SCIENCE science.org
wondering about its trajectory. Those details
could be filled in by the administration’s
upcoming 2023 budget proposal, expected
in March. The new moonshot aims to cut
cancer deaths by at least 50% over the next
25 years and to improve support for navigat-
ing the medical, financial, and emotional
burdens of cancer treatment and survivor-
ship. These actions will “end cancer as
we know it,” Biden said. The effort would
encourage people to get cancer screenings
they missed during the COVID-19 pandemic
and support research on vaccines and blood
tests that screen for multiple cancers. The
original moonshot’s funding, projected at
$1.8 billion over 7 years, will end in 2023; it
has focused on immunotherapies, pediatric
cancer treatments, and data sharing.
CRISPR patent fight heats up
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY | Lawyers for
the two sides battling over who invented
the genome editor CRISPR traded pointed
exchanges at a hearing last week, as one
team claimed a key scientist on the other
improperly obtained early information on
the “guide RNA” molecule that ferries a
DNA-cutting enzyme to a target sequence.
The lawyer representing the institutions
of Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle
Charpentier, who shared the 2020 Nobel
Prize in Chemistry for developing CRISPR,
said Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute of
MIT and Harvard was given confidential
details on the guide RNA from a collabora-
tor who reviewed the key initial CRISPR
paper by Doudna, Charpentier, and
colleagues. The lawyer representing the
Broad group argued the information was
presented publicly and stressed that Zhang’s
team, not Doudna’s and Charpentier’s, was
the first to make the guide RNA work inside
eukaryotic cells. When the U.S. Patent Trial
and Appeal Board will rule is unknown.Airline ends monkey flights
RESEARCH ANIMALS | Kenya Airways
has agreed to stop shipping monkeys for
research after a truck carrying 100 long-
tailed macaques the company had flown
from Mauritius to New York City’s John F.
Kennedy International Airport crashed in
Pennsylvania while en route to a quarantine
facility. Three of the animals reportedly
escaped and were later euthanized; others
sat in crates on the road for hours. In a
27 January email to People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals (PETA) obtained
by Science, Kenya Airways Chair Michael
Joseph wrote that he was “horrified” by the
accident and that “transport of any wild
animals will no longer take place by Kenya
Airways” after the current contract for
the macaques ends on 28 February. PETA
Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo says
another company could jump in to ship
monkeys from Mauritius, one of the world’s
top suppliers of macaques for research.U.S. OKs some Iran nuclear work
NONPROLIFERATION | Key areas of civil-
ian nuclear cooperation with Iran are
back on the table as world powers seek to
revive a lapsed nuclear arms control deal.
On 4 February, the U.S. Department of
State waived sanctions on several projects,
including reconfiguring uranium centrifuges
at Iran’s underground Fordow enrichment
site to produce isotopes used in medicine.
Under the 2015 agreement, the United
States and other nations granted Iran relief
from economic sanctions in exchange
for curtailing uranium enrichment and
plutonium production. Then-President
Donald Trump’s administration pulled out
of the deal in 2018, and 1 year later Iran
ramped up enrichment and other proscribed
activities. The new sanctions waivers allow
China, Russia, and other countries to resume
technical discussions on redesigning the
Arak heavy water reactor to limit plutonium
accumulation in spent fuel, providing ura-
nium fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor,
and eventually converting Fordow to an
international physics research center.THREE QSArchaeology makes amends
Recent discoveries suggest the fi rst
people arrived in the Americas at least
23,000 years ago, much earlier than
researchers thought only a decade
ago. But too often, scientists have not
respected their living descendants,
say paleogeneticist Jennifer Ra of the
University of Kansas, Lawrence—whose
book Origin: A Genetic History of the
Americas was published this week—and
archaeologist Joe Watkins, a member
of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma
who is the immediate past president of
the Society for American Archaeology.
(A longer version of this interview is at
https://scim.ag/3rJJMPT.)Q: In your work on the peopling of
the Americas, why has genetics been
both vital and controversial?
Joe Watkins: Genetics has helped us
fi gure out some of the basic questions.
Jennifer Raff : There are major gaps
geographically and temporally in the
genetic record. I am hopeful as we work in
this space in a more ethical way, we can
start to recover more genomes. [But] that
is really up to the tribes. I don’t think we’re
going to learn the whole picture unless this
work is done to build relationships.Q: Can scientists do better?
J.R.: In the last few years, there have
been increasing requirements for
[community] engagement as part
of ethics statements and increasing
scrutiny as part of grant proposals.
J .W. : [E orts] to create ethical guidelines
for the fi eld ... may be faltering, but it’s
progress—at least there are steps.Q: How do you address ancient DNA
research, which destroys small
amounts of human remains?
J .W. : [By] bringing in the social and
historical concerns of American Indians
and understanding the reasons they
often feel the way that they do. Too often
archaeology and genetics and many of
the sciences have jumped in and said,
“We need your dead ancestors to give
you access to your history.” ... We are
within the generation that will repair
those relationships.
J.R.: There are scientists who will say, “If
we just hit them with enough data, they’ll
come around to our way of thinking.”
But there are other ways to view things,
and we should be respectful of these
traditional knowledges about history.Light trails left by
Starlink internet satellites
have interfered with
astronomical observations.11 FEBRUARY 2022 • VOL 375 ISSUE 6581 595