How to do it. Participate in an international conference.

Attending an international conference should be instructive and fun. But it can also be alarming and lonely. Although participating in scientific conferences is now almost essential to medical career development, no medical school describes how to make the most of the opportunity as part of its curriculum. Here are some hints on how to get yourself organised so that the experience can be both scientifically productive and enjoyable. In essence, you should travel, see places, meet people, make friends, and identify one or two ideas that you can apply in your own work or research.     

Racial discrimination: How not to do it

The UNESCO Statements on Race of the early 1950s are understood to have marked a consensus amongst natural scientists and social scientists that ‘race’ is a social construct. Human biological diversity was shown to be predominantly clinal, or gradual, not discreet, and clustered, as racial naturalism implied. From the seventies social constructionists added that the vast majority of human genetic diversity resides within any given racialised group. While social constructionism about race became the majority consensus view on the topic, social constructionism has always had its critics. Sesardic (2010) has compiled these criticisms into one of the strongest defences of racial naturalism in recent times. In this paper I argue that Sesardic equivocates between two versions of racial naturalism: a weak version and a strong version. As I shall argue, the strong version is not supported by the relevant science. The weak version, on the other hand, does not contrast properly with what social constructionists think about ‘race’. By leaning on this weak view Sesardic’s racial naturalism intermittently gains an appearance of plausibility, but this view is too weak to revive racial naturalism. As Sesardic demonstrates, there are new arguments for racial naturalism post-Human Genome Diversity Project. The positive message behind my critique is how to be a social constructionist about race in the post-genomic era.     

How to do it. Run a preparation course for postgraduate examinations.

This paper provides a practical guide to running preparation courses for postgraduate examinations and is based on the authors'' experience. It is intended to be useful to organisers of proposed or existing courses as well as to potential users of courses--people in every specialty preparing for a postgraduate examination. The paper covers the practical aspects of staging and financing a course and recruiting tutors and attracting candidates, in addition to covering the structure, educational content, and evaluation of the course.