Nasty priority disputes

The first human blood transfusion: priority disputes (Henry Oldenburg).

IT IS notoriously difficult to deal clearly and accurately with the history of controversy over priority, and the dispute over priority in blood transfusion recently explored by Dr. A. D. Farr in this journal is no exception.' The story has often been told from various points of view:2 and we ourselves printed many documents connected with the controversy in our edition of The correspondence of...

Some Nasty Reflexive Groups

In Almost Free Modules, Set-theoretic Methods, Eklof and Mekler [5, p. 455, Problem 12] raised the question about the existence of dual abelian groups G which are not isomorphic to Z ⊕G. Recall that G is a dual group if G ∼= D for some groupD withD = Hom (D,Z). The existence of such groups is not obvious because dual groups are subgroups of cartesian products Z and therefore have very many homo...

No more Mr Nasty.

A s my 6-year term as Chief Editor of EMBO Reports draws to its close, I think it’s time to offer a personal reflection on what it’s like to have been in what some may think of as one of the most hated positions in academic science. I consider myself lucky that at least a handful of colleagues are still speaking both to me and to my team of professional editors in Heidelberg, who do all the wor...

Point Sets Can Have Nasty

Verbal Disputes

Is there a distinction between questions of fact and questions of language? Many philosophers have said no. But a version of the distinction is ubiquitous, in philosophy and elsewhere, in the notion of a verbal dispute. Intuitively, a dispute between two parties is verbal when the two parties agree on the relevant facts about a domain of concern, and just disagree about the language used to des...