O Brave New World: The Dark Side of Cyberspace

Brave New World

Scientific publishing began in 1665 with the inauguration of the Journal des sçavans in France and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in England. These enterprises established the pattern that has endured to the present: that of a learned publication, financed privately, which shared knowledge within a select circle. By recording a date of publication, claims of scientific prio...

Brave New World

Written in 1931 and published the following year, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is a dystopian—or anti-utopian—novel. In it, the author questions the values of 1931 London, using satire and irony to portray a futuristic world in which many of the contemporary trends in British and American society have been taken to extremes. Though he was already a best-selling author, Huxley achieved intern...

The Brave New Brain World

This cannot be explained solely by the fact that we all have a brain. After all, there is no market for the dissemination of magazines on nephrology or biochemical targeting the lay public. At the meeting between mathematics, physics, biology, psychology, philosophy, anthropology and the arts, neuroscience fascinates more and more people with the possibility of understanding the mechanisms unde...

Brave new RNA world.

In 1995, you could still find, in the opening paragraphs of manuscripts and grant applications from my lab and others, the phrase “In the absence of a crystal structure for the ribosome....,” by way of rationalizing any number of biochemical studies aimed at figuring out the three-dimensional locations of things inside the ribosome, and ultimately its mechanism. We no longer have this excuse. T...

The Brave New World of Scholarly Repositories

The manner in which scholarly research is conducted is changing rapidly. This is most evident in Science and Engineering, but similar revolutionary trends are becoming apparent across disciplines. Improvements in computing and network technologies, digital data capture techniques, and powerful data mining techniques enable research practices that are highly collaborative, network-based, and dat...

The brave new world of oncology research.