaction
has been muted by the current partial gov-
ernment shutdown, which has furloughed
the NSF staffers who oversee the project.
One question is whether Battelle’s con-
tract to manage NEON will be renewed
when the current agreement ends in Sep-
tember 2020. NSF selected the firm “be-
cause they know how to build things and
because we were facing a crisis,” says Fung,
adding that board members expect “a ro-
bust competition” for the next contract.
Some scientists wonder whether it’s time
for a change. “Battelle rescued NEON and
did an excellent job of building it out,” says
plant biologist Scott Collins of the Uni-
versity of New Mexico in Albuquerque, a
STEAC member who worked at NSF when
NEON was hatched. “But they don’t know
how to run an ecological observatory.”
Despite the current turmoil, ecologists
are still rooting for NEON to succeed. But a
tweet Desai posted shortly after getting the
news about this month’s shake-up reflects
what many worry might happen instead:
“Great data, no users, no trust = failure.” j
S
wimming through the oceans, vo-
raciously consuming plankton and
other small creatures—and occasion-
ally startling a swimmer—the beau-
tiful gelatinous masses known as
comb jellies won’t be joining Mensa
anytime soon. But these fragile creatures
have nerve cells—and they offer insights
about the evolutionary origins of all ner-
vous systems, including our own. Inspired
by studies of a glue-secreting cell unique to
these plankton predators, researchers have
now proposed that neurons emerged in the
last common ancestor of today’s animals—
and that their progenitors were secretory
cells, whose primary function was to release
chemicals into the environment.
Joseph Ryan, a computational evolution-
ary biologist the University of Florida Whit-
ney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience in
St. Augustine, suggested that scenario last
year after tracing the development of nerve
cells in embryos of comb jellies, among the
most ancient animals. Earlier this month at
the annual meeting of the Society for In-
tegrative and Comparative Biology (SICB)
here, he marshaled evidence from develop-
mental studies of other animals, all point-
ing to common origins for some neuron
and secretory cells.
“What Ryan is proposing is novel andimportant,” says David Plachetzki, an evo-
lutionary biologist at the University of New
Hampshire in Durham. Among other mys-
teries, it could resolve a long debate about
whether the nervous system evolved twice
early in animal life.
Today, nerve cells are among the most
specialized cell types in the body, able to
transmit electrical signals, for example.
Some versions talk to each other, others
relay information from the environment to
the brain, and still more send directives to
muscles and other parts of the body. They
are an almost universal feature of animals;
only sponges and placozoans, an obscure
group of tiny creatures with the simplest
of animal structures, lack them.
When and how the animal nervous sys-
tem arose has remained murky, however.
Ryan and Whitney lab postdoctoral fellow
Leslie Babonis were drawn into the debate
by their recent analysis of the developmen-
tal origin of the colloblast, a specialized
cell unique to most comb jellies. Studding
the tentacles of comb jellies, the cells se-
crete glue that grabs passing prey.
By tracing the development of individ-
ual cells in comb jelly embryos and moni-
toring each cell’s gene activity, Babonis
discovered that colloblasts arise from the
same progenitor cells as the animal’s nerve
cells. “That was not expected at all,” recalls
Ryan, whose team published those resultsEVOLUTIONBy Elizabeth Pennisi, in Tampa, FloridaThe rudimentary nervous system of the warty comb jelly may help resolve how nerve cells arose. PHOTO: ANDREY NEKRASOV/ALAMY STOCK PHOTODid neurons arise from
an early secretory cell?
Cell lineage studies of comb jellies and other creatures may
suggest a single ancient origin of the nervous system
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