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Quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP) has been proposed as a scientific domain that can enable efficient and informative drug development. During the past several years, there has been a notable increase in the number of regulatory submissions that contain QSP, including Investigational New Drug Applications (INDs), New Drug Applications (NDAs), and Biologics License Applications (BLAs) to the US Food and Drug Administration. However, there has been no comprehensive characterization of the nature of these regulatory submissions regarding model details and intended applications. To address this gap, a landscape analysis of all the QSP submissions as of December 2020 was conducted. This report summarizes the (1) yearly trend of submissions, (2) proportion of submissions between INDs and NDAs/BLAs, (3) percentage distribution along the stages of drug development, (4) percentage distribution across various therapeutic areas, and (5) nature of QSP applications. In brief, QSP is increasingly applied to model and simulate both drug effectiveness and safety throughout the drug development process across disease areas.

Philosophical discussions of disagreement typically focus on cases in which the disagreeing agents are aware that they are disagreeing and can pinpoint the proposition that they are disagreeing about. Scientific disagreements are not, in general, like this. Here we consider several case studies of disagreements that do not concern first-order factual claims about the scientific domain in question, but rather boil down to disputes regarding methodology. In such cases, it is often difficult to identify the point of contention in the dispute. Philosophers of science have a useful role to play in pinpointing the source of such disagreements, but must resist the temptation to trace scientific debates to disputes over higher-level philosophical accounts.

Introducción: Las pseudociencias utilizan herramientas discursivas falaces para inmiscuirse en la sociedad. Estudios recientes investigan a diferentes colectivos profesionales para identificar, caracterizar y subvertir estos discursos. Objetivo: Analizar la percepción de las pseudociencias en el colectivo médico español. Método: Se usó una metodología cualitativa basada en entrevistas en profundidad. Los datos se analizaron mediante un modelo de análisis inductivo con la intención de identificar los patrones comunes presentes en las entrevistas. Resultados: Los entrevistados definieron las pseudociencias como manifestaciones carentes de método científico y que derivan de la autoridad de un supuesto especialista. Se muestran reticentes ante su uso. La connotación espiritual de las pseudociencias, junto con la instrumentalización del efecto placebo, su disfraz de natural e innocuo, y el acompañamiento emocional se identificaron como las causas principales de su expansión. Conclusiones: 1) para la prevención de las pseudociencias debe contarse con el apoyo coordinado de las autoridades sanitarias; 2) la precarización de los servicios asistenciales puede ser una de las causas de su expansión; 3) en el contexto de la posverdad, los argumentos emocionales o espirituales adquieren una mayor autoridad que los científicos, causando una pérdida de confianza en el marco epistemológico científico. Introduction: Pseudoscience’s use fallacious arguments to expand in society. Different groups of professionals are being analyzed in order to identify, characterize and eventually undermine these major communicative patterns. Objective: To analyze the Spanish healthcare professionals’ perception of pseudoscience. Methodology: A qualitative approach was used, consisting of in-depth interviews and questionnaires. Data was analyzed using an inductive analysis with the intention to identify the main patterns present in the subjects. Results: Interviewees defined pseudoscience as those practices lacking any scientific method and created by false specialists. The spiritual character of pseudoscience, together with the exploitation of the placebo effect, its disguise of natural and innocuous, and the emotional support of the preceptors of the false therapies are highlighted as the main causes of its spread. Conclusions: 1) For pseudoscience’s prevention, healthcare professionals should be supported by coordinated strategies from the authorities; 2) the decline in public investment in the care services can be one of the causes of its expansion; 3) in the post-truth context, the emotional and spiritual arguments acquire a greater authority than the scientific ones, thus provoking a loss of confidence of the epistemological scientific framework.

In recent decades the use of forensic science in investigations and therefore its subsequent presentation within the courts has increased exponentially, fuelled by an increase in scientific advances, development of databases and greater access to scientists and their expertise. This explosion in the use of forensic evidence has not been limited to one single scientific domain, as there are a broad range of scientific disciplines, encompassed by the general umbrella term' forensic science'. Many of these involve commonly applied methodologies and are accepted by the courts with limited scrutiny. Where tensions exist concerning the use of science in the courtroom is when novel or emerging sciences and scientific techniques are introduced. This may be particularly evident when the demands of the investigatory phase, where those working want to apply all possible tools at their disposal to gather as much evidence as possible and the needs of the courts, where the evidence must scientifically robust and admissible for it to be presented before a jury, come together. This paper examines the implications for the court for emerging or novel sciences and scientific techniques. In such cases, the potential rewards of implementing the scientific process and the information these may contribute to an investigation provides a temptation to investigators to push for their operational use, with the unintended consequence of posing an issue to the court when considering whether to admit the evidence into the judicial process.

As a cross-disciplinary scientific domain, a great deal of research on landscape geochemistry has been conducted since its establishment. However, the used methods lack the ability of revealing the...

This paper studies the combined effect of affiliation with prestigious universities, underwriters, and venture capitalists on the valuation of biotech ventures at IPO and their post-IPO performance. We argue that affiliation to a prestigious university provides the affiliated firm with a quality signal in the scientific domain. The pure quality signaling effect of the affiliation is isolated from the substantive benefits it provides by performing a difference-in-difference approach based on the scientific reputation of scientists in firms' upper echelons. The signal is stronger the weaker is the scientific reputation of scientists of the focal IPO-firm and is additive to those provided by prestigious venture capitalists and underwriters. Results for a sample of 254 European biotech ventures that went through an IPO between 1990 and 2009 confirm our predictions.

Dendrimers and dendrimer-based delivery systems are potential biomedicines in the rapidly growing field of nanomedicine. At present, dendrimers are drawing attention in the scientific domain due to their unique structural features, physiological properties and biological attributes. These multifunctional nanomaterials provide unique platforms for targeting, imaging, diagnostics and theranostics. The rationale of this article is to offer insight into the pulmonary delivery of these multifunctional nanomaterials. This review examines reports on inhaled dendrimers which have been published in the last few years. The article begins by describing the relevant background knowledge of dendrimers, dendrimer synthesis schemes and their potential advantages as nanomaterials. It progresses to the pulmonary applications of dendrimers, with special emphasis on pressurized metered-dose inhalers (pMDIs), soft mist inhalers (SMI), nebulizers and dry powder inhalers (DPI). Additionally, this review article contains a dedicated section discussing the biocompatibility challenges and clinical outcomes of dendrimer-based nanotherapeutics. In summary, this review is the first comprehensive account of inhaled dendrimers to appear in recent years.

Spin-polarization can be essential in many cases of vital importance to the procedures of chemical and biological function. Its realization and utilization have been drawing intensively growing attention for over half a century, whereby numerous strategies get developed with related mechanisms proposed. Furthermore, spintronics has evolved as a scientific domain in which efforts are made to better understand the electron's intrinsic quantum properties based on its angular momentum. To date, an effective approach for aligning the electrons’ spin usually employs an external magnetic field, which may not be viable or efficient in all applications. This review emphasizes on the advances of spintronics where the polarization of spin is able to be implemented by other means than an external magnetic field. The key role of chiral structures for filtering the electrons on spin along with the approaches applied to monitor the polarization of spin will get introduced. Moreover, theoretical frameworks rationalizing the experimental results obtained are also presented herein. The thread running through all of these will be the proposal and evolution of Chiral-Induced Spin Selectivity (CISS) effect.

Understanding semantic word shifts in scientific domains is essential for facilitating interdisciplinary communication. Using a data set of published papers in the field of information retrieval (IR), this paper studies the semantic shifts of words in IR based on mining per-word topic distribution over time. We propose that semantic word shifts not only occur over time, but also over topics. The shifts are examined from two perspectives, the topic-level and the context-level. According to the over-time word-topic distribution, stable words and unstable words are recognized. The diverging and converging trends in the unstable type reveal characteristics of the topic evolution process. The context-level shifts are further detected by similarities between word vectors. Our work associates semantic word shifts with the evolving of topics, which facilitates a better understanding of semantic word shifts from both topics and contexts.

The recent popularization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for use in terrestrial remote-sensing science has brought a class of inexpensive and largely unmeasured set of sensors into the scientific domain. Remote-sensing science demands high-quality data for information production and requires that the radiometric and spectral characteristics of imaging systems are known. This study compared the radiometric and spectral characteristics of 10 imaging systems commonly used in UAV research. From very inexpensive board-level cameras, consumer-grade cameras and purpose built remote-sensing systems were tested. The results show that sensor non-linearity with respect to radiance is a major limitation in producing reliable results. Spectral results demonstrated a degree of similarity between sensors with broad overlapping spectral bands being the norm. Careful attention to radiometric correction and spectral characterization will enhance the quality of the data produced from these systems.

In the philosophy of science, we can consider debates about the nature of non-causal explanations in general (e.g. Reutlinger, Saatsi 2018; Lange 2017) and then especially those in the life sciences (e.g. Huneman, 2018; Kostic 2020). These debates are accompanied by the development of a new mechanism that is becoming the major response to the nature of scientific explanation in the life sciences (e.g. Craver, Darden 2013; Craver 2006); and also by the development of a design explanation (e.g. Eck, Mennes 2016) that represents a modern variant of a functional explanation. In this paper, we will methodically: 1. evaluate the plurality of explanatory strategies in contemporary science (chapter 2). 2. describe the mechanical philosophy and mechanistic explanation (Glennan 2016; Craver, Darden 2013, etc.) (chapter 3). 3. explicate the role of mechanisms in code biology (Barbieri 2015, 2002, etc.) and its relation to the new mechanism (chapter 4). 4. fulfill the main goal of the paper – to apply mechanistic explanations in code biology (Barbieri 2019, etc.) and to apply their suitability for this scientific domain (chapter 5).

In the scientific domain, millions of research papers in many different languages are published throughout the globe every year. This causes not only information overload, but because of the language barrier, researchers might not understand or even find articles that could be relevant for their work. Therefore, in the field of psychology, the Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information (ZPID) and its partners have created PubPsych ( https://www.pubpsych.eu/ ), an open access vertical search engine for psychological literature, tests, treatment programs and research data (metadata, not the content itself). We discuss the motivation for creating the system, design decisions, connected problems and our solutions, especially concerning multilingual information.

Research and development in the biosensors for medical applications remain a focused area benefiting industry, society and knowledge production alike. The framework established is conducive to innovation and rapid assimilation of technological change. At the advent of nanotechnology, the various biosensor classes have been benefited in different ways, scales and rates. This paper studies the nanotechnology-driven shifting of the biosensor innovation system towards new concepts and the broadening, in depth and extent, of its science base. The scientific domain of (nano)biosensors has been studied using a roadmapping framework, especially developed to handle the dynamics and scopes of academic research. The results indicate that the sector seized the opportunities that nanotools offered to solve technology problems and revisit old concepts for optimizing the traditional platforms. Yet, the ability to control nanoeffects fuels a new transition towards bioelectronic integration that sets entirely new horizons for future trajectories.

Beyond intuitions: A biological interpretation of cognition How can the study of cognition become an ordinary science that is intrinsically connected to the other natural sciences? Since the cognitive revolution in and around psychology, ‘cognition’ has become the standard term to refer to the processes that make us – humans – intelligent. The interpretation of this cognitive domain and cognition itself, however, has never become really clear. First, cognition is a mental concept that is conceptually linked with theories and ideas that are not self-evidently connected to the world as described by the natural sciences. In addition, cognition tends to remain a phenomenon that we recognize ‘on sight’, without the need for an explicit demarcation criterion, a ‘mark of the cognitive’. In this paper, I abandon this intuition-based demarcation of cognition and propose an unequivocal biological one. This biological demarcation does not build on our current intuitions concerning cognition and in any many cases will not be in line with these. As a consequence, the direct conceptual connection between cognition and the traditional notion of ‘mind’ will be cut and the term ‘cognition’ will acquire a fundamentally different meaning. However, the term ‘cognition’ can and will be maintained, as with its new meaning it still refers to the processes that make us humans – as well as other organisms – intelligent: it still covers the scientific domain that its original form was meant to cover, although now with some additional areas. The proposal states that cognition is to be interpreted as the interactions between organisms and their environments together with the organismal structures specifically involved in this interaction. This proposal gives a specific material foundation to cognitive phenomena, which can act as the empirical basis for existing and new cognitive theory formation that will place human cognition unequivocally in the wider framework of living organizations. Some of the implications of the proposal will be further illustrated by differentiating between agents and organisms. When organisms rather than agents form the focal point for cognition, due consideration can be given to ongoing research on intelligence in bacteria, plants and fungi, as well as research concerning the fundamental roles played by nervous systems in animals.

Research in computational science (CS) poses several challenges, stemming both from the scientific domain being studied and the sophisticated IT infrastructures used by the CS researchers. IT infrastructures typically consist of the latest and most powerful supercomputers, high-performance networks and high-capacity data storage services that are provided, developed and operated by IT experts who do not have in-depth understanding of the CS problems being studied. This "standard service approach" has been a very useful tool for streamlining the interaction between IT and application domain users. However, in many cases it has started to become a limiting factor that may prevent realizing the full potential of the IT services when tackling the most challenging CS research topics. The partnership initiative pi(CS) established at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) aims at transforming the relationship between Computational Scientists and IT service providers from a service-centered approach to an integrated partnership. The partnership between CS researchers and IT service provider allows IT services to better address the requirements of CS in an optimized and efficient manner. In addition to describing this model and its background and results achieved so far, the paper sheds some light on future development and assessment activities. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Drug designing costs as well as design of immunotherapeutic agents could be nearly halved through the involvement of computer-aided drug designing methods in discovery and research. The inter-disciplinary, time-, and money-consuming process of drug discovery is amended by the development of drug designing, the technique of creating or finding a molecule that can render stimulatory or inhibitory activity upon various biological organisms. Meanwhile, the advancements made within this scientific domain in the last couple of decades have significantly modified and affected the way new bioactive molecules have been produced by the pharmaceutical industry. In this regard, improvements made in hardware solutions and computational techniques along with their efficient integration with biological processes have revolutionized the in silico methods in speeding up the lead identification and optimization processes. In this review, we will discuss various methods of recent computer-aided drug designing techniques that forms the basis of modern day drug discovery projects.

Vascular biology is an important scientific domain that has gradually penetrated many medical and scientific fields. Scientists are most often focused on present problems in their daily scientific work and lack awareness regarding the evolution of their domain throughout history and of how philosophical issues are related to their research field. In this article, I provide a personal view with an attempt to conceptualize vascular development research that articulates lessons taken from history, philosophy, biology and medicine. I discuss selected aspects related to the history and the philosophy of sciences that can be extracted from the study of vascular development and how conceptual progress in this research field has been made. I will analyze paradigm shifts, cross-fertilization of different fields, technological advances and its impact on angiogenesis and discuss issues related to evolutionary biology, proximity of different molecular systems and scientific methodologies. Finally, I discuss briefly my views where the field is heading in the future.

This paper examines some of the debates over maternal instinct in France under the Third Republic. It focuses on the work of three naturalists (Fabre, Perrier, and Giard) and shows how these scientists shaped, reinforced, or challenged feminine identities as well as a number of sexual social conventions making constant reference to the natural as their authority. This paper highlights these scientists' views on womanhood and maternity and their stances on contemporary feminist discourses as well as seeking to establish the extent to which these views and stances influenced their scientific discourses and practices. It also aims to demonstrate the interpenetration of science and policy, not only in terms of the transfer of political concepts into the scientific domain (and back again), but also as a joint construction process, which produced a new political and natural order in nineteenth century France.

Purpose – By using the UNISIST models this paper argues for the necessity of domain analysis in order to qualify scientific information seeking. The models allow better understanding of communication processes in a scientific domain and they embrace the point that domains are always both unstable over time, and changeable, according to the specific perspective. This understanding is even more important today as numerous digitally generated information tools as well as collaborative and interdisciplinary research are blurring the domain borders. Nevertheless, researchers navigate “intuitively” in “their” specific domains, and UNISIST helps understanding this navigation. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – The UNISIST models are tentatively applied to the domain of art history at three stages, respectively two modern, partially overlapping domains, as well as an outline of an art historical domain anno c1820. The juxtapositions are discussed against the backdrop of, among others, poststructuralist concepts such as “power” and “anti-essentialism” Findings – The juxtapositions affirm the point already surfacing in the different versions of the UNISIST model, that is, structures of communication change over time as well as according to the agents that are charting them. As such, power in a Foucauldian sense is unavoidable in outlining a domain. Originality/value – The UNISIST models are applied to the domain of art history and the article discusses the instability of a scientific domain as well as, at the same time, the significance of framing a domain; an implication which is often neglected in scientific information seeking.

Using the case of European Union Cooperation in Science and Technology Actions, this paper investigates why despite the small scale of funding provided and substantial scientific and management workload, researchers are increasingly interested in formal networking research funded by the European Union. This paper empirically examines this motivation while controlling for researcher scientific domain, country of work and previous experience of such funding. We find that most researchers are primarily driven by a need to meet peers and that over time researchers view such funding scheme significantly less as additional funding and more as a venue for meeting peers and for disseminating research results., JRC.J.2-Knowledge for Growth

This work presents a method to aid in the prioritization of research within a scientific domain. The domain is encoded into a directed network in which nodes represent factors in the domain, and directed links between nodes represent known or hypothesized causal relationships between the factors. Each link is associated with a numeric weight that indicates the degree of understanding of that hypothesis. Increased understanding of hypotheses is represented by higher weights on links in the network. Research is prioritized by calculating optimal allocations of limited research resources across all links in the network that maximize the degree of overall knowledge of the research domain. We quantify the level of knowledge of individual nodes (factors) in the map by a network centrality measure that reflects in dependencies between knowledge level of nodes and the knowledge level of their parent nodes in the map. We analyzed a funded research proposal concerning the fate and transport of nanomaterials in the environment to illustrate the method.

The adaptive approach to thermal comfort has gained unprecedented exposure and rising status recently among the thermal comfort community at the apparent expense of the heat balance approach for the evaluation of naturally ventilated buildings. The main appeal of this adaptive approach lies in its simplicity whereby the comfort temperature is expressed as a function of the outdoor air temperature only. The main responsibility for attaining thermal comfort is given to the individual, who is supposed to have some degree of control over the personal thermal environment. The adjustment of expectation enables a wider comfort temperature range in which occupants feel comfortable. Arguments in favor of the adaptive approach have been based on the results from a large number of field studies conducted across the globe involving the occupants of various types of buildings. It is not surprising, therefore, to watch proliferation of papers on the adaptive approach in the scientific domain and the incorporation of adaptive findings into standards and guidelines. However, there are a number of issues in the advancement of this approach, which have had little exposure in the literature. This paper looks critically at the foundation and underlying assumptions of the adaptive model approach and its findings.

In this essau we claim that omputing is the fourth great scientific domain, on par with the physical, life, and social sciences.

In this article, we propose mapping and visualizing the core of scientific domains using social network analysis techniques derived from mathematical graph theory. In particular, the concept of Network of the Core is introduced which can be employed to visualize scientific domains by constructing a network among theoretical constructs, models, and concepts. A Network of the Core can be used to reveal hidden properties and structures of a research domain such as connectedness, centrality, density, structural equivalence, and cohesion, by modeling the casual relationship among theoretical constructs. Network of the Core concept can be used to explore the strengths and limitations of a research domain, and graphically and mathematically derive the number research hypotheses. The Network of the Core approach can be applied to any domain given that the investigator has a deep understanding of the area under consideration, a graphical or conceptual view (in the form of a network of association among the theoretical constructs and concepts) of the scientific domain can be obtained, and an underlying theory is available or can be constructed to support Network of the Core formation. Future research directions and several other issues related to the Network of the Core concept are also discussed.

This paper investigates the role of outliers in literature-based knowledge discovery. It shows that detecting interesting outliers which appear in the literature on a given phenomenon can help the expert to find implicit relationships among concepts of different domains. The underlying assumption is that while the majority of articles in the given scientific domain describe matters related to a common understanding of the domain, the exploration of outliers may lead to the detection of scientifically interesting bridging concepts among disjoint sets of scientific articles. The proposed approach contributes to cross-context link discovery by proving the utility of outlier detection for finding bisociative links in the process of autism literature exploration, as well as by uncovering implicit relationships in the articles from the migraine domain.

The creation of some kind of representations depicting the current state of Science (or scientograms) is an established and beaten track for many years now. However, if we are concerned with the automatic comparison, analysis and understanding of a set of scientograms, showing for instance the evolution of a scientific domain or a face-to-face comparison of several countries, the task is titanically complex as the amount of data to analyze becomes huge and complex. In this paper, we aim to show that graph-based data mining tools are useful to deal with scientogram analysis. Subdue, the first algorithm proposed in the graph mining area, has been chosen for this purpose. This algorithm has been customized to deal with three different scientogram analysis tasks regarding the evolution of a scientific domain over time, the extraction of the common research categories substructures in the world, and the comparison of scientific domains between different countries. The outcomes obtained in the developed experiments have clearly demonstrated the potential of graph mining tools in scientogram analysis.

Este artigo relata um estudo sobre a familiaridade de alunos de Ensino Médio com situações análogas. Procurou-se evidenciar em que medida as situações análogas a eles apresentadas em atividades de ensino lhes são familiares, a partir das justificativas que deram ao avaliar tal familiaridade. Para isso, primeiramente, lançamos mão de questionários, aplicados a 112 estudantes de segundas e terceiras séries de quatro escolas das cidades de Candelária, Nova Palma e Santa Maria no Estado do Rio Grande do Sul, Brasil. Em continuidade, realizamos entrevistas individuais com uma amostra de 06 alunos de uma das escolas envolvidas neste estudo para aprofundar a coleta de informações. A análise de todo o material coletado revelou que: a) os alunos consideram familiares apenas as situações efetivamente vivenciadas; b) alguns estudantes geraram novos análogos, além dos já apresentados, mudando de um aluno para o outro os análogos sugeridos; c) análogos que parecem adequados para cientistas ou para professores, por vezes, não se mostraram dessa forma para os alunos, que os rejeitaram; d) a necessidade de justificar a familiaridade com os análogos fez com que os alunos explorassem suas experiências pessoais, em busca de outros análogos que lhes permitissem justificar os primeiros; e) as justificativas para a familiaridade partiram de fundamentações distintas; enquanto alguns recorreram a situações vivenciadas e/ou a experiências profissionais, outros apelaram a conhecimentos que se enquadram no domínio dos conteúdos escolares; f) os alunos manifestaram partilhar de conhecimentos e informações científicas, aprendidos tanto na escola como fora dela, utilizando-se deles para produzir suas respostas; g) os análogos com origem num tópico conceitual de um domínio científico específico parecem correr o risco de serem pouco familiares; h) situações análogas que mostraram-se não-familiares aos alunos de um contexto social podem ser familiares em outro contexto; i) os aspectos sócio-culturais da região em que vivem os alunos tendem a condicionar o conhecimento que eles costumam demonstrar sobre os análogos. Diante desse conjunto de evidências, sugere-se que os professores, durante o ensino com analogias, verifiquem quais análogos convêm utilizar em um determinado contexto. Recomenda-se, ainda, dar preferência a análogos presentes no cotidiano dos alunos ou por eles sugeridos.

This longitudinal study of the development of Spain’s ISI scientific domain examines three key time periods: 1990-1995, 1996-2000 and 2001-2005, with the goal of describing the basic structure and backbone of Spanish research, as well as studying its development over time. To this end, ISI categories are used as units of analysis, co-citation as units of measure, and pruning algorithms to simplify the relationship between categories in the visualizations. The results show that from the macrostructure point of view, biomedicine and materials science research provide the basic nucleus at first. Over the years this nucleus is consolidated and expanded with agricultural and soil sciences research. From the microstructure perspective, an increase is observed in the number of interdisciplinary categories, which occupy central positions, indicating increased interaction between disciplines that have traditionally been more important or visible and those on the periphery, or less well known.

This review presents works on computer science and telecommunications. The review does not claim to be complete. Its goal is to call attention to newly emerged lines in the context of the considered scientific domain, as well as to the development of nonstandard approaches to solving known problems, with emphasis on divisions of computer science in which we have universally recognized works by Russian scientists that are, to say the least, at world level.

The potential impact of farmer's innovations for the development of food regimes is the topic of this chapter. Two case studies analysed from the perspective of strategic niche management show that there is niche formation visible as an alternative to the dominant modern food regime. These innovations are based upon the active rediscovery of marginalised and often forgotten knowledge and result in effective linkages between old and new knowledge. This retro side of innovations can have a large potential for developing viable alternatives for rural development. Social scientists play an important role in the understanding of the retro side of innovations and its potential and influence on the prevailing knowledge and information systems inside and outside of the scientific domain.

Haemophilia was recognized early on as an ideal candidate for a gene transfer approach to therapy. In the past decade, gene transfer experimentation in the haemophilias has indeed played an integral role in furthering the science in the global field of gene therapy. However, these expectations have placed haemophilia gene transfer researchers under pressure to succeed in a scientific domain in which successes are infrequent and progress is necessarily slow. These same expectations have also fueled the perception of gene therapy as the inevitable therapeutic goal for the youngest children with haemophilia. In this paper, we will discuss the ethical implications of this perception in light of anticipated benefits, acceptable risk, perceived consumer need and the unknown cost of this intervention. A framework for the future study and therapeutic implementation of gene transfer technology in this specific population is proposed. Public debate on this issue that includes the voices of the intended beneficiaries, especially the parents of the youngest children with haemophilia and the children themselves, is encouraged.

The image of Roger Bacon as a 'modern' experimental scientist was propagated as historical truth in 19th century scientific historiography. Twentieth century criticisms attacked this tradition, arguing that Bacon was primarily a medieval philosopher with 'medieval' scientific interests. However, recent scholarship has provided a more careful and critical account of Bacon's science, and identifies his greatest achievement in terms of his successful attempt to assimilate the worlds of Greek and Islamic optics. It can be justly claimed that Roger Bacon was the first Western thinker in the middle ages to have mastered most of the Greek sources and the central Islamic source in optics. He made this scientific domain understandable for a Western Latin-reading audience. Yet, Bacon himself acknowledged Adelard of Bath, whose translations and commentary of Euclid's Elements set the foundations for a science of optics, as the true pioneer.

This paper discusses an extensible authoring model called ExAM. ExAM guides the hypertising of learning material to support the automatic generation of multiple instructional views. This paper emphasises the features of object-oriented (OO) methodology which benefit the hypertext authoring of learning material, and which are incorporated in ExAM. ExAM provides the author with a framework which enables him/her to elicit, extend, and store knowledge about conceptual information contained within learning material. Algorithms have been developed which access the resulting hypertext knowledge-store in order to generate multiple views to suit different instructional objectives. The model provided is generic and extensible in order for subject experts to develop tailored hypertext for most learning material from the scientific domain.

The aim of this article is to address the issues of impact factor and circulation with reference to dental and orthodontic journals by discussing various parameters including language, citations, nature of published articles, and scientific domain. Examples from the literature are provided to illustrate the variability of impact factors among periodicals, based on the publicity and scientific area covered, and the impact factor scores are presented together with the circulation of orthodontic periodicals.

The United States leads the world in the impact its research makes in almost every scientific domain. But European countries could challenge that if they were to divide their labours according to their strengths.

This study compares Pairs of subjects with Single subjects in a task of discovering scientific laws with the aid of experiments. Subjects solved a molecular genetics task in a computer micro-world (Dunbar, 1993). Pairs were more successful in discovery than Singles and participated more actively in explanatory activities (i.e., entertaining hypotheses and considering alternative ideas and justifications). Explanatory activities were effective for discovery only when the subjects also conducted crucial experiments. Explanatory activities were facilitated when paired subjects made requests of each other for explanation and focused on them. The study extends from individual to collaborative discovery activities the importance to the discovery process of setting goals to find hypotheses and evidence (Dunbar, 1993) and to construct explanations of phenomena and processes encountered in examples (Chi, Bassok, Lewis, & Glaser, 1989).

The scientific reasoning strategies used to discover a new concept in a scientific domain were investigated in two studies. An innovative task in which subjects discover new concepts in molecular biology was used. This task was based upon one set of experiments that Jacob and Monod used to discover how genes are controlled, and for which they were awarded the Nobel prize. In the two studies reported in this article, subjects were taught some basic facts and experimental techniques in molecular biology, using a simulated molecular genetics laboratory on a computer. Following their initial training, they were then asked to discover how genes are controlled by other genes. In Study 1, subjects found no evidence that was consistent with their initial hypothesis. Subjects then set one of two goals for conducting experiments and evaluating data. One goal was to search for evidence consistent with the current hypothesis (and they did not attend to the features of discrepant findings); none of the subjects who only had this goal succeeded at discovering how the genes were controlled. Other subjects in Study 1 used a different goal: Upon noticing evidence inconsistent with their current hypothesis, these subjects set a new goal of attempting to explain the cause of the discrepant findings. Using this goal, a subset of these subjects discovered the correct solution to the problem. Study 2 was conducted to test the hypothesis that subjects' goals of finding evidence consistent with their current hypothesis blocks consideration of alternate hypotheses and generation of new goals. It was predicted that if subjects could achieve their initial goal of discovering evidence consistent with their current hypothesis, they would then attend to particular features of discrepant evidence and solve the problem. To test this prediction, an additional mechanism of genetic control that was consistent with subjects' initial goal was added to the genes. Here, subjects had to discover two mechanisms of control: one mechanism consistent with their current hypothesis, and one inconsistent with their hypothesis. Twice as many subjects reached the correct solution in Study 2 than in Study 1. The findings of the two studies indicate that goals provide a powerful constraint on the cognitive processes underlying scientific reasoning and that the types of goals that are represented determine many of the reasoning errors that subjects make.

Eight different indicators are calculated on the basis of an extensive bibliography on science in Cote d'Ivoire, and presented by scientific domain in polar graphs. They permit to have a synthetic image of scientific activity and distinguish different scientific styles. Moreover the notion of “colonial science” is re-evaluated, and a case is made in order to distinguish between different ways of doing science. The indicators and graphic representation proposed here may be a valid method to identify differing patterns at a glance.

This article addresses the problem of the impact of a major change in the "instrumentation space" of a given scientific domain. The domain under scrutiny is turbulent combustion. It has the peculcarcty of being developed, essentially since the 1940s, by the progressive interpenetration of two autonomous fields, the chemistry of combustion and the mechanics of turbulence. The analyzed change in instrumentation is a major one in that the new laser-based optical diagnostic techniques which, since the 1970s, invaded turbulent combustcon, allowed for the first time the quantitative characterization of turbulent reacting flows. The impact of this new instrumentation on the relations between experimental and theoretical lines of work is analyzed. These relations concern both the global organization of the workplace and the scientific "division of labor" between theoreticians and experimentalists. The impact of the sudden availability of new experimental information on the cognitive structure of this borderland domain is also explored.

Objective: To review the first 10 years of operation of the Neuroscience Institute of Schizophrenia and Allied Disorders (NISAD), Australia's first virtual research institute. Method: Narrative description of the evolution of NISAD. Results: Since inception in 1996, NISAD has developed a wide range of activities to enhance existing efforts and develop new initiatives in schizophrenia research, initially throughout New South Wales, but increasingly on a national scale. This involved the initial development of critical research infrastructure to provide the foundation, with the subsequent focus on developing a multidisciplinary programme of schizophrenia research, across the basic to applied research spectrum. While the primary focus has been the scientific domain, NISAD has also played a leading role in increasing public awareness of schizophrenia as a disease amenable to scientific investigation. Conclusion: NISAD has succeeded in building a framework to apply the latest developments in neuroscience to the study of schizophrenia and has formed a multidisciplinary network of clinicians and neuroscientists who are actively collaborating on a range of research initiatives. The ‘virtual institute’ structure of NISAD has proven cost-efficient and consistent with innovative thinking about research resource management.

The Twenty-seventh Congress of the CPSU, the resolution of the Central Committee of the CPSU on the work of the periodical Kommunist, and the All-Union Conference of Heads of Departments of the Social Sciences have all stressed the necessity of taking a new look at some of the cardinal problems of social development and overcoming dogmatism and narrowmindedness in the way they are conceived. One scientific domain whose timeliness is growing is economic sociology—a science that studies social structure and the social mechanisms of development of the society's economy.

Just as christianity has used philosophy as a con ceptual framework for the elaboration of its theology, and as it uses historical science for the study of its own past, in the same way christians in our own day are applying themselves to the study of the sociology of religious phenomena. Some work in the purely scientific domain, others seek to apply the results of research in action. It is how ever very important to respect the rules of sociological science, and to avoid trying to arrive over-hastily at practical conclusions.

The practice of justifying scientific explanations generates argumentative patterns in which several types of arguments may play a role. This paper is aimed at identifying these patterns on the basis of an exploration of the institutional conventions regarding the nature, the shape and the quality of scientific explanations as reflected in the writings of influential philosophers of science. First, a basic pattern for justifying scientific explanations is described. Then, two types of extensions of this pattern are presented. These extensions are derived from philosophical accounts of requirements for the quality of explanations and the choice of the best explanation from a number of candidate explanations respectively. The description of the second extension will make clear how pragmatic argumentation plays a role in argumentative patterns within the scientific domain.

Although close to the Volga this time, it was, nevertheless, a Danubian meeting. This designation has come to be traditionally applied to “workshop” discussions of psychologists from countries through which the Danube, a European waterway, flows. However, it was not limited to psychologists from these eight Danubian countries, but contacts were established and psychologists invited from various countries of the psychological world. The se Danubian meetings are attended by psychologists who want to promote and accelerate the integrating tendencies in this developing scientific domain. And this design is pursued not only in the lectures, but even more so in a particular manner in the corridors, real science lobbies. The se meetings involve a week of life in common, where in contentions for psychological truths, old friendships renew and new ones form. Such was the case at three Danubian meetings of psychologists held in Czechoslovakia (Smolenice 1969, 1972, and 1974), at the fourth one in Hungary (...