When making decisions about funding and jobs the scientific community should recognise that most of the tools used to evaluate scientific excellence are biased in favour of established disciplines and against interdisciplinary research.

The biomedical research enterprise in the US has become unsustainable and urgent action is needed to address a variety of problems.

Science is an essential component of policy-making in most areas of government, but the scientific community does not always understand its role in this process.

Funding agencies use many different criteria and peer review strategies to assess grant proposals.

As the equipment needed to perform state-of-the-art research in many areas of biology becomes ever more expensive, Eve Marder worries that researchers in less wealthy institutions might be left behind.

Proposals to reduce the number of students who do PhDs are misguided because they would exclude young scientists with qualities that do not show up in exam results and interviews.

The fact that it is difficult to evaluate and compare the outputs of individual researchers might actually be good for science.

The National Institutes of Health needs to make radical changes to ensure that biomedical research continues to thrive in the United States.

The relentless expansion that threatens the sustainability of biomedical research in the US takes a heavy toll on young researchers.