Bacterial Growth: Constant Obsession with dN/dt

Bacterial growth: constant obsession with dN/dt.

GUEST COMMENTARY Bacterial Growth: Constant Obsession with dN/dt

One of life’s inevitable disappointments—one felt often by scientists and artists, but not only by them—comes from expecting others to share the particularities of one’s own sense of awe and wonder. This truth came home to me recently when I picked up Michael Guillen’s fine book Five Equations That Changed the World (4) and discovered that my equation—the one that shaped my scientific career—wa...

Academia's obsession with quantity.

We live in the era of rankings. Universities are being ranked, journals are being ranked, and researchers are being ranked. In this era of rankings, the value of researchers is measured in the number of their papers published, the citations they received, and the volume of grant income earned. Academia today is governed by one simple rule: more is better. The idea to reward those who are produc...

The obsession with primary angioplasty.

To the Editor: Grines et al1 once more reiterate their enthusiasm for primary percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA) in STsegment elevation myocardial infarction. We agree that this maneuver is extremely attractive for most cardiologists, yet we believe that data should be examined for what they actually show. The Keeley et al2 review shows only a trend in mortality reduction whe...

Genomic Imprinting: An Obsession with Depilatory Mice

Excessive grooming in mice has been promoted as a model of human obsessive-compulsive disorders. A recent paper adds Grb10 to the list of genes with effects on behavioral hair loss, with the added twist that this time the gene is imprinted.