Surgical audit: one year's experience in a teaching hospital.

For 12 months the surgical staff at Hope Hospital have operated a form of audit. The monitored information included work load, methods of treatment, complications, misdiagnoses, and deaths. The method described is suitable for any district general or teaching hospital provided adequate secretarial help is available. In addition to helping to maintain standards, an audit of this type has a positive educational role.     

THE GENETICS OF ADAPTATION: THE GENETIC BASIS OF RESISTANCE TO WASP PARASITISM IN DROSOPHILA MELANOGASTER

There have been very few genetic analyses of “natural” adaptations, that is, those not involving artificial selection or responses to human disturbance. Here we analyze the genetic basis of geographic variation in Drosophila melanogaster's resistance to parasitism by a wasp, Asobara tabida. Our results suggest that population differences in ability to encapsulate parasitoid eggs have a fairly simple genetic basis: 60% of the D. melanogaster genome plays no role in differences between resistant and susceptible populations. Instead, resistance gene(s) are restricted to chromosome two, and may be further restricted to the centromeric region of this chromosome. This finding suggests that natural adaptations—like many responses to artificial selection and human disturbance—sometimes have a simple genetic basis.     

Big science meets small embryos

A meeting report from the Santa Cruz Developmental Biology Meeting, University of California at Santa Cruz, USA, July 21-25, 2000.     

DNA break repair: refined rules of an already complicated game.

Of the many types of DNA-damage repair, this review concentrates on the aspects of DNA single- and double-strand break repair. Originally considered to represent separate routes based on distinct enzymatic machineries, it has recently been shown that these pathways converge and are interlinked at a number of points. Poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase-1 (PARP-1) is a central player in this complicated game. We present new data and our view on the mechanisms by which PARP-1 is guided to its respective interaction partners to coordinate or participate in repair or apoptosis.     

Marital Stability Among Physicians

Analysis of 57,514 initial complaints for divorce, separate maintenance, and annulment filed in California during the first six months of 1968 reveals that physicians are considerably less prone to marital failure than men of comparable age in the general population. Furthermore, when compared to professionals in general, doctors also appear less prone to marital collapse. For physicians, marriages break down in the greatest numbers and at the greatest rate between the ages of 35 and 44. Women doctors are at least 40% more prone to marital instability than men, and black physicians are nearly 70% more prone to divorce than their white colleagues. Of the individual specialists, orthopedists and psychiatrists possibly have the highest rates of marital demise.