CONVEYING THE EXCITEMENT OF OUR DISCOVERIES

Taxonomic discoveries bridging the gap between our knowledge and biodiversity

Southeast Asia includes four overlapping biodiversity hotspots: Indo-Burma, Philippines, Sundaland and Wallacea (Myers et al. 2000; Sodihi et al. 2004). Southeast Asia covers about 4.5 million km2, which is approximately 3 % of earth’s total land area. There is, however, approximately 20 to 25 % of Earth’s higher plant species in this area (Myers et al. 2000). It is crucial to understand the bi...

The excitement of discovery.

I had the good luck to start research at the dawn of molecular biology when it was possible to ask fundamental questions about the nature of the nucleic acids and how information is transferred in living systems. The search for answers led me into many different areas, often with the question of how molecular structure leads to biological function. Early work in this period provided some of the...

From the Workshop of Discoveries From the Workshop of Discoveries

The excitement and rewards of research with our discovery of some of the biological effects of nitric oxide.

The rewards of biomedical research can be very exciting and remarkable. The feeling of having done an experiment for the first time and only you know the results that will have an important effect on your research and perhaps broader applications is exhilarating. I suspect that it is not common for scientists to see their fundamental research develop during their research career into such broad...

Mountain excitement

theory? What is its legacy today in biology? Quite a few mathematical fads have burst onto the popular press, promising great new insights into biology: information theory, catastrophe theory, chaos theory, and most recently complexity theory, to name just a few. All were quite useful in their founding fields (except complexity, which has proven slippery to even define), but all failed to live ...