"Science is knowledge gained through repeated observation or experiment. It is communicated through publication of papers in journals. Science can only flourish if journals maintain minimal standards, and papers are read critically. In this talk I will describe some rules of thumb for the presentation of data in publications that can also be used when interpreting other people's papers. The talk will be illustrated by numerous examples of papers by high profile researchers in prestigious journals that would only have had some value had they been printed on more absorbent paper with perforated pages.” (David Vaux)

Short CV of Prof. Dr. David Vaux:

David Vaux graduated in medicine from the University of Melbourne in 1984, and after spending an intern year at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, commenced a PhD at The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute. His main project was to investigate the function of the putative oncogene product Bcl-2. After obtaining his PhD in 1989, he was a post-doctoral fellow in Irv Weissman’s lab at Stanford, where together with Stuart Kim he made transgenic C. elegans worms that expressed human bcl-2. He returned to Australia in 1993, and has mainly focused on the IAP family of proteins, and their antagonists, such as Smac/Diablo and HtrA2/Omi. When he is not studying molecular mechanisms of cell death, he wastes far too much time on issues of research integrity.