Tag: Law

Is IVF at risk? US scientists fear for the fertility treatment’s future

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A fertility treatment that has been used for 45 years is once again available in Alabama. In vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures in the state were halted after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled in February that embryos created using the technique have the same rights as children. A new state law protecting clinics from legal fallout has allowed IVF treatments to resume — but clinicians and scientists in the United States who are working with human embryos are not totally reassured and fear that they will face an increasing number of legal and constitutional challenges.

Physicians are especially worried that officials might cap the number of embryos that can be created in each treatment cycle, which often entails the fertilization of several eggs. Lawmakers could also ban the freezing of backup embryos, which doctors say would result in less efficient and more expensive treatments.

The fact that IVF is so popular in the United States could protect the practice to some extent, says Hank Greely, director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University in California. But research using human embryos — which is already restricted or even banned in some states — might be an easier target for anti-abortion advocates, some of whom contend that life begins at conception and that discarding an embryo is akin to killing a child. “From a researcher’s perspective, there’s reason to be worried,” he says.

‘Wrongful death’

Concerns about restrictions on the handling of embryos began to escalate in 2022, when the US Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade. That reversal stripped away the right to an abortion in the country.

But IVF seemed to remain protected, says Eli Adashi, a reproductive endocrinologist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. “Because in so many ways you could look at IVF as a pro-life proposition, IVF was by and large left alone,” he says.

That changed after three couples in Alabama filed a lawsuit against a fertility clinic for the accidental destruction of their frozen embryos. The suit claimed that the loss violated the 1872 Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, a state law that allows family members to sue when their child dies owing to negligence.

People rally for IVF rights outside the Alabama State House after a state supreme court ruling led clinics to put IVF treatments on hold.Credit: Stew Milne/AP for RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association via Alamy

The Alabama Supreme Court ruled on 16 February that the act covers “all unborn children”, including embryos outside the uterus. The decision meant that the lawsuit was valid — and that clinics and doctors could be liable for the destruction of embryos created by fertility procedures. Clinics suspended IVF treatments, and the resulting backlash prompted lawmakers to quickly pass legislation on 6 March to provide immunity to providers and patients for the destruction of embryos.

Several states, including Alabama, have laws conferring rights to embryos. Because there is no federal law protecting IVF, state laws could potentially be targeted at the technique, which often involves discarding embryos, such as those with genetic abnormalities.

Complicated politics

The Alabama ruling was a warning shot, Greely contends. It signalled that some anti-abortion forces are now interested in protecting embryos outside the womb. If “you’ve just won this great victory in overturning Roe v. Wade, you’re going to be looking for what’s next,” he says.

Mary Szoch, the director of the Center for Human Dignity at the Family Research Council, an anti-abortion organization in Washington DC, didn’t directly answer a written question from Nature about whether anti-abortion organizations are pushing for restrictions on IVF in the United States. The council recognizes the value of the lives of children born as a result of the procedure, she says. However, “millions more lives have been lost as the result of human life being made in the laboratory”, she adds. “Society must stop viewing these embryos as mere products.”

It’s not clear how far anti-abortion groups will go to campaign to restrict IVF. These groups have consistently opposed the destruction of embryos for any reason, says Jennifer Holland, a historian at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. But they have been cautious about advocating against IVF because of concerns about whether “this erodes the kind of political support that they’ve gotten from the Republican Party”, Holland says. Many Republican leaders have openly supported IVF.

Eroding efficiency

Even if IVF is not banned, clinicians worry about the prospect of restrictions on disposal of embryos. Other countries have imposed such constraints: a law in Italy, for example, mandated that only three embryos could be produced per round of IVF, and required all embryos to be transferred “as soon as possible”. “It was very inefficient, and they finally overturned that,” says Eric Forman, a reproductive endocrinologist at Columbia University in New York City.

How much should having a baby cost?

If embryo freezing is considered legally risky, “couples will limit the number of eggs retrieved or inseminated [per treatment cycle] to avoid any frozen embryos”, says Nanette Santoro, chair of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Colorado in Aurora. That would make each round of IVF much less efficient, she notes, which could raise the number of cycles couples undergo, drive up costs and increase exposure to risks from the procedure and fertility drugs.

Forman is also concerned with potential restrictions on genetic testing of embryos, which helps providers to select embryos that are more likely to result in a viable pregnancy and avoid certain genetic conditions. “I worry that [would] result in fewer healthy babies from this technology,” he says.

Fears of restrictions

The study of human embryos is already heavily restricted in the United States. Since 1996, federal funding for research involving the creation or destruction of human embryos has been barred. In 11 states, human embryo research is banned. For scientists, the Alabama ruling sounded an alarm about the prospect of increased constraints.

“I’m concerned, obviously, about what the consequences of this decision are going to be,” says Ali Brivanlou, an embryologist at The Rockefeller University in New York City who conducts research involving human embryonic stem cells.

He says that he understands why people might find it easier to support IVF than human embryo research. With IVF, “you’re trying to help couples to have kids who otherwise would not have kids, so it’s easier to accept why this technology is important,” he says. That doesn’t take into consideration, however, “the fact that IVF could not exist without basic research and that most other aspects of medical practice are derived from the basic research approach.”

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April 2, 2024
crypto-funded researchers grapple with FTX collapse

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Sam Bankman-Fried, former chief executive of the now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, has been sentenced to 25 years in prison after being convicted of fraud and money laundering last year.

Meanwhile, the broader fallout from the collapse of FTX continues — and has ramifications on research that his organizations funded.

Bankman-Fried co-founded FTX in 2019. Before its collapse, the company allocated tens of millions of dollars to effective altruism — a movement that involves wealthy companies or individuals donating funds to charitable causes — and to tackling long-term risks to humanity, such as climate change.

This included giving money to research organizations and scientists, many of which now face the prospect of returning the funds to avoid possible legal action.

One research organization that did not want to be named for sensitivity reasons said that the situation was a “source of great stress and confusion”, adding that it was allocated funds “in good faith” but was now being pressed to return the money.

Others are concerned that news of the fraud has damaged the perception of effective altruism itself. “It appeared, up until the fraud was revealed, that [FTX] had a genuine interest in making the world a better place,” says Jake Eberts, communications director of the US-based medical-research advocacy organization 1Day Soone. “It was frustrating to see how the community had been led astray.”

Future fund

At its peak, FTX’s parent company, the FTX Foundation, was responsible for managing more than US$700 billion in annual cryptocurrency trading and was valued at $32 billion. But in November 2022, Bankman-Fried was found to be siphoning money to a sister company and himself, leading to a mass withdrawal of funds by FTX customers and the company declaring itself bankrupt later that month. Many people lost their investments in the collapse.

Before any fraudulent activity came to light, FTX had announced it would allocate some of its money to scientific organizations, charities and individual researchers, making “grants and investments to ambitious projects to improve humanity’s long-term prospects” through a body called the FTX Future Fund.

Crypto and digital currencies — nine research priorities

The fund awarded more than 250 grants from March 2022. One of the largest recipients was Lightcone Infrastructure, a California-based company that promotes projects to tackle long-term goals for humanity and runs an online forum for effective altruists, called LessWrong. “In total, we received something close to $4 million,” says Oliver Habryka, the company’s chief executive. The subsequent collapse of FTX “had a huge effect on us”, he says. “Currently half of my job is probably still dealing with that fallout.”

The FTX contribution amounted to “around 50 to 60%” of Lightcone’s total funds, says Habryka. Some of the money helped to pay for the Lightcone Offices in Berkeley, California, which had to close in early 2023; some was allocated to running LessWrong.

By the time the fraudulent activity came to light, many of the funds had already been spent, leaving Lightcone in a difficult situation. “We are talking to the FTX estate about what are reasonable settlement numbers and how we can return things,” says Habryka. “We were very heavily impacted by FTX. I’ve put [in] a decent chunk of my personal money to keep the organization afloat. But we have no chance of giving back most of the money because it was already committed, and I don’t know where we’d get the money from.”

Cancelled plans

1Day Sooner received a considerably smaller sum from the FTX Future Fund than Lightcone — less than $400,000, accounting for about 4% of the organization’s funding — which they decided to return when news of the fraudulent activity broke. Losing the money still had an impact, says Eberts. “It did require curtailing plans.”

The organization had planned to use the funds to support future pandemic preparedness in Africa and take steps towards a pandemic insurance fund for developing countries. The idea was to create a mechanism in the World Health Organization that industrialized countries would contribute to, he says. “The Future Fund grant would have been used on “lobbying to get this proposal [discussed] at the World Health Assembly”.

Those plans have been cancelled. “We decided to shelve indefinitely the pandemic insurance fund,” says Eberts. “It was a moonshot in a lot of ways, but the required funding was not forthcoming from other funders.” When news of the FTX fraud broke, “we were all devastated”, he adds.

Sawyer Bernath, executive director of the Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative (BERI) in California, has been through a similar experience. The Future Fund awarded his organization, which seeks to tackle long-term threats to humanity through research collaborations, nearly $400,000 in grants, about 10 percent of BERI’s total funding, for five projects. After the bankruptcy was announced, BERI decided to return the money. For three projects, the cash had not yet been spent. For “the remaining two, we did end up spending because it was very time-sensitive,” says Bernath. “When we did decide to return everything, we used some of our general funds to fill in.”

Operationally, returning the funds has not been too much of a problem, says Bernath, but the “psychological impacts” have been big. “In terms of the existential-risk community, we were really gearing up to this big change with all the money that FTX was committing to things,” he says. “Right at the upswing where everyone was excited, all of a sudden it turned out to be all fake.”

The bankruptcy came as a surprise, and he now finds that there is less funding available from other philanthropic organizations. “When FTX was offering all this money there was a push for mega projects, [worth] $100 million,” he says. “No one talks about that any more.”

The fallout is likely to continue. “Many of the charities that received this money have been negatively affected,” says Bernath, noting that FTX customers also suffered losses. “Many lost all of their life savings, because they felt like this was a trustworthy company, as did we,” he says. “I hope they’re able to get that back.”

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March 28, 2024
Abortion-pill challenge provokes doubt from US Supreme Court

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Members of the US Supreme Court expressed skepticism today about arguments from a group of anti-abortion organizations and physicians seeking to restrict use of the abortion drug mifepristone in the United States. The group is challenging the US Food and Drug Administration’s decision to expand access to the medication.

The justices must decide whether the challengers are qualified to bring suit in the first place — in legal terms, whether the challengers have standing. If the answer is yes, then the court’s nine justices must decide whether the FDA’s actions to facilitate access to mifepristone are valid. A decision is expected in June.

Changes made by the agency over the past eight years allowed the drug to be used through 10 weeks of pregnancy, rather than the previous limit of 7 weeks. The changes also relaxed the requirement that the drug be dispensed in person, allowing it to be sent through the mail. If the court invalidates those actions, mifepristone access would be restricted nationwide. The Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, the decision legalizing abortion nationally, in 2022.

US lawsuit threatens access to abortion drug: the science behind the case

Eva Temkin, a lawyer specializing in FDA regulatory issues at the law firm Paul Hastings, who is based in Washington DC, notes that the justices seemed particularly skeptical that the plaintiffs had standing. The court didn’t focus much on the appropriateness of the FDA’s actions, she says. “I am very hopeful that the Supreme Court was not immersed in those issues as much because they recognized how outrageous it would be to find the FDA scientific judgment here was not exercised appropriately.”

Reproductive health researchers say that the case has no scientific merit, because mifepristone has proved to be safe and effective. They also say that a ruling against the FDA would undermine the agency’s authority to regulate medicines. Mifepristone, which the FDA approved in 2000, is used in combination with the drug misoprostol to induce abortion. Endorsed by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the pairing is the most commonly prescribed regimen for medication abortion in the United States, where 63% of abortions are carried out using pills.

A question of standing

During oral arguments today, justices questioned the anti-abortion group’s allegation that the physicians it represents could be harmed by the widespread access to mifepristone. Emergency room doctors, the group says, might have to treat people who experience complications as a result of a medication-induced abortion. Treating the aftereffects of a therapy to which they have ethical objections would cause emotional suffering and distress, the group says.

“I’m worried that there is a significant mismatch, in this case between the claimed injury and the remedy that’s being sought,” said justice Ketanji Brown Jackson at the hearing. “The obvious common-sense remedy would be to provide them with an exemption, that they don’t have to participate in this procedure,” she added. Existing federal and state laws already allow health care providers to refuse to perform abortion-related care, noted solicitor general Elizabeth Prelogar, who was representing the US government at the hearing.

“This case seems like a prime example of turning what could be a small lawsuit into a nationwide legislative assembly on an FDA rule,” said justice Neil Gorsuch.

But some justices expressed sympathy for the anti-abortion group’s arguments. “Maybe what (the FDA) did was perfectly lawful,” said justice Samuel Alito. “But shouldn’t somebody be able to challenge that in court?”

Retracted studies

The case started in 2022, when the anti-abortion group filed suit against the FDA claiming that the drug’s approval in 2000 — and subsequent decisions that facilitated access to the drug — had “potentially serious and life-threatening effects on women and girls.”

Influential abortion-pill studies retracted: the science behind the decision

In 2023, the judge overseeing the case, Matthew Kacsmaryk in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas ruled in favour of the plaintiffs, invalidating mifepristone’s FDA approval. But the Supreme Court put the ruling on hold, which allowed mifepristone to remain on the market while the case was being appealed.

In his decision, Kacsmaryk relied on problematic studies to question mifepristone’s safety. Two papers¹^,² he cited were retracted in February because of problems with study design and methodology and errors in data analysis, among other issues. The prevailing scientific literature³^,⁴ contradicts the papers that Kacsmaryk cited.

Later that year, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that mifepristone should remain an approved drug but invalidated the FDA’s recent actions to make it more accessible. The Supreme Court’s stay on Kacsmaryk’s ruling meant that the Fifth Circuit decision didn’t take effect immediately.

Hanging in the balance

If the Supreme Court decides that the anti-abortion group has no standing, the case might be dismissed, Temkin says. If, however, the high court agrees with the Fifth Circuit judges, the resulting rollback in mifepristone accessibility would especially affect pregnant people who seek abortion care later in their pregnancy and those who have difficulty attending an in-person appointment with an abortion provider.

The decision could also have implications for drug development in general, Temkin says. The Fifth Circuit called for a cumbersome and unprecedented new standard for drug approval. If the Supreme Court follows that lead, “that would create delays, that would create inefficiencies and costs and would ultimately undermine patient access to scientifically appropriate medicines,” Temkin says.

Such a decision “would have nothing to do with science or medicine or protecting the health of pregnant people,” says Heidi Moseson, an epidemiologist at Ibis Reproductive Health, a global research organization that supports abortion rights, who is based in Oakland, California.

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March 26, 2024
US legislators vote to ban TikTok unless it severs ties with China

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TikTok faces a potential ban in the US

Thiago Prudêncio/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

US politicians have voted to ban popular video-sharing app TikTok unless its owner, technology company ByteDance, sells it.

The US House of Representatives voted by a margin of 352 to 65 to approve the app-restricting bill on 13 March. The legislation will require ByteDance, which has its headquarters in China but is incorporated in the Cayman Islands, to sell TikTok within six months due to concerns over the company’s links to China. The bill still needs to pass another vote in the US Senate before it heads to the desk of President Joe Biden, who previously told reporters he would sign it into law.

While a smaller committee was considering the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Controlled Applications Act” bill last week, TikTok users received notifications through the app encouraging them to contact their public representatives to protest the potential ban. Despite being bombarded with messages, legislators passed the bill through committee on 7 March, approving it for a full vote this week.

TikTok enthusiasts are not the only ones to oppose the bill. “The Protecting Americans from Foreign Controlled Applications Act is censorship, plain and simple,” says Kate Ruane of the Center for Democracy & Technology, a non-profit organisation that advocates for digital rights in the US. “It is fundamentally flawed and will operate, functionally, as a ban on TikTok in the United States.”

Despite such concerns, a cross-party consensus in the US fears China’s ruling Communist Party could compel TikTok to hand over user data to track behaviour. Although the app is only one of many online services that collects data about its users, the US and a number of other countries have classified TikTok as a “national security threat”, banning the app from being used on government devices held by public officials. However, no evidence has been presented by any nation to support those claims.

TikTok, which is run from offices in the US and the UK, among other countries, has always denied receiving any data-sharing requests from the Chinese government – and claims it would never hand over users’ information. However, Chinese law requires all companies operating in the country, including ByteDance, to accede to government requests.

TikTok itself has previously called the proposed bill contrary to the “First Amendment rights of 170 million Americans”, the number of app users in the US. That number also includes many of the politicians deliberating over TikTok’s fate, including Biden.

Tom Divon at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel says the debate over the app is “a peculiar dance of advocating for [TikTok’s] shutdown over data harvesting and surveillance fears – yet capitalising on its vast audience for campaign gains”. He believes politicians are putting political manoeuvring above real concerns and risks, such as alienating young voters who are more likely to use TikTok and increasing distrust in traditional media outlets.

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March 13, 2024
Why does the US want to ban TikTok?

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The US House of Representatives is voting on a bill that would require TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app or risk a nationwide ban

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March 12, 2024
Why a publisher retracted abortion-pill studies cited in a case set for the Supreme Court

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A physician at a clinic in New Mexico watches as a person takes the abortion pill mifepristone in 2023.Credit: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Early this month, a scientific publisher retracted two studies¹^,² cited by a federal judge in Texas when he ruled that the abortion pill mifepristone should be taken off the market, suggesting that the drug causes a burden on the public-health system. It also retracted a third³ that surveyed abortion providers in Florida, linking them to malpractice and disciplinary issues. According to Sage Publications, the first two papers had problems with study design and methodology and errors in data analysis. And all three included unsupported assumptions and misleading data presentations. In addition, the studies’ authors, many of whom are affiliated with anti-abortion organizations, failed to declare conflicts of interest, Sage said in its retraction notice.

Nature spoke to the researcher who contacted Sage with concerns about the papers, as well as to reproductive-health specialists to learn about the perceived issues that triggered the papers’ retractions. They praise the retractions, but say that there are many similar publications alleging the harms of abortion that have yet to be addressed.

James Studnicki, the lead author of the three papers and director of data analytics at the Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI) in Arlington, Virginia, which describes itself as a pro-life research organization, said in a statement that there is “no legitimate reason for Sage’s retractions”, and that the authors “fully complied with Sage’s conflict disclosure requirements” by reporting their affiliations and CLI funding. The authors will be taking legal action against Sage, according to Studnicki.

Papers questioned

Chris Adkins, a pharmaceutical scientist at South University in Savannah, Georgia, first came across one of the Sage papers after it was cited in April 2023 in a ruling by Matthew Kacsmaryk in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas. Kacsmaryk pointed to the study, published in 2021¹, as evidence that mifepristone-induced abortions lead to an elevated incidence of emergency-room (ER) visits.

“I found enough issues in the paper that I felt compelled to reach out to the journal,” Adkins says — especially given its impact.

Activists protest against a ruling restricting the availability of the abortion drug mifepristone in Texas.Credit: Olga Fedorova/SOPA Images/Shutterstock

The Texas ruling has since been appealed, and the lawsuit has wended its way to the US Supreme Court, which will hear arguments in late March about whether mifepristone use should be restricted nationwide.

After hearing concerns about the 2021 paper, Sage began an investigation. Two more papers by some of the same authors were included in the review, and the publisher enlisted independent experts to examine the science behind the studies.

The 2021 paper compares the number of ER visits in the 30 days after a surgical abortion with those after a medication-induced abortion, using data from Medicaid, a US government programme that provides health insurance to people with limited resources. The conclusion, now retracted, was that medication-induced abortions were linked to more visits.

One problem, Adkins says, is that the study claims that the incidence of visits after any type of induced abortion is increasing year on year, without comparing the trend with that in overall ER visits. If overall ER visits were increasing owing to, say, a rise in Medicaid use, the trend could not be attributed to abortions becoming riskier.

Abortion-pill ruling threatens FDA’s authority, say drug firms

The authors pointed Nature to a rebuttal letter they publicly released after Sage’s investigation, in response to a request for comment. They deny that the study’s focus was on comparing people who had an abortion with those who didn’t. One conclusion listed in the paper begins: “The incidence and per-abortion rate of ER visits following any induced abortion are growing”.

Another issue raised by researchers is that the study uses ER visits as a proxy for abortion-related complications, says Ushma Upadhyay, a reproductive-health specialist at the University of California, San Francisco. “We know that many people go to an emergency department because they live too far from the abortion provider,” she says, and they want someone to check any bleeding they might experience after taking mifepristone. Many studies⁴ have shown that mifepristone is safe, and that bleeding is a normal, short-lived side effect of taking it — not a complication.

In their rebuttal letter, the authors quote from their 2021 paper, saying that ER visits are “particularly insightful” events to use when comparing the relative safety of chemical and surgical abortions. “Adverse events following a mifepristone abortion are more likely to be experienced at home in the absence of a physician, increasing the likelihood of an ER visit,” they add.

Although Sage did not publicly release the findings of its independent reviewers, the authors’ rebuttal letter gives insight into other problems that the experts flagged.

US lawsuit threatens access to abortion drug: the science behind the case

One of the papers, published in 2019³, investigates the characteristics of physicians who provide abortions in the state of Florida. It says that nearly half of the abortion providers that the researchers evaluated had at least one malpractice claim, public complaint, disciplinary action or criminal charge against them, without providing any comparison with the overall rate of such claims in the general physician population. According to the rebuttal letter, two independent reviewers noted that, because abortion providers do not have to advertise their services publicly or necessarily register with the state, the cohort investigated by the authors might be biased in some unknown direction.

The authors say in their letter that the paper made no claims that the sample was statistically representative or could be generalized to other states.

When asked by Nature how the papers made it through review, a Sage spokesperson responded that the publisher relies on journal editors to make individual decisions on submitted works based on the evaluations of peer reviewers. In its retraction notice, Sage said that it discovered one peer reviewer who had evaluated the three papers was affiliated with an anti-abortion organization.

Roadblocks to retractions

Upadhyay was surprised — and relieved — to hear the news of the retractions. It’s difficult for publishers to retract these types of articles, she says. “In the past, we’ve seen that anti-abortion researchers have threatened lawsuits against the publishers.”

Chelsea Polis, an epidemiologist at the research organization Population Council in New York City, points to a meta-analysis published in the British Journal of Psychiatry⁵ as an example. Many scholars, including Polis and her colleagues, have published letters pointing out concerns about the methods used in the paper, which concluded that there’s an increased risk of mental-health problems after an abortion.

‘We are bearing witness’: Health researchers navigate a post-Roe world

An investigation by The BMJ last year reported that even after an internal panel appointed by the journal recommended that the article should be retracted, the journal declined to do so. Members of that panel resigned from the journal’s board as a result and suggested that the publisher, the Royal College of Psychiatrists in London, fears being sued. The author, Priscilla Coleman, a psychologist retired from Bowling Green State University in Ohio, threatened legal action after she was notified that the paper was being investigated.

Coleman did not respond to Nature’s request for comment.

Contacted by Nature, the Royal College of Psychiatrists did not comment on what motivated its decision. Instead, it pointed to a 2023 statement indicating that “the widely available public debate on the paper, including the letters of complaint already available alongside the article online”, made it unnecessary to retract the study. According to a commentary published today in The BMJ⁶, the paper has been cited in 25 court cases, including the ruling by Kacsmaryk, as well as in 14 parliamentary hearings in 6 countries.

Polis, who has herself been sued because of another complaint she lodged that led to a paper being retracted, says that these legal threats discourage academics from speaking out against problematic papers. “At least in my field of sexual and reproductive health, I don’t think enough feel compelled to action,” she adds. “At present, there is a lot of risk in taking on this kind of work, and very few advantages.”

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February 27, 2024
I took my case to Nepal’s highest court to improve conservation

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An advocate for endangered species both inside and outside the courtroom, Kumar Paudel tracks pangolins in central Nepal.Credit: Greenhood Nepal

As a child born and raised in Sindhupalchowk, a remote, hilly district northeast of Kathmandu, Kumar Paudel had heard plenty of stories about wildlife smuggling. The region is home to a major trade route exploited by smugglers trafficking wildlife from Nepal to China. He had seen people rapidly amass wealth through illegal trade of red sandalwood (Pterocarpus santalinus), pangolins and red pandas (Ailurus fulgens).

In 2010, while pursuing a bachelor’s degree in environmental science at Amrit Campus in Kathmandu, Paudel often encountered news about wildlife poaching, especially that of the endangered greater one-horned rhinoceros (Rhinoceros unicornis). He and his friends organized political protests and rallies, which resulted in improved parliamentary investigations into controlling wildlife poaching. Encouraged by their success, he co-founded Greenhood Nepal, a non-profit conservation organization based in Kathmandu that is dedicated to saving the country’s endangered flora and fauna. Paudel spoke to Nature about his study of the illegal wildlife trade, and how interviewing people who had been incarcerated for wildlife crimes inspired him to take his cause to Nepal’s highest court.

What led you to visit prisons as part of your conservation research?

When I started my master’s programme at the School of Environmental Science and Management in Kathmandu in 2012, I was already advocating for wildlife through public forums, writing newspaper opinion pieces and organizing outreach events. For my thesis, I connected all of these experiences to the smuggling cases in my home town, to explore the illegal trade route.

But reaching out directly to traders involved in an illegal business was challenging. I opted to visit prisons and talk with people serving sentences for wildlife poaching. I had a lot of questions: who were these people? Where do they come from? I later realized that most of them hailed from remote, marginalized communities, were from low-income families and lacked basic education. Many of them underestimated the social cost that their imprisonment would have on their families.

How did your master’s research evolve into advocacy?

While attending a wildlife-crime conference in South Africa in 2015, I met Jacob Phelps, a wildlife-trade researcher at Lancaster University, UK. Phelps was impressed that I was visiting prisons, and he advised me to expand the research into a nationwide study. I sampled seven prisons in the country and carried out in-depth interviews with 116 incarcerated people.

Visiting prisons and listening to the life stories of the people there helped me to connect with them and understand their struggles. In August 2016, I saw a preview of a television interview in which a former prime minister of Nepal displayed a large tiger pelt at his residence. The disparity struck me — the poorer people in prison had been convicted for their roles in the illegal wildlife trade, but the powerful could showcase parts of endangered animals on national television with no consequences.

What did you do about it?

I went to social media to ask for answers from enforcement agencies. I learnt that Nepal’s law clearly states that possession of wildlife parts without a registered licence is as illegal as trading protected animals. The law required any person possessing any protected wildlife parts to register them with the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation. Surprisingly, when I checked in 2016, not a single person had done so.

Paudel teaches an Indigenous community in Chitwan, Nepal, about pangolin conservation.Credit: Greenhood Nepal

I repeatedly followed up with the Ministry of Forest and Environment, the Nepal Police and the Central Investigation Bureau. An officer at the environment ministry threatened me, saying that he could get me arrested if I kept pursuing the issue. I have to be honest: as a young researcher, I was scared. But after two years of getting no concrete answers, I sought legal action.

How did you prepare for a court battle?

Because I had been following up for nearly two years, I had a lot of evidence. I found an environmental lawyer — Padam Bahadur Shrestha, based in Kathmandu — who helped me to refine the petition and file it with the Nepal Supreme Court.

I knew that getting results out of the court system would be a frustrating process. I had heard about people who had waited decades for a decision. But I had no other options. My case garnered significant attention from lawyers and the public, because one of the judges who was supposed to hear it owned several wildlife parts.

My case went through 14 deferrals over five years. Last May, the Supreme Court finally heard my case. In my petition, I claimed that the government did not keep track of individuals who owned wildlife parts, and that the government was enforcing laws inequitably. The court acknowledged that my claim was valid and requested written answers from the government.

What arguments came up in the case?

The court extensively discussed one crucial matter: how law-enforcement bodies can intervene in matters related to people’s cultural beliefs. In Nepal, there is rich cultural diversity, and wildlife parts can hold cultural, religious and ancestral values. I defended my stance by emphasizing that, despite the parts’ symbolic meaning, wildlife is an important aspect of our biodiversity. Bringing the wildlife parts under a legal framework should help to deter illegal smuggling without hurting their historical and cultural significance.

What was the government’s response? Did the ruling change how wildlife laws are enforced?

The government acknowledged the failure to keep records of wildlife-part ownership. The court directed the government to take a proper accounting of who possessed such parts, including evidence for those in legal possession. It ordered the confiscation of illegally owned parts.

Although the issue has been politicized because it involved powerful people, the ruling set a precedent for the regulation of wildlife-trade crimes. The decision also supports enforcement officers, enabling them to pursue powerful figures if needed. The court order brings thousands of illegal wildlife parts under enforcement, regardless of who owns them.

What’s next for you?

I plan to continue working in conservation science and social justice, whether through courtroom battles or documentation of threatened species. Although conservation science is my main focus, I recognize the importance of translating theoretical discussions into the laws and policies that dictate how society operates. I hope that my case sets an example that there are times when researchers can transcend academic boundaries.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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February 12, 2024
what it means for scientists

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Michael Mann was responsible for the famous ‘hockey-stick graph’ depicting climate warming.Credit: James Ross/Australian Associated Press/Alamy

US climate scientist Michael Mann has prevailed in a lawsuit that accused two conservative commentators of defamation for challenging his research and comparing him to a convicted child molester. A jury awarded Mann, who is based at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, more than US$1 million in a landmark case that legal observers see as a warning to those who attack scientists working in controversial fields, including climate science and public health.

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“It’s perfectly legitimate to criticize scientific findings, but this verdict is a strong signal that individual scientists shouldn’t be accused of serious misconduct without strong evidence,” says Michael Gerrard, a legal scholar at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law in New York City.

The case stems from a 2012 blog post published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a libertarian think-tank in Washington DC. In it, policy analyst Rand Simberg compared Mann, then at Pennsylvania State University in State College, to Jerry Sandusky, a former football coach at the same university who was convicted of sexually assaulting children, saying that “instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet”. Author Mark Steyn subsequently reproduced Simberg’s comparison as he accused Mann of fraud in a blog published by the conservative magazine National Review. In the same year, Mann sued both Simberg and Steyn, as well as the CEI and the National Review, for libel, without asking for damages. The case has been winding its way through the courts ever since.

Mann tells Nature that he hopes the win “signals the beginning of the end of the open season on scientists by ideologically-motivated bad actors. And maybe, just maybe, that facts and reason still matter even in today’s fraught political economy”.

Counting the cost

After a three-week trial in the Washington DC Superior Court, the jury ordered both Simberg and Steyn to pay $1.00 in compensatory damages. In addition, Steyn was ordered to pay U$1,000,000 in punitive damages, and Simberg was ordered to pay $1,000. The court had ruled earlier that neither the CEI nor the National Review could be held liable for the blog posts, because both Simberg and Steyn were independent contributors and not employees of the organizations.

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The jury’s decision comes at a time of increasing political polarization that has left many scientists in the United States and beyond vulnerable to verbal abuse and harassment, both online and in person. Climate scientists have become accustomed to such attacks over more than a decade; a global survey published last year indicated that scientists are suffering both physically and emotionally as a result. Many biologists and public-health scientists have encountered similar attacks since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The verdict represents “a big victory for truth and scientists everywhere who dedicate their lives answering vital scientific questions impacting human health and the planet”, Mann’s attorney, Peter Fontaine, said in a prepared statement.

Scientists who say that they, too, have faced harassment from science denialists are cautiously optimistic. “I have been subjected to similar classes of attacks, both on my science and on myself as a person,” says Kim Cobb, a palaeoclimatologist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. “Mann is certainly out there on the front lines, and not by choice.”

Hockey-stick fame

Mann achieved notoriety after reconstructing global temperature trends spanning a 1,000-year period in a pair of papers published in 1998¹ and 1999². That work included what came to be known as the ‘hockey-stick graph’ — a plot depicting a gradual decline in temperatures over much of the past millennium, followed by a sharp spike in the twentieth century, after the industrial revolution boosted greenhouse-gas emissions in the atmosphere.

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The hockey-stick graph became a symbol of human interference in the climate system and was reproduced by many others, including the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “In a simple picture that a kindergartner can understand, you internalize just how unprecedented the current climate trends are in the context of natural variability,” says Cobb. “It’s one of the most enduring and well-reproduced contributions in climate science.”

Because of his work, Mann became a target of criticism from climate-science deniers. His e-mails were among a trove of thousands of documents that were released after being illegally obtained from the University of East Anglia, UK, in 2009. Critics claimed that some of the e-mails showed an attempt to manipulate climate data to indicate global warming rather than cooling. The following year, Mann was targeted in an investigation by former Virginia attorney-general Ken Cuccinelli, a conservative who questioned whether Mann had used fraudulent data to obtain grants while at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville in 1999–2005. Demands for relevant documents and communications were eventually denied by the Virginia Supreme Court in a case that many saw as a win for academic freedom.

High burden of proof

In the latest case, Mann went on the offensive. But he faced a high burden of proof owing to his own notoriety: as a public figure, Mann and his attorneys had to prove not only that the defendants published false statements, but also that they acted with malice. “It is not easy to prove defamation against a public figure,” says Lauren Kurtz, executive director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, an organization in New York City that was formed in 2011 to advocate for Mann and other scientists who were being targeted and harassed by climate sceptics.

Scientists that Kurtz has worked with have expressed some hope for the future in response to yesterday’s verdict. But she warns that Mann’s case was unusually clear-cut: the defendants accused him of fraud, but multiple investigations run by institutions such as the US National Science Foundation, which provided him with funding, and Pennsylvania State University, his former employer, have cleared him of wrongdoing and upheld his research findings.

“This case might give a few commentators a moment’s pause, but it is certainly not going to lead to a rush to the courthouse by other scientists,” Gerrard says.

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February 9, 2024