Carl Djerassi murió a los 91 años. Cuando se pretende ilustrar el impacto de la investigación científica, la contribución de Djerassi y de quienes junto con él la desarrollaron (Luis Ernesto Miramontes, Jorge Rosenkranz) es uno de los mejores ejemplos. Al margen de que la parte esencial del proyecto se desarrollara en México, pocas aportaciones científicas han tenido las repercusiones que alcan...

Henry Morgentaler was a physician who performed abortions, acted as a reproductive rights [4] activist, and advocated for legal access to abortions in Canada during the twentieth century. In 1969, he opened his first abortion [5] clinic in Canada and participated in the legal/court case of R v. Morgentaler (1988), which led Canada to decriminalize abortion [5]. Morgentaler helped establish lega...

The Medical Annual for 1923 is a volume which no practising general practitioner can afford to be without. It is particularly rich in articles of practical clinical value. Among many other articles perhaps that by Sir W. I. de C. Wheeler on " General surgical treatment" is the most interesting: he emphasises the necessity for team work, the use of written instructions to sisters in charge of th...

Fletcher H. McDowell, MD, died at his home in New York City on April 23, 2017. He was 93 years old. Fletcher graduated from Dartmouth College and then from Cornell Medical School in 1947. He continued training in medicine there and at Stanford, returning to neurology residency with Harold Wolff at Cornell. He then joined the Army Medical Corps and was chief of neurology at army hospitals in Bad...

THERE has been some uncertainty as to whether yeast could synthesise vitamin B when grown on a medium which did not contain it. Macdonald [1922], Heller [1923], and Nelson, Fullmer and Cessna [1921] tested for the factor promoting growth in rats and found it present. Harden and Zilva [1921] and Heller [1923] tested for the antineuritic factor, and found this to be synthesised. But Eijkman, Hoog...

Matter waves, as introduced by de Broglie in 1923 (L. de Broglie, Nature, 1923, 112, 540), are a fundamental quantum phenomenon, describing the delocalized center of mass motion of massive bodies and we show here their sensitivity to the molecular structure of constitutional isomers.