Editorial: Troubled times demand heroes: Heroic marketing and marketing heroes

Understanding the heroes of our times

Green Heroes

1 Dipartimento di Scienze di Sanità Pubblica, Sezione di Parassitologia, University of Rome-La Sapienza, Rome, Italy, 2 Department of Infectious and Tropical Diseases, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, United Kingdom, 3 Centre Medical Saint Camille, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, 4 Kenya Medical Research Institute, Wellcome Trust Programme, Centre for Geographic Medicine Resea...

When heroes stumble.

The American Sexually Transmitted Diseases Association faces a quandary. The name of Dr Thomas Parran, a 20th century hero in the field of sexually transmitted disease prevention, accompanies a prestigious award given by the organization annually. Members are now confronted with the unsettling realization that Parran, like many honored figures of the past, also had a less heroic side. It was al...

Man-of-Action Heroes: The Pursuit of Heroic Masculinity in Everyday Consumption

We develop a model describing how certain American men, those men who have been described as emasculated by recent socioeconomic changes, construct themselves as masculine through their everyday consumption. We find that American mass culture idealizes the man-of-action hero—an idealized model of manhood that resolves the inherent weaknesses in two other prominent models (the breadwinner and th...

The Heroes of CRISPR

Three years ago, scientists reported that CRISPR technology can enable precise and efficient genome editing in living eukaryotic cells. Since then, the method has taken the scientific community by storm, with thousands of labs using it for applications from biomedicine to agriculture. Yet, the preceding 20-year journey--the discovery of a strange microbial repeat sequence; its recognition as an...