Breakthroughs Today

A GOOD part of me loves to read fiction. But only recently I got myself introduced to the writings of female authors. Call it gender bias, but I judge a book by its story, not by its cover, although occasionally by its author. So I got books written by Barry Eisler, William Brodrick, Michael Alexander Eisner, David Hewson, and of course Tom Clancy and a few of Arthur Conan Doyle. My first book by a female author was Phyllis Whitney’s Rainbow in the Mist (1989). I bought it in 1999 while doing some research on fictional literature that deals with the paranormal. And the ease of flow and dynamic way she told the story impressed me a lot. Well, I got my first Kay Scarpetta novel in June 2010. Patricia Cornwell wrote the book Blow Fly (2003) to tell the story of a retired chief medical examiner from Virginia who can use bluebottle (Calliphora vicina), a blow fly capable of giving clues in determining the time of death. So it is reading about “post-mortem” autopsies in a snap. I had ass

A DATE on Saint Valentine’s Day will be great if you have one. But even if you don’t, you will not be alone. Perhaps you will even be in an “exalted” company. With all their number-crunching statistics, medical scientists find it difficult to form relationships. A scientist himself, D. J. Williams wrote in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (2004): “It’s undoubtedly true that a statistically significant proportion of medical science nerds have difficulty forming intimate relationships.” “Many of us are more comfortable pursuing intimate relationship with our computers than with a fellow human being. We busily collect and analyze complex data for mind-numbing research reports and journal articles, but can’t seem to figure out the fundamentals of love,” he added. The reason apparently for this disconnect with love or romance is that their world revolves on the quantitative. And the language of love is, by nature, qualitative. So Williams ventured to study this phenomenon though