Just before the fascinating article on Francis Crick’s correspondence in today’s Nature, there’s a feature by Brendan Maher on sabotage in the laboratory. Vipul Bhrigu, erstwhile postdoc at the University of Michigan, narrowly escaped a jail sentence after pleading guilty to sabotaging a PhD student’s experiments.
In this guest post, Stephen Curry calls for scientists in the UK to support the Science is Vital campaign. Thanks to the world-wide economic reverberations of the credit crunch, Britain’s deficit stands at around £160 billion, meaning that to run UK plc for the coming year the government will have to spend £160bn more than it…
Elizabeth Blackburn, FRS, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2009, and F1000 International Advisory Board Member, gave a Keynote Lecture at the recent EMBO 2010 meeting in Barcelona. Edyta Zielinska and Kathleen Wets were lucky enough to catch her briefly between engagements to hear about her current research. This is the first of three videos…
If I were a visitor from another world, what would be my impression of how we do science? First the good news. As we noted yesterday, the number of PhDs achieved by women in the US, across all disciplines, exceeded the number obtained for men. The distribution is reasonably field specific, as you can tell…
I always have been against big science. I think it’s mostly a waste of money and all the history of science shows us that it never leads to the attempted goal. Jan Klein, the Czech-American immunologist, co-founded the modern science of immunogenetics. He is the author or co-author of over 560 scientific publications and of…
First edible GM animal? The U.S. Food and Drug Administration may soon approve the first genetically modified animal for humans to eat
One of my laments concerning the internet age is that not enough publishers use high quality metadata to identify their content. By metadata, I mean hidden parts of content which seek to describe that content. So metadata can be loosely defined as data which is explicitly concerned with data. In essence it tells us what…
One of my laments concerning the internet age is that not enough publishers use high quality metadata to identify their content. By metadata, I mean hidden parts of content which seek to describe that content. So metadata can be loosely defined as data which is explicitly concerned with data. In essence it tells us what…
The media faces constant criticism from medical specialists and advocacy groups whenever it trumpets the latest new wonder drug to cure any form of cancer. Many spurious claims have over the years been splashed across the UK Daily Mail’s front page, prompting backlash from organisations such as the National Health Service, Cancer Research UK and…
As anyone who has worked in a lab will tell you, labcoats are a complete pain in the Gilson until the day they save your Armani suit from being dosed with TEMED, E. coli or radioactivity (and in extreme cases, all three). Invariably made from cheap polycotton with fasteners that don’t and sleeves that dangle…
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