A New Fragment from the Amarna Royal Tomb

The lameness of King Philip II and Royal Tomb I at Vergina, Macedonia.

King Philip II was the father of Alexander the Great. He suffered a notorious penetrating wound by a lance through his leg that was nearly fatal and left him lame in 339 B.C.E. (i.e., 3 y before his assassination in 336 B.C.E.). In 1977 and 1978 two male skeletons were excavated in the Royal Tombs II and I of Vergina, Greece, respectively. Tomb I also contained another adult (likely a female) a...

Individualized Medicine from Prewomb to Tomb

That each of us is truly biologically unique, extending to even monozygotic, "identical" twins, is not fully appreciated. Now that it is possible to perform a comprehensive "omic" assessment of an individual, including one's DNA and RNA sequence and at least some characterization of one's proteome, metabolome, microbiome, autoantibodies, and epigenome, it has become abundantly clear that each o...

Design for a Tomb

A design for a tomb does not ordinarily interest anyone but the designer and his client. There is, however, in the Museum Print Department a sixteenth-century tomb drawing of more than ordinary interest, since it presents a puzzle as rich in clues as a detective story. Once folded in half and bound in a scrapbook with the shop drawings of an unidentified atelier, this drawing shows an elaborate...

Taxane analogues: distinguishing royal robes from the "Emperor's New Clothes".

Whenever anticancer agents of therapeutic impact are identified, analogue development reflexively surges forward. In these situations, the quest to build a better mousetrap is typically massive and resource-intensive as exemplified by the search for superior DNA intercalating agents, which spanned several decades with little to show in terms of catching a larger number of mice (1). Such evaluat...

AVICENNA ON UNIVERSALS A FRAGMENT FROM HIS LOST AL-MUJAZ