Academic freedom really means freedom of inquiry. To be able to probe according to one’s own interest, knowledge and conscience is the most important freedom the scholar has, and part of that process is to state its results.

The Lord just smiled on us about that.

In a way it was a bad year for evolution, given what happened in Kansas and Dover and lots of other places. But at the same time, it was a really good year for evolution research, really in every area of biology.

It used to be there was a chain store here and there and 'independents' all around. It's the reverse now.

As Science celebrates its 125th birthday, we've recognized that an examination of science's outstanding mysteries also reflects its tremendous accomplishments.

Scientific fraud is not new to us. It is not rare, but it is not common either. It happens at a frequency that's high enough to bother certainly people in the United States Congress, and probably others as well. But it is not frequent enough to declare that because the peer review system cannot reliably detect it, something has to be done about the peer review system. I think the peer review system is not quite fine, but absolutely the best thing we have.

Science is publishing this study because it provides information necessary for developing drugs and vaccines that could help prevent another global flu pandemic. We carefully considered the implications of publishing this research and concluded that the knowledge we're gaining to potentially protect public health far outweighs the risk of working with this virus.

There's no possibility at all of that. It's held under the kinds of conditions the Centers for Disease Control specifies for select agents.

At the time of publication, we felt on ethically solid ground.

We are going to be giving that paper careful scrutiny, guided by what we can learn in the course of time about the 2005 one and what went wrong there.