My challenge here is to convey the lessons I have learned in serving as a mentor to budding physicianscientists; yet, this is not as easy as it seems at first blush for at least two reasons. First, so many outstanding scientists, including Nobel laureates, have extolled the virtues of their own mentors who were central to their success. Thus, it feels pretentious to explain how to be a mentor, ...

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2002 is to be shared between scientists working on two very important methods of chemical analysis applied to biological macromolecules: mass spectrometry (MS) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). Laureates John B. Fenn, Koichi Tanaka (MS) and Kurt Wüthrich (NMR) have pioneered the successful application of their techniques to biological macromolecules. Biologi...

Plagiarism causes a serious concern in scientific literature. I distinguish two types of plagiarism. What is routinely highlighted and discussed is the reprehensible type of stealing another author's ideas and words. This type I categorize as "heterotrophic" plagiarism. A more prevalent and less-discussed type of plagiarism is the verbatim use of same sentences repetitively by authors in their ...

The hedgehog (Hh) pathway, initially discovered in Drosophila by two Nobel laureates, Dr. Eric Wieschaus and Dr. Christiane Nusslein-Volhard, is a major regulator for cell differentiation, tissue polarity and cell proliferation. Studies from many laboratories, including ours, reveal activation of this pathway in most basal cell carcinomas and in approximately 30% of extracutaneous human cancers...

It is in the nature of the training and work of pathologists to be practical, observant and down-toearth. We appreciate that food is central to the experience of all societies, hence, in communicating many of our descriptions of pathological changes, we use terms related to food. For example, we use terms such as “bread-and -butter” pericarditis, “caseous” necrosis, “anchovy sauce” abscesses, “...