The eagerly awaited seventh version of the Declaration of Helsinki (DoH) was released by the World Medical Assembly (WMA) on October 19, 2013 at the 64th General Assembly . It has been 13 years since the most debated version of the DoH, the fifth one, was released in 2000, followed by two rela...

The judgment delivered last week by the Supreme Court of India, upholding the constitutionality of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), overturns a judgment by the Delhi High Court in 2009 that decriminalised sexual activity between two consenting adults. This judgment has unleashed a v...

2013 has been a landmark year, in fact, a bad year for biomedical journals. Medical journals and their editors have been respected for long, as they are the harbingers of change and of progress in scientific thought. Science expects transparency from the agents through which scientists publish...

The brutal assassination of Dr Narendra Dabholkar in Pune has been a big blow to the progressive social movement in Maharashtra. A medical practitioner turned activist, Dr Dabholkar was renowned for his more than two-decade-long crusade in the state against superstitions and his efforts to pro...

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s reference to “a knife without a blade, for which the handle is missing” has been illustrated recently by Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. In his work, Jokes and their Relation to the Cognitive Unconscious, Freud suggested that the “knife without a blade which has no...

Cervical cancer is the second most common cause of cancer-related death worldwide and kills over 70,000 Indian women every year.

In 2005, the government amended Schedule Y of the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, 1940, and Rules, 1945, to liberalise the conduct of global drug trials in India. Proponents of this policy had asserted that we needed less, and not more, regulation, in order to expand the business of drug trials. Many...