Concepts in 2003

Organisms and their environment evolve as a single, self-regulating system.

Why has cognitive science struggled to find an explanation for the terms that we use every day?

Advice to students at the start of their scientific careers.

Viewing cancer as a robust system with potential points of fragility opens up new strategies for the development of drugs and therapies.

Materials that expand laterally when stretched can act as molecular-scale strain amplifiers. This amplification might be exploited in nature and in future technologies.

Position effects continue to raise questions about the physical structure of the particulate mendelian gene.

Climate modellers need to start saying what changes can be ruled out as unlikely, rather than simply ruled in as possible.

Elucidation of all of the mechanisms that regulate developmental potential will allow us to discover the true limits of cell differentiation.

New approaches are needed to determine the logical and informational processes that underpin cellular behaviour.

Evolving techniques for redesigning organisms have enormous potential but they must be matched with equally sophisticated methods for evaluating their benefits and risks.

Ancestral genetic data are far more useful for medical purposes than are racial categories, which may be correlated with disease for social or economic rather than biological reasons.

Recognition that bacterial cells can communicate and organize into groups has led to new ways of thinking about chronic infections.

When you're a large organism and made of wood, you can't have a heart or other contractile organs, but you still need to move fluids to live. How is this done?

A quantitative means of comparing the functional abilities of different biopolymers would allow us to dissect out differences and to discern their origins.

Scientists differ from the public, and even among themselves, in their ideas of what constitutes a crystal. As these varying approaches testify, the definition of this form of matter is not as clear as its name suggests.

Some brain regions can map nothing but the body, and are the body's captive audience. These regions may form the basis of the mind's representation of the 'self'.

The fact that most people are not perpetually sick is testament to innate immunity squelching most of the infections that we contract.

In piecing together our ancestors' habits, corroborating lines of evidence are vital if we are to be confident that the emerging jigsaw reveals the true picture.

Preserving nature is not about stasis, but about maintaining the exciting, ever-evolving variety of life on Earth.