Basic science and better medicine

Basic science research in medicine.

The utility of research in basic sciences is not discernible to the casual observer, as most of it is undertaken to answer scientific questions rather than with the goal to cater to the needs of a particular discipline. The relevance of basic sciences to medicine is not immediate, as decades pass before the relevance of a particular research can be recognized. One recent example is Robert Edwar...

Evolution : medicine ’ s most basic science

12 Acknowledgement. Thanks to the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study for providing a fellowship to RMN that made preparation of this chapter possible. Essentials The role of evolutionary biology as a basic science for medicine has been expanding rapidly. Some evolutionary methods are already widely applied in medicine, such as population genetics and methods for analysing phylogenetic trees. N...

Better Science, Better Science Reporting

The paradigm of IL-6: from basic science to medicine

IL-6 is a pleiotropic cytokine with a wide range of biological activities in immune regulation, hematopoiesis, inflammation, and oncogenesis. Its activities are shared by IL-6-related cytokines such as leukemia inhibitory factor and oncostatin M. The pleiotropy and redundancy of IL-6 functions have been identified by using a unique receptor system comprising two functional proteins: an IL-6 rec...

Evolution in health and medicine Sackler colloquium: Making evolutionary biology a basic science for medicine.

New applications of evolutionary biology in medicine are being discovered at an accelerating rate, but few physicians have sufficient educational background to use them fully. This article summarizes suggestions from several groups that have considered how evolutionary biology can be useful in medicine, what physicians should learn about it, and when and how they should learn it. Our general co...