Sir

Personal financial interests (Opinion, Nature 412, 751; 2001) are relatively minor among the many factors relevant to potential bias. To think that bias will be meaningfully corrected by requesting disclosure of personal financial interests is naive or even harmful, as it could give a false assurance that bias has been checked.

No journal, Nature included, could ever guarantee the veracity of everything it publishes. In my experience, peer review simply screens gross and inappropriate statements; final or near-final answers come solely from the iteration of experiments in different hands. That is the only process of conditional verification known to science.

Nature has joined other special-interest publications in giving delusionary guarantees of veracity, rather than continually warning and helping readers to develop their own critical skills. A more mundane, but altogether more admirable, standard of publishing sincerity would be to print a disclaimer about implied standards of truthfulness on each issue's contents page.