Securing the Company Jewels

Aquatic jewels

what he calls a string of coincidences. A physiologist colleague in Guatemala who happened to have worked with John Vane, then at the Royal College of Surgeons, recommended Moncada to Vane. Once in England, Moncada joined Vane's team, which was then working on the mechanism of action of aspirin and its relationship with prostaglandin synthesis. In 1974, he returned to Honduras to pursue a resea...

Gpx5 protects the family jewels.

Immature spermatozoa are vulnerable to oxidative stress after their release from the testes, due in part to an innate deficiency in antioxidant enzymes. The male reproductive tract compensates for this deficiency by secreting antioxidant enzymes such as glutathione peroxidase 5 (Gpx5) into the epididymal lumen. In this issue of the JCI, Chabory et al. examined the phenotype of Gpx5-/- mice and ...

Generalized jewels and the point placement problem

The point placement problem is to determine the positions of a linear set of points, P = {p1, p2, p3, . . . , pn}, uniquely, up to translation and reflection, from the fewest possible distance queries between pairs of points. Each distance query corresponds to an edge in a graph, called point placement graph (ppg), whose vertex set is P . The uniqueness requirement of the placement translates t...

Finite Semigroups: Jewels and Problems

Causes in epidemiology: the jewels in the public health crown.

In this issue, McDowell pinpoints the central challenge in public health sciences—the extraction of causes from the morass of statistical, anecdotal or clinically observed associations. Understanding causes paves the way to success, whether it be cure in clinical work, or prevention and control in public health. Hippocrates told us that. McDowell reminds us of the historical continuity of this ...