When Colonel T.E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia") was fatally injured in a motorcycle accident in May 1935, one of the several doctors attending him was a young neurosurgeon, Hugh Cairns. He was moved by the tragedy in a way that was to have far-reaching consequences. At the beginning of the Second World War, he highlighted the unnecessary loss of life among army motorcycle dispatch riders as a...

1 2 TNFα Mechanically Sensitizes Masseter Muscle Afferent Fibers 3 of Male Rats 4 5 6 Akhlaq W. Hakim, Xu-Dong Dong, Peter Svensson, Ujendra Kumar, Brian E. Cairns 7 8 1 Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British 9 Columbia, V6T 1Z3, Canada 10 2 Department of Clinical Oral Physiology, School of Dentistry, Århus University, DK-8000 11 Århus C, Denm...

Introduction In 1963, Cairns invented DNA fiber autoradiography to spread and visualize [H]thymidine-labeled chromosomal DNA from Escherichia coli cells (Fig. 1 A). Using this technique, bidirectional replication was found to start at a single site (Cairns, 1963; Prescott and Kuempel, 1972), but its position could not be determined. Meanwhile, genetic studies suggested that in E. coli, each aut...

Crown-of-thorns starfish (CoTS; Acanthaster spp.) are an outbreaking pest among many Indo-Pacific coral reefs that cause substantial ecological and economic damage. Despite ongoing CoTS research, there remain critical gaps in observing CoTS populations and accurately estimating their numbers, greatly limiting understanding of the causes and sources of CoTS outbreaks. Here we address two of thes...

Two papers examining mental incapacity among psychiatric in-patients are presented in the Journal this month – one investigation focuses on assessment reliability (Cairns et al, pp. 372–378) and one on the prevalence and predictors of incapacity (Cairns et al, pp. 379–385). The authors find that the MacArthur Competence Assessment Tool for Treatment (MacCAT– T) can be used reliably to assess ca...

IN a bacterial system devised by Cairns and Foster The letter from Cairns and Foster (2003, this issue) (1991), a lac mutant population, starved in the pressuggests that our calculations are in error because we ence of lactose, gives rise to 100 revertant colonies extrapolated from rates observed or inferred for genes over 6 days. In this time, the plated population is not on an F plasmid to pr...

This Frontiers Research Topic, “Stem Cell Genetic Fidelity,” is the product of an attempt to develop a comprehensive integrative treatment of the historical progression of ideas and research advances on the topic of biological mechanisms of gene mutation control in tissue stem cells, with human tissues as a primary interest. In retrospect, this undertaking began with a somewhat ambitious goal f...