There are certainly more mysteries than knowledge and, perhaps, more ways of finding out than science. I like science because when you think of something you can check it by experiment; "yes" or "no", Nature says, and you go on from there progressively. Other wisdom has no equally certain way of separating truth from falsehood. So I have taken the easy course with easy methods.

    - Richard Feynman, Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From The Beaten Track, p. 356  

The 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow's famous Rede lecture on the "Two Cultures" has been marked this year, around the web and sometimes in real life too, with various symposia and blogfests.  I've personally got nothing to contribute to the debate, but one of my favorite authors has - except he did it 25 years ago, at the 25th anniversary of Snow's lecture.

At most biomedical research conferences, you hear talks filled with published or almost published materials, which is unfortunate, because it's a lost opportunity for colleagues to talk about the problems their confronting with work that's in its early stages.

Some conferences, like the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory conferences, try to get around this problem by having strict confidentiality rules, in an attempt to get scientists to be more open with each other about research that's not quite ready for prime time. The confidentiality policy includes limitations on what reporters can report from these meetings.

 An essential prerequisite [for genius] is a particular skepticism. [The scientist] must have refused to acquiesce in certain previously accepted conclusions. This argues a kind of an imperviousness to the opinions of others, notably of authorities.

- Ernest Jones, "The Nature of Genius" Scientific Monthly February 1957

This can't all be good stuff: a paper I'm reading noted that "Just a few keywords (linkage, mapping,
SNP, genomewide association) identified 6866 articles in the PubMed database published in 2007 alone."

(Before you get too depressed, note that this means the total of each single keyword search, not a search for all 4 terms at once.)