Sir — The peer-review system, discussed in your News feature “Publish, and bedamned…” (Nature 419, 772–776; 2002),operates almost entirely on a voluntarybasis. It carries some prestige, but does not really affect an individual’s academicprogress. This is wrong, for two reasons.

First, to whichever end of the“scientific-publishing food chain” (as your feature engagingly calls it) it isapplied, peer review plays a major role in preventing pollution of scientific datawith falsified or distorted information. It also decreases wasteful publication ofbad science.

Second, it introduces an element of additional, independent judgment,which eliminates noise and clarifiesinterpretation. Thus, like an audit in

the medical world, peer review is crucial in ensuring that science works properly.

In spite of all this, peer review isbecoming more difficult to apply becauseof the increasingly scarce commodity oftime. A substantial number of potentialreferees are declining to accept journals’invitations to review, or are unable todeliver a report, because of timeconstraints.

Thus, there must be more institutionalsupport of peer review. Although scientistsand editors recognize that being invited toreview is an act of academic recognition,assessment-conscious institutions fail to recognize this. Yet peer review is animportant service to science, and it seemsobvious that scientific institutions shouldsupport it very strongly. A ranking system

is needed, reflecting an individual’s participation in the peer-review process,similar to his or her publication record,and this should be taken into account inperformance assessments. The systemcould be weighted according to the impactfactors of the journals served, and therecould be an element of funding associatedwith an institution’s peer-review score.

All this is necessary to take into accountever-increasing time pressures that couldaffect the quality of science. Peer reviewdoes not need to change fundamentally,but it should be moved higher up the list of academic priorities. Marek H. DominiczakMedical Humanities Unit, Gartnavel GeneralHospital, 1053 Great Western Road, Glasgow G12 0YN, UK

correspondence

NATURE | VOL 421 | 9 JANUARY 2003 | www.nature.com/nature 111

Funding should recognize the value of peer review This service to science is threatened by time constraints and performance assessment.

Biology can be helpful toopen-minded physicistsSir — Your News Feature1 “Bridging theculture gap” is a welcome update on thestatus of interdisciplinary research inbiology, as relevant today as it was 15 yearsago when Arthur Kornberg commented on a similar topic2.

Communication is a major barrier that impedes collaboration betweenbiologists and physicists.

Biologists tend to start by asking aspecific question for a specific biologicalsystem. The answers to specific questionsgradually contribute to the delineation ofgeneral principles.

Many physicists, when addressingbiological problems, consider themselvesas generalists who are more interested indeveloping general theories or findingevidence to fit them.

Although physicists can dismissbiologists’ explanations as too “empiricaland descriptive”, this level of explanation isapparently good enough for biologists andhas served biology well in practice.Physicists’ quantitative explanations may well provide a deeper level ofmechanistic understanding, but deeper is not necessarily better if importantbiological context is lost. The satisfactionof scientific explanation is a relative termand exists in the eye of the beholder.Insisting on the most fundamentalexplanation for every biologicalphenomenon brings us all the way down to the elementary particles, which isbeyond the scope not only of biology but also of many subdisciplines in physics.

The physicists who make the greateststrides in interdisciplinary research areopen-minded, genuinely interested inbiological problems and determined tomake the transition. They applyquantitative techniques to addressquestions of interest to biologists.

John Hopfield is an excellent exampleof a physicist whose theoretical modelshave always focused on biologicalfunctions. In addition to his work onneural networks in the 1980s, as mentioned in your feature, in the 1970sHopfield developed a series of elegantmodels on kinetic proofreading to explain the extremely low error rate in the biosynthesis of macromolecules and kinetic cooperativity of haemo-globin (see, for example, refs 3 and 4respectively). These models and theirvariations have been enthusiasticallyembraced by biologists and are now beingapplied to areas of immunology, signaltransduction, intracellular transport, DNAdisentanglement and protein folding invivo to explain why small quantitativechanges in molecular interactions can leadto qualitative differences in biologicalfunction, as well as how biochemicalenergy can be used to improve theaccuracy of molecular processes.

Although the idea of interdisciplinaryresearch has been around for a long timeand has been actively promoted byagencies such as the US National ScienceFoundation and Department of Energy, itis far from reaching its potential.

It is to be hoped that opportunities ingenomics and other data-rich biologicalfields can finally provide the necessaryattraction to drive more and more

interested physicists towards biology —and to keep them there.Guangpu Li Department of Biochemistry and MolecularBiology, University of Oklahoma Health SciencesCenter, 940 S.L. Young Boulevard, BMSB 853, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73104, USA 1. Knight, J. Nature 419, 244–246 (2002).

2. Kornberg, A. Biochem. 26, 6888–6891 (1987).

3. Hopfield, J. J. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 77, 5248–5252 (1980).

4. Hopfield, J. J., Shulman, R. G. & Ogawa, S. J. Mol. Biol. 61,

425–433 (1971).

Strict guidelines make itclear who’s responsibleSir — The headline “Physics guidelinesdrop equal-responsibility clause”, on yourNews story (Nature 420, 258; 2002)reporting new ethical guidelines adoptedby the American Physical Society (APS) inresponse to recent cases of misconduct,leaves the impression that the APSweakened its guidelines. On the contrary,the guidelines have been strengthened.

A major reason for the APS revisionwas to make explicit the responsibilities ofco-authors. In particular, the new versionincludes a provision that specifies someauthors who must take full responsibilityfor the content of an entire paper.

As your News story indicates, somephysicists feel that the guidelines are now too strict, but most of them aresupportive. The APS will continue toconsider its role in establishing ethicalguidelines and promoting education in professional conduct.Myriam P. SarachikPresident, American Physical Society, 1 PhysicsEllipse, College Park, Maryland 20740-3844, USA

© 2003 Nature Publishing Group