Policy Concentrates INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
POLLUTION
State to suspend Chemours water permit Manufacture of fluorinated chemicals, including Nafion sulfonated tetrafluoroethylene-based ionic polymers, at Chemours’s plant near Fayetteville, N.C., could be hampered because North Carolina is suspending part of the facility’s permit to discharge process wastewater. Earlier this year, Chemours pledged to capture and safely dispose of wastewater containing the fluoropolymer processing aid GenX and related fluorinated compounds. GenX has tainted public drinking water drawn from the Cape Fear River downstream of the plant as well as nearby wells. In September, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality warned Chemours that as of Nov. 30, it would suspend the part of the water pollution permit covering the Nafion and fluoromonomers production area of the plant, a move that would require the company to capture and dispose of all wastewater from those manufacturing processes. Then in late October, the agency said this action wasn’t necessary because Chemours had taken steps to control the release of per- and polyfluorinated compounds in wastewater. North Carolina is moving to But now, the agency says it will restrict Chemours’s permit to make good on its threat because discharge process wastewater Chemours allegedly failed to reinto the Cape Fear River, which port a spill of GenX at the plant in provides drinking water to early October. Chemours in early residents of Wilmington, N.C. November acknowledged the spill, which led to a nearly 100-fold increase in GenX concentrations at its outfall into the Cape Fear River, the agency adds. Chemours calls the suspension “unwarranted.” The company says it has worked in good faith to cooperate with the agency. The company and its former parent, DowDuPont, face a class-action lawsuit over the contaminated drinking water.—CHERYL HOGUE
Patent office boosts fees for filings and challenges The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has revamped its fee schedule for the first time in over four years, raising most patent fees by roughly 10%. PTO says the increases, which will take effect on Jan. 16, 2018, will help cover the office’s operational costs, reduce its backlog, and grow a reserve balance. The most significant change is for inter partes review, the widely used proceeding that allows alleged infringers and others to challenge the validity of an existing patent. Petitioners before PTO’s Patent Trial & Appeal Board will have to pay fees totaling $30,500 for such a review. That’s up from $23,000 under the current fee schedule, a 33% increase. “These fee adjustments seek to more closely align fees and costs,” PTO says. The cost of challenging patent validity before the appeals board will remain “significantly less than court proceedings for most stakeholders,” the office adds. The increases in patent application filing, search, and examination fees are smaller. For a business with more than 500 employees, the “large entity” filing fee for a utility patent will rise $20 to $300; the search fee will go up $60 to $660; and the examination fee will increase $40 to $760. For design patents, the large-entity filing fee increases $20 to $200; the search fee will rise $40 to $160; and the examination fee will go up $140 to $600. A utility patent protects the way an article is used and works, while a design patent protects the way an article looks.—GLENN HESS, special to C&EN
ETHICS
CR E D I T: S HU T TE RSTO C K
Research misconduct is common among Middle East scientists, new study shows Research misconduct is a serious problem in the Middle East, a survey of academic scientists there shows. Nearly 60% of respondents reported committing at least one breach of research ethics, and almost 75% said they knew of similar problems among their colleagues. “Scientific misconduct represents a significant issue in several universities in the Middle East,” the paper says. Previous studies have found that misconduct is common in the U.S., Eu-
rope, and beyond. However, this is the first examination of the problem in the Middle East, the authors say. They analyzed anonymous responses from 278 investigators at universities in three countries: Egypt, Lebanon, and Bahrain (J. Acad. Ethics 2017, DOI: 10.1007/ s10805-017-9295-9). The most common type of misconduct was circumventing research ethics regulations, followed by fabrication and falsification of data. Faculty were less likely
to have committed misconduct than students and postdocs. Lack of ethics training was a significant predictor of misconduct. Those who had previous ethics training or had worked in Western labs were less likely to say they had committed misconduct. “Training in ethics might enhance investigators’ awareness and understanding of the issues surrounding research integrity,” the authors reported.—ANDREA
WIDENER NOVEMBER 27, 2017 | CEN.ACS.ORG | C&EN
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