Aliens or colleagues?

Angels or aliens? Refugee nurses in Britain, 1938 to 1942.

In spring 1940 Annie Altschul, an Austrian probationer nurse at Ealing Voluntary Hospital in London, was forced to leave her employment. Altschul was later to become a pioneer in psychiatric nursing and in 1976 was appointed Professor of Nursing at Edinburgh University, the first from her specialism to attain this rank. In 1940, however, Altschul, a socialist and former Viennese mathematics stu...

Are aliens among us?

Dear colleagues — and other colleagues

I reckon that taken together these excellent reviews exceed the number of words in What kinship is—and is not by a considerable margin. Moreover, considering that the range of these opinions on the proposed notion of kinship as mutuality of being runs from “intuitively graspable” to “fundamentally inscrutable,” the disorder being sown by this small book would seem to qualify it as an exercise i...

Are we made of aliens?

Aliens on the shores

In the early 1980s, a biologist at the tropical aquarium in Stuttgart, Germany, noticed that the beautiful green alga Caulerpa taxifolia (Fig. 1) would make an ideal aquarium decoration. It does not wither, it is fast growing and it withstands cool temperatures. In the following years, many aquariums acquired Caulerpa plants from Stuttgart, among them the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco, from wh...