Any registered clinical trial number should be indicated after the abstract.

No abstract

No abstract

OBITUARY Kuen Charles Kao, pioneer of optical fibres, remembered p.326 SUSTAINABILITY Governments should unite to cut meat consumption p.325 ARCHAEOLOGY Virtual reality rebuilds architectural rubble, bit by bit p.321 HISTORY Samuel Goudsmit, spin physicist, atomic sleuth and journal editor p.320 S elf-help and business books are replete with advice for learning from failures. The biomedical community must do just that if it is to ease the burden from intractable conditions such as Alzheimer's disease. It can take 20 years or more to get a drug to market, from testing compounds in animals to running late-stage (phase III) clinical trials in thousands of subjects. More than 80% of drugs that are tested in humans fail to demonstrate safety and efficacy 1 (see 'High failure rate'); the rate for Alzheimer's treatments is estimated at more than 99% (ref. 2; see ' Alzheimer's drug attrition'). Yet the data behind these failures are generally not seen by regulators, or considered deeply by anyone outside the company sponsoring the trial. Without this Be open about drug failures to speed up research Access to evidence from disappointing drug-development programmes advances the whole scientific process, explain Enrica Alteri and Lorenzo Guizzaro.