Funding the NHS. Is the NHS sustainable?

The survival of the NHS lies largely in the hands of government, and this article suggests steps that it should take to deal with pressures on the NHS in terms of funding, managing efficiency, and demands. Changes to the system of funding may be unfeasible, but management could be improved by research to allow greater understanding of the local effects of national policies. Alternatively health authorities could be given more freedom to manage funds, although this would have to be accompanied by stiff sanctions for those who failed. Demand could be contained by strengthening policies to ensure that new technologies are cost effective. The government could try to reduce demands arising from increased expectations by encouraging informed public debate about priorities and influencing the availability of private health care. All these efforts should be guided by the values underpinning the NHS, which should be debated and decided collectively and confirmed in a new charter for NHS''s 50th anniversary in 1998.     

Speech perception: when to put your money where the mouth is

Visual information augments our understanding of auditory speech. New evidence shows that infants' gaze fixations to the mouth and eye region shift predictably with changes in age and language familiarity.     

Pharmacogenomics: will the promise be fulfilled?

Tools such as genome resequencing and genome-wide association studies have recently been used to uncover a number of variants that affect drug toxicity and efficacy, as well as potential drug targets. But how much closer are we to incorporating pharmacogenomics into routine clinical practice? Five experts discuss how far we have come, and highlight the technological, informatics, educational and practical obstacles that stand in the way of realizing genome-driven medicine.     

Protein folding: where is the paradox?

In this contribution we shall try to argue that no folding scenario - be it hierachical, nonhierarchical, nucleation, etc. - needs to be invoked to solve Levinthal's paradox: It fails on its own grounds.