December 2009

The Ancient Indians were the fi rst to use pens around 5000 BCE. While these writing implements were primitive, typically consisting of hollowed out reeds that could hold a small amount of ink, which was generally soot in water with a plant gum binder, they were used for thousands of years and are still used today in certain parts of Pakistan.

Two seemingly unrelated news items that recently appeared in the lay press and that discussed important public health policy issues prompted the writing of this editor's page.

Once a human malignancy metastasizes, currently available cytotoxic chemotherapy is usually palliative. While conventional chemotherapy regimens are associated with objective tumor regression, this only occurs in a minority of patients.