Suicide: a Socratic revenge.

2400 years have passed since the occurrence in Athens, Greece of one of the famous suicides recorded in human history. This autobiographical essay provides a montage on the history of suicide, with snippets from the final hours of Socrates, as described by Plato. Suicide in contemporary Japanese culture is also explored briefly, with reference to the deaths of internationally acclaimed movie directors Akira Kurosawa and Juzo Itami. The author also questions why no researcher has yet been honoured for the past 99 years with a Medicine Nobel prize for his or her work on suicidology or thanatology.

The blood revolution initiated by the famous footnote of Karl Landsteiner's 1900 paper.

A 1900 publication authored by Karl Landsteiner, at the age of 32 years, contained a footnote which stated that, "the serum of healthy human beings not only agglutinates animal red cells, but also often those of human origin, from other individuals". He followed up this statement in his 1901 paper, and concluded that, "My observations reveal characteristic differences between blood serum and red blood cells of various apparently healthy persons" and that "the reported observations may assist in the explanation of various consequences of therapeutical blood transfusions". These significant observations resulted in the discovery of A, B, O and AB blood groups and later led to successful blood transfusions in humans. The impact of the revolutionary finding by Landsteiner also changed a number of biomedical disciplines such as immunochemistry, medical anthropology, forensic medicine, genetics and pathology.

Charles Darwin's anthropological observations on Ceylonese.

In his 1871 work, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. Darwin has made three anthropological observations pertaining to the nose, beard and polygamy in Ceylonese. He never visited Ceylon, and his observations were based on the works of Sir J. Emerson Tennent (1859) and Sir J. Lubbock (1865).