The new discipline of sociomicrobiology is revealing life’s struggle tooth and nail—and gut.

Drugs that target specific tumors are harbingers of a new era of genetically informed medicine.

By Sarah Greene The “Me Decade” of Cancer Drugs that target specific tumors are harbingers of a new era of genetically informed medicine. The old rules involving randomized populations may not provide the best answers. Thirty-five years ago journalist Tom Wolfe anointed the ‘70s in America the Me Decade—critiquing the quest for self-actualization via primal-scream therapy, high colonics, and mysticism. The age of social conscious

This is your brain on emotions.

By Sarah Greene To Err is Human This is your brain on emotions. Researchers bring their own values and passions to the lab bench. I was delighted to see a couple recent F1000 evaluations that strayed from traditional peer-reviewed literature. F1000 Members Frank Harrell, a biostatistician at Vanderbilt Medical School, and Daniel Beard, a bioengineer at the Medical College of Wisconsin, independently evaluated an article by Jonah Lehrer in The New Yorker

Intoxicating ideas for saving a billion lives

By Sarah Greene Brave New Drugs Intoxicating ideas for saving a billion lives A call to indie innovators to come up with affordable alternatives David Nutt was no stranger to controversy by the time he was fired as chair of the UK’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs in October 2009, after claiming that alcohol is more harmful to health, and to society as a whole, than many illegal drugs—including cannabis, LSD, and ecstasy. Though no

By Sarah Greene We Must Face the Threats Reading between the lines of a top-ranked Faculty of 1000 article Science at its most exciting: arguable and demanding refinement Numbers employed to determine a scientist’s career have always seemed dodgy. Just ask Eugene Garfield, creator of the citation index and the impact factor, who has written, “The use of journal impacts in evaluating individuals has its inherent dangers.” Yet where mov

By Sarah Greene Peer Review and the Age of Aquarius It’s time to reinvent the system that validates scientific discovery The most wonderous disruption of all: the idea that papers and data have lives beyond their original posting. This month our new column, Thought Experiment, considers whether mathematics can answer the deepest perplexities of science, such as evolution and consciousness. Here’s a corollary: Can metrics point to the great

By Sarah Greene All the News That’s Fun to Print Scientific dialogue and that in the popular press can diverge radically. Why not explain that natural selection has already “engineered” the most invidious creatures imaginable? It’s a fun time to be a biologist. The Science paper from the J. Craig Venter Institute on reengineering a Mycoplasma cell using the techniques of synthetic biology stole the media spotlight for several wee

By Sarah Greene Our Science, Our Selves Gender biases are deep, entrenched, and persistent. What science stands to lose as a result. There’s reason to fear greater disparity in coming years. This month’s Careers feature ("Are Women Better PIs?") opens with a story from Sue Rosser, author of the recently published Women, Science, and Myth: Gender Beliefs from Antiquity to the Present. In 1973, as a postdoc in zoology at the University of Wis

By Sarah Greene Naturally Selected Ninety thousand ways to make you smarter. Can the molecular biologist afford to ignore developments in systems biology, bioinformatics, structural biology, and now even physics? Many thanks to readers who responded to my inaugural editorial (in the February issue), calling for feedback on the “next new thing.” To some, the thing was the t-shirt (we’re working on that), othe