At the inaugural Castellani lecture last year, Vitarana reviewed the life and work of this creative man with particular reference to his work in Ceylon. It remains for me to include in this lecture, some aspects of our own work, related to his. His rich biography also allows of some gleanings on more general issues of science, science administration and the world of medicine. In discussing thes...

Handwritten autobiographies from 180 Catholic nuns, composed when participants were a mean age of 22 years, were scored for emotional content and related to survival during ages 75 to 95. A strong inverse association was found between positive emotional content in these writings and risk of mortality in late life (p < .001). As the quartile ranking of positive emotion in early life increased, t...

Harvill Press. 16/'. This is a terrible book, illuminating in its psychological aspects and the light it throws upon the workings of the immature mind when all external moral motives have been removed or profoundly inhibited. The author was a Soviet waif in the years between 1930 and the outbreak of the Second World War, motherless from infancy but gently and carefully nurtured by a kindly nurs...

A list, with titles, of about 120 papers by the author and his colleagues is followed by a classified list of important contributions by others in the fields discussed. Author and subject indices are given. Adventures in Respiration is not a physiological monograph in the usual sense, but rather the scientific autobiography of one of America's leaders in the physiology of respiration. The layma...

The attached paper—a study of caning schoolboys—is remarkable in many respects. In particular, it illustrates battles that are ongoing even half a century later around the ethics, feasibility, desirability and political acceptability of randomized trials (RCTs) outside medicine. For many working in medical research, it can seem peculiar that randomized trials are resisted in other fields. There...

In his autobiography Casimir barely mentioned the Casimir effect, but remarked that it is “of some theoretical significance” [1]. We will describe some aspects of Casimir effects that appear to be of particular significance now, more than half a century after Casimir’s famous paper [2].