Reflections: A Personal Canon

Personal reflections on twentieth century vaccinology.

The science of vaccinology was created in the late 18th and 19th centuries by "giants" of the time including Jenner, Pasteur, Koch, von Behring, Ehrlich and Lister. Relatively little technologic advance was made in the period leading to World War II except for yellow fever and influenza vaccines. Support for war efforts fueled developments which led to the modern era of vaccines of 1950 onwards...

Challenges for QCD theory – some personal reflections –

At the LHC all processes are QCD ones, whether “signal” or “background”. In this review the frontiers of current QCD research are addressed, towards increased understanding, improved calculational precision, and role in potential future discoveries. Issues raised include the limits of perturbative QCD calculations and parton distribution usage, the nature of multiparton interactions, the impact...

Software for Science: Some Personal Reflections

As computer hardware systems become more and more complex, software and tools lag more and more behind. This is especially true for scientific software that often demands high performance, and thus needs to take advantage of parallelisms, memory hierarchies and other software and systems. How do we help bridge this ever-increasing gap? This paper describes some of my experiences and thoughts re...

Personal reflections on the "animal-rights" phenomenon.

Mediterranean diet and public health: personal reflections.

My concern about diet as a public health problem began in the early 1950s in Naples, where we observed very low incidences of coronary heart disease associated with what we later came to call the "good Mediterranean diet." The heart of this diet is mainly vegetarian, and differs from American and northern European diets in that it is much lower in meat and dairy products and uses fruit for dess...