Peer review is supposed to combat fraud, but it can just as easily hold back radical discoveries, says Terence Kealey writing for The Daily Telegraph (19 Feb, 2008).

Kealey (Vice Chancellor of the University of Buckingham) goes on to say:

Peer review carries dangers. First, it allows dunderheads to block unexpected ideas. Everybody within the scientific community knows of researchers such as Barbara McClintock, who won the Nobel Prize in 1983 for discovering gene jumping, a process by which scraps of DNA move about the genome. She was forced to publish her findings informally, in the annual reports of the Carnegie Institution, because she could not persuade peer reviewers to accept them. Moreover, peer review is slow, and allows unscrupulous reviewers to plunder their competitors' papers and to block their publication.

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Terence Kealey has a new book 'Sex, Science and Profits'

Tags: science

Bioteams Books Reviews

Mobile phone users: are we now cyborgs

March 28, 2007 | article by Ken Thompson in Book Reviews (37)

The term cyborg is used to designate an organism which is a mixture of organic and synthetic parts so designed to enhance its abilities via technology. William Mitchell a professor at MIT Media Lab believes that through our mobile devices we are all becoming mobile cyborgs and its for the better. In his book Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City which he discusses in an interview with James Harkin Mitchell describes how the new communications technologies have overlaid our city spaces with central nervous systems connecting us into the wireless ether via our mobile devices which act as umbilical cords to anchor us into the information society's digital infrastructure.

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