Articles by Alexander Kohn

Hidden Figures I wish to congratulate you on the new format of The Scientist. I find it now much more interesting and exciting than the former editions. Over the last few years I have been collecting same figures and drawings from the scientific literature, which looked to my perverse satirical eye to represent something than they were intended to. Here is one example borrowed from the proceedings of the Oholo Biological Conference (held in Israel in 1981) and presented side by side with its sa

Before the end of this year, the British government will have compelled the country’s universities to curtail the time-honored system of offering tenured employment to their staff (The Scientist, June 27, page 21). The Thatcher administration, whose massive parliamentary majority makes this step inevitable, believes that “jobs for life” can no longer be justified. The universities and many opposition politicians, especially those in the House of Lords, have strongly conteste

Scientists attending the Asilomar conference at Pacific Grove, Calif., in February 1975, made history by expressing public concern about the then newly recognized opportunities for splicing DNA artificially from one organism to another. Some possibilities—such as the introduction into the ubiquitous Escherichia coli of genes coding for botulinum toxin—were seen as so risky that they would never even be attempted. But many other fears ventilated at that time have proved to be un-fou

Looking back, my scientific career seems to have been liberally strewn with missed opportunities. In fact, right at its outset I missed an opportunity by force of circumstance. After a six-year break in my studies occasioned by service with the Jewish Brigade in the 8th Army during World War II, I began work on my Ph.D. thesis at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1947. The subject was a search for soil bacteria that would produce an antibiotic against typhoid and dysentery bacteria. At th

The cost of participating in international scientific conferences steadily rises. Currently, registration fees range from $100 to $500 or more. While scientists may grumble among themselves about these high fees, they continue meekly to pay them. Are these high fees justified? It seems to depend, in part, on the kind of conference. Nonprofit groups like professional societies, research institutions and universities set a fee that covers the actual costs of the meeting. If an outside subsidy is a