Science loses two good friends

Good Agreements Make Good Friends

When starting a new collaborative endeavor, it pays to establish upfront how strongly your partner commits to the common goal and what compensation can be expected in case the collaboration is violated. Diverse examples in biological and social contexts have demonstrated the pervasiveness of making prior agreements on posterior compensations, suggesting that this behavior could have been shaped...

Good friends are hard to nd !

We focus on the problem of finding (the size of) a minimal winning coalition in a multi-player game. We prove that deciding whether there is a winning coalition of size at most k is NP-complete, while deciding whether k is the optimal size is DP-complete. We also study different variants of our original problem: the function problem, where the aim is to effectively compute the coalition; more s...

I-20: Good Science and Good Ethics@ WhyWe Should Discourage Payment for Eggs inStem Cell Research?

Background: To evaluate current scientific and legal trends in provision of human eggs for stem cell research and to propose a policy which is both ethically and scientifically sound Materials and Methods: Literature survey of European and US policies on payment for egg donation in somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) research; comparative analysis of potential for success in SCNT and induced p...

Risk assessment: good science for good decisions.

A registry including information about nearly 1,600 cases of retinoblastoma diagnosed in Britain has been created at the Childhood Cancer Research Group. Cases have been classified as 'old germ cell mutation', 'new germ cell mutation' or 'sporadic non-hereditary'. For a population-based group of 918 cases diagnosed between 1962 and 1985 we have calculated the proportions of unilateral/bilateral...

Portraits of science. Two good women, or too good to be true?