When I worked in developmental biology between 1986 and 1991 only two books had permanent places on my bench. The first, ‘Maniatis’, was a manual of the molecular cloning methods that our Cambridge laboratory was using to identify genes that specify muscle development in the South African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis. The second was ‘Nieuwkoop and Faber’, a ‘normal table’ that describes Xenopus ...

I live just off of Bell Road outside of Newburgh, Indiana, a small town of 3,000 people. A mile down the street Bell Road intersects with Telephone Road not as a modern reminder of a technology belonging to bygone days, but as testimony that this technology, now more than a century and a quarter old, is still with us. In an age that prides itself on its digital devices and in which the computer...

The faces ofBlack and White men and women stare back from the sepia-colored pages of the past. These images, set between the pages of a tattered black photograph album, are a record ofa bygone era. Men and women, Blacks and Whites, all gathered together to record their experiences of the summer of 1915: the setting, rural Alabama, the participants, Negro teachers, White supervisors, and a speci...

of state police, Al Capone wasn’t arrested for robbery and murder, he was jailed on federal charges of income tax evasion. It goes to show that sometimes things that are not obvious, and are technical in nature, are needed to bring about a downfall. In 1988, Jacque Benveniste published a paper describing the activity of homeopathic preparations that had been diluted so much that there were no m...

Within some of these buildings it seems that time has taken a giant step backwards. The figures bent over their computer consoles are engaged in much the same quest as the frock-coated microscopists and Dodo-stuffers of bygone years; they are today's taxonomists, though their raw materials are of course sequences rather than morphological features, and statistical models and ingenious computer ...

In 1994, a controversial book hit newsstands. Its claim was that the consistent gap in intelligent quotient (IQ) scores between Black and White students was the result of genetic differences between the races. This proposition that one class of people is intellectually inferior to another was not a new claim. In the 1800s, Sir Francis Galton was one of the early psychologists to study intellige...

The rondo is a musical form in which a single recurrent theme alternates with different melodic motifs that are each distinct from one another. The recurrent theme is typically repeated multiple times, providing both the overall unity for the musical movement and a familiar musical destination to which the piece returns after the presentation of distinct interspersed themes. The parallels betwe...

If you ever thought that training through humiliation and intimidation was something from a bygone age, think again. In some places it is the norm. The last annual survey of junior doctors conducted by the General Medical Council (GMC) showed that bullying was a problem in up to 40 per cent of units within hospital trusts in some regions of the United Kingdom. According to the Chartered Institu...

Although we are prepared to spend dizzying sums on health care no one seems quite sure what health is. The World Health Organization made a bold offer in 1948. Their definition of health is ‘not merely the absence of disease or infirmity but a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being’. But this utopian vision is an unattainable ideal, bearing no relation to the struggles of real...

How much of a doctor–patient interaction is acting by one or both participants? Doctors seem to dislike the word acting as a descriptor for the part they play in a clinical consultation, preferring words like professionalism to account for their approach and behaviour with patients. Having no difficulty with the concept of patients being cast in a sick role, they demur from the notion of themse...