News & Comment

High-quality translational research beckons a high-quality translational meeting.

A vaccine has the potential to substantially reduce the AIDS death toll. In the wake of the recent halting of phase 2b trials of Merck's HIV vaccine candidate, a hard look at the field's expectations and strategies is in order.

It can take twice as long to get a PhD in biomedical sciences in the US as it does in other countries such as the UK and Australia. Are US PhDs worth more, or are there advantages to a speedier system?

What would you do if you could publish only 20 papers throughout your career?

The US should revamp rules on informed consent to ensure that people have all of the information and support they need before deciding to enroll in clinical trials.

Good reviewers underpin the quality of a journal. At Nature Medicine, what do we seek in our reviewers? And how do we retain the best in the face of the plethora of requests from an increasing number of journals?

The FDA needs more power to monitor the safety of drugs in the market, but it also needs to show that it can handle the additional responsibilities.

“Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.” —Mark Twain

If American science is to meet the needs of all of its citizens, its scientists must reflect the diversity of the country's population.

Large-scale sequencing projects to identify mutations related to cancer and psychiatric disorders will generate a lot of data. But the usefulness of these results will be limited unless we have good models to test their contribution to disease.

Efforts are underway to modernize clinical trial standards and normalize regulations to facilitate international collaboration. But as the European Union's Clinical Trials Directive shows, a one-size-fits-all regulatory strategy may be easier to conceive than to implement.