My first brush with the issue of humanity in medical field was when I read this quote, a few months back, put up by a prestigious international journal for an essay writing competition. As I read that quote, it stirred my conscience. And although I almost instantaneously quelled the desire to write on it, thinking my chances of winning an essay contest too slim to bother with, it set me thinkin...

Naming new human species may seem to be a harmless endeavor, of little interest to all but a few specialists playing out the consequences of different evolutionary explanations of phyletic variation, but it has significant implications in how humanity is viewed because studies of race and human evolution are inexorably linked. When essentialist approaches are used to interpret variation in the ...

Humanity is facing nearly insurmountable challenges, risks, and crises. Resource depletion, global pollution of the entire biosphere, and climate change due to our excessive and uncontrollably growing human population may be the most difficult long-term problems that urgently need to be solved. However, the current influenza pandemic and other unforeseen but inevitable health emergencies includ...

Despite its undoubted toxicity, arsenic is a much-used element, finding applications in agriculture, industry, and medicine. Arsenic as a poison has a prominent role in plays and novels as well as in real life. In medicine, arsenic was so widely used in the 19th century as a cure-all that it has been termed a “therapeutic mule.” Some arsenic compounds are still used in the treatment of parasiti...

background: the fertility experience in iran suggests that the family planning programs had an effective role in the fertility reduction. this study aimed to specify patterns of marriage in iran and especially in a northern city of iran and to investigate the association between patterns of marriage and contraceptive use before first pregnancy and current contraceptive use. methods: in this cro...