SCIENTISTS make much of the fact that their work is scrutinised anonymously by some of their peers before it is published. This “peer review” is supposed to spot mistakes and thus keep the whole process honest. The peers in question, though, are necessarily few in number, are busy with their own work, are expected to act unpaid—and are often the rivals of those whose work they are scrutinising. And so, by a mixture of deliberation and technological pressure, the system is starting to change. The internet means anyone can appoint himself a peer and criticise work that has entered the public domain. And two recent incidents have shown how valuable this can be.
The first concerns pluripotent stem cells, the predecessors of every other body cell. Pluripotent cells interest doctors and biologists, who hope to use them to investigate diseases, test drugs and, eventually, regrow patients’ damaged body parts.
At first, such cells had to be extracted from embryos, an ethically dodgy process if those embryos were human. Then a way of making them from skin cells was invented. This, though, involves fiddling about with proteins called transcription factors, and is finicky. So when, in January, Nature published a pair of papers describing a simpler way of making them, people around the world sat up. In these papers Haruko Obokata of the RIKEN Centre for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, and her team, claimed to be able to create pluripotent cells by exposing ordinary, non-stem cells to weak acids, physical squeezing and some bacterial toxins.
SCIENTISTS make much of the fact that their work is scrutinised anonymously by some of their peers before it is published. This “peer review” is supposed to spot mistakes and thus keep the whole process honest. The peers in question, though, are necessarily few in number, are busy with their own work, are expected to act unpaid—and are often the rivals of those whose work they are scrutinising. And so, by a mixture of deliberation and technological pressure, the system is starting to change. The internet means anyone can appoint himself a peer and criticise work that has entered the public domain. And two recent incidents have shown how valuable this can be.
The first concerns pluripotent stem cells, the predecessors of every other body cell. Pluripotent cells interest doctors and biologists, who hope to use them to investigate diseases, test drugs and, eventually, regrow patients’ damaged body parts.
At first, such cells had to be extracted from embryos, an ethically dodgy process if those embryos were human. Then a way of making them from skin cells was invented. This, though, involves fiddling about with proteins called transcription factors, and is finicky. So when, in January, Nature published a pair of papers describing a simpler way of making them, people around the world sat up. In these papers Haruko Obokata of the RIKEN Centre for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, and her team, claimed to be able to create pluripotent cells by exposing ordinary, non-stem cells to weak acids, physical squeezing and some bacterial toxins.
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