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Re: Best Places to Work: Postdocs,¹ maybe it would be good to have an article pointing out the reasons some institutes did not rate highly in the survey. I don't think the institutions should be named but being able to compare the good with the bad would be a good tool for students and postdocs, to get an idea of what to watch out for when applying for jobs.

Claire Seymour
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Leuven, BELGIUM
claire.seymour@gmail.com

References

Years ago, many a kid got into science through chemistry sets. Unfortunately, the chemistry sets nowadays are extremely watered down from what was available 40 years ago. I think that we've turned into a nation of scared wimps as far as our children are concerned. If amateur science is to flourish, as Richard Gallagher calls for in his editorial,¹ we need to bring back better chemistry sets!

Gary Huber
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
La Jolla, CA
ghuber@ucsd.edu

I have a similar dream of a future cottage industry of bioinformaticians. I have a passion for untapped information associated with flow cytometry data taken in increasingly standardized multi-site clinical trials, especially in vaccine trials. Among the challenges for really broad pattern recognition is the annotation of patient information; do smokers have recognizable suppression of immune responses, do autoimmune patients have holes or spikes in their repertoire, etc?

With the new enthusiasm for an Electronic Medical Record, and with a small but pretty powerful group of informaticians growing out of the Pacific Northwest (www.FICCS.org), I can imagine smart people from Bangalore to Botswana, pouring over public databases, discovering important biomarkers, patenting them, getting rich selling the rights to big first world pharma/diagnostics companies.

John Dunne
BD Biosciences
San Jose, CA
john_dunne@bd.com

References

I am a bit surprised by the flow chart presented in "Fixing Fraud,"¹ outlining the steps researchers should take when they suspect misconduct. The recommended route is to immediately go to the institutional ombudsman instead of the PI. As a PI I would want to know if anyone suspected data was being fudged in my lab. After years of preaching "the data is the data" if it wasn't I would want to know and not from someone in the dean's office.

Jeffrey Frelinger
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill NC
jfrelin@med.unc.edu

I completely agree with the previous comment—as a PI, I am the first person who would want to be made aware that someone in my group might be committing fraud. Also, I am ultimately responsible for the data that gets published from my team and therefore I would be very receptive to hear any issues in relation to the scientific integrity of the people who work in my lab. Bringing possible data fabrication to the attention of the PI should be the first course of action.

Maria Castro
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center UCLA
Los Angeles, CA
castromg@cshs.org

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Re: "You've been plagiarized,"¹, as an author I have sometimes found Paragraphs from my book quoted without acknowledgment. However, though a little irritating, I believe "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery". (No, sorry, I don't know who said that originally!)

Barbara Vincent
Childers, Queensland, AUSTRALIA
claravale_boergoats@bordernet.com.au

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Re: "Schools in Energy States Flourish,"¹ it is rough being a faculty member and researcher at a university 70 miles from the northern border and in the middle of the country. I have seen it as high as 103 °F (39 °C) and as low as -47 °F (-43 °C) (no, that is the air temperature not the dreaded added wind chill). But, we have money, lots of it according to my colleagues in many other states.

We just hired two new faculty members in our department, each of whom is getting a competitive package. Now the jokes at national meetings about whether we have electricity and indoor plumbing are less frequent and as colleagues complain about salary cuts, I can proudly add that we are getting raises this year and next year. All of a sudden many of my colleagues at other institutions think it isn't so bad being at the University of North Dakota.

In August of 2006, The Scientist profiled UND as an example of significant inequalities in science funding, and alluded to researchers in our region having a significant reduced ability to acquire funding to further our research endeavors². My how times have changed.

Eric Murphy
University of North Dakota
Grand Forks, ND

References

Erratum

In the March Long Hot Paper, the full attribution for Cambridge University molecular biologist Steve Jackson was mistakenly omitted from the story. The Scientist regrets the error.