Biomedical researchers would benefit from emulating the logically rigorous reasoning of the late Alan Turing, British mathematician, computer scientist, and master cryptographer.

One researcher's reservations about Francis Collins's nomination as head of the agency

Leading journals including Science and Nature are exaggerating research novelty

The physicist (and Einstein's esteemed colleague and sometime intellectual opponent) Niels Bohr gave biologists a new conceptual tool

Image: Anthony Canamucio In a recent commentary in Science, on the semantics of cloning,1 three eminent members of the scientific community asserted, "Scientists who are fluent in the language of any specific discipline can speak to one another using shorthand expressions from this dialect and can convey an exact understanding of their intended meanings." It is a comforting thought, but the preponderance of evidence does not support this grand claim, if by "can convey" the authors mean to sugg

Some members of the Ohio State Board of Education are maneuvering to have "intelligent design" (ID) taught to Ohio students as an alternative to teaching them about biological evolution.1 These board members were pursuing the inclusion of ID in the biology curriculum despite unambiguous opposition from the relevant science advisory committee. One board member apparently regards this development as a chance for Ohio "to be on the cutting edge." Unfortunately, this cutting edge will only serve to

The most optimistic proponents of genomics suggest that with some human genomes (almost) completely sequenced, the next step of identifying disease-associated genes will be greatly enhanced. Now, so the argument goes, it should be possible to determine the functions of these genes and their corresponding gene products. Scientists hope this step will pave the way for the identification of drugs that target these disease-related gene products and treat or even cure the associated diseases. A scena