Back in 1996, Bill Clinton was still in his first term of office, Charles and Diana agreed to divorce, the Unabomber was apprehended, and Ella Fitzgerald died. That year I hadn’t even dreamed of moving permanently to North America: I
The cannibal hungrily carved muscle from the girl’s body; then he broke “Jane’s” skull open to scoop out brain matter. But it was neither in New Guinea nor in the Amazon jungle that her corpse was plundered; it happened in
A commuter in the Monday morning gridlock on the Washington beltway might well daydream about trips on open roads – the feeling of freedom and joie de vivre, and the expectation of a happy arrival at the end of a
I remember a biology lesson when our schoolteacher laid out a row of pickled brains. The lids of some jars were leaking formaldehyde vapor into the classroom, an irritating odor that I had to get used to after I started
A memorial service for Bob Edwards was held last weekend at Bourn Hall, near Cambridge, England. That is the Jacobean mansion house where he founded the world’s first in vitro clinic for fertility treatment (IVF) with Patrick Steptoe in 1980.
I took the title from Aaron Copland because his suite captures the very essence of my feelings about Appalachia at this time of year. Springtime arrives late, growing very slowly like the music until a major arpeggio bursts out of
When I fly out of JFK airport and can look out from a window seat I gaze at the empty marsh below instead of the Manhattan skyline after our wheels lift off runway 4L. I’m thinking about Bob Morris, the
The King of Serendip (Sri Lanka) sent his three sons away to a foreign country to experience life in the real world. They got into trouble, as boys will, when a merchant accused them of stealing a camel he had
Sandy was not only his name but his nature too. He was a Saunders, a name that came down from Scotland via Ireland, as it had for one of my grandparents. He was also a blazing redhead, his hair as
Marmite. I love it! But it divides people more than anything else. Yes, even more than congressional politics! You either love it or loathe it; no one stands between the poles of passion. In case you haven’t tried it, or
I no longer sleep-walk when writing articles for scientific or medical journals, because I was woken to the drumbeats of an academic spring. As young scientists we were taught we must either “publish or perish” but I now hear the
Virginia died yesterday, a life sown, grown, and ripened in the state that gave her a name. She slipped away gently in the night, her passing unnoticed until she had gone. It’s often like that. Our neighbor was just one