Issues

Alllllrighteee !

Looks as if someone else is in the same groove I am in along the lines of
wishing more ivory tower academic
hot shots would stop pretending to know more than they do, and separate the
relatively more certain things from
far-out speculations all dressed up in arcane esoterica and voluminous
name-droppings.

The following article is from current ed. of Science.


What Don't We Know?
Donald Kennedy and Colin Norman
At Science, we tend to get excited about new discoveries that lift the veil
a little on how things work, from cells to the universe. That puts our focus
firmly on what has been added to our stock of knowledge. For this
anniversary issue, we decided to shift our frame of reference, to look
instead at what we don't know: the scientific puzzles that are driving basic
scientific research.

We began by asking Science's Senior Editorial Board, our Board of Reviewing
Editors, and our own editors and writers to suggest questions that point to
critical knowledge gaps. The ground rules: Scientists should have a good
shot at answering the questions over the next 25 years, or they should at
least know how to go about answering them. We intended simply to choose 25
of these suggestions and turn them into a survey of the big questions facing
science. But when a group of editors and writers sat down to select those
big questions, we quickly realized that 25 simply wouldn't convey the grand
sweep of cutting-edge research that lies behind the responses we received.
So we have ended up with 125 questions, a fitting number for Science's 125th
anniversary.

First, a note on what this special issue is not: It is not a survey of the
big societal challenges that science can help solve, nor is it a forecast of
what science might achieve. Think of it instead as a survey of our
scientific ignorance, a broad swath of questions that scientists themselves
are asking. As Tom Siegfried puts it in his introductory essay, they are
"opportunities to be exploited."

We selected 25 of the 125 questions to highlight based on several criteria:
how fundamental they are, how broad-ranging, and whether their solutions
will impact other scientific disciplines. Some have few immediate practical
implications--the composition of the universe, for example. Others we chose
because the answers will have enormous societal impact--whether an effective
HIV vaccine is feasible, or how much the carbon dioxide we are pumping into
the atmosphere will warm our planet, for example. Some, such as the nature
of dark energy, have come to prominence only recently; others, such as the
mechanism behind limb regeneration in amphibians, have intrigued scientists
for more than a century. We listed the 25 highlighted questions in no
special order, but we did group the 100 additional questions roughly by
discipline.

Our sister online publications are also devoting special issues to Science's
125th anniversary. The Science of Aging Knowledge Environment, SAGE KE
(www.sageke.org), is surveying several big questions confronting researchers
on aging. The Signal Transduction Knowledge Environment, STKE
(www.stke.org), has selected classic Science articles that have had a high
impact in the field of cell signaling and is highlighting them in an
editorial guide. And Science's Next Wave (www.nextwave.org) is looking at
the careers of scientists grappling with some of the questions Science has
identified.

We are acutely aware that even 125 unknowns encompass only a partial answer
to the question that heads this special section: What Don't We Know? So we
invite you to participate in a special forum on Science's Web site
(www.sciencemag.org/sciext/eletters/125th), in which you can comment on our
125 questions or nominate topics we missed--and we apologize if they are the
very questions you are working on.





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