When engaging an enemy in battle, it’s always an advantage to enlist some help, and in the case of the immune system this is no exception. To aid their vital task of specifically binding to and destroying invading bacteria and viruses, antibodies recruit a special type of protein to deliver a lethal blow. The identity…

Our immune system does a remarkable job of protecting us against the harmful effects of infectious agents that cause disease. However, every so often this defence mechanism can be made to turn on itself, triggering a violent, often fatal reaction against its host. Understanding how the immune system can be prompted to behave in such…

The 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal for revealing the inner beauty of the nervous system. By developing methods that could colour and highlight its key components, Golgi and Cajal allowed the anatomy of the nervous system to be observed and documented in precise…

The first Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine acknowledged both the development of a scientific concept that concerned the way in which the immune system can fight certain infectious agents, and its successful translation into a method of keeping the illnesses they cause at bay. At the forefront of these achievements was Emil von Behring.…

The wave of creativity that has swept through Latin American writing since the 1960s has turned the region into an engine for change on a global scale and Mario Vargas Llosa is one of the major figures in this Latin American renaissance. He was born in Peru in 1936 and his life, like his writing,…

Herta Müller has lived through the kind of vicious absurdity that most can only imagine. A member of Romania’s German minority, which was protected when Romania allied itself with Hitler, but was then persecuted under Ceauşescu’s communist dictatorship, she will always be an outsider, someone whose past will never allow them to fit in. Born…

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio has said that the French language is the only place where he feels a sense of belonging. He is someone who has always lived on the edge, and in-between, and is hard to identify with a single locality. Itinerant from childhood, he has continued to travel, and now divides his time…

Doris Lessing’s career, like that of Mario Capecchi, another 2007 Nobel Laureate, shows that a strict pattern of formal schooling is not the only way to success. Lessing was born in Persia (now Iran), to British parents, but her family moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in hope of a better future. However, that future…

In this age of mass media, mass movement, and globalization it is likely that we will confront different cultures and different races as we go about our daily business. But Turkey, which straddles the intersection of East and West, has always had to deal with the problems and pleasures of diversity. The best-selling Turkish novelist…

Life on earth is built on carbon. Chains of carbon atoms, variously arranged, constitute the backbone of most of the molecules that form and regulate living systems. These molecules, large and small, of course contain several other elements too. But the greatest challenge to chemists, when they seek to replicate and even improve on nature’s…