A Time to Speak

Time to speak up for research.

As U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins stated in recent testimony to Congress, “Our nation has never witnessed a time of greater promise for advances in medicine.” Researchers are moving closer to developing a universal flu vaccine, cancer immunotherapy (harnessing the immune system to attack tumor cells) is on the horizon, and the public/private BRAIN initiative w...

Time to let the patient speak.

"Listen to the complaint of the patient, however tiresome or irrelevant that may seem. He will eventually tell you what is the matter with him.... It is usually better in terms ofboth care and time to allow the flow to come to a natural halt from exhaustion of either the speaker or the material." The first half of this advice (from an experienced advocate and judge in medicolegal cases and a he...

UniEuk: Time to Speak a Common Language in Protistology!

Universal taxonomic frameworks have been critical tools to structure the fields of botany, zoology, mycology, and bacteriology as well as their large research communities. Animals, plants, and fungi have relatively solid, stable morpho-taxonomies built over the last three centuries, while bacteria have been classified for the last three decades under a coherent molecular taxonomic framework. By...

It's Time for Doctors to Speak Out on Climate Change.

Speak to me, melody

Music, more than any other art form, can raise the human spirit to the heights of joy or plunge it into the depths of sorrow. Yet, the power of music to influence our emotions, regardless of age or cultural background, has left philos ophers, scholars and musicians baffled; perhaps unsurprisingly, given the inevitable subject ivity of the phenomenon (Fig 1). In the late twentieth century, biolo...