It’s time for surgery to speak out

It's Time for Doctors to Speak Out on Climate Change.

Editorial: Daring to Speak Out

When we commented on the Brussels bombings in Issue 3, we did not imagine that further shocking violence would be in the forefront of our minds only a few months later. Two horrific events in recent weeks have brought tragedy to the lives of individuals and families and forced into public consciousness issues of principle which lie at their heart. The mass shootings in the early hours of Sunday...

Physicians' Obligation to Speak out for Prisoners' Health.

As this is written, military review hearings at the US detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are under way to determine whether any of the individual detainees has been wrongly classified as an "illegal combatant" by the Department of Defense, and is, thus, eligible for repatriation. The men facing these hearings have been held, often in solitary confinement, for up to 21⁄2 years and have n...

Time to speak up for research.

As U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins stated in recent testimony to Congress, “Our nation has never witnessed a time of greater promise for advances in medicine.” Researchers are moving closer to developing a universal flu vaccine, cancer immunotherapy (harnessing the immune system to attack tumor cells) is on the horizon, and the public/private BRAIN initiative w...

Silent pericentromeric repeats speak out.

Pericentromeres are essential structural components of the chromosome that function to ensure proper sister chromatid segregation during cell division. These chromosomal domains are composed of major satellite DNA repeats whose constitutively heterochromatic structure facilitates kinetochore formation (1). Characteristically demarcated by the silencing histone mark trimethyl-histone-3lysine-9, ...