My contacts with animals in childhood were not, I regret to say, demonstrations of precocious altruism. Animals were more likely to find themselves in pieces at the end of a dinner fork or, occasionally, in the sights of one of the shotguns my father bought for me and my three brothers to use as ducks and geese made their long trek south from Canada over the wetlands of' North Dakota. My father...

What is happening in and around psychiatric services that raises fears of a harmful separation between psychiatrists and the rest of the medical fraternity? The last National Health Service (NHS) reforms at the beginning of the 1990s split some mental health services into separate organisations from their local acute services. Paragraph 5.14 in the Government’s White Paper The New NHS (NHS Exec...

BACKGROUND Medico legal autopsies can be valuable sources of information about the distribution of causes of reported deaths, particularly in homicidal cases. The present study provides information regarding the homicidal deaths due to firearm injuries in the district of Peshawar, NWFP, Pakistan. METHODOLOGY This descriptive study was conducted over the period of the year 2004. Data were coll...

Bushmeat hunting has evolved into a large-scale commercial activity in western and central Africa. Primates are particularly vulnerable to over-exploitation and tend to be absent from heavily hunted areas. To reduce their rate of decline, human use of, and reliance on, bushmeat must be understood so that locally appropriate mitigation strategies can be developed. We address the social dimension...

Dynamically regulated cell adhesion plays an important role during animal morphogenesis. Here we use the formation of the visual system in Drosophila embryos as a model system to investigate the function of the Drosophila classic cadherin, DE-cadherin, which is encoded by the shotgun (shg) gene. The visual system is derived from the optic placode which normally invaginates from the surface ecto...

BACKGROUND After a 1996 firearm massacre in Tasmania in which 35 people died, Australian governments united to remove semi-automatic and pump-action shotguns and rifles from civilian possession, as a key component of gun law reforms. OBJECTIVE To determine whether Australia's 1996 major gun law reforms were associated with changes in rates of mass firearm homicides, total firearm deaths, fire...

The impacts of unregulated sport hunting can severely affect populations of target game species. Because hunting in Brazil is limited by law, obtaining data on illegal sport hunting in this country is challenging. We used an unusual online resource, YouTubeTM, to detect the occurrence of sport hunting in Brazil, measure the impacts of the activity on the main Brazilian game species and biomes, ...

BACKGROUND The traditional emphasis on developing high specificity pharmaceuticals ("magic bullets") for the treatment of Neurological and Psychiatric disorders is being challenged by emerging pathophysiology concepts that view disease states as abnormal interactions within complex networks of molecular and cellular components. So-called network pharmacology focuses on modifying the behavior of...

Single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) is the most common form of DNA variation. The set of SNPs present in a chromosome (called the haplotype) is of interest in a wide area of applications in molecular biology and biomedicine. Personalized haplotyping of (portions of/all) the chromosomes of individuals is one of the most promising basic ingredients leading to effective personalized medicine (inc...

Technological innovations in biology, chemistry, and medicine have provided the pharmaceutical industry a wealth of targets and molecules with the potential to treat diseases once thought intractable to drug therapy. These advances have brought about a renaissance in the industry and current estimates suggest there are more than 5,000 potential new medicines in human testing, a high percentage ...