In looking back at previous issues of RNA and my own eight RNA papers, what strikes me, in addition to all the great science that’s been published in our society journal over the past 20 years, is the evolution (or more properly, revolution!) in the methods and technologies we use. Equally striking has been the exponential increase in the amount of data in each published paper. In two decades, ...

In 1994, a total of 159,959 marriages were performed in Canada, up only slightly from 159,316 the year before. This small increase had no effect on the crude marriage rate, which remained at 5.5 marriages per 1,000 population. Aside from a brief uptum in the late 1980s, Canada's marriage rate has fallen quite steadily since the early 1970s. The overall decline is also evident when rates are dis...

In 1976, in the landmark case of Tarasoff v. The Regents of the University of California, the California Supreme Court imposed a legal duty on psychotherapists, enforceable by a civil suit for damages, to warn a person who may become a victim of a violent act by a patient. Courts and legislatures in other jurisdictions soon began to examine the subject, and within a decade or so the “duty to wa...

Much has changed in international finance in the twenty years since UNU-WIDER was founded. This paper identifies five broad contours of what we might expect in the next twenty years: the flow of capital from ageing societies to the more youthful economies of the South; the growth in the financial services industry in emerging economies and the consequences for their capital flows; the current s...

In the twentieth century, vaccination has been possibly the greatest revolution in health. Together with hygiene and antibiotics, vaccination led to the elimination of many childhood infectious diseases and contributed to the increase in disability-free life expectancy that in Western societies rose from 50 to 78-85 years (Crimmins, E. M. & Finch, C. E. 2006 Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 103, 498-5...

The first RTA conference took place in Dijon, in 1985. This year, 2005, it takes place in Nara. Nara and Dijon share a glorious past but can be considered as being “Sleeping Beauties”, after the title of a book by the Nobel price novelist yasunari Kawabata. Is RTA sleeping on its glorious past ? Back in the late 80s, many of us feared that this would soon be the case, that research in rewrite s...

As I was reflecting deeply in front of the statue of Bodhisattva of Gr~ and Wisdom in the University Muset~n, I was startled to see Jane. Having heard from Don that he had asked the old cats to reflect on the 20 years of ACL, Jane had decided that she should drop in on some of them to seek their advice concerning the future of ACL. I wish to thank Alice, the Cheshire Puss, and Lewis Carroll for...

One of the problems of moving to the USA to practise medicine is taking "finals" again. I don't mean the exam for an Educational Council for Foreign Medical Graduates (ECFMG) certificate, which is a one-day affair taken in the familiar surroundings of London or Edinburgh. Without the ECFMG, of course, one's chances of getting a visa to live in the USA are next to nil. But actually to practise a...