Human understanding is still important

Big data are no substitute for scientific intuition and understanding

This month marks the 15th anniversary of the establishment of Science Signaling as a journal. Prior to January 2008, it was “STKE,” which stood for signal transduction knowledge environment. The “knowledge environment” was an experiment by AAAS that eventually became a journal.

are extremely proud of Science Signaling. It publishes deep, mechanistic studies of signal transduction, bringing together the best of biochemistry, cell biology, immunology, and other fields. Our parent journal, Science, publishes shorter papers on new findings, especially those that have the potential to change the way scientists think. But the kinds of findings that end up in Science are of no real use unless we have deep understanding of how they came about. For sure, there’s plenty of mechanistic information in Science and our other journals, but the mechanistic insight in Science Signaling is truly extraordinary.

The chief scientific advisor of Science Signaling is Dr. Michael Yaffe, an outstanding researcher and clinician. He and I wrote about all of this in an editorial celebrating the anniversary of Science Signaling.

Signalers unite!