A large and growing group of individuals -- the seniors -- is being chased out of our factories, our offices, our classrooms, our boardrooms, and in fact out of all aspects of active professional life. Although America is aging, and the mean age creeps up inexorably, institution after institution has programs designed to get rid of any gray heads with many years of experience and faithful service and replace them with younger, cheaper, and often part-time employees. AT&T, IBM, and other b

Diana Morgan's piece on oral delivery of peptide drugs [The Scientist, March 4, 1991, page 1] quotes a number of pessimistic appraisals of the future development of such systems. The critics usually point to poor reproducibility, poor bioavailability, and the formidable physiological barriers to efficient absorption of large peptide molecules. However, several groups, including our own (Biochemical Society Transactions, 18:752-4, 1990), have managed to deliver sufficient insulin by mouth to pro

The Commentary "Senior Scientists Could Play A Key Role In Resolving Big Problems In Peer Review," by David Kritchevsky, and the article "Senior Scientists Face Funding Hurdles, Mandatory Retirement," by Julia King (The Scientist, Jan. 22, 1990, pages 12 and 19), deal with the very important problem of the forced retirement of senior scientists. This waste of human resources first impressed me in 1965. I was then building director of the McIntyre Medical Sciences Building at McGill University.

Concern over the pressure to publish and its spawning of fraudulent publications has led to an examination of multiple authorship of scientific papers. In prestigious journals, such as the New England Journal of Medicine and Science, papers with six or more coauthors are not uncommon. While many of the authors may have contributed to the work described in a paper, there are many instances in which names are added to the author list for political reasons. A scientist may supply a needed compou

Tucked in among the multipage, multicolored ads touting medications for baldness, hypertension, and assorted infections in the New England Journal of Medicine on November 17, 1988, was a one-column notice in plain, black and white describing an innovative research grant program. The ad, placed by the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (CFF) of Bethesda, Md., called for proposals from investigators whose grant applications to the National Institutes of Health had received the NIH’s dreaded verdi

European visitors to the United States often remark on the surprising power and influence of religion in this country. Religion in Europe is largely a private and individual activity. In the U.S., in contrast, religion continually overflows into politics and other aspects of daily life. We recently had a serious presidential candidate who claimed that God told himto run for office. And strong, vocal groups have been calling for such practices as school prayer and the teaching of Biblical crea

An ecological study of scientists conducted in the pre-jet plane era concluded that the likeliest place to find a scientist was at O’Hare airport in Chicago. Now, a similar statement can be made about important international airports, such as Heathrow in London and Orly in Paris. Every terminal seems to be populated with scientists on the move. Why do scientists travel? Hans Selye, the father of the concept of stress, wrote that scientists are not motivated by fortune, but by fame. The

Changing times have depleted the ranks of physicians who enter into careers as researchers. The shortage of physician-scientists has prompted the National Institutes of Health, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and similar organizations to offer fellowships and other incentives to entice graduated M.D.s into research careers. But these inducements may come too late in the education of a physician. Scientists often choose their careers because they were exposed at some point to a laboratory.