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

Leadership under pressure: the two worst mistakes

August 7, 2008 | article by Ken Thompson in Book Reviews (37)

I have been thinking a lot about what happens when a leader gets under severe pressure, usually because things are not going according to plan. It seems to me this is the very essence of real leadership and where leaders can really justify their salaries. BUT according to Professor Dietrich Dorner, in his excellent book The Logic Of Failure: Recognizing And Avoiding Error In Complex Situations, there are two very tempting but ultimately disastrous tangents a leader can pursue in a crisis instead of addressing the real issues.

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