We live in a very uncertain world. Variation surrounds our work. There is noise in our experiments, in our measurements, and in our test subjects. From all these sources of uncertainty and variation, we try to extract a coherent picture of very complex and sometimes dynamic, biological and chemical processes. In fact, one of our major challenges is to separate this signal, the 'real' biology or chemistry, from the noise. The tools developed to do this are called, collectively, biostatistics. Any tool, even a hammer, can be misused. This could result, at best, in inefficiency, and, at worst,...

We live in a very uncertain world. Variation surrounds our work. There is noise in our experiments, in our measurements, and in our test subjects. From all these sources of uncertainty and variation, we try to extract a coherent picture of very complex and sometimes dynamic, biological and chemical processes. In fact, one of our major challenges is to separate this signal, the 'real' biology or chemistry, from the noise. The tools developed to do this are called, collectively, biostatistics. Any tool, even a hammer, can be misused. This could result, at best, in inefficiency, and, at worst,...