Sexy birth: Breaking Hollywood’s last taboo

The last taboo?

Ageing and Death - Breaking a Taboo

This position paper argues for addressing ‘good death’ as part of ‘well ageing’ in human life. Although in most societies death is protected through taboos, we have to provide solutions in helping citizens preparing for their own death. The Oedipus Trilogy is an ancient narrative to describe clearly the three phases in any human life, the unavoidability of those phase changes. We have to use th...

Non-Heart-Beating Donor Heart Transplantation: Breaking the Taboo

Roughly 60% of hearts offered for transplantation are rejected because of organ dysfunction. Moreover, hearts from circulatory-dead patients have long been thought to be non-amenable for transplantation, unlike other organs. However, tentative surgical attempts inspired by the knowledge obtained from preclinical research to recover those hearts have been performed, finally culminating in clinic...

Sexy science

Every year, new graduates and project students make an appearance in the lab. Acquiring the skills necessary to become a researcher can be a long and painful process, and many of the hints that would help relieve the pain are not written in books. For instance, you can’t be a researcher without being able to ask questions, but this doesn’t come naturally to everyone. Once you get the knack, how...

The Last Taboo: Opening the Door on the Global Sanitation Crisis

The publication of each of these texts during 2008—declared the International Year of Sanitation by the United Nations General Assembly to draw attention to the 2.6 billion people without access to basic sanitation—is timely. Each seeks to provide practical information and guidance to increase the proportion of the population with access to sanitation. Maggie Black is a writer who focuses on so...