This is the lecture that I gave when I was awarded Acta Ophthalmologica's gold medal and honorary award at the Nordic Ophthalmological Congress in Reykjavik in August 2010. I was inspired by Jared Diamond's famous book: Guns, Germs, and Steel, The Fates of Human Societies. Diamond is professor of geography and physiology at the University of California, Los Angeles. In this book, which won the Pul

The kinetics of insulin, glucagon and somatostatin release was studied in human pancreatic islets. Batches of 10-15 islets were perifused and the hormones measured with RIA in 30-sec fractions. Increase of glucose from 3 to 20 mM resulted in a brief pulse of glucagon coinciding with suppression of basal insulin and somatostatin release. There was a subsequent drop of glucagon release concomitant w

Perivascular epithelioid cell tumour is not uncommon in the liver but seldom malignant.

Understanding networks of protein-protein interactions constitutes an essential component on a path towards comprehensive description of cell function. Whereas efficient techniques are readily available for the initial identification of interacting protein partners, practical strategies are lacking for the subsequent high-resolution mapping of regions involved in protein-protein interfaces. We pre

Low molecular weight protein tyrosine phosphatase (LMW-PTP) dimerizes in the phosphate-bound state in solution with a dissociation constant of K-d = 1.5(+/-0.1) mM and an off-rate on the order of 10(4) s(-1).H-1 and N-15 NMR chemical shifts identify the dimer interface, which is in excellent agreement with that observed in the crystal structure of the dimeric S19A mutant. Two tyrosine residues of

Artikel om laserskivans betydelse för den tekniska reproduktionen av film och om betydelsen av tillgängligheten av extramaterial för filmforskningen.

A rapid (6.5 min) and simple one-step magnetic immunoassay (MIA) has been developed for analysis of human urinary albumin in near patient settings. Polyclonal rabbit anti-human albumin was used as a capture antibody and monoclonal mouse anti-human albumin as a detection antibody in a two-site immunometric assay requiring no additional washing procedures. The polyclonal anti-human albumin was conju

Background: The human genome comprises numerous human endogenous retroviruses ( HERVs) that formed millions of years ago in ancestral species. A number of loci of the HERV-K(HML-2) family are evolutionarily much younger. A recent study suggested an infectious HERV-K(HML-2) variant in humans and other primates. Isolating such a varian t from human individuals would be a significant finding for huma

Logarithmic norms are often used to estimate stability and perturbation bounds in linear ODEs. Extensions to other classes of problems such as nonlinear dynamics, DAEs and PDEs require careful modifications of the logarithmic norm. With a conceptual focus, we combine the extension to nonlinear ODEs [15] with that of matrix pencils [10] in order to treat nonlinear DAEs with a view to cover certain

We study the geodesic exponential maps corresponding to Sobolev type right-invariant (weak) Riemannian metrics mu((k)) (k >= 0) on the Virasoro group Vir and show that for k >= 2, but not for k = 0, 1, each of them defines a smooth Frechet chart of the unital element e is an element of Vir. In particular, the geodesic exponential map corresponding to the Korteweg - de Vries (KdV) equation ( k = 0)

Background: General practice is a common setting for medical students' clinical training. However, little is known about patients' views on consulting with senior students. Aims: To investigate patients' attitudes to consultations conducted by senior students alone, before patients saw their GP; and to enquire into patients' perception of their teaching role. Method: Adult patients attending 50 he

Progression to hormone-refractory growth of prostate cancer has been suggested to be mediated by androgen receptor (AR) gene alterations. We analyzed AR for mutations and amplifications in 21 locally recurrent prostate carcinomas treated with orchiectomy, estrogens, or a combination of orchiectomy and estramustine phosphate using fluorescence in situ hybridization, single-strand conformation polym

Phosphorylated tyrosine residues in receptor tyrosine kinases serve as binding sites for signal transduction molecules. We have identified two autophosphorylation sites, Tyr-988 and Tyr-1018, in the platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF) alpha-receptor carboxyl-terminal tail, which are involved in binding of phospholipase C-gamma (PLC-gamma). The capacities of the Y988F and Y1018F mutant PDGF alpha

Abstract in UndeterminedFlow-induced oscillation of an elastically supported circular cylinder subject to an incompressible fluid at Re=100 and 400 has been studied using three-dimensional simulations. The cylinder is either subjected to a uniform flow in an unconfined surrounding or confined by rectangular channel, i.e. the cylinder is confined in both the span-wise and the cross-stream direction