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

The recent, vigorous debate occurring in our pages regarding whether it's necessary to accept the theory of evolution1,2 (also, see Letters) as a prerequisite to studying the sciences has set me thinking: What exactly is a scientist? Albert Einstein--who better to guide us--had some forthright views. In an address to the Società Italiana per il Progresso della Scienze on occasion of its 43rd meeting in Lucca, Italy, October 1950, he implied that science must be all-consuming: "... apa

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

Why is it that smoking--so expensive, personally injurious, and detrimental to the public purse--is still an essential part of daily life for so many of us? The primary answer is craving: Smoking is more reinforcing than crack cocaine. Teasing out the factors--psychological, neurological, and genetic--that contribute to nicotine dependence is a complex process, as we report on page 21. But the potential payoffs from new treatments in terms of health benefits (and developer profits) guarantees

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

There comes an hour when protest no longer suffices; after philosophy there must be action; the strong hand finishes what the idea has sketched. --Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, Saint Denis in book 13, ch. 3 In the Feb. 10 issue, after polling 2,800 postdocs, we highlighted the best places to work and the factors that contribute to job satisfaction. But in the box for free-text comments, quite a different set of verdicts was being delivered. Most of the 600 comments were shrieks of protest, f

I have two Iraqi friends, both scientists, both wonderfully witty people. One of them is perhaps the kindest, gentlest, best-humored man I've ever known; I was honored to serve as his best man when he married a Cumbernauld girl of Polish descent. Such Iraqi/Scots-Polish liaisons might often occur in the melting-pot of the US, but in late-1980s Dublin this was quite an exotic event. Unfortunately, no one from the Iraqi side of the family was permitted to be present. A couple of years earlier,

Turn to page 10 of this issue to view a first-rate Eureka moment, a full-blown YOOOO-REEEEEEE-KAAA epiphany: a photograph of the lab notebook page recording the discovery of the virus now known as HIV. The document deserves prominent display in a major museum. However, when I contacted author Francoise Barré-Sinoussi to ask for it, the reply was, and I paraphrase, "I should have that somewhere, let me get back to you." Who says that researchers are all egomaniacs? Since the discovery

An advertising colleague asked a potential client if he was familiar with The Scientist. "Yes, of course," the man responded. "It's the only real scientific magazine, a kind of Playboy for geeks." I have to admit to being delighted with this description. While I do not consider our readers geeks, nor am I an avid fan of Hugh Hefner, the phrase has connotations of a "wanna read," and that's exactly our aim with The Scientist. Plenty of science publications around have aspirations and pretensi

"Men are only so good as their technical developments allow them to be." --George Orwell, Inside the Whale and Other Essays, 1940 There are numerous awards and prizes for scientific achievement, and rightly so. Today's researchers are heavily dependent on sophisticated laboratory equipment, specialized software, and electronic access to databases. Orwell's maxim has never been so relevant. Yet recognizing excellence in the provision of these services has been remarkably lacking. That omi

Serious concerns about the general public's lack of technological know-how were highlighted by a National Academy of Engineering report earlier this year.1 It began: "Although the United States is increasingly defined by and dependent on technology and is adopting new technologies at a breathtaking pace, its citizens are not equipped to make well-considered decisions or to think critically about technology. As a society, we are not even fully aware of or conversant with the technologies we use

Those who make many species are the 'splitters,' and those who make few are the 'lumpers.' --The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, vol. II. Extending the above analogy from taxonomy to biology, "splitters" have had the best of things recently, generating massive amounts of data on genes and their networks, proteins and their pathways, cascades and cassettes. But unifying this torrent of information into a seamless whole now requires "lumpers," integrative scientists. Two types of lumpers