Mess with Texas

Don't mess with the DSMB.

Since the DSMB (data and safety monitoring board) is charged with ensuring that clinical equipoise is maintained as trial data are accrued, it is considered very bad, even self-destructive, behavior for people who are involved with the study to interact with DSMB members on trialrelated issues. Traditionally, there has been a wall between investigators, sponsors, and the DSMB. This wall prevent...

Parkinson's disease: don't mess with calcium.

The hallmark of the movement disorder Parkinson's disease (PD) is progressive degeneration of dopaminergic neurons. Mitochondrial dysfunction, impaired ubiquitin-mediated proteolysis of α-synuclein, and ER stress are each implicated in the complex and poorly understood sequence of events leading to dopaminergic neuron demise. In this issue of the JCI, Selvaraj et al. report that in a mouse neur...

The modernity mess

When we had the good fortune to study the Klasies River Mouth Cave remains at the South African Museum in 1989, the isolated partial zygomatic KRM 16651 presented us with a morphometric challenge. The face of the bone appeared quite large, but only a small portion of the inferior border was preserved, and that mostly under the temporal process. No measuring points allowed standard comparisons t...

The Big Mess Construction

There is a construction in English, exemplified by how long a bridge, which is so irregular that it has been named the Big Mess Construction, see Berman (1974). This paper first sketches its main characteristics (section 1) and a treatment of the internal structure of the noun phrase which serves as a background for the analysis (section 2). It then presents three ways in which the Big Mess Con...

The Independent Counsel Mess