Abstract:
:This article reviews some of the technological devices and ideas which have been used over the years to answer the question, how does the brain work? It describes some of the early technology-based analogies and models of nerve fibers, and then discusses other analogies and models of the brain based on mechanical and electrical technologies. There are also short sections on cybernetics, telephone exchanges, and computers. Although all of these ideas are flawed to some extent, this article offers a brief argument on the usefulness of analogy and abstraction in brain science.
journal_name
Perspect Biol Medjournal_title
Perspectives in biology and medicineauthors
Kirkland KLdoi
10.1353/pbm.2002.0033subject
Has Abstractpub_date
2002-04-01 00:00:00pages
212-23issue
2eissn
0031-5982issn
1529-8795pii
S1529879502202124journal_volume
45pub_type
杂志文章,评审abstract::This article outlines a Darwinian approach to sports that takes into account its profoundly cultural character and thereby overcomes the traditional nature-culture dichotomies in the sociology of sport. We argue that there are good reasons to view sports as culturally evolved signaling systems that serve a function si...
journal_title:Perspectives in biology and medicine
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1353/pbm.0.0063
更新日期:2009-01-01 00:00:00
abstract::How will developments in genetic knowledge affect the classification of disease? Leaders in genetics have suggested that knowledge of the role of genes in disease can determine nosology. Diseases might be defined by genotype, thus avoiding the limitations of more empirical approaches to categorization. Other commentat...
journal_title:Perspectives in biology and medicine
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1353/pbm.2006.0012
更新日期:2006-01-01 00:00:00
abstract::The concept of placebo has evolved over time. Generally believed to be the basis of the premodern pharmacopoeia, the placebo has been adopted in practice as a harmless but unscientific approach towards alleviating symptoms. Currently, many medical scientists view placebos pejoratively as confounding elements in the an...
journal_title:Perspectives in biology and medicine
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1353/pbm.2004.0053
更新日期:2004-07-01 00:00:00
abstract::Popular fiction responds to, and may exacerbate, public anxieties in ways that more highbrow literary texts may not. Robin Cook's 1977 novel Coma exemplifies the ways in which medical thrillers participate in the public discourse about health care. Written shortly after the medical establishment promoted "irreversible...
journal_title:Perspectives in biology and medicine
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1353/pbm.0.0168
更新日期:2010-07-01 00:00:00
abstract::Biologists use models in two distinct ways that have not been clearly articulated. A model may be used either as an exemplar of a larger group, or as a surrogate for a specific target. Zebrafish serve as an exemplary model of vertebrates in developmental biology; rodents are both exemplary vertebrates and specific sur...
journal_title:Perspectives in biology and medicine
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1353/pbm.0.0125
更新日期:2009-10-01 00:00:00
abstract::This paper reexamines the recent case of the conjoined twins from Malta. Survival was said to be possible only through separation, which would actually leave only one twin alive. The parents refused to allow the killing of one to save the other, but the court ruled that this would amount to the neglect of innocent lif...
journal_title:Perspectives in biology and medicine
pub_type: 历史文章,杂志文章
doi:10.1353/pbm.2002.0063
更新日期:2002-10-01 00:00:00
abstract::This article proposes a means for better understanding the self and consciousness. Data indicate that the basic "emotional brain" continually computes potential survival risk against reward to rank consequent "emotion scores" for all sensory inputs. These scores compete to yield winner-takes-all outcomes that determin...
journal_title:Perspectives in biology and medicine
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1353/pbm.2012.0031
更新日期:2012-07-01 00:00:00
abstract::Autobiographical narratives of illness and disability are influential in popular and medical discourses of illness and disability, in part because these narratives represent illness and disability within a sociocultural context, intersecting with other categories of difference. Clinicians can benefit patients through ...
journal_title:Perspectives in biology and medicine
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1353/pbm.0.0135
更新日期:2010-01-01 00:00:00
abstract::There is a growing national awareness that the extraordinary extension of life expectancy in our society poses an impending crisis for our health-care system. This is due in large part to the scarcity of primary-care providers, especially geriatricians. To address these concerns, the Obama administration has considere...
journal_title:Perspectives in biology and medicine
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1353/pbm.0.0092
更新日期:2009-07-01 00:00:00
abstract::The pace of biomedical innovation is important because it determines the rate of progress in medicine and allied disciplines. A review of the history of medical advances reveals that the three decades from 1950 to 1980 were a particularly innovative time. Subsequent decades have seen fewer seminal advances, despite co...
journal_title:Perspectives in biology and medicine
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1353/pbm.2018.0067
更新日期:2018-01-01 00:00:00
abstract::There is a need in our society to raise the national consciousness about aging, health, and the prospects for longevity, so that many more persons take responsibility for their personal health and understand what we will need in an era of health-care reform to promote health across the life course. We address this imp...
journal_title:Perspectives in biology and medicine
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1353/pbm.2013.0021
更新日期:2013-04-01 00:00:00
abstract::This commentary considers two informing influences on Pope Francis's support of perinatal hospice care for families facing diagnoses of serious fetal anomalies. Reflecting on the morally formative scriptural narrative of Mary's pregnancy and Jesus's birth and drawing upon an often-repeated idea of Pope Francis's papac...
journal_title:Perspectives in biology and medicine
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1353/pbm.2020.0044
更新日期:2020-01-01 00:00:00
abstract::Antibody-dependent enhancement is a general in vitro property of enveloped viruses. In certain circumstances, antibody-dependent enhancement is a bona fide pathophysiologic mechanism in vivo. There are several examples of virus disease of humans and animals in which incomplete or partial immunity can lead to enhanced ...
journal_title:Perspectives in biology and medicine
pub_type: 杂志文章,评审
doi:10.1353/pbm.1992.0048
更新日期:1992-07-01 00:00:00
abstract::As health care has become of great importance to both individual citizens and to society, it has become more important to understand medicine's relationship to the society it serves in order to have a basis for meaningful dialogue. During the past decade, individuals in the medical, legal, social sciences, and health ...
journal_title:Perspectives in biology and medicine
pub_type: 杂志文章,评审
doi:10.1353/pbm.0.0045
更新日期:2008-10-01 00:00:00
abstract::Of all the principles set out by Flexner in 1910, the most fundamental, that of academic and scientific excellence, is more relevant to medical education in the United Kingdom today than ever before. To realize this, undergraduate medical education (UGME) at Oxford has evolved to incorporate the tutorial method of tea...
journal_title:Perspectives in biology and medicine
pub_type: 传,历史文章,杂志文章
doi:10.1353/pbm.2011.0013
更新日期:2011-01-01 00:00:00
abstract::The traditional forms of public health law were directed largely toward communicable diseases and other externalities, such as pollution, with negative health impacts. The more modern view treats any health issue that affects large numbers of individuals as one of public health, which would include such problems as ob...
journal_title:Perspectives in biology and medicine
pub_type: 杂志文章,评审
doi:
更新日期:2003-07-01 00:00:00
abstract::In retrospect, mortality from coronary heart disease (CHD) in the 20th century followed an epidemic pattern: mortality rates increased dramatically from 1920 until about 1960, remained roughly constant for almost a decade, and have been decreasing since the late 1960s. CHD has traditionally been conceived of as a sing...
journal_title:Perspectives in biology and medicine
pub_type: 历史文章,杂志文章
doi:10.1353/pbm.2007.0013
更新日期:2007-04-01 00:00:00
abstract::Diverse and non-coherent sets of epistemological principles currently inform research in the general area of functional genomics. Here, from the personal point of view of a scientist with over half a century of immersion in hypothesis driven scientific discovery, I compare and deconstruct the ideological bases of prom...
journal_title:Perspectives in biology and medicine
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1353/pbm.2015.0025
更新日期:2015-04-01 00:00:00
abstract::In this essay we link the rationale for the medical humanities with radical hermeneutics, a move that infuses the medical humanities with incredulity and suspicion. This orientation is particularly important at this historical moment, when the evidence-based and competency blanket is threatening to overpower all aspec...
journal_title:Perspectives in biology and medicine
pub_type: 历史文章,杂志文章
doi:10.1353/pbm.2007.0040
更新日期:2007-07-01 00:00:00
abstract::Medical leadership and leadership education have recently emerged as subjects of an expanding though as yet uncritical literature. Considerable attention is being given to the development of courses and electives, together with some proposals for generalizing these offerings to all medical students and doctors. This a...
journal_title:Perspectives in biology and medicine
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1353/pbm.2013.0027
更新日期:2013-07-01 00:00:00
abstract::As a result of the growth of evidence-based practices across the world, health-care providers and policymakers in the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe have established institutes such as the United Kingdom's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) to produce clinical guidelines that physi...
journal_title:Perspectives in biology and medicine
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1353/pbm.0.0084
更新日期:2009-04-01 00:00:00
abstract::While the necessity of normalizing surgery on intersexed individuals is a topic of ongoing debate in the 21st century, the origins of surgery as a therapeutic practice for ambiguous or unusual genitalia lie in the 19th century. The first report of corrective surgery published in the United States appeared in the Ameri...
journal_title:Perspectives in biology and medicine
pub_type: 历史文章,杂志文章
doi:10.1353/pbm.2005.0012
更新日期:2005-01-01 00:00:00
abstract::The emerging field of synthetic biology is a novel biological discipline at the interface between traditional biology, chemistry, and engineering sciences. Synthetic biology aims at the rational design of complex synthetic biological devices and systems with desired properties by combining compatible, modular biologic...
journal_title:Perspectives in biology and medicine
pub_type: 杂志文章,评审
doi:10.1353/pbm.2012.0042
更新日期:2012-01-01 00:00:00
abstract::When we figure medical practice as warfare, an individual clinician may be either a dutiful combatant or a conscientious objector. The rhetorical structure of this choice means that clinicians may exercise their consciences by loyally joining or disloyally exiting the medical ranks' battle against disease. But there a...
journal_title:Perspectives in biology and medicine
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1353/pbm.2019.0025
更新日期:2019-01-01 00:00:00
abstract::This paper constructs a brief history of the biochemical term agonist by exploring the multiple meanings of the root agôn in ancient Greek literature and describing how agonist first appeared in the scientific literature of the 20th century in the context of neurophysiologists' debates about the existence and properti...
journal_title:Perspectives in biology and medicine
pub_type: 历史文章,杂志文章
doi:10.1353/pbm.2002.0056
更新日期:2002-07-01 00:00:00
abstract::Concerns about nature are playing increasingly prominent roles in a variety of social debates, including medical biotechnology, environmental protection, and agricultural biotechnology. These concerns are often simply rejected as incoherent: critics argue that there is no good account for how natural states of affairs...
journal_title:Perspectives in biology and medicine
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1353/pbm.2007.0049
更新日期:2007-10-01 00:00:00
abstract::This article examines five letters from the correspondence of American zoologist Edwin Grant Conklin that highlight his theories of genetic and social inheritance, in order to suggest that Conklin's eugenic beliefs--like those of many American authorities during this time--were complex and sometimes contradictory. The...
journal_title:Perspectives in biology and medicine
pub_type: 传,历史文章,杂志文章
doi:10.1353/pbm.2001.0058
更新日期:2001-07-01 00:00:00
abstract::This article reviews the cultural history of man's relationship with tobacco and the steps in the discovery of tobacco addiction. Nicotine dependence (ND) or nicotine addiction (NA), among other forms of drug addiction, continues to be a significant public health problem in the world, as it is associated with major se...
journal_title:Perspectives in biology and medicine
pub_type: 杂志文章,评审
doi:10.1353/pbm.2011.0047
更新日期:2011-10-01 00:00:00
abstract::Over time, contemporary writing becomes part of the historical record. In medicine, it is an important learning tool, particularly for understanding the experience and context of disease and illness. Although a century has elapsed since the fictional events on a single day described in James Joyce's Ulysses, the work ...
journal_title:Perspectives in biology and medicine
pub_type: 传,历史文章,杂志文章
doi:10.1353/pbm.2006.0032
更新日期:2006-04-01 00:00:00
abstract::The organism, like the molecule, the cell, and the species, is one of the fundamental levels in our hierarchical classification of life and its components. The units ranked at these levels, being concrete, particular things, are individuals in the broadest philosophical sense. But in a much narrower and more familiar ...
journal_title:Perspectives in biology and medicine
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1353/pbm.2011.0022
更新日期:2011-04-01 00:00:00