The first WHO essential drugs list, published in 1977, was described as a peaceful revolution in international public health. The list helped to establish the principle that some medicines were more useful than others and that essential medicines were often inaccessible to many populations. Since then, the essential medicines list (EML) has increased in size; defining an essential medicine has ...

We prove that for every Borel equivalence relation E, either E is Borel reducible to E0, or the family of Borel equivalence relations incompatible with E has cofinal essential complexity. It follows that if F is a Borel equivalence relation and F is a family of Borel equivalence relations of non-cofinal essential complexity which together satisfy the dichotomy that for every Borel equivalence r...

The experimental design of a minimal synthetic genome revealed the presence of a large number of genes without ascribed function, in part because the abstract laws of life must be implemented within ad hoc material contraptions. Creating a function needs recruitment of some pre-existing structure and this reveals kludges in their set-up and history. Here, we show that looking for functions as a...