ABSTRACT
Over the years there have been many comments on the failings of the peer review system, and I have tried to capture the best of them on these pages. Perhaps the most perceptive is the comment of Erwin Chargaff in Chapter Seven which points out how repeated rejections by the Granting Agencies produce “Pavlovian effects and a general neurasthenia that are bound to damage science irreversibly”. I will say more about this here, but I cannot resist first telling you about Chargaff, and my brief encounter with him, since it illustrates well the pressures researchers are under to operate strictly according to the current fashion (“paradigm”), or suffer the consequences.
