John Maddox

High-dilution experiments a delusion

The now celebrated report by Dr J. Benveniste and colleagues elsewhere is found, by a visiting Nature team, to be an insubstantial basis for the claims made for them.

Colloquium on scientific authorship: rights and responsibilities.

The Colloquium on Scientific Authorship was held at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) at a time of extraordinary scrutiny by the public of the ethics of scientists, as represented by intense interest of the press and the Congress of the United States. Indeed, several regulations dealing with scientific misconduct have been proposed during the last year in the Federal Register, and new legislation has been proposed in the Congress. As a result of these concerns, conferences have been organized by the Institute of Medicine, the American Association for the Advancement of Science/American Bar Association, the Council of Biology Editors, and other groups. The colloquium at NIH, which was held May 31, 1988, and sponsored by the Intramural Scientists, focused on publication practices, especially multiple authorship, as contributing to perceived difficulties. The participants suggested various changes in conventions related to authorship that might help prevent future problems.

Positioning the goalposts

The best environmental policy depends on how you frame the question.

What price academic freedom

The British government now has its Education Reform Act. Academics and their leaders should stay alert until the governments intended uses of its powers are made clear.

Physicists about to hi-jack DNA?

Unless molecular biologists are careful and energetic, they will find that the mechanical and thermo-dynamic properties of DNA have been taken over by physicists.

New ways with Bell's inequalities

Writing the rules that determine when quantum mechanics behaves non-locally in the language of information theory may carry important benefits, intuitive good sense particularly.

Schizophrenia. The price of language

A meeting held last month, “The evolution of language and the speciation ofHomo sapiens”, had a hidden agenda - a theory for the underlying biological cause of schizophrenia. According to this theory, schizophrenia stems from a failure to develop the normal asymmetric positioning, in the brain, of the language-processing centre (Brocas region). If this is so, a gene or genes involved in development would be implicated, and could in principle be identified. But resolution of the issue is unlikely to be so straightforward

TOWARDS UNEQUAL PARTITION OF ENERGY

A tantalizing simulation of simple colliding particles in one dimension reveals a clumping tendency in which energy is by no means equally shared among them. The bearing of this on three-dimensional hydrodynamics is another matter.

The temptations of numerology

Too much innocent energy is being spent on the search for numerical coincidences with physical quantities. Would that this Pythagorean energy were spent more profitably.

How to make antimatter last

An experiment at CERN has shown that antiprotons can be kept for several minutes in an electromagnetic trap. But the prospect of making reality of the science fiction remains remote.