"ost government scientists were ordered to stay at home, their offices and labs closed or run by a skeleton staff of ‘essential’ workers. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) stopped processing grants, some government websites were made inaccessible and many important research programmes were left hanging, potentially putting lives at risk in the case of some disease studies. Use of government telephones and e-mail was also suspended. The restrictions were still in place as Nature went to press. At the NIH, headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, 73% of the agency’s 18,646 employees were immediately placed on furlough, or enforced leave. The agency also stopped accepting patients for its clinical trials or initiating new studies. Minimal staff remain to care for lab animals and to protect NIH facilities. The NSF, in Arlington, Virginia, ordered 98.5% of its roughly 2,000 employees to stay at home. One notable exception was staff in the Division of Polar Programs, which oversees the agency’s trio of Antarctic research stations and its remote facilities in Greenland. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), based in Washington DC, retained almost 5,400 of its 12,000 employees, largely to support the essential work of the National Weather Service. Most of its scientists were put on leave, with some exceptions; for example, roughly a dozen people will stay on to maintain the agency’s six greenhouse-gas monitoring stations, including sites in Hawaii, Alaska, Greenland and Antarctica. But the team of scientists in Boulder, Colorado, that analyses the data collected by those stations has been told to stay at home, even as flasks of air samples shipped from NOAA field sites begin to pile up. At NASA, one casualty could be the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission, which until 1 October was being prepared at Cape Canaveral in Florida for an 18 November launch. MAVEN’s principal investigator, Bruce Jakosky of the University of Colorado Boulder, says that his team can accommodate a brief work stoppage. But if MAVEN, which will study the Martian atmosphere, misses its three-week launch window, it will be delayed until 2016, when Mars and Earth will again be favourably positioned in their orbits. Under NASA’s contingency plans, operational missions, such as work on board the International Space Station, will continue. Meanwhile, the shutdown forced the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, to halt its tracking of influenza cases just when the US flu season normally begins."
Posted on: Tue, 01 Oct 2013 21:41:41 +0000
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