This special issue, the result of a partnership between Nature and Scientific American, explores the links between diversity and good research. Readers may like to begin with the excellent editorial that provides an overview of the other articles in the issue, and makes a strong case for racial, ethnic, gender, and LGBT diversity in the lab. From there, peruse the other articles at your leisure. For instance, based on a sample of 2.5 million research papers, Richard Freeman and Wei Huang make the interesting case that ethnically diverse teams publish more highly cited work. Likewise, Esteban Burchard describes how his experiences in a variety of cultures have led him to do better research, while Monica Ruiz-Casares argues against the common practice of generalizing Western industrialized samples onto other people around the world.