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In recent years there have been a number of highly visible attacks on American science, everything from the fundamentalist assault on evolution to the Bush administration’s strong-arming of government scientists. But for many people who pay close attention to research and development (R&D), the biggest threat to science has been quietly occurring under the radar, even though it may be changing the very foundation of American innovation. The threat is money -- specifically, the decline of government support for science… more

Leave aside, for a moment, the question of why Ted Cranford wanted to perform a CT scan on the head of a sperm whale and consider instead how he could pull it off. First, of course, he would need a dead whale, preferably a young one that had beached itself on the coast of California near his home. Then he would need a device big enough to scan a 600-pound head. And he would have to figure out how to… more

The patient's name was Diane. She was a 28-year-old truck driver with advanced breast cancer, and her tumor was one of the largest that her doctors had seen. It bulged from the upper right quadrant of her right breast and penetrated deep into her ribs, attaching itself to her chest wall. "It was the size of a muskmelon," oncologist William Peters recalls. "It was a terrible circumstance."

Peters was as young as his patient, but he was rising through the… more