This Week’s Nature Magazine

日期:2013/04/23

I feel like Pitt looking through the current issue of Nature which has a million ideological articles about biology, including a purchase for 60 million of a 2 million Mendeley company, a start up that involves 2 million users sharing and using research papers, an article about Gosling who used paper clips to take the photo of DNA that Watson and Crick used without mentioning to discover DNA. A non-ideological thing from Nature of relevance: "Discoveries take ego, genius, conflict, inspiration, and fierce ambition. But they also need, the hard graft of PhD students who beaver away late into the night and improvise with what they find in the stationery cupboard." Of course articles on how trawling is depleting our fishing stocks, how Greek science is being depleted because we don't give it enough money, and paeans to Obama for funding based science and his budgeted increases in research spending, (but a slight slap for not funding more basic science), and a strident denunciation of those who would wish for deficit decreases, the new secretary of the interior who will "oversee" 200 million hectares of public land and 700 million of land offshore, Sally Jewell (a personage good to know), an article on how we shouldn't use synthetic science to destroy the rain forests, an article on an unsung pioneer of classification who showed that structure and uniqueness is more important than DNA in classification, 2.3 million paid for Nobel prize medal of Francis Crick, and how coelacanths' genes can tell us how we got from the water to the land. Much going on in biology, and much has the idea that consumes our world to make man small in it.