Une obsession nationale: l'anglicisme

Academia's obsession with quantity.

We live in the era of rankings. Universities are being ranked, journals are being ranked, and researchers are being ranked. In this era of rankings, the value of researchers is measured in the number of their papers published, the citations they received, and the volume of grant income earned. Academia today is governed by one simple rule: more is better. The idea to reward those who are produc...

Eating soap ? Obsession?

Kudos for thinking about how your behavior might affect your long-term health and writing in to ask about it! What you describe may be considered behavior associated with pica, which is considered a craving to eat non-nutritive, non-food items. The research is unclear as to why some people exhibit pica behavior, but there are some potential correlations (read on for more). Depending on the subs...

Éditorial: Education nationale

Isolated Musical Obsession

Dear Sir, It was of interest to read the case report on musical obsessions (Journal 1999, 41,77-78). The clinical picture, especially the phenomenon of a particular set of known musical notes repeatedly being perceived resembles Palinacousis. This phenomenon was descnbed by Jacob and associates in 1973 as persistent or recurring paroxysmal auditory illusions in which enviornmentally produced au...

Académie Nationale De Médecine

Interventions causing genome modifications that can be passed on to descendants have been prohibited in France since 1994. New methods, such as CRISPR-Cas9, have been developed, raising questions about their potential use on human germline cells and embryos. The only acceptable medical indication would be to prevent the transmission of a disease gene to the child. However, the necessary conditi...