Recent papers by Lisk and Sibbald have again raised the role of basic sciences in medical training – a debate stretching back to the original Flexner Report [1, 2]. For medical students like myself, Flexner’s vision for scientific rigor in medical education continues to resonate deeply. Many of us are trained in basic sciences prior to entering medicine. We arrive keen to learn basic science is...

The 13th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections featured a strong basic science program that provided new findings on the nature of HIV disease as well as surprises regarding the antiviral action of innate restriction factors.

In the past century there have been incredible advances in the field of medical research, but what hinders translation of this knowledge into effective treatment for human disease? There is an increasing focus on the failure of many research breakthroughs to be translated through the clinical trial process and into medical practice. In this mini review, we will consider some of the reasons that...

Translational research used to be fun. In fact, it used to be arresting—of course, considered here in the frame of triplets and ribonucleic acids of the transfer and mRNA variety. In fact, the mind-boggling concept that someone could actually know the velocity of a ribosome trundling down a messenger RNA, like a freight car on a railway track, led me to decide at a tender age that biochemistry ...

C ompared with that of other human pathogens, the proposed replicative cycle of prions is disarmingly simple. It encompasses misfolding of a single protein, the cellular prion protein (PrP), into a disease-associated form called PrP. This is followed by PrP aggregation and possibly fragmentation of aggregates, which may augment the number of replicative units. Although there is no formal proof ...