Editor's Note: All of these letters relate to the Opinion article, "The Disregard Syndrome: A Menace to Honest Science?" by Isaac Ginsburg, published in the Dec. 10, 2001 issue of The Scientist. See also, "Demand Citation Vigilance," a commentary by Eugene Garfield. Two common variants of the disregard syndrome deserve explicit identification. The "but see" variant typically involves a citation sequence such as "Much work supports this idea (Alpha 1991, Beta 1992, Gamma 1993—but see Delta

If American society is now threatened by a philosophy utterly alien to all we value as scientists, the nation can turn again to its immigrant roots for a great symbol of its endlessly renewable inspiration. The strength in melding together the traditions and talents of immigrants, each freely choosing to adhere to American ideals, with the skills of those born here is nowhere more evident than within American science. Albert Einstein--himself fleeing a terrible terror--is but its most visible fa

Illustration: A. Canamucio The triumph of the mapping of the human genome is eloquent testimony to how fast the life sciences have come from the 1960s when the Nuffield Foundation found it necessary to launch a program of biological scholarships to leaven the "soft" biological sciences with expertise from the "hard" sciences of physics and chemistry. The program supported academically qualified physicists and chemists seeking careers in the life sciences, or life scientists wishing to obtain a d

Nadia Halim1 performs a valuable service in highlighting the low frequency of awards to women scientists. I am saddened, however, by her article's emphasis on women nominating women as a path to correcting this imbalance. If nominations of women for membership of the National Academy of Sciences are to come largely from the 6 percent of the NAS who are women, progress will be slow indeed. I would prefer to see my male colleagues addressing the problem from other directions. In an era when academ