Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Commentary
  • Published:

Foreword: Towering science: an ounce of creativity is worth a ton of impact

Nature Medicine volume 10, pages 1015–1017 (2004)Cite this article

Here is a mind-boggling statistic. For every minute you spend reading this article, one new article will enter the world's biomedical literature. Last year, 500,000 new articles were published in more than 4,000 journals archived by the National Library of Medicine's MEDLINE Database. Even if only 1/1,000 of last year's 500,000 articles contain novel information that ultimately proves useful, we are still left with 500 potentially important articles published each year, any one of which could contain the first hint of a great scientific discovery. We are clearly immersed in a flood of information.

Given this relentless rise in scientific knowledge, how does a group of ordinary mortals, such as the 24 members of the Lasker Jury, evaluate and rank the hundreds of different discoveries made over the last several decades? I've wrestled with this question for the past 10 years and could never come up with a satisfying answer until several months ago when I went to the Roof Garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy this article

  • Purchase on Springer Link
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Figure 1: British sculptor Andy Goldsworthy standing next to one of his stone towers during its installation at the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden on top of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Chair, Lasker Awards Jury,

    Joseph L Goldstein

Authors
  1. Joseph L Goldstein
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Goldstein, J. Foreword: Towering science: an ounce of creativity is worth a ton of impact. Nat Med 10, 1015–1017 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm1004-1015

Download citation

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nm1004-1015

This article is cited by

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing