If it was your brother

If it was good enough for Aristotle......

‘If you want to understand today you have to search yesterday ’ wrote the American novelist Pearl Buck, and such is the challenge facing those who hope to disentangle the pathogenesis of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). The disease is characterised by the insidious but progressive development of fibrosis that culminates in respiratory failure and death, usually within 5 years of diagnosis. ...

Multiple pulmonary nodules: and if it was not a cancer.

A 72-year-old woman was admitted in the Cardiology Department for respiratory insufficiency. ECG revealed atrial fibrillation, and echocardiography revealed heart failure with an estimated left ventricular ejection fraction of 25%. Chest roentgenogram revealed multiple nodules, and chest CT scan revealed multiple dense nodules surrounded by ground-glass attenuation (halo sign) with unilateral p...

Growing talent as if your business depended on it.

Traditionally, corporate boards have left leadership planning and development very much up to their CEOs and human resources departments-primarily because they don't perceive that a lack of leadership development in their companies poses the same kind of threat that accounting blunders or missed earnings do. That's a shortsighted view, the authors argue. Companies whose boards and senior execut...

What would you do if it were your kid?

Evidence-based policy? Only if it fits with your preconceptions

From May, a new clause [2] will be slipped in to all government grant agreements, preventing public funding from being used to lobby the government. While the clause is aimed at quangos, it will also affect charities [3], and crucially academic research [4]. As David Nutt puts it in yesterday's Guardian [5], this move is an attempt to "limit scientific outputs to those that support its policies".