Being mindful of the extremes, science can remain a pursuit of reality.

Talk of systems biology has a way of drifting, quite rapidly, into the abstract. I'm reminded of the preamble to Georges Perec's complex but engaging novel, Life, A User's Manual."The art of jigsaw puzzles seems of little substance, easily exhausted, wholly dealt with by a basic introduction to Gestalt: The perceived object... is not a sum of elements to be distinguished from each other and analyzed discreetly, but a pattern, that is to say a form, a structure... knowl

The industry needs more foxes and fewer hedgehogs

Some of you may be wondering why The Scientist is today publishing a linkurl:news story;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/23352/ that on the face of it seems quite critical of BioMedCentral, our sister company. It's a fair question, and one with a simple answer: We are commited to covering significant developments, in science publishing and elsewhere, that are likely to be of interest to our readers, irrespective of the source of the story. This particular article is a test of the edit

What do natural disasters and cancer have in common? Ecology.

Roll up for the public battering of the publishing heavyweights. In the red corner, from London, England, 'the world's top multidisciplinary science journal,' and in the blue corner, from Chicago, Illinois, 'the oldest continuously published reference work in the English language.' Ding! Ding! Round 1: Nature lands the opening blow with a linkurl:news article;http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html on December 14 that compared the accuracy of science coverage from Encyclopaedi

The lot of postdocs may be improving a bit, but a new threat has materialized

Authors may need to take some of the blame for what ails the system

linkurl:Today?s science fraud revelation;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/22952/ is that a study published in __The Lancet__, purportedly demonstrating that common painkillers could protect against oral cancer, was pure fiction. The response of __The Lancet__ Editor Richard Horton, linkurl:as quoted by the BBC;http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4617372.stm "The peer-review process is good at picking up poorly designed studies, but it is not designed to pick up fabricated research

Welcome to the inaugural monthly issue of The Scientist.

we discuss the issues that have had an impact on infrastructure and business in the life sciences. As ever, science marches on.

The last time I wrote about vaccines was two years ago – November 17, 2003, to be precise.1 That editorial crackled with frustration about the status of the most effective health intervention that has ever been invented:"Vaccines are unattractive targets for industry, underappreciated from the public health perspective, underfunded by basic research organizations, and treated with suspicion by the public."It's a pleasure to report that, two years later, there are the beginnings of a remark