News & Comment

Nature Publishing Group has established new responsibilities for authors and has introduced changes in reporting methodology.

Jan Vilcek relates how his work helped to identify some of the pleiotropic actions of tumor necrosis factor and contributed to the development of infliximab, the first medically useful tumor necrosis factor antagonist.

How have women fared at Harvard since the events of four years ago? Here, Judy Lieberman and Laurie Glimcher reflect on progress made and barriers still to be breached.

Over 20 years ago, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative was launched. Today, polio is still endemic in four countries.

Do you delight in Brahms? Do you delight in immunology? Tada Taniguchi recounts the story of Type 1 interferon and its downstream regulators.

Immune cell signal transduction is just too complicated to be effectively queried using traditional methods and mindsets.

Journals are taking steps to stem of the practice of plagiarism.

Is it possible to return from the industrial sector back to academia? Although academic scientists have traditionally perceived this to be akin to winning the Nobel prize, the personal experience of Ross Kedl suggests that the reality is something quite different altogether.

The time has come to reassess the benefits of the present practice of patenting human genetic material.

Type 1 diabetes is an immune-mediated disease in which pancreatic insulin-producing beta cells are damaged and destroyed. Animal models have served a prominent function in the development of the present ideas of pathogenesis and approaches to therapy. This commentary addresses the utility and limitations of these models for facilitating the 'translation' of immunology research into clinical applications.

Will the ongoing financial crisis prevent Barack Obama from increasing funding for the biomedical sciences?

Anjana Rao recounts the contributions of two talented and productive postdoctoral fellows who purified and characterized the transcription factor NFAT.