One of the beautiful attractions of the modern scientific enterprise is the utter honesty of its practitioners. It simply does not cross one’s mind that results published in a technical paper might be faked, made up, distorted, adulterated, or otherwise misrepresented. The interpretations might be questioned, but not the results.

A couple of recent instances have caused me to be less sanguine about the integrity of science. First Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa revealed that researchers at Harvard, Cincinnati, and several other undisclosed places had failed to report industry payments. Support from commercial interests is required to be disclosed by anyone receiving federal research funds in order to reduce potential conflicts of interest. Why is this important? Because the public needs to know it can trust the independence of medical research results.

The second unnerving event was a study from the NIH’s Office of Research Integrity (ORI). The essential finding is that about 9% of investigators have witnessed misconduct and that this misconduct goes unreported more than a third of the time.

Competitive pressures—on individuals to be productive and on institutions to avoid unseemly publicity—are the underlying source for this problem, and easy solutions are not readily apparent. Nonetheless the ORI study (see Nature, 19 June 2008, pp. 980–982) suggests six specific remedies. To do less than try them surely undermines the whole of science, and the damage becomes nearly irreversible when a certain threshold is passed.

I fear we are nearer to that threshold than at any time in my recent memory.

The Biotechnology Heritage Award is given annually by the Chemical Heritage Foundation and the Biotechnology Industry Organization to recognize outstanding contributions to the biotechnology community. The award recognizes an individual within the biotechnology community

• Who has displayed significant entrepreneurship through discovery, innovation, or commercialization;
• Whose contributions to public understanding are noteworthy; and
• Who has been active in philanthropic and communal affairs.

This year’s award was presented last week to Henri A. Termeer, who admirably and easily rises to all three criteria. His company, Genzyme, has grown under his leadership from a modest start-up to one of the world’s leading biotechnology companies, with 10,000 employees, almost $4 billion in revenues, and products serving patients in over 90 countries.

Henri Termeer has not restricted his many talents to his own company. He has served in various advisory roles to Harvard Medical School, MIT, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick’s Council of Economic Advisors, Project Hope, the New England Healthcare Institute, and the Boston Museum of Science. He has also worked to improve educational outcomes in local schools.

A well-deserved award in the very distinguished company of 12 previous luminaries.

The electromagnetic spectrum spans about 10¹ to 10²⁷ hertz, or 27 orders of magnitude. Some of the regions more relevant to humanity are

• Megahertz (10⁶), the frequency of radio waves, MRI, wireless networking, and Dan Rather.

• Gigahertz (10⁹), wherein lie microwave ovens and WiFi networking.

• Petahertz (10¹⁵), the land of ultraviolet and visible light, which makes us tan, initiates melanoma, and allows for fiber optics.

You’ll notice that terahertz (10¹²) is missing from its rightful, orderly place in this list. This is because lower frequencies (MHz, GHz) can be carried by electrons, while the higher ones (PHz) require photons.

In between (THz), there has been a deficit of materials that are sensitive information carriers in this range. But now comes new chemistry (or perhaps it’s physics, but no matter) from Boston University and Boston College.

Investigators fabricated metamaterials consisting of micron-size unit cells with a gallium arsenide conductor and polyamide dielectric (Optics Express, 12 May 2008, pp. 7181–7188). Such devices can be tuned to a narrow frequency range and have high absorption in the heretofore inaccessible terahertz zone.

No practical uses yet, and you can’t buy such materials in your local mall. Soon enough, though, there may be very useful applications in thermal sensing and precision imaging, as, for example, in biomedical and security applications.

 I bet you didn’t know that

• Over 4.8 billion historical artifacts are held in trust by 30,000 institutions in the United States alone. These include rare books and manuscripts, photographs, documents, sound recordings, moving images, digital materials, art, historic and ethnographic objects, archaeological artifacts, and scientific collections.

• American museums, libraries, archives, historical societies, and scientific research organizations receive 2.5 billion visits per year.

• 65% of collecting institutions have suffered damage to their collections because of improper storage.

• Only 44% of institutions have proper security measures in place.

• About three-quarters of institutions have no emergency plan in place.

These figures come from the Heritage Health Index conducted jointly by Heritage Preservation and the Institute for Museum and Library Services.

The Chemical Heritage Foundation houses one of the world’s important collections of the immense ephemera of the molecular sciences. I hope it is reassuring to readers to know that CHF falls on the correct side of all these statistics.

We have a robust collections policy, a full disaster-recovery plan, and good on-location care of the many valuable objects entrusted to us. These collections are the record of human scientific achievement, and we pledge to do our darnedest to take good care of them.

So come by and see for yourself!