Contracting away our credibility?

The deep reach of the pharmaceutical industry into academic and clinical medicine sets up ample opportunity for conflicts of interest on the part of biomedical researchers. To minimize the risks that such conflicts could introduce bias into the scientific literature,...

Do we expect the body to be a “One Hoss Shay”?

In an 1858 humorous poem The Deacon’s Masterpiece, or the Wondeful One Hoss Shay, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. described a carriage so artfully constructed as to have no weakest link. The carriage ran smoothly for exactly a hundred years, and then one day it went...

Avoiding resistance by disrupting cooperation

As most readers of this website are well aware, antibiotic resistance poses a considerable problem for public health, and we are in serious need of new approaches for dealing with this threat. One possible direction could be to use drugs such as quorum-sensing...

Phenotypic noise and the evolution of virulence

Commentary on: M. Ackermann, B. Stecher, N. E. Freed, P. Songhet, W.-D. Hardt, and M. Doebeli (2008) Self-destructive cooperation mediated by phenotype noise. Nature 454:987-9 One of the most exciting developments in microbial population biology over the past few...