There is only a rough correlation between the quality of the science in an application and the priority score. There has been much concern about the impact of tight funding on the careers of young scientists. When only a small percentage of grants are ...
I learned about the difficulty in starting a collaboration when I began searching for one early in my career. Collaborations are becoming increasingly important in biology because of the need to apply multiple technologies to tackle the most complex ...
I remember my delight at receiving hundreds of reprint requests for individual papers that I fought long and hard with reviewers to get published. The Internet has changed scientific publishing in many ways, some good and some bad. No one would deny ...
It was hard to accept the thought that my research ideas were too innovative to be funded. One of the most difficult questions a scientist must resolve is which problem to investigate. An especially critical aspect of this process is getting the ...
The best students see connections between everything; a prodigious memory does little good if you cannot spot these relationships. Scientists are a persistent group. We all have the experience of doing experiments that refuse to work as planned, or ...
If you are a biologist in the United States, you are likely to be acutely aware of the new funding for biology from the economic stimulus program of President Barack Obama's administration. The extra funds going into both the National Institutes of ...
These public instances of misbehavior give us a chance to reinforce our shared sense of morality. It's nice to see all of the recent positive press coverage on Charles Darwin. It is refreshing because it often seems that the scientific press is more ...
There is a common perception among young students that the surest path to resolving scientific controversies is to design a clever experiment, one that will definitively resolve conflicting hypotheses. However, I have found that most scientific ...
We felt that teaching how facts were discovered was better than the facts themselves. We were wrong. I enjoy reading online news and opinions not only because of convenience, but also because of the responses from readers. I know that these responses ...
Playing the citation game would be of purely academic interest if the stakes were not so high. An essential part of our job is to publish our work. Unfortunately, it seems like not just any scientific journal will suffice. Both grant review panels ...
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