We may not know much about the deep sea, but do we care about mining it?

Do We Know What We Do not Know? A Response to Celine Bonnet

What We Do Not Know About Cells

The intracellular reactions of E.coli chemotaxis constitute one of the bestunderstood behavioral responses. We know the principal proteins responsible, their structures and biochemical properties and how they enable the bacterial cell detect and respond to attractants and repellents[1]. Numerous computer simulations have been developed that reproduce essential features of the response[2, 3]. In...

Q&A: What do we know about influenza and what can we do about it?

Influenza pandemics occur when human populations are infected by a variant virus to which a population has no prior immunity. What are the crucial varying genes? The crucial genes are those encoding the two viral surface proteins hemagglutinin (H or HA) and neuraminidase (N or NA). The influenza A viruses [1] that infect mammals like us replicate principally in the epithelial cells of the airwa...

How Much Do We Really Know about Criminal Deterrence

This Article discusses the deterrence of crime through sanctions. It begins with a brief intellectual history of deterrence theory in the work of Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham, two Enlightenment philosophers who created the conceptual foundation for later deterrence and rational choice theory. Although a prominent intellectual current by the end of the 1700s, interest in deterrence and rat...

How Much Do We Really Know about Growth and Finance?

Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta E C O N O M I C R E V I E W First Quarter 2003 D evelopment economics has changed profoundly in the course of one generation. Twenty-five years ago the emphasis among development economists was on planning and allocation mechanisms, which separated the development community from the core of mainstream market-oriented economics. Academicians who followed developme...