HOW TO MAKE NATURAL SCIENCES BECOME THE SCIENCES OF PRIORITY

in Humanities , Social Sciences , and Natural Sciences

Priority of discovery in the life sciences

The job of a scientist is to make a discovery and then communicate this new knowledge to others. For a scientist to be successful, he or she needs to be able to claim credit or priority for discoveries throughout their career. However, despite being fundamental to the reward system of science, the principles for establishing the "priority of discovery" are rarely discussed. Here we break down p...

University of Natural Sciences

We start with irrationality proofs. Historically, the first ones concerned irrational algebraic numbers, like the square roots of non square positive integers. Next, the theory of continued fraction expansion provided a very useful tool. Among the first proofs of irrationality for numbers which are now known to be transcendental are the ones by H. Lambert and L. Euler, in the XVIIIth century, f...

How to support the basic sciences.

It has become axiomatic that basic science faculty and research programs at medical schools must support themselves. The days when excess clinical revenue was used to support basic research are long gone. With the pressure of managed care and faculty practice programs on medical school budgets, it appears that medical school leaders are looking everywhere but at clinical programs for critical s...

Foucault and the Natural Sciences