Earlier today I was reading President Eisenhower's farewell speech, in which he warns against control of government by the military-industrial complex. It's chilling to read, especially in view of its absolute control over the policies of President Bush. In the same speech, Eisenhower warned about the control of science by the ...

Today I received an email from Clontech Laboratories with the subject line "Titer your virus in under four hours!".  I have little faith in a company that cannot compose a grammatically correct email. Titer is a unit of concentration. It is not a verb, and therefore it is incorrect to ...

Last week Dr. Bruce E. Ivins, an Army biodefense scientist, committed suicide. He was about to be indicted for murder in connection with the 2001 anthrax-letters incident. His death lead to an article in the New York Times questioning whether the boon in biodefense spending since 2001 has made the ...

The social development of the web 2.0 has largely bypassed science. Hugely popular websites such as facebook, myspace, twitter, digg, delicious and the like have millions of members and generate huge amounts of traffic. But those who use these sites come from all walks of life. None are devoted solely ...

In finishing up details on our new version of "Principles of Virology", I came across this outdated statement in the introduction of volume 19 of "Comprehensive Virology", written in 1984: "Virology, as a science, having passed only recently through its descriptive phase of naming and numbering, has probably reached that ...