Commentary in 1989

The Japanese consume enormous amounts of drugs on prescription, some of which are not legally available elsewhere in the world. The reason is a defective national system for drug approval and dispensing.

Sir Rudolf Peierls adds a personal postscript to a year that marked the fiftieth anniversary of a discovery that helped shape the twentieth century.

The United States and Britain have a lot to learn from the Soviet way of doing science — not least from the system of allocating research funds.

Nature has been in hot water in Australia for supposedly misreporting the prospects for a new technique of genetic manipulation. The truth is more interesting and complicated than Nature (and many Australians) know.

The British parliament will shortly be called upon to decide whether research on human eggs, fertilized in vitro, should be permitted or made a criminal offence. Scientists must make clear to their MPs where they stand.

It seems strange that Isaac Newton, for all his scientific achievements, was so attracted to the occult. Yet his vision of the power of symbols has resonance today.

New vaccines, developed through genetic engineering, can make immunization an even more effective weapon for tackling disease in developing countries. So what is preventing progress?

The concept of P-selection, by which graduates of the more prestigious (P) universities tend to publish longer than those from other (NP) universities, is herewith introduced into the literature.

The government intends to reform Britain's National Health Service. Medical research —much of which is supported by charities —will suffer if the government does not think again.

When apartheid breaks down (as it must), South Africa will need a new, non-racial educational system. Moves to that end are already afoot.

The articles printed below are by co-authors of some of the papers called into doubt by Talent. Two are by close colleagues of Gupta at the Centre of Advanced Study in Geology at Panjab University.

On 20 April 1989 Nature published an article by Dr John Talent accusing "one Indian scientist" of corrupting the palaeontological literature on the Himalayas. Below, that scientist — Professor V. J. Gupta — replies. On pp.13–16 appear four other articles, each of them prompted by the appearance in print of Talent's allegations.

Since the advent of the genre in the 1930s, horror movies have reflected public anxieties about science and technology. Through the years the images have changed.

Nothing but the full expression of public opinion can remove the evils that chill the enthusiasm, and cramp the energies of the science of England.

The Spanish government plans to shorten the length of undergraduate degree courses. The wisdom of this move is questionable and its execution impossible without a major overhaul of the present system.

nternational exchange between Japanese and foreign researchers would benefit both groups. Why are foreign scientists still so reluctant to work in Japan? And what awaits them there?

The technique of immunoassay is widely used in all branches of medicine. Yet an ugly patent dispute bodes ill for its future availability.