Baltimore has many nicknames, from “Charm City” to the “City that Reads” and many others along the way. For those of us at Baltimore Corps, we say “Baltimore is the best place in the world to change the world.” READ MORE

It was 2010, I was perusing The New Yorker online as my keen seventeen-year-old self occasionally did, and I stumbled upon a piece innocuously entitled ‘Letting Go’. On its face, it was an article about health policy and palliative care. But what I found upon reading it was a powerful and visceral exploration of human mortality, about what it means to be confronted with the end of one’s own life. I was floored by it. That was also the first time I read the name Atul Gawande. READ MORE

Justice Edwin Cameron, in convening the Forum, stated that we were in the room not because we were the same, but because peoples’ hatred attempts to make us the same.  In thinking about the process of being an ally, this is my starting point.  And it is certainly a process, and not a label. READ MORE

Since leaving Oxford, I have had the privilege of teaching social science in various forms to young people from a host of different countries, and at a wide range of different types of institutions. From Stanford University, to the University of Katyavala Bwila in Angola, where entry is even more competitive, one thing stands out: my best students are always about the same, across the board. READ MORE

I am a genetics researcher, medical trainee, and passionate about the potential for genomics to revolutionise how we diagnose and treat certain diseases. But, as a Canadian citizen, I would not have my own genome tested. At least, not yet. READ MORE

Can evolutionary biology inform medical research? Medicine, necessarily, focuses on proximate causes: the “what” and “how” of disease. Evolutionary thought can contribute a third dimension: the “why,” the adaptive significance and evolved history of humans and pathogens.  READ MORE

On 18 January, Dame Sally Davies, Chief Medical Officer for England, gave a talk at Rhodes House entitled “Science and Policy – The Example of Anti-Microbial Resistance.” Dame Sally introduced the concept of anti-microbial resistance by examining the case of colistin, a strong antibiotic with significant side effects often used as a last-resort drug in cases of drug-resistant bacterial infections. Since the first discovery of colistin-resistant E. coli bacteria in China in late 2015, a number of countries around the world have detected such strains of their own.  READ MORE