Cognitive Aging Research: An Exciting Time for a Maturing Field

An exciting time of year.

Why do you want to be a family doctor? What is the role of the family physician in the health care system and in people’s lives? These are the kinds of questions that will echo across Canada at the end of January. Medical students from across the country and around the world, as well as university departments of family medicine, are preparing for the interviews that are part of the annual Canad...

Aging Ergonomics: A Field with Inadequate Notice

An exciting time to study the nucleus

Some exciting new findings were reported at the Minisymposium “The Cell Biology of Genetic Information” held at the 2015 annual meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology. G. V. Shivashankar (Mechanobiology Institute, Singapore) spoke about how geometric constraints, such as extracellular matrix stiffness, can regulate nuclear organization in mammalian cells, from nuclear shape to chromat...

Embryonic stem cells: An exciting field for basic research and tissue engineering, but also an ethical dilemma?

Recent reports describing that, not unexpectedly, human embryonic stem (ES) cells have become available [Shamblott et al., 1998; Thomson et al., 1998] suddenly put ES cells in the centre of public interest. Mouse ES cells have been known as a fascinating object of biological research for many years, and in particular they have proven useful as an experimental tool for basic studies on gene func...

MTO: a new journal for a maturing field

The association between natural viral infection and remission of cancer has been described for over a 100 years. 1 The clinical observations that microbial infection of tumor may produce direct killing of cancer or through host immune actions are the basis of the field of oncolytic viral therapy. Astute investigators in the 1950's through the 1960's attempted to capitalize on such observations ...