The report looks at: why clinical research is important, it’s history in SA, the national culture supporting it, the public’s engagement, the ethical issues, the funding issues, the published outputs, the workforce and the institutional arrangements. It also looks at what kind of interventions have been successfully used elsewhere in the world to address the kind of challenges SA clinical research is facing.

Based on the report’s findings it is clear that clinical research in SA needs to be revitalized.

The panel then proposed recommendations/solutions and also identified which stakeholders/government departments need to attend to these. The overall recommendations state that there’s a need for:

1. National Strategic Planning, Regulation and Co-ordination of Clinical Research
2. Human Infrastructural Capacity
3. The creation of Clinical Research Centres and Research Institutes as national hubs in the academic health complexes and other sites
4. National Funding Schemes for Clinical and Health Research
5. Monitoring and Evaluation of the Clinical and Health Research Enterprise

The report has been positively received and stakeholders are currently being engaged in order to ensure that the recommendations are implemented. The concise version of the report is available on ASSAf’s website.

The lectures were aimed at encouraging students to further their studies up to post-graduate level, highlight the contribution of published research undertaken at institutions to evidence-based policy making, and emphasise the role of science in economic development as well as the “International Year of Biodiversity” theme. 

National Science Week is an initiative of the Department of Science and Technology (DST). The initiative is managed by SAASTA, a business unit of the National Research Foundation (NRF). It is aimed at highlighting the significant role that science plays in our lives and to encourage young people to enroll for careers in science, engineering and technology.

In addition to lectures, the Quest magazine was showcased at these events with the aim of promoting it to both learners and teachers. Quest: Science for South Africa is a quarterly, popular science magazine directed at a target audience comprising learners, educators and the general public. It aims to present the country’s foremost scientific work in an accessible form. It is widely distributed to public high schools with science departments and at national science events. 

Universities of Technology were targeted for 2010 and the following areas were visited:

Gauteng: Tshwane University of Techonology, Pretoria, Arcadia, Soshanguve and Garankuwa, campuses as well as the Vaal University of Technology

Mpumalanga: Tshwane University of Techonology, Emalahleni and Nelspruit campuses 

KwaZulu Natal: Durban University of Technology

Eastern Cape: Walter Sisulu University

Limpopo: Tshwane University of Techonology, Polokwane Campus

North West: North West University, Potchefstroom Campus

Northern Cape: National Institute of Higher Education

Free State: Central University of Technology

Western Cape: Cape Peninsula University of Technology

The Speakers were:

Drs Thandi Mgwebi, Stanely Liphadzi, Nomusa Dlodlo, Nthabiseng Taole, Linda Fick, Regina Maphanga, Velaphi Msimang, Sibusiso Sifunda; Thulani Dlamini; Bridgette Farham; Carol Nokwelo and Bheki Radebe

Prof’s Fred Otieno, Daniel Makinde, Fulufhelo Nelwamondo, Sibusiso Moyo; Richard Fuggle; Tshilidzi Marwala; Esta van Heerden, Mr Sershen Naidoo, Mr Maximus Sefotho and Mr Xolani Duba.

Land-cover transformation poses one of the greatest threats to global biodiversity and, in light of extensive land-cover change, protected areas are often viewed as a ‘Noah’s Ark’ for conservation. However, there has been growing awareness that formally protected area systems are failing to protect global biodiversity effectively.

Conservation initiatives have had to look beyond reserve fences, to the actual management of the surrounding landscape, to enhance the functioning of protected areas. Land-cover transformation beyond the borders of the protected areas may have potentially devastating impacts on the ongoing conservation efforts undertaken within these, should it continue unchecked.

Given the current government’s emphasis on socio-economic development, conservation has had to evolve in order to be politically acceptable. Conservation decisions cannot occur in isolation any longer; future conservation initiatives must explicitly acknowledge proposed socio-economic development agendas. The challenge now is how to rectify the failings of the current protection area system in order to maximise biodiversity protection, while addressing the unavoidable land-cover modification that is associated with economic growth. In order to ensure the best use of limited conservation resources and promote enduring biodiversity protection, conservation efforts need to be directed at areas that will remain intact and secure from future transformation.

In a first step towards such a conservation plan for the Kruger to Canyons Biosphere Reserve, the largest in South Africa and the third largest in the world, Coetzer et al. quantified land-cover changes in this landscape and found that 36% of the reserve underwent land-cover change between 1993 and 2006. Settlement areas increased by 40%, while the vegetation remaining intact in the surrounding areas declined. This loss of intact vegetation could result in fragmentation, which would affect ecosystem functioning. Although there were small declines in forestry and mining, agricultural usage in the reserve increased by 52%. These land-cover data, together with economic and biodiversity data, can help to reconcile the spatial requirements of socio-economic development with those of conservation in future conservation initiatives.

Read it in the July August volume of the South African Journal of Science: Coetzer KL, Erasmus BFN, Witkowski ETF, Bachoo AK. Land-cover change in the Kruger to Canyons Biosphere Reserve (1993– 2006): A first step towards creating a conservation plan for the subregion. S Afr J Sci. 2010; 106(7/8), Art. #221, 10 pages. DOI: 10.4102/sajs.v106i7/8.221.

A  keynote speech by South African Minister of Science and Technology, Ms Naledi Pandor, highlighted the under-representation of women in the field of science and technology as a whole, as well as their under-representation in research management positions and policy-making.

Leading scientists from developing countries were invited to present keynote papers, followed by workshops with papers and discussions on the scientific contribution of women to these critical areas. Eminent women scientists from the South presented their research work, stressing policy issues pertaining to the participation of women in science and technology in their countries.

TWOWS is an international organisation whose central role is to promote women’s access to science and technology (S&T), enhancing their greater involvement in the decision-making processes for the development of their countries and in the international scientific community. Created in 1989, TWOWS’ overall goal is to work towards bridging the gender gap in S&T. TWOWS uses its forum for intellectual discussions to assist in the development of national capabilities to evolve, explore, and improve strategies for increasing female participation in science. The South African national chapter is hosted by ASSAf, who provide a secretariat for the implementation of its activities.

The Scholarly Publishing Unit of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) is happy to report that four more journal titles are in the process of being added to the SciELO SA Open Access platform! They are: 

-          Psychology in Society (PINS)

-          South African Journal of Industrial Psychology (SAJIP)

-          South African Journal of Animal Science (SAJAS)

-          South African Journal of Agricultural Extension (SAJAE). 

This will bring the total number of journals on the  SciELO SA platform to eleven titles. ASSAf is continually negotiating with the editors of prestigious South African journals regarding placing their titles on this platform.

To date, 1064 articles have been added to the SciELO SA collection. According to Google Analytics, the SciELO SA site has been visited 14, 830  times by 163 countries and 2 112 cities between 10 May 2010 and 9 June 2010. At present, the countries accessing SciELO SA  the most are South Africa, the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Australia, India, Germany, Canada and China.

Two representatives from SciELO Brazil Solange Santos (the SciELO supervisor) and Roberta Takenaka (SciELO System Analyst) visited ASSAf from 24 May to 2 June 2010 for SciELO IT and SciELO workflow training. The following Scholarly Publishing staff attended the training: Tawanda December (Systems and Database Manager); Louise van Heerden (Metadata Librarian) and Zweli Ndayi (Project Officer). The training has enabled the SciELO-team to understand the SciELO network and how it is set up; as well as the SciELO methodology, including the markup and conversion of articles and sending them to the public SciELO site.

 The SciELO SA and SciELO Brazil teams will work in parallel for a few months.

The first person to describe a new fossil gets the rights to name it. This has got be done at the time of the first publication as the privilege is not retrospect. Hesitate and someone else will pip you at the post. The payout is pretty impressive because the once the fossil has been named, the name is there forever with your priority stamped all over it in Latin.

But not everything in the name game is about priority and bragging rights. The whole system of classification is an art, not a science, and the choice of name tells you as much about the researcher as it does about the fossil.

Lee Berger and his team have just had the rare opportunity to name a new hominid species.  They have chosen the name Australopithecus sediba for the debut of the fossils from Malapa in the Cradle of Humankind and the new taxon is on the tip of the tongue of lots of South Africans, from the Deputy Minister of Technology to the kids in school who have been given the chance to give a popular name for the fossils.  

So what is in the name? What statement has Lee Berger made with his choice?  In fact, he has made two statements, one that concerns the genus name Australopithecus and the second concerning the species name sediba.

Let’s start with the easy one: sediba.  The language is seSotho and the meaning is ‘wellspring’ or ‘fountain’. Not a bad choice at all. Making use of one of the indigenous languages of South Africa is a smart move if South Africans are going to ‘take ownership’ of this new specimen. If Berger really wanted to go back to ‘roots’ for the name, he could have chosen one of the ‘Bushman’ languages for inspiration in the same way that we have for our national motto. It reads: !Ke e: /xarra //ke, and means “Unity in Diversity” or more literally “Diverse People Unite” in the extinct language of the /xam. In fact, an extinct language is exactly what is needed for national motto as you don’t want confusion about the precise meaning and a dead language never changes. But seSotho is not only very much alive, it is the first language of 4 million South Africans and a second language of nearly the same number. This is about claiming heritage for the living, not the dead, and Berger’s selection is a good one.

The choice for the genus name needs to be viewed from a cold scientific perspective. Choosing a genus name is about linking the specimen to other discoveries and it plants a flag at a point on the evolutionary road. The specimens from Malapa were clearly related to other fossil forms from around the same age, so the choice was not about a new name, but it was about deciding which name to link it to. In the end Berger chose Australopithecus rather than the more controversial Homo. It doesn’t sound like it, but this is pure philosophy, not science.

Had Berger chosen Homo, he would have been recognising human-like attributes in the bones implying that they were ‘real men’ and not ‘ape men’.  The accepted consensus is that Homo had the ability to make tools, manipulate the environment, probably used speech, and, in Phillip Tobias’s words, was at a “new level of organisation”. But Berger has chosen to lump his new fossils into Australopithecus, meaning that his new discovery had not yet reached Tobias’s new level of organisation.  

But Berger hasn’t quite excluded his new specimens from the human line because the species name sediba implies that his species is at the point of transition from Australopithecus to Homo. Berger is quite up front about this. In his opinion, his discovery is the root of humanity as we know it.

Well this is where the fun in science begins. There has already been some debate about Berger’s claims. The fossil seems too late in time to be at the origin point for Homo. There are also other candidates and the anatomically oriented anthropologists will need to discuss the meaning of the morphology of the new specimens in the light of the detailed anatomy of its predecessors and contemporaries. As I have always told my students, the best thing to do is to wait when a new discovery is made and affinities are proclaimed. It will take at least 5 years for the consensus to develop and much academic blood will be probably be shed in the process.

Note: Read Prof Morris’s article on Australopithecus sediba appearing in the South African Journal of Science.

South Africa can never produce enough scientists, engineers and technologists until the quality of science education offered at schools improves. The factor that affects this quality the most is the quality of teaching. This, is turn, is affected by the school environment and available resources. But most of all it is affected by teachers’ understanding of the subject matter and how to teach it effectively, sometimes called content knowledge (CK) and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). For many of South Africa’s maths and science teachers, their preservice education did not adequately equip them with either of these two forms of knowledge. On the other hand, no professionals can be expected to acquire all the knowledge they will ever need in their initial qualification. This fact is recognised in other professions such as medicine and engineering, where members are required to obtain continuing professional development (CPD) credits throughout their careers. In many countries teachers are subject to the same requirement.

Part of our problem in South Africa is that there is no CPD requirement of teachers (although a policy was gazetted in 2007). Many of our teachers have bought no reference books for themselves and attended no extended courses in which they developed their CK and PCK in a sustained and integrated way. In-service education, with a few exceptions, has tended to focus either on chasing after qualifications that do little to improve teachers’ CK and PCK, or on one-shot interventions with no follow-up. A related problem is that most of our maths and science teachers do not see themselves as part of a community of mathematicians and scientists. Their identity is more often that of teacher who happens, at this moment, to be teaching a particular subject.

For several years the Department of Science and Technology has funded an Educator Support Programme. Part of the funds have gone to the South African Institute of Physics, the South African Chemical Institute and the South African Mathematics Association to enable these professional bodies to offer support to subjects advisers and teachers to implement the new curricula. Each of these bodies has subject specialists who focus on the educational aspects of their subjects and are therefore ideally placed to participate in such programmes. If the Department of Education implements its CPD policy, then university maths and science educators will be able to offer courses on CK and PCK that teachers will be required to attend. And then our chances of improving the quality of school maths and science will be a whole lot better.

Development Indicators, and Global Economic Monitor are now free, open, and easy to access at data.worldbank.org.

Recognizing that transparency and accountability are essential to development, the World Bank Group now provides free, open, and easy access to its comprehensive set of data on living standards around the globe – some 2,000 indicators, including hundreds that go back 50 years. The data is available in Arabic, French, and Spanish in addition to English.

“I believe it’s important to make the data and knowledge of the World Bank available to everyone,” said World Bank Group President Robert B. Zoellick. “Statistics tell the story of people in developing and emerging countries and can play an important part in helping to overcome poverty. They are now easily accessible on the Web for all users, and can be used to create new apps for development.”

The open data announcement coincides with the launch of the World Development Indicators (WDI) 2010, the Bank’s popular statistical resource. Apart from giving open access to the WDI, with nearly 1000 indicators, the initiative also opens up the Global Development Finance (GDF), Africa Development Indicators (ADI), Global Economic Monitor (GEM), and indicators from the Doing Business report.

Access to these new resources is available at data.worldbank.org, a central web site that makes it easier to find, use, and manipulate data. A data catalog lists the available databases. The Bank will continue to add databases in the months ahead.

 For convenience to users in areas without internet access, print and CD-ROM editions of WDI, GDF, ADI, and other products will continue to be available, now at a much-reduced cost.

As always, World Bank Publications will continue to bring the most up- to-date and accurate research and knowledge on development. For more information on this announcement please visit www.worldbank.org.

For questions, please email at the addresses below:

 data@worldbank.org      For questions on data and or technical issues on the new data platform

onlineresources@worldbank.org   For questions on your existing online database subscription

books@worldbank.org     For questions on print and CD-ROM editions of the databases

From almost every corner of the Anglophone world, the complaint is the same: “The Humanities are under threat”. I use the qualifier because, sadly, my ability to access other language worlds – beyond  the Dutch-Afrikaans link – is limited.*

The question is what is to be done to recover and revive the Humanities?

Research and deliberations into ASSAf’s own Consensus Report on the Humanities in South Africa is well under way and the hope is to issue a preliminary report in late October, 2010. My own view of this issue is framed by an understanding of political economy – the rise of neo-liberal economics has emphasized economic growth and efficiency and, in this particular universe, the Humanities have no place ( the State of Science in South Africa, pg 210). This is a fallacy, of course. Take the creation of jobs. In this country alone, right now, one of the strongest areas of economic growth is Afrikaans cultural production – most of this is both creates jobs and pushes economic growth.

But this ignores a series of issues into which the Humanities can shed light – the planetary crisis – known as ‘Climate Change’ – which is generated by mindless economic growth is perhaps the most obvious example. Another example, of course, is the financial crisis of late-2009: here, reckless speculation on money markets helped to generate the most severe financial crisis for 80 years and raised serious questions about the discipline of Economics which remain to be addressed.

But re-igniting interest in the Humanities (which for these purposes includes the Social Sciences) cannot be the responsibility of academies and of Blue Ribbon Panel-types alone. The responsibility falls upon us all – even upon Natural Scientists many of whom have a deep appreciation for the importance of the Humanities but, as the battle for resources in academia has intensified over the past three decades, have turned away from what we might call a ‘dual loyalty’ to intellectual life.

It is certain so that in many instances the Humanities are themselves to blame for the reversal in their fortunes. But the test of their viability should be quality and excellence, through peer-review, not whether they can generate economic growth.

Writing in London’s The Guardian, on these issues, the acclaimed journalist, Simon Jenkins, Scientists may gloat, but an assault is under way against the arts (an article by Simon Jenkins, 25 March, 2010; The Guardian) recently issued a warning to Natural Scientists. Any hope they might have that sweeping the Humanities to the corners would benefit them, was a risky proposition. For one thing, budgetary savings might encourage successive generations of politicians and bureaucrats that further cuts could be made in research funding – this would certainly come from the Natural Sciences.

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* Incidentally, in 2009, the Dutch issued a Blue-Ribbon report called “Sustainable Humanities”.