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When the patient dies the kidneys may go to the pathologist, but while he lives the urine is ours. It can provide us day by day, month by month, and year by year, with a serial story of the major events going on within the kidney.
Typical Month of Onset Gross Motor Skill 1-2 Holds head erect and steady 2-3 Lifts head and chest with arm support on tummy Sits with support 3-4 Rolls tummy to back 6-7 Rolls back to tummy 6-8 Sits alone 8-9 Pulls to stand 9 Crawls 9-10 Walks with handholds ("cruises") 11-12 Stands Alone 12-13 Walks alone Typical…
Until very recently doctors didn't use analgesia when they operated on small babies, because they thought their minds were too primitive to really feel pain or to remember it if they did. This is a dramatic example, but it often seems as if we discount children's pain compared with adult pain. Child abuse isn't evil…
WE HAVE, it seems, a fierce attraction for spirits: auras, angels, poltergeists, disembodied souls, out-of-body experiences. Mostly, I think, we are drawn to these things because we intuit—correctly, it turns out—that there must be more to the world than meets the eye. We inherit the spirit world from a time when our…
When individuals shunt the comprehensive cosmic regeneration into exclusive advantaging of only their own survival and enjoyment and succeed in prolonged local short-circuiting of cosmic regenerativity, they disqualify the invention "human" as a reliable function of regenerative Universe. They are just as…
What a piece of work is the mammalian skeleton. I don't mean it is beautiful in itself, although I think it is. I mean the fact that we can talk about 'the' mammalian skeleton at all: the fact that such a complicatedly interlocking thing is so gloriously different across the mammals, in all its parts, while…
Every animal and plant genome is subject to a constant bombardment of deleterious mutations: a hailstorm of attrition. It is a bit like the moon's surface, which becomes increasingly pitted with craters due to the steady bombardment of meteorites. With rare exceptions, every time a gene concerned with an eye, for…
In 1717 Lady Mary travelled to Turkey with her husband, the British Ambassador at Constantinople. There she first witnessed variolation. She described the procedure in a letter to her friend Sarah Chiswell: The small-pox, so fatal, and so general amongst us, is here entirely harmless by the invention of ingrafting…
There is no abiding thing in what we know. We change from weaker to stronger lights, and each more powerful light pierces our hitherto opaque foundations and reveals fresh and different opacities below. We can never foretell which of our seemingly assured fundamentals the next change will not affect. What folly, then…
The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the "content" of any medium is always another medium. the content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content…