Oxford University Press

Long before it cured disease, medicine aimed to relieve suffering-but despite that precedence, the relief of suffering often takes a back seat in today&'s biomedical research and treatment. Modern bioethics, too, has been slow to come to terms with suffering. Attention to ethical quandaries has sometimes displaced attention to the experience of...

Consciousness is undoubtedly one of the last remaining scientific mysteries and hence one of the greatest contemporary scientific challenges. How does the brain&'s activity result in the rich phenomenology that characterizes our waking life? Are animals conscious? Why did consciousness evolve? How does science proceed to answer such questions? Can...

&'You might pass Eleanor Harding in the street without notice, but you could hardly pass an evening with her and not lose your heart.&'John Bold has lost his heart to Eleanor Harding but he is a political radical who has launched a campaign against the management of the charity of which her father is the Warden. How can this tangle be resolved? In...

Selection, Phylogeny, and ConstraintEvolutionary biomechanics is the study of evolution through the analysis of biomechanical systems. Its unique advantage is the precision with which physical constraints and performance can be predicted from first principles. Instead of reviewing the entire breadth of the biomechanical literature, a few key...

Biomedical scientists are the foundation of modern healthcare, from cancer screening to diagnosing HIV, from blood transfusion for surgery to food poisoning and infection control. Without biomedical scientists, the diagnosis of disease, the evaluation of the effectiveness of treatment, and research into the causes, cures and treatment of disease...

A compendium of unpleasant infectionsAn extraordinary range of infectious agents affect humans, from worms, arthopods, and fungi to bacteria, viruses, and prions. Looking at the curious nature of each, David I. Grove explores their life history, the people who discovered them, and how they were identified, in this fascinating exploration of...