Magnanimity pays off
Francis Crick exceeded the brilliance of his famous double helix model by this magnanimous act:
Tag Archives: Science
Premature human engineering
The news buzz alive with excitement about human genome editing, even human germline engineering. Successful germline engineering requires (1) a technology …
Deceptive Numbers
You want to estimate an important quantity. You compute an exact number purporting to estimate it. You compute another exact …
Increasingly direct evidence
The results in our Cell report are particularly satisfying to me since they bring clarity to a puzzle that I …
Science and failures of authority
One of the key milestones in the emergence of the scientific method was placing empirical evidence above authority. This shift …
Which publications are citable?
The number of references to a scientific publication is frequently used as an objective measure for the significance of the …
Ideas
I have heard many biomedical researchers express the opinion: “In biology, ideas are cheap. It is the doing that matters.” …
Evolving scientific culture
Scientific research depends crucially on the scientific culture. Unhealthy culture cannot support healthy research.
High quality journals with low quality peer-reviews
There is much outcry about the increasing competition in scientific research. Yet, I do not hear comparable outcry about the …
The dark age of 20th century science
Dogma held reason back for half a century. It happened in the age of “modern science” and the atomic bomb. It happened because of sloppy reasoning and twisting arguments in favour of the preferred conclusion, the dogma of the time. What could be more antithetical to science ? What is the antidote ?
