efforts to achieve effective and meaningful patient and public involvement (ppi) in healthcare have existed for nearly a century, albeit with limited success. this brief commentary discusses a recent paper by carter and martin exploring the “challenges facing healthwatch, a new consumer champion in england,” and places these challenges in the context of the broader struggle to give a voice to h...

Keyword: tivity of common cancer cell lines to PPARg agonists in a DOK1-dependent manner. The potential for repurposing of PPARg agonists, an established class of anti-diabetic medications, is one of the practical implications of the results of the Burgermeister et al. paper. As for the clinical relevance, the authors demonstrate that the loss of DOK1 expression portends worse survival in patie...

The combination of the latest report from the trustees of the Medicare Trust Fund and the debate over balancing the federal budget has moved the need for Medicare reform to center stage. The trust fund, which finances Medicare Part A, will be bankrupt by the year 2002. Medicare Part B, which pays for physician services, diagnostic tests, and other outpatient services, is funded through general ...

Efforts to achieve effective and meaningful patient and public involvement (PPI) in healthcare have existed for nearly a century, albeit with limited success. This brief commentary discusses a recent paper by Carter and Martin exploring the “Challenges Facing Healthwatch, a New Consumer Champion in England,” and places these challenges in the context of the broader struggle to give a voice to h...

Specific plant associations may decrease (associational resistance, AR) or increase (associational susceptibility, AS) the likelihood of detection by, and/or vulnerability to, herbivores. We discuss presumed mechanisms leading to AR and AS, suggest others, and conduct meta-analyses on plant and herbivore traits affecting AR and AS, and the effects of habitat. Specific plant associations determi...

Large, complex computing systems have many similarities to biological systems, at least at a high level. They consist of a very large number of components, the interactions between which are complex and dynamic, and the overall behavior of the system is not always predictable even if the components are well understood. These similarities have led the computing community to look to biology for d...