" Until then I knew only naturalist and, to tell the truth, almost exclusively Russian naturalist art…I believed that no one had the right to paint so imprecisely. I vaguely felt that the object (the subject) was missing in this work. But with astonishment and confusion, I observed that not only did it surprise, but it imprinted itself indelibly in the memory and that before your eyes it recomp...

C ells often weigh confl icting signals. They do so in part, say Kevin Janes, Peter Sorger (MIT, Cambridge, MA), and colleagues, by generating extracellular signaling circuits that allow for group consensus. The MIT group measured 19 signaling markers over 13 time points after cells were stimulated with different combinations of proapoptotic TNF and mitogenic insulin and EGF. The data were plot...

In May 2001, the Swartz Foundation sponsored a workshop called ‘Can a machine be conscious?’ at the Banbury Center in Long Island (http://www. swartzneuro.org/banbury_2001.cfm). Around twenty psychologists, computer scientists, philosophers, physicists, neuroscientists, engineers, and industrialists spent three days in a mixture of short presentations and long and lively discussions. At the end...

I read the two letters from McCaughey and Curry and their respective colleagues 1 2 with astonishment. Their debate on a policy for electron microscopy (EM) use reminded me of those mediaeval ones about the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin. Interesting debate, pity it missed the point. They failed, I think, to address three important aspects: (1) The nature of virus diagno...

The above excerpts of quotations from Charles Darwin’s writings, which I present and discuss in detail below, capture themes that proved seminal for generations of scientists who were equally captivated by both the marvels and the perils of island life. Although presented as I have done so above as disarticulated and seemingly unrelated metaphors and observations, these passages from Darwin’s p...

Interest in systematic reviews and meta-analysis in medicine began in the late 1970s. During the 1980s, these methods began to be adopted more widely by medical researchers, and in the late 1980s, expository journal articles began to appear, and the first book about meta-analysis in medicine was published. The book was published in 1987 by Milos Jenicek, a professor at the Université de Montréa...

It was obviously my hope that the chemiosmotic rationale of vectorial metabolism and biological energy transfer might one day come to be generally accepted, and I have done my best to argue in favour of that state of affairs for more than twenty years. But, it would have been much too presumptuous to have expected it to happen. Of course, I might have been wrong, and in any case, was it not the...

H ISTORY offers us a tool to avoid the condemnation George Santayana (1863–1952) envisioned for those who forget the past. In studying the history of anesthesia, and in particular the singular events that brought anesthesia into the consciousness of the world in Boston in 1845 and 1846, we find much to admire, but even more that we might hope not to repeat. The first public demonstrations of an...

spin is a quantum property of every electron, associated with its intrinsic angular momentum. Though there are no suitable physical analogies to describe the spin quantum number, there are two possibilities , called spin 'up' and spin 'down.' The electronic structure of iron in minerals is generally such that valence electrons will more abundantly occupy different spatial orbitals and maintain ...