Prosper Merimee: Heroism, Pessimism and Irony

Heroism, Suffering, and Change

Live long and prosper.

In this issue of Molecular Pharmacology, Meyn et al. (p. 1320) provide the results of the first comprehensive investigation of the expression pattern of the Src family of nonreceptor tyrosine kinases (SFK) in mouse embryonic stem (ES) cells. They found that self-renewing ES cells express seven of the eight mammalian SFK members and that some undergo distinct expression changes during early diff...

'Heroism' in Warfare

The willingness of people to risk their lives fighting on behalf of their nation (which we call heroism) is a background assumption in the study of war, thus of international relations, but also an evolutionary puzzle. We use two computer simulations to explore the possibility that heroism could have evolved as a domain specific form of altruism, selected through humans’ ancient past as a conse...

Optimism, pessimism, and mortality.

ings quite a remarkable finding: that the new Optimism-Pessimism scale of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) predicts no less a dependent variable than death itself. The finding is unusually important for 2 reasons: First, the obvious one is predicting a “hard” measure like mortality from a “mere” paper-andpencil psychological construct. The second is more subtle, and it com...

Nursing heroism in the 21st Century'

BACKGROUND The Vivian Bullwinkel Oration honours the life and work of an extraordinary nurse. Given her story and that of her World War II colleagues, the topic of nursing heroism in the 21st century could not be more germane. DISCUSSION Is heroism a legitimate part of nursing, or are nurses simply 'just doing their job' even when facing extreme personal danger? In this paper I explore the pl...