- Why did Röntgen refuse to patent X-rays?
Science, Ethics, and Society
The relationship between science, ethics, and public life.
- What did later researchers determine was actually causing the stomach lesions Fibiger studied in his rats?
- Why is Fibiger's Nobel Prize now treated as a case study in the history of science rather than a settled discovery?
- How did Fibiger's death in 1928 shape how his mistaken discovery came to be remembered?
- What was the stated goal of the Lasker Foundation when it was founded in 1945?
- What is the operational definition, and why did it matter to physics beyond high-pressure research?
- What did Albert Schweitzer mean by his ethic of 'reverence for life'?
- Why did Physical Review Letters reject Maiman's laser paper before Nature published it?
- What controversy surrounded Denton Cooley's 1969 artificial heart implantation?
- Why did scientists voluntarily pause certain recombinant DNA experiments in 1974 and convene at Asilomar in 1975?
- How did public and religious reaction to Louise Brown's birth range from jubilation to alarm?
- What did the Nobel Committee mean by honouring Wiesel for the argument that indifference to suffering is not a neutral position?
- Why does Wiesel treat memory as a moral obligation rather than a sentiment?
- Why did announcing the result at a press conference before peer review undermine the claim's credibility?
- What happened when labs on three continents tried to replicate the excess heat Pons and Fleischmann reported?
- Why do the entry's authors describe the episode as not quite fraud despite the claim collapsing under scrutiny?
- What concerns did Struchkov's publication rate raise about how science measures productivity?
- Why was the patented device never actually used on a patient?
- What evidential limitations does a home test face that a criminal forensic lab does not?
- What did Karl Kruszelnicki's survey find about who accumulates the most navel lint?
- How did the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee reason through what it might mean to morally wrong a plant?
- Why would no ethics board or funding body have approved this study if it had been proposed formally?
- Why did critics dispute calling this the 'first synthetic cell'?
- Why has this finding faced replication difficulties in later studies?
- What controversy erupted at the end of 2015 over CRISPR's use in human embryos?
- What happened when seventeen laboratories tried to replicate the pen-in-teeth facial feedback effect?
- Why did the Ig Nobel committee honour Strack for reporting his own effect's failure to replicate?