Inside Science: Revolution in Biology and Its Impact

Looking behind widely held beliefs about the myth of the scientific enterprise, this book is a rare examination of how science really functions. Drawing on his 25 years of experience as the founding editor of Cell, the world's leading journal in biology, the author questions the dogma that scientific papers describe how research was actually done, describes the distortions caused by pressure to publish, and considers the effects of changes in the way science is communicated as we move ever further into the digital era. The view that science protects itself by identifying and excluding work that is not reproducible is rigorously examined, as is the prevalence of fraud in science. The author argues that the move from research done in small teams to the much larger scale of "big science" has the potential to change the nature of science itself.