Darwin, after his return to England from his fateful voyage on the Beagle, took lodgings on March 7, 1837, near his brother Erasmus’s house on Great Marlborough Street in London.1 He remained there for nearly two years until he was married. In his Autobiography he calls the period from the time of his return to his marriage “the most active ones which I ever spent.‘? During his residence at 36 ...

Throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, imaginary voyages in the setting of the antipodes were published alongside genuine exploration accounts, and competed with them for the public’s attention. Both offered the novelty of glimpses into strange and exotic distant places and both were concerned with mapping, in painstaking detail, the routes taken and the lands discover...

The final voyage of Ulysses, which is recounted by the Greek hero in the eighth bolgia of Dante’s Inferno, has given rise to much critical debate. An authoritative reading of the episode has been difficult to establish because Ulysses’ monologue appears detached from its context. This occurs as a result of the grandeur of the hero, but also because the voyage seems to have very little in common...

In this essay I describe my personal journey from reductionist to systems cell biology and describe how this in turn led to a 3-year sea voyage to explore complex ocean communities. In describing this journey, I hope to convey some important principles that I gleaned along the way. I realized that cellular functions emerge from multiple molecular interactions and that new approaches borrowed fr...

Introduction A recent Channel 4 television series, Secrets of the Dead, had one programme entitled “The Syphilis Enigma.” It presented evidence, summarised in book form, which challenged the accepted view that venereal syphilis came to Europe with the return of Columbus from his first voyage of discovery of the New World. This new and challenging case is based on a study of over 240 skeletons e...