Did you know that gay men can’t donate blood, nor can they donate sperm anonymously to sperm banks? I applaud the 18 senators who have banded together to urge FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg to revisit this issue, as current scientific data on infectious diseases does not lend credence to these policies.
Ushma S. Neill
While our eyes usually glaze over at the continued talk of health care reform, there are a few particulars that bear repeating. So many of the parties involved fail to consider the most basic and most important of all the issues: health insurance is not a luxury, it is a right.
Laurence A. Turka, Arthur L. Caplan
The regular articles and technical advances published in this issue are an average of 9,050 words, with 8.4 display items (figures and tables). Do we always need so many words to convey a message? We think not. With this editorial, we issue a call for brief reports.
Ushma S. Neill
Physicians in the United States have a unique appreciation of the tremendous successes and even greater potential of our health care system, yet we also endure firsthand its woeful deficiencies. In the ongoing debate about how to improve the current health care structure in the United States, our individual voices have been all too quiet. No single health care organization, nor its spokesmen, speaks for the broad range of physicians’ opinions. Rather, doctors must make every effort, and indeed have an obligation, to speak forcefully as informed participants in this important process.
Jonathan A. Epstein, Laurence A. Turka, Morris Birnbaum, Gary Koretzky
When has an author been scooped? It sounds like a simple question, but in fact, as a recent editorial meeting unfolded, this issue became far more complex than I had thought.
Laurence A. Turka
When US President Barack Obama declared in his 2009 inaugural address, “We will restore science to its rightful place,” many applauded. The US has led the world in research, innovation, and education in the medical sciences. The National Science Foundation, the NIH, and other government organizations involved in scientific investigations are the primary engines that have fueled this excellence over the past half century. Nevertheless, we cannot afford to assume that preeminence, or even excellence, will persist without attention and cultivation.
Jonathan A. Epstein
In the two years that I have been Editor in Chief of the JCI, the editors and I have sent approximately 2,500 papers for external review. The referee reports that we’ve received have spanned the spectrum from incredibly insightful to completely unhelpful. Together with a longer piece immediately following this editorial, I would like to reflect on what I think makes a good review.
Laurence A. Turka
An inauspicious start to 2009, unfortunately. This issue may seem a little thinner than others we’ve recently published, as 4 articles that were previously accepted and scheduled for publication in this issue will not appear. We continue to screen all figures from accepted manuscripts, and we continue to find irregularities. In several cases, the alterations in the figures led to the discovery of some fundamental problems with the data. Many of the papers suffered from the same problems, and this led us to consider whether it was time to revisit some experimental basics.
Ushma S. Neill
Unfortunately, we seem to run article amendments (corrections, errata, retractions, addenda) in every issue these days. In the current issue, we have a correction and a retraction — both coming after intensive investigations and peculiar situations we hadn’t encountered before.
Ushma S. Neill, Laurence A. Turka
In the midst of the monumentally important 2008 presidential election, information about the candidates’ proposals for biomedical research is notably absent. Why is this the case, and more importantly, what can be done about it?
Laurence A. Turka
No posts were found with this tag.