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BIOPHYSICAL SOCIETY NEWSLETTER
6
AUGUST
2016
Public Affairs
BPS-sponsored Golden Goose
Award For Work that Led to
Breakthrough Pest Control
Technique
Edward F. Knipling
and
Raymond C. Bushland
,
two United States Department of Agriculture
entomologists, are being posthumously honored
with the Golden Goose Award for their study of
the Sex Life of the Screwworm Fly.
Knipling and Bushland are being honored for
research that led to the “sterile insect technique,”
in which lab-raised and sterilized male insects are
used to overwhelm and eventually eradicate native
pest populations. The technique has been herald-
ed as “the only truly original innovation in insect
control in [the 20th] century,” and continues to
inform ongoing fights against other agricultural
pests and insects carrying infectious pathogens,
including the tsetse fly and the Aedes aegypti
mosquito — the primary culprit in transmission
of the Zika virus.
The Golden Goose Award honors scientists
whose federally funded work may have seemed
odd or obscure when it was first conducted but
has resulted in significant benefits to society. The
Biophysical Society is a sponsor of the award.
Knipling and Bushland, along with two other
teams of researchers, will be honored at the fifth
annual Golden Goose Award ceremony at the
Library of Congress on September 22.
American Innovation
and Competitiveness Act
Approved
In late June, the Senate Commerce Committee
approved the American Innovation and Com-
petitiveness Act, which would reauthorize the
National Science Foundation (NSF) and National
Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST)
and the White House Office of Science Technol-
ogy through 2018. The bill is an updated version
of the 2010 America COMPETES Act.
The bill, S. 3084, was introduced by Senators
Cory Gardner (R-CO) and Gary Peters (D-MI),
leaders of the Commerce Committee’s innova-
tion and competitiveness working group on
federal science and technology research policies,
along with Senators John Thune (R-SD) and
Bill Nelson (D-FL.) who serve respectively as the
chair and ranking member of the Senate Commit-
tee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.
The bipartisan bill reaffirms the NSF merit-based
peer-review process for determining grants, codi-
fies reforms to increase transparency and account-
ability in the grant-making process, and includes
measures to reduce regulatory burdens on feder-
ally funded researchers. An amendment approved
during the bill’s consideration allows for 4 percent
growth in the budget per year at NSF and NIST
in FY 2018, based on what the Senate has pro-
posed for these agencies for FY 2017.
The Biophysical Society, through its membership
in the Coalition for National Science Funding,
thanked the committee for its work on the bill,
and particularly for its support of science and
the authorized increase, but also encouraged the
committee to lengthen the funding authorization
beyond 2018.
The bill’s chances of becoming law are not par-
ticularly good; there is very little time left on the
Senate schedule for its consideration. Even if it
does not make it to the Senate floor, the bill is
significant because it will serve as a marker for the
next Congress’s starting point.