Some of you have (hopefully) noticed that our October issue is fatter than normal, with a special focus on childhood developmental disorders. Four specially commissioned perspectives in this issue explore dyslexia, autism, specific language impairment and Fragile X syndrome, as well as the commonalities between these disorders and the overlap between normal and abnormal development. This is a large and often somewhat contentious field, but we hope that these articles stimulate thought and act as a spur for further research. Thanks to our sponsors, the content of the article is freely available through December 2006 here. Here are the links to the individual articles which make up this focus:

From genes to behavior in developmental dyslexia

Time to give up on a single explanation for autism

Fragile X syndrome and autism at the intersection of genetic and neural networks

What developmental disorders can tell us about the nature and origins of language

Let us know what you think of the focus! We’d love to hear your thoughts on these articles, and on this topic.

Dong et al., CREB modulates excitability of nucleus accumbens neurons

Adler et al., UNC-6/Netrin induces neuronal asymmetry and defines the site of axon formation

Priebe and Ferster, Mechanisms underlying cross-orientation suppression in cat visual cortex

As always, comments welcome!

Demonstrations by animal rights activists are unfortunately nothing new, but there was an interesting demonstration last weekend in Oxford, UK. This one also had lots of placard waving about animal research, catchy slogans, and yes, a strong police presence. The message however was very different: this was actually a demonstration in favor of animal testing.

Hundreds of people marched in support of a new biomedical lab, set to be built in the University of Oxford’s Science area. Work on the facility has been set back because of threats from animal rights activist, and protests against the lab are a familiar sight for anyone who lives and works in Oxford. But this is the first time that there has been a demonstration in favor of the lab, and it is being seen as a reaction to growing indignation over the extreme tactics being used by some animal rights activists.

Most interestingly, this demonstration was not organized by scientists, but by a 16 year old student, Laurie Pycroft, who was unhappy with the one-sided public debate on this issue. He created a research advocacy website catchily called Pro-test, and went on to organize the march. Though there were plenty of scientists who spoke at the demonstration (as well as the local member of parliament), the mobilizing force behind this march seem not to be scientists. Animal rights activists have been far more successful in arguing their case to the general public, and this is partly because few researchers want to risk the kind of concentrated campaigns which have been carried out against the handful of researchers who have spoken for animal research (and Laurie himself is now a target ). Groups like Pro-test suggest that some of the messages from the scientific community are getting through, and the chance for a more open debate is welcomed.

Unlike Annette, I’m a relative newcomer to the US of A, and I’m still fairly attached to my old stomping ground in the UK. And there is a knock-down, drag-out battle developing in the newspaper pages there about a scientific issue that I for one had thought was long gone: the link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The debate of course goes back to the Lancet paper by Andrew Wakefield way back in 1998, which suggested a link between the triple measles-mumps-rubella vaccine and autism (though the authors were careful to say that they had not established a causal link). This was followed by a precipitous drop in MMR vaccination in the UK, but in 2004, ten of the original co-authors of paper issued a ‘retraction of interpretation’ of the original paper in the face of increasing doubts about the results and the ethical conduct of the study. And a Cochrane review published last month concluded that there was unlikely to be a link between autism and the MMR vaccine, which should have put the controversy to bed. Instead, as this well-written article by a parent with child suffering from autism suggests, it has led to resurgence of the whole argument, with salvos by both people against and for the original paper.

Quite apart from the controversy about the MMR-autism link, the whole story raises interesting issues about how science is handled by non-scientists, especially the media: most scientists rejected the idea of the link between MMR and autism, but this was enthusiastically taken up by a lot of British media. Can scientists do a better job of communicating the uncertainties inherent in research? Or as the Bad Science column right in holding the media largely responsible for misreported science? And do you think that there are some areas of neuroscience which are particularly prone to this kind of misreporting?

Following up on interesting things happening at SFN, our chief editor Sandra Aamodt (along with Nature and Nature Reviews Neuroscience editors) gave a talk on Monday on publishing in Nature journals. One of the aims of the talk was to give people a better idea about exactly what happens to a paper once it has been submitted to us. The whole editorial process can sometimes appear to be a bit mysterious, and we are hoping to take away some of the mystery in this talk. Did we succeed? Did you find this talk useful? Feedback welcome!