The Scientist

Scientists are in general a fair, even high-minded bunch, but if one thing brings them down, it is their superior attitude toward a particular group of coworkers, namely technicians and lab assistants. Towards technicians, scientists can often be condescending, even belittling. Let me illustrate with two examples, which would have appeared in the pages of The Scientist but for editorial intervention. The first comes from discussions on the status of postdocs. The character in question was quo

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Some topics are best depicted through example, so here goes: The Jeremy Norman Molecular Biology Archive, which includes papers from Aaron Klug, Max Perutz, Rosalind Franklin, Francis Crick, and James Watson, was on the auction block at Christie's.1 Its value? Between $2.2 and $3.3 million. Now, as a responsible scientist you surely keep detailed notebooks and retain raw data from your experiments. But in addition to these, do you preserve letters (professional and personal), diaries, and s

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A recent survey revealed that nine out of 10 Brits do not know that beer is made from barley, and one in 10 believe that rice is grown in the United Kingdom.1 Exactly where they think the paddy fields are located was not recorded. This ignorance illustrates the growing disconnect between the city-dwelling majority and the countryside in terms of food production. A further disconnect is revealed in the changing attitude toward animals in the United States. "I think there is an urban prism thro

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During Pontiac's Rebellion, a pan-Native American uprising in the Great Lakes and Ohio River Valley in 1763, biological weapons were used. Two blankets from Fort Pitt's smallpox ward were purposely given to Delaware Indians who were trying to negotiate a surrender. A short time later, a vicious smallpox epidemic broke out. There has been but one subsequent incidence of bioterrorism in the United States of which I'm aware. That occurred in the fall of 2001, when five people died and as many as

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The Public Library of Science, whose editorial board reads like a Who's Who of the biology community,1 is slated to start publishing later on this year. PLoS will practice what it has preached: open-access publication, joining BioMed Central (a sister company of The Scientist), which has been publishing open-access journals for the last two years. If successful, this approach will trigger a seismic change in academic publishing. What is open-access publishing all about and who will it benefit

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