Let us go back to basics

Translational research needs us to go back to basics and collaborate: interview with Lars Sundstrom

Lars Sundstrom is Director of Enterprise and Translation at the West of England Academic Health Sciences Network [1] (UK), a Professor of Practice in Translational Medicine and Co-Director of the Elizabeth Blackwell Institute for Health Research at Bristol University [2] (UK), and an honorary Professor of Medicine at Cardiff University (UK). He has extensive experience in translational medicine...

DDT is back: let us spray!

Getting Back to Basics

Advances in understanding basic developmental and physiological processes often have direct relevance to human disease. They provide insights into pathogenic mechanisms and reveal new pathways that can be exploited in diagnosis and the development of therapeutics.

Quintessence: back to basics

Quintessence is often invoked to explain the universe acceleration suggested by the type Ia supernovae observations. The aim of this letter is to demonstrate that the scalar potential necessary for quintessence is strongly constrained by the field and conservation equations. As an application, we show that all the potentials used up to now in the literature do not satisfy this constraint and so...

Skilled attendance at childbirth: let us go beyond the rhetorics.

Almost two decades into the Safe Motherhood Initiative, maternal mortality ratios of 500+ per 100 000 live births still being the rule rather than the exception in sub-Saharan Africa are no reason to celebrate (AbouZahr & Wardlaw 2003). Lukewarm political commitment, inadequate resource prioritization, competition between international agencies, major technical difficulties to accurately measur...