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Crossword puzzle
Click the puzzle for a full-size, interactive version. Note: The answer grid will include every letter of the alphabet.
BY EMILY COX AND HENRY RATHV

Collectively, these initiatives should encourage journals and other actors in the research ecosystem—including funders, employers, and individual researchers—to actively address parachute research and other unfair research practices, by introducing mechanisms to monitor, manage, and improve the conduct of research collaborations in situations of power imbalance.

Sepeedeh Saleh et al., writing in PLOS Global Public Health about the need for publishers to adopt a more-detailed accounting of author contributions to studies as a way to combat helicopter (or “parachute”) research (March 30)
ACROSS

1. Descriptor for a beetle, quince. or maple
5. Sus scrofa in the wild
9. Aid in grasping for a panda or opossum
10. Plant once thought to be a medical panacea
11. Field gear of Ansel Adams
12. Graphic displaying data
14. Drupe of the genus Prunus
16. Author of the three-volume Understanding Physics
19. Ancient Celt whose name means "oak-knower"
21. Energize or produce a magnetic field in
24. Ancient culture of the Four Corners region
25. Path typically elliptic
26. Alpha-keratin plate
27. Good time for a polysomnogram reading (2 wds.)

DOWN

1. Natural fiber used in rope-making
2. Covering that may be "nuptial" or "basic"
3. Inert, as gases
4. Beetle with more than 30,000 species
6. Greek letter symbolizing electrical resistance
7. One in the same tree?
8. Turkey or chicken vocalizations
13. Precipitation with adverse impacts (2 wds.)
15. Of a nerve or artery in the arm
17. Having the power to change forms
18. Like some small Egyptian mummies
20. One of the five basic tastes
22. Kin of rooks and ravens
23. Swab in many a first-aid kit (hyph.)

I believe this is the first time this has happened in the history of cancer.

Luis Diaz, a researcher at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York speaking to The New York Times about his group’s recently published trial in which all 18 rectal cancer patients who were given a drug called dostarlimab for six months saw their tumors disappear (June 5)

What I’d really like us to do is get a bigger trial where this drug is used in a much more diverse setting to understand what the real, true response rate is going to be. It’s not going to end up being 100 percent. I hope I bite my tongue on that in the future, but I can’t imagine it will be 100 percent.

Hanna Sanoff a researcher at the University of North Carolina’s Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, talking to NPR about the recently published study from Diaz and colleagues (June 7)
Comic of a doctor passing a patient a bottle of pills labeled "Hope".
© JONNY HAWKINS