CHEMISTS and physicists have been known to remark that biology — even molecular biology, which underpins most of the subject as a whole — remains a 'soft' science. The reason is that so much work measures a distant result of many complex processes.More proximal measurements can of course be technically very difficult to make, but at least in one area of immunology progress is being made. On page 616 of this issue, Alam et al. provide quantitative data on a central issue for immunologists: how thefate of developing T lymphocytes is decided.
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