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In finishing up details on our new version of "Principles of Virology", I came across this outdated statement in the introduction of volume 19 of "Comprehensive Virology", written in 1984: "Virology, as a science, having passed only recently through its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

I am always fascinated by how virological terms and concepts are used by the field of computer science. For example, a computer virus is a program that can copy itself and infect a computer without the knowledge or permission of the user. And viral video is content which becomes highly ...

Since Monday I have been in Sitges, Spain for Europic 2008. This is a scientific meeting on picornaviruses held every other year in a European country. The picornaviruses are a family of non-enveloped, positive-strand RNA viruses, and includes poliovirus, rhinovirus, and foot-and-mouth disease virus. I have been attending Europic meetings ...