was considered the greatest American surgeon of his time. Among his many writings was a treatise on the genito-urinary organs (1851) containing the first account of the distribution of urinary calculi. He was immortalized in the monumental (8 ft by 6 ft, 6 in) painting by Thomas Eakins known as The Gross Clinic which now hangs in the Jefferson Medical College. Fielding Garrison, in his authorit...

Dr. David Rimm, MD PhD, is a professor of Pathology at the Yale University School of Medicine specializing in developing quantitative, diagnostic techniques. His lab recently engineered a fluorescence-based algorithm, Automated Quantitative Analysis (AQUA), to analyze tissue microarrays in the hope of moving toward personalized medicine and diagnoses.

His training through the early 1960s, in his chosen specialty of endocrinology and diabetes, began in the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast. After a Clinical Research Fellowship using the new technique of radioimmunoassay to measure growth hormone, he travelled as Fulbright Fellow to the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, USA . His identification and report in the journal Nature of a growth horm...

Very early, there was an insight that explanation was crucial for system acceptance. I remember that in Buchannan’s and Shortliffe’s early work on medical consultation systems, the ability to create explanations was a number one requirement. Initially, it seemed that simple explanation mechanisms might be sufficient, and tracing the rules used by an expert system is straightforward. Fairly soon...

David Baltimore studied viruses and the immune system in the US during the twentieth century. In 1975, Baltimore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering reverse transcriptase, the enzyme used to transfer information from RNA to DNA. The discovery of reverse transcriptase contradicted the central dogma of biology at the time, which stated that the transfer of inform...

O n the surface it seems implausible that a colonial scientist could be characterized as a mathematician by today’s standards. Yet the single aim of this note is to provide evidence that two of David Rittenhouse’s papers from 220 years ago qualify him as a modern analyst. Rittenhouse (1732–1796) had no formal education and never earned a degree. Except for a brief appointment as professor of as...

T he passage of a single C. elegans cell through two basement membranes to connect the worm's uterus and vulva might seem an unlikely model for tumor metastasis. But David Sherwood— who fi rst characterized the process as a post-doc in Paul Sternberg's laboratory at Caltech—thinks that the system can teach us a great deal about cell invasion events in both normal development and cancer. Sherwoo...

In recent years, advances in science and low-cost permanent storage have resulted in the availability of massive data sets. Together with advances in machine learning, this data has the potential to lead to many new breakthroughs. For example, high-throughput genomic and proteomic experiments can be used to enable personalized medicine. Large data sets of search queries can be used to improve i...