Science before the CD‐ROM

Every scienti®c discipline has its core of fundamental observations that de®ne principles applicable to multiple experimental situations. These provide concepts and universal laws that form the foundation for the work that follows. We all learn these basics before we embark upon our own research topic and always cite the seminal papers in explanation of our investigational strategy, ensuring that the correct etiquette is followed to give credit to those who performed innovative work. This process of building and re®nement forms the basis of scholarship and allows each generation to pass the baton of scienti®c investigation on to subsequent generations enriched by embellishments made on a central theme. Or do we? A vast amount of scienti®c data is now available at the click of a mouse. It should therefore be easy to ®nd and cite seminal articles from the published literature, so that our generation should be better scholars than those who worked before the information revolution. Furthermore, by having access to seminal articles, present day investigators should be able to prevent the repetition of experiments which have already been described and should be able to cross-fertilise one investigational area with techniques developed in another. Or do they? In practice, many abstracts for meetings or articles submitted for publication fail to recognise that similar work has been performed by others. In the most egregious examples, this includes the same virus and the same cell lines and/or the same PCR primers and/or the same experimental animal or human situation; in others, it concerns one virus where another has been investigated in parallel circumstances. If I, acting as a general reviewer for virology, can recognise multiple examples, outside my personal research interest, whose articles fail to recognise seminal work, what does this say about the authors whose chosen specialist research area is the subject of the abstract or paper? Two possible explanations are apparent: either some colleagues are unaware of what has been published previously or they are aware but hope that journal editors and reviewers will not recognise this and so accept their work as novel. Irrespective of whether the cause is ignorance or plagiarism, it is clear that some colleagues are oblivious to our scienti®c heritage. If they do bother to perform a literature survey, they merely consult the latest CD-ROM (currently, years 1996±2000 in our University) and very few bother to go back as far as the earliest disk provided by Medline (1966). Rarely does anyone still visit a reference laboratory to seek out original dusty tomes which, despite their ages, may contain insights into contemporary scienti®c investigation. For example, the series of Classic Papers reproduced in Reviews in Medical Virology illustrates past investigative examples which continue to illuminate topical problems. The current Classic Paper contains important information about the dynamics of viral clearance from the circulation [1]. The experimental ®ndings continue to challenge our understanding of host innate defence systems and are directly relevant to modern treatment with antiviral drugs [2±4]. Nevertheless, many colleagues with a research interest in AIDS appear to believe that the ®eld of viral dynamics was created during studies of HIV, whereas, as this Classic Paper shows, the essential concepts were de®ned a third of a century ago [1]. Arguably, progress in the control of HIV-induced pathology would have been even more rapid if investigators had appreciated at an early stage the need to combat rapid viral replication with potent antiviral chemotherapy. Armed with the paradigm provided in the current Classic Paper, they would have used direct measures of viral replication in vivo to determine that monotherapy (with any currently licensed drug) lacked potency and so proceeded to study combinations of drugs promptly. Since it is the use of anti-retroviral Reviews in Medical Virology Rev. Med. Virol. 2000; 10: 205±206.