The Scientist’s Year in Review

April

Cover story
The Forces of Cancer: A tumor’s physical environment fuels its growth and causes treatment resistance.

News highlight
Branching Out: Researchers create a new tree of life, largely composed of mystery bacteria.

May

Cover story
A Scrambled Mess: Why do so many human eggs have the wrong number of chromosomes?

News highlight
With CRISPR, Modeling Disease in Mini Organs: Organoids grown from genetically edited stem cells are giving scientists a new tool to screen drugs and test treatments.

June

Cover story
Noncoding RNAs Not So Noncoding: Bits of the transcriptome once believed to function as RNA molecules are in fact translated into small proteins.

News highlight
Creating a DNA Record with CRISPR: Researchers repurpose a bacterial immune system to be a molecular recording device.

July

Cover story
Changing Oceans Breed Disease: In the planet’s warming and acidifying oceans, species from corals to lobsters and fish are succumbing to pathogenic infection.

News highlight
Will Organs-in-a-Dish Ever Replace Animal Models? Increasingly sophisticated tissue organoids can model many aspects of disease, but animal studies retain a fundamental role in research, scientists say.

August

Cover story
Decoding Human Accelerated Regions: Do the portions of our genomes that set us apart from other animals hold the secret to human evolution?

News highlight
That Other CRISPR Patent Dispute: The Broad Institute and Rockefeller University disagree over which scientists should be named as inventors on certain patents involving the gene-editing technology.

September

Cover story
Proprioception: The Sense Within: Knowing where our bodies are in space is critical for the control of our movements and for our sense of self.

News highlight
Targeting the Noncoding Genome with CRISPR: Two independent groups demonstrate the utility of CRISPR-based techniques to identify regulatory elements that govern disease-linked genes.

October

Cover story
Thirty Years of Progress: Since The Scientist published its first issue in October 1986, life-science research has transformed from a manual and often tedious task to a high-tech, largely automated process of unprecedented efficiency.

News highlight
Investigation Finds Pathologist Guilty of Systemic Misconduct: A Wayne State University probe into allegations of research misconduct leveled against pathologist Fazlul Sarkar has found the scientist guilty of multiple instances of image manipulation, among other infractions.

November

Cover story
2016 Life Sciences Salary Survey: Most researchers feel stimulated by their work but are dissatisfied with their compensation, according to this year’s results.

News highlight
Predicting Scientific Success: A scientist’s most influential paper may come at any point in her career but chances are it won’t change her overall success, researchers show.

December

Cover story
Nuclear Pores Come into Sharper Focus: Solving a long-standing structural puzzle will open the door to understanding one of the cell’s most enigmatic machines.

News highlight
PubPeer Wins Appeal on Anonymous Comments: The Michigan Court of Appeals rules that anonymous commenters on the post-publication peer review website are protected under the First Amendment.