The Modern Dance of Death by Peyton Rous was originally delivered as the Linacre lecture for the year 1929 at the University of Cambridge. The purpose of the lecture was to discuss the manner in which humankind's relationship to physical ailments and the attendant risks of death had altered in the four hundred years since Thomas Linacre's time. As Rous saw it, 'From the moment that the body becomes a going concern it must fight for its integrity. Its Dance (...) with Death begins long before birth and never ceases throughout the lengthening period of what we call health. Everything coming in contact with it shapes its destiny.'. (shrink)

In this concise book based on his Arne Ryde Lectures in 2002, Young suggests a conceptual framework for studying strategic learning and highlights theoretical developments in the area. He discusses the interactive learning problem; reinforcement and regret; equilibrium; conditional no-regret learning; prediction, postdiction, and calibration; fictitious play and its variants; Bayesian learning; and hypothesis testing. Young's framework emphasizes the amount of information required to implement different types of learning rules, criteria for evaluating their performance, and alternative notions of equilibrium to (...) which they converge. He also stresses the limits of what can be achieved: for a given type of game and a given amount of information, there may exist no learning procedure that satisfies certain reasonable criteria of performance and convergence. In short, Young has provided a valuable primer that delineates what we know, what we would like to know, and the limits of what we can know, when we try to learn about a system that is composed of other learners. (shrink)

This article concerns itself with the reception of Rous' 1911 discovery of what later came to be known as the Rous Sarcoma Virus (RSV). Rous made his discovery at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research which had been primarily established to conduct research into infectious diseases. Rous' chance discovery of a chicken tumor led him to a series of conjectures about cancer causation and about whether cancer could have an extrinsic cause. Rous' finding was received with some scepticism by the (...) scientific community that held that cancer was not infectious and favored explanations which located the origins of cancer in the inner mechanism of the cell. After 4 years of unsuccessful effort to isolate and further determine the virus Rous felt compelled to discontinue his work on cancer viruses. When 55 years later, the significance of Rous's discovery was attested by the award of the Nobel Prize, it opened up debates about the issues of delayed recognition and scientific reputation. This article also considers why Rous' hypothesis of a viral origin of cancer could not be incorporated into the existing body of knowledge about cancer before the 1950s. (shrink)

This article concerns itself with the reception of Rous’ 1911 discovery of what later came to be known as the Rous Sarcoma Virus. Rous made his discovery at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research which had been primarily established to conduct research into infectious diseases. Rous’ chance discovery of a chicken tumor led him to a series of conjectures about cancer causation and about whether cancer could have an extrinsic cause. Rous’ finding was received with some scepticism by the scientific (...) community that held that cancer was not infectious and favored explanations which located the origins of cancer in the inner mechanism of the cell. After 4 years of unsuccessful effort to isolate and further determine the virus Rous felt compelled to discontinue his work on cancer viruses. When 55 years later, the significance of Rous’s discovery was attested by the award of the Nobel Prize, it opened up debates about the issues of delayed recognition and scientific reputation. This article also considers why Rous’ hypothesis of a viral origin of cancer could not be incorporated into the existing body of knowledge about cancer before the 1950s. (shrink)

In Cancer Virus Hunters, Gregory J. Morgan traces the high points in the development of tumor virology, from Peyton Rous's pioneering work on chicken tumors in 1909 to the successful development of an HPV vaccine for cervical cancer in 2006. Morgan offers a novel approach to understanding the interconnectedness of a long series of biomedical breakthroughs, including those that led to seven Nobel prizes. Among other advances, Morgan describes and contextualizes the science that prompted the discoveries of reverse transcriptase, (...) RNA splicing, the tumor suppressor p53, the vaccine for hepatitis B, and the HIV test. He also explores how "cancer virus hunters" have demonstrated the virtue of beginning with a simple system, even when investigating a complex disease like cancer. Based on extensive archival research and over fifty interviews with experts, Cancer Virus Hunters is a tour de force summarizing a century of research to show how discoveries made with tumor viruses came to dominate the contemporary understanding of cancer. (shrink)

The aim of our work is to study and compare interactive and traditional teaching methods of pharmacists-interns for first medical care at the post-graduate educational stage. To prove statistically or to deny advantages of interactive teaching methods, such as: simulation training, based on clinical cases, interactive lecture, close discussion, Peyton’s 4 steps approach, positive criticism, based on two groups of pharmacists-interns, assessing the formed competence, stress-resistance and motivation for giving first medical care. This is a prospective, randomized, pilot study (...) with two groups of pharmacists-interns at studying at the internship from 2014 to 2017 year, based on the Institute of post-graduate education of the National medical university, named after O. O. Bogomolets, at one of learning stages – «Care at urgent states and acute intoxications”. The participants were randomized and divided in two groups. There was formed the control group, including 95 pharmacists-interns of 2014 year of admission, and in further the training was started according to the traditional methodology that doesn’t provide interactive methods and simulation. The experimental group included 104 pharmacists-interns of 2015 year of admission that the program using interactive methods was elaborated for. Interactive methods used in the experimental group, included: simulation training, based on clinical scenarios, interactive lecture, close discussion, practical activity using Peyton’s 4 steps approach, positive criticism. Activities lasted 12 hours in groups of 16 persons, there were also used diverse handbooks and posters according to ERC recommendations. Exclusion criteria were missing classes or failing a course. Indices of the experimental group demonstrated the growth of assuredness level at giving urgent care up to 75,0 %. The number of interns, satisfied with the structure and methodology of giving information – up to 92,3 %. The analysis of data, received at assessing tests, demonstrated that 85,6 % of EG at the final level of assessing fixed correctly the signs of the blood circulation stop comparing with 17,3 % in the initial result ; 86,5 % indicated correctly the time, given for conforming the blood circulation stop at FL comparing with 22,1 % in IR; 80,8 % chose the tactics at the blood circulation stop correctly at FL comparing with 28,8 % in IR; the number of pharmacists-interns, who know medicaments, administered at CPR grew from 31,7 % at IR to 90,4 % at FL; at the beginning of studying only 6,7 % chose the tactics at giving first medical care to traumatized patients correctly, at the final assessment – 69,2 % in FR.; 88,4 % chose the technique of stopping bleeding in FR comparing with 54,8 % in IR. The results of the initial and final assessing of formation levels of the competence in the control group didn’t statistically differ. Our study considered the new model of the curriculum using interactive teaching methods comparing with the traditional one. Interactive methods such as simulation training, based on clinical scenarios, interactive lecture, close discussion, Peyton’s 4 steps approach, positive criticism demonstrated their effectiveness. (shrink)

Contemporary oncological research is predominantly characterised by genetic explanations, a situation which may be briefly denoted as the oncogene paradigm. This essay discusses why the new paradigm was perceived so attractive that it could take over the whole field of oncology within a time-span of less than two decades. It is argued that the revolutionary character of the oncogene paradigm stems from the fact that it transcends a dichotomy which has kept experimental cancer research divided for more than three quarters (...) of a century. This concerns the dichotomy between so-called exogenous and endogenous explanations of cancer causation. This essay mainly focuses on the role of the exogenous/endogenous dichotomy in the reception of research on oncogenic viruses, especially discussing the work of Nobel laureate Peyton Rous on cancer viruses at the Rockefeller Institute. Rous was severely criticised by James Ewing, director of the Memorial Hospital for Cancer and Allied Diseases in New York, who held the idea that the origin of cancer was based in the cell. The twentieth century controversy over oncogenic viruses is placed in the context of the intense discussion over causality in medicine during the first decades of the twentieth century in Germany. It is argued that the oncogene paradigm may be seen as revolutionary because it succeeded in uniting the exogenous and endogenous explanations of cancer in a single paradigm. (shrink)