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The article offers information to biologists who wish to submit their papers to the journal "Nature." The journal aspires to publish papers that are not only interesting and thought-provoking, but reproducible and useful. To be published, materials and reagents need to be carefully described and readily available to interested scientists.

A sound epistemological foundation for biological inquiry comes, in part, from application of valid statistical procedures. This tenet is widely appreciated by scientists studying the new realm of high-dimensional biology, or 'omic' research, which involves multiplicity at unprecedented scales. Many papers aimed at the high-dimensional biology community describe the development or application of statistical techniques. The validity of many of these is questionable, and a shared understanding about the epistemological foundations of the statistical methods themselves seems to be lacking. Here we offer a framework in which the epistemological foundation of proposed statistical methods can be evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A biography of David Dexter Perkins, senior research scientist, is presented. He was born on May 2, 1919. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Biology in 1941 at the University of Rochester in New York. He is married to Dorothy Newmeyer Perkins. Perkins pioneered the use of Neurospora as a model experimental organism for a variety of genetic, cytogenetic, and developmental studies. He died on January 2, 2007.