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Summary In a rapidly changing world, scientists and research institutions need to plan for the infrastructure, skills, and policy engagement that will help society navigate social-ecological challenges. Foresighting draws on approaches used in strategic and long-range (>10 years) planning and participatory futures studies. Here, we describe a new quantitative approach to develop and rank 14 foresight scenarios across a range of general and marine-relevant science domains. Indicators for each foresight were used to assess the time-specific probability of each scenario being realized. Assessments by scientists in 2 consecutive years showed foresight scoring consistency and revealed surprises. Despite high variation among scientists in scoring the year that each indicator would occur, there was overall consistency across the foresights between years. We show that foresighting can be quantitative and that individual performance and changes in likelihood can be evaluated. This approach can motivate and guide strategic planning and investment decisions by scientific institutions in response to different anticipated futures and build skills in futures thinking.

16 pages, 6 figures, 3 tables, supplementary data https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pocean.2021.102659.-- Code and data availability: The experimental protocol in this paper has no code associated with it. Forcing data from CMIP5 used for the protocol, and the FishMIP model outputs presented in this paper are available on the ISIMIP servers (https://www.isimip.org/), Climate change is warming the ocean and impacting lower trophic level (LTL) organisms. Marine ecosystem models can provide estimates of how these changes will propagate to larger animals and impact societal services such as fisheries, but at present these estimates vary widely. A better understanding of what drives this inter-model variation will improve our ability to project fisheries and other ecosystem services into the future, while also helping to identify uncertainties in process understanding. Here, we explore the mechanisms that underlie the diversity of responses to changes in temperature and LTLs in eight global marine ecosystem models from the Fisheries and Marine Ecosystem Model Intercomparison Project (FishMIP). Temperature and LTL impacts on total consumer biomass and ecosystem structure (defined as the relative change of small and large organism biomass) were isolated using a comparative experimental protocol. Total model biomass varied between −35% to +3% in response to warming, and -17% to +15% in response to LTL changes. There was little consensus about the spatial redistribution of biomass or changes in the balance between small and large organisms (ecosystem structure) in response to warming, an LTL impacts on total consumer biomass varied depending on the choice of LTL forcing terms. Overall, climate change impacts on consumer biomass and ecosystem structure are well approximated by the sum of temperature and LTL impacts, indicating an absence of nonlinear interaction between the models’ drivers. Our results highlight a lack of theoretical clarity about how to represent fundamental ecological mechanisms, most importantly how temperature impacts scale from individual to ecosystem level, and the need to better understand the two-way coupling between LTL organisms and consumers. We finish by identifying future research needs to strengthen global marine ecosystem modelling and improve projections of climate change impacts, JDE was funded by Australian Research Council Discovery Projects DP150102656 and DP190102293. MC, JS, NB and OM received financial support by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 817578 (Triatlas project). CH received funding from the Open Philanthropy Project. NB and OM also acknowledge the support of the French ANR project CIGOEF (grant ANR-17-CE32-0008-01). DPT acknowledges funding from the ISI-MIP project to support a workshop on this topic, and the Jarislowsky Foundation. EDG received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 682602, BIGSEA). RFH was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities through the Acciones de Programación Conjunta Internacional (PCIN-2017-115). MC acknowledges the ‘Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence’ accreditation (CEX2019-000928-S) to the Institute of Marine Science (ICM-CSIC). TDE acknowledges funding from the ISIMIP project to support a workshop on this topic and the Fisheries and Oceans Canada Atlantic Fisheries Fund. All authors declare no conflict of interest with respect to this study. JAFS received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 FutureMARES project (#869300).

In a rapidly changing world, scientists and their research institutions need to plan for the infrastructure, skills, and policy engagement that will be demanded to help society navigate current and emergent social-ecological challenges. Foresighting draws on approaches used in strategic and long-range (>10 year) planning, and participatory futures studies. It is outcome-oriented and typically involves development of scenario narratives that can inform planning in a qualitative sense. Here we describe a new quantitative approach to develop and rank 14 foresight scenarios of potential futures across a range of general and marine-relevant science domains. Indicators for each foresight were used to assess the time-specific probability of each scenario being realised and assessments by scientists were undertaken in two consecutive years to test for foresight scoring consistency and outliers (surprises). Despite high variation among scientists in scoring the year that each indicator would occur, there was overall consistency across the foresights between years. Our approach shows that foresighting can be quantitative, by using time specific evaluation of indicators which is an improvement over traditional descriptive approaches, as individual performance and changes in likelihood can be evaluated. This approach can motivate and guide strategic planning and investment decisions by scientific institutions in response to different anticipated futures and build the skills of staff in futures thinking.

Background Randomised phase 3 trials have demonstrated that poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) inhibitors significantly improve progression-free survival in BRCA-mutant high-grade serous and endometrioid ovarian carcinoma. Consequently, the demand for germline and tumour BRCA1/2testing has increased significantly throughout the UK. We report results from a tumour BRCA1/2testing service available to cancer centres across England, Wales and Northern Ireland from July 2017 to February 2019. Methods DNA extracted from formalin fixed, paraffin-embedded tumour samples underwent next generation sequencing for BRCA1/2 variants. Eligibility criteria included relapsed, platinum-sensitive ovarian, fallopian tube or primary peritoneal cancer with germline BRCA1/2wild-type or unknown germline. Patients also had to have received ≥2 prior lines of platinum-based chemotherapy. A confirmatory histopathology report was requested as part of the tumour BRCA1/2testing service. Results Two hundred and ninety-three histologically-confirmed high-grade serous and/or endometrioid ovarian cancer tumour samples underwent tumour BRCA1/2testing. The prevalence of pathogenic (class 5) or likely pathogenic (class 4) variants was 17.7% (52/293). The germline BRCA1/2was wild-type for 185/293 (63.1%) of patients, with the remaining 36.9% (108/293) with germline BRCA1/2unknown. There were at least 36 (12.3%) pathogenic/likely pathogenic somatic BRCA1/2variants detected. The allele fraction for somatic BRCA1/2pathogenic variants ranged from 0.06 to 0.98, with 50% (18/36) reported with an allele fraction of ≥ 0.5 (50%), in keeping with putative biallelic loss-of-function. Conclusions Prospective evaluation of paired germline and tumour BRCA1/2testing in all women who are diagnosed with platinum-sensitive high-grade serous and/or endometrioid ovarian cancer in the UK is now required to validate these findings. Legal entity responsible for the study AstraZeneca. Funding AstraZeneca. Disclosure All authors have declared no conflicts of interest.

Background Cystic fibrosis (CF) is produced by mutations in the Cystic Fibrosis Transmembrane Conductance Regulator Gene (CFTR) gene. Methods One hundred twenty eight patients with CF were analysed for mutations in the CFTR gene in order to establish the frequency of CF mutations in the Romanian population. The chief methods of analysis were polymerase chain reaction (PCR) of DNA extracted from blood and electrophoresis of PCR products. Results The frequency of F508del in CF chromosomes from Romania is approximately 56.3%. Other frequent mutations noted are: G542X (3.9%), W1282X (2.3%), and CFTRdele2,3(21 kb)(1.6%); the remaining mutations have frequencies below 1%. Conclusions We consider that the frequency of F508del in CF patients from Romania is higher than in previous reports, reaching 56.3%, probably owing to more rigorous selection of patients for genetic testing, allowing improved calculation of mutation frequencies.