Lifetime Insurance Benefit for Living Donors: Is It Necessary and Could It Be Coercive?

Time as it could be measured in artificial living systems

Being able to measure time, whether directly or indirectly, is a significant advantage for an organism. It permits it to predict regular events, and prepare for them on time. Thus, clocks are ubiquitous in biology. In the present paper, we consider the most minimal abstract pure clocks and investigate their characteristics with respect to their ability to measure time. Amongst other, we find fu...

Could it be Lyme neuroborreliosis?

Cognitive rehabilitation for schizophrenia: is it possible? Is it necessary?

Limitations of available psychosocial interventions combined with the increasing evidence that schizophrenia is characterized by diverse deficits in information processing has stimulated great interest in the possibility of cognitive rehabilitation. However, the current optimism seems unjustified. The precise role of information processing in the behavioral handicaps evidenced by schizophrenic ...

Donation from old living donors: how safe is it?

As the rate of living kidney donor (LKD) transplantations increases, the selection of extended criteria donors such as old donors (>60-65 years) becomes more common. The pool of these old donors is probably wider than we think, especially if we tolerate a lower glomerular filtration rate (GFR) than the gold standard of 80 mL/min/1.73 m(2). Several important studies with large cohorts of living ...

Patenting genes: is it necessary and is it evil?

Last October, biologists’ neck-hair rose when J. Craig Venter announced his company, Celera, had filed 6,500 provisional patent applications for human genes. Henry Ford mass-produced automobiles — it seems evident we are now entering an era in which intellectual property is rolling off the assembly lines. Is this really the ultimate legacy of Watson and Crick’s elegant double helix? And what do...