Renato Dulbecco (of DMEM fame) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1975, for demonstrating that DNA from oncoviruses can incorporate into normal cells, causing some forms of cancer. He shared the Prize with two former students, Howard Temin and David Baltimore, who were recognized for their work on the enzyme that…
Cite and be cited Tit-for-tat seems to be par for the course in the scientific literature. An analysis of more than 53,000 scientific papers published over the past century in Science reveals that articles with longer reference lists were cited more than manuscripts that listed fewer references. “There is a ridiculously strong relationship between the…
You might remember that the Royal Institution (Ri), a charity dedicated to research, education and connecting science and the wider public, has been having financial difficulties. This wasn’t helped when ex-Director Baroness Susan Greenfield decided to sue them for unfair dismissal. That case is over, but the Ri isn’t out of the woods yet, and…
Look what arrived in the post when I was on vacation: Thanks to the boys and girls and Testudines at BioMed Central.
The front page of The Guardian featured an article highlighting the apparent waning efficiency of antibiotic efficiency due to the global spread of certain drug-resistant bacteria. NHS takes a closer look behind the headlines, but what do you think? Is it likely that we will be dealing with infections in the UK that are completely…
If you were designing a train, would you seek input from car manufacturers? No? Maybe when building a hospital, you’d consult Heckler & Koch? Possibly not? So why would anybody involve drinks manufacturers in formulating governmental alcohol policies?
The scientific utility of a project is not always positively correlated with political or social will; Pavlovsk is nothing new. Here’s the chemist and author Carl Djerassi talking about his work on Pygmy Chimps in Zaire: This work on Pygmy Chimps didn
(This is an excerpt from my forthcoming e-book “Four Steps To Funding”, available first to my mailing list subscribers and later through other outlets). Funding agencies are in the business of solving problems and filling human needs.
I guess we’ve all had our fair share of unreasonable reviewer comments. But does that mean that peer review is broken? Peer review is inextricably linked with citation metrics and the impact factor, but for now, let’s just focus on that single aspect. Is peer review broken? Is the fact that we’ve noticed problems with…
Reactome paper retracted The journal Science has ceded to doubts about the validity of a “reactome” tool that would allow scientists to assess the functionality of hundreds of active proteins simultaneously. The original description of the device — an array of nearly 2,500 metabolites and other substrate compounds tethered to a glass slide — was…
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