Dr. Steve McKnight is President of the American Society For Biochemistry And Molecular Biology and chairman of the biochemistry department at the University of Texas-Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. He has probably also made a few enemies among young researchers in the society he manages. read...
read moreWhy would anyone bake bread and then turn around and toast it?I lived in a Pennsylvania house heated by wood. The idea of using our manual labor, in the form of wood, to toast bread was silly - but we owned an electric toaster. Somehow, being removed from the direct labor equation made toasting more acceptable, though our ancestors thought it a pastime for the idle rich. read...
read moreSpend any time in American science media and you may find some of them are pretty far out of the political mainstream; so far out, they may not even be friends with anyone who has not always voted the same way as them.So it's unsurprising that much of science media once perpetuated the claim that 'science votes Democrat.' Humans are fallible and confirmation bias is sneaky. As was...
read moreRevolutions are messy business, they require participation by a type of personality that is not very savory; militant, bombastic, a little crazy. read...
read moreIn today's Wall Street Journal, I have an article discussing recent problems in peer review. read...
read moreNot the JVC peer review ring, an actual gambling ring. Credit: China Daily It's something of a mild joke in science circles - you can figure out who is peer-reviewing your paper by looking for the common author in the citations you 'missed' in your submission.It was only a matter of time before peer review cabals became an actual strategy somewhere. read...
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