Scott (Herbert) Federhen passed away on May 5, 2016, after a short illness. Scott was well known for heading the National Center for Biotechnology Information’s (NCBI’s) Taxonomy project, which he started in 1991. Under his leadership it became an international standard for nomenclature and classification. Born in 1952, Scott obtained a MS degree in Computer Science, focused on denotational sem...

Margaret VanAmringe Direc to r , Center f o r Research Dissemination and Liaison Agency f o r Health Care Pol icy and Research Parklawn Building, Room 18A-10 5600 F i she r s Lane Rockvil le , MD 20857 Telephone: (301) 443-2904 For f i s c a l and admin i s t r a t ive matters, con tac t : Ralph S l o a t Chief,. Grants Management Branch Agency f o r Heal th C a r e Pol icy and Research Parklaw...

Fragile X Syndrome (FXS) is caused by an expansion of CGG trinucleotide repeats in the 5′ untranslated region of the Fragile X mental retardation 1 (FMR1) geneon theXchromosome.Affected individuals possess over 200 copies of the CGG repeat, resulting in hypermethylation of the FMR1 promoter, which leads to epigenetic silencing of the gene and FMRP protein deficiency. Children with FXS display i...

The ‘limits of agreement’ method proposed by Martin Bland and Douglas Altman is a statistical technique for comparing the accuracy and precision of two measurement systems. By analyzing the differences between measurements made on a subject by each measurement system, the goal of the technique is to decide whether two systems can be used interchangeably. Although it is widely cited and frequent...

As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible o...

Robin Nunn has argued that we should stop using the terms ‘placebo’ and ‘placebo effect’. I argue in support of Nunn’s position by considering the logic of why we perform placebo comparisons. Like all comparisons, placebo comparison is just a case of comparing one thing with another, but it is a mistake, I argue, to think of placebo comparison as a case where something is compared to ‘a placebo...

K. T. Kaczmarek1,∗, P. M. Ledingham, B. Brecht, S. E. Thomas, G. S. Thekkadath, O. Lazo-Arjona, J. H. D. Munns, E. Poem, A. Feizpour, D. J. Saunders, J. Nunn, I. A. Walmsley1∗ Clarendon Laboratory, University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PU, UK. QOLS, Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College London, London SW7 2BW, UK. University of Ottawa, 25 Templeton St, Ottawa, K1N 6N5, Canada. Departme...