Much ado about nothing is making a money of science: what do you get if you put six monkeys, one computer and [pounds sterling]2,000 together in a science lab? A monkey's tale told by a bunch of research idiots.

by Iain Murray

Every so often scientists demand to be taken seriously. Put us in a soap opera, they plead. Popularise us. Make us better understood. Rid us of this awful image of being somehow sinister.

It's all a waste of breath. The problem with what I suppose we must call the scientific community is that it is so large and diverse. At one, extreme you have the serious stuff -- double helixes, DNA, the stuff of life -- and at the other you have the pretend sciences of sociology and the like. Somewhere in between are the white-coated villains we love to hare, busily working away on designer babies and Frankenstein foods and torturing puppy dogs.

And for all their supposed detachment and objectivity, scientists, no less than the rest of us, ate vain and ambitious. They...