For many a researcher at NCBS subjecting their system to microscopic scrutiny is a daily routine. But between January 5-7 2010, the tables were turned, and the critical lens of a five-yearly review was turned upon NCBS itself. The seriousness of the process was reflected in the size of the review panel - nineteen scientists in all - and the fact that sixteen of these had come from some of the best overseas universities and institutes. "The focus of the review was on examining our science and scientific programmes from the ground up and then distilling an institutional perspective", says NCBS Director, Dr K. VijayRaghavan. Three days were set aside for the Review, the main highlights of which were a series of 36 talks - by every faculty member and facility head - and poster sessions that introduced the research of NCBS in greater depth.

In my previous post I tried to allay some possible concerns about "writing to recipes", and one of my main points was that sticking to a schema can lead to clearer writing. In this post I want to tackle another "fear of the formula", one that seems the most paradoxical of all: an aversion to the very clarity that we were previously (and naively?) assuming to be a desirable feature of science reporting.

There is probably no single topic of research that straddles as many NCBS teams as olfaction. Despite seeming the most mysterious of our senses, the sense of smell is actually the simplest sensory system to study, and NCBS teams try to understand it from every angle.

In my role as a writing advisor to young scientists, I'm a big supporter of using schemas (or templates) to help organise a research paper. A schema provides a layout into which the writer introduces the details relevant to their own report. The one scientists are most familiar with is the "IMRAD" system of partitioning the paper (Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion), and its widespread use alone indicates it has been a useful aid to scientific communication. But teachers of academic writing like myself also suggest the use of schemas for the individual sections of a paper and even for paragraphs.