Getting the Point As scientific papers become increasingly specialized, they become more and more indigestible to those outside the field. For the casual reader-a majority-it can be difficult to get the point of the article. Can something be done about it? Some journals have the policy of publishing brief statements about the context, objectives, and general conclusions of the work. I find such "take-home messages" useful and urge the ASM journals to adopt such a policy with suitable modifications. This may not be very demanding on authors, as many include statements of this sort somewhere in the paper. One of the many gratifying examples appeared at the end of the abstract of the paper by Komeili et al., Science 311:242-245, 2006. It reads: " .. it seems that prokaryotes can use cytoskeletal filaments to position organelles within the cell." However, unless highlighted, such statements are easily missed.
Elizabeth Carter suffered from severe headaches all her life. Her letters are peppered with references to fits of "head-ach" so bad they made her bold enough to demand her own room wherever she visited, and to cherish a preference for solitude contrary to the ideal of Bluestocking sociability. Following her friends and physicians, she bowed to fashionable diagnoses in considering these headaches the result of a nervous constitution, and she was prescribed the usual remedies, including sociable trips to fashionable watering places. While positioning her sufferings within the frame of fashionable diseases, Carter tried to dissociate herself from fashionable sensibility, and struggled to gain acceptance for her pain as part of her body's "mechanism" by using a more old-fashioned, religious interpretative frame. This case study of Carter's headaches thus charts Carter's own understanding of her constitution, her body, and her pain within-and without-the framework of eighteenth-century fashionable diseases.
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