Suicides of elite Japanese writers: The case of Ryunosuke Akutagawa.

Background . To mark the 130th birth anniversary of Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927), I revisit his suicide (as recorded by his hand) in comparison to that of his junior contemporaries, who also chose a similar mode of death. Data sources . Two works of Akutagawa, namely Tenkibo (1926: Death Register) and Aru Ahono Issho (1927: The Life of a Stupid Man) in English translation of Jay Rubin were used as the main sources, in addition to published literature about his creativity. Results . In his final work, The Life of a Stupid Man, completed in the penultimate month before suicide, 7 among the 51 brief descriptions, Akutagawa had described his thoughts on illness and death, in addition to visiting his biological mother in a lunatic asylum, and studying a cadaver for his famous short story 'Rashomon'. These descriptions offer a fascinating perspective on Akutagawa's state of mind, before his suicide. Akutagawa's suicide is also compared with the suicides of five other renowned Japanese writers (Osamu Dazai, Yasunari Kawabata, Misuzu Kaneko, Yukio Mishima and Juzo Itami). Conclusion . Before his suicide, doctors offered Akutagawa various diagnoses: 'insomnia, gastric hyperacidity, gastric atony, dry pleurisy, neurasthenia, chronic conjunctivitis, brain fatigue'. Though it is uncertain, what percentage of hereditary factor(s) played a role, why the practitioners of the medical profession in 1920s Japan failed to save the life of this creative individual still remains a question.

CIA, MoSSAD, NKGB and SURETE in medical research: The RAW truth.

Background: We aimed to categorize the types of productivity among published scientists and correlate them with the Nobel Prize. Data source: Nobel Foundation website ( www.nobelprize.org/nobel_organizations/nobelfoundation/) and PubMed database. Inclusion criteria: Scientists born from 1867, the year in which Alfred Nobel patented dynamite to accumulate his fortune, which in turn led to the establishment of Nobel's famous will in 1895. Design: Retrospective analysis of the Nobel awards since 1901. Results: We propose an eponymous formulation called Pai-Kan Footprints (PKF) each with an alphabet tag of a recognized gumshoe agency.

Detection of elevated antibody against calreticulin by ELISA in aged cynomolgus monkey plasma.

Calreticulin (Crt) is a molecular chaperone ubiquitously present in the endoplasmic reticulum. In non-human primates, age-related occurrence of anti-Crt antibody has not been reported. We developed an ELISA assay for an anti-Crt antibody and determined the age-related increase in the levels of anti-Crt antibody in three groups of cynomolgus monkeys: juvenile (1.5 yr), young adults (5-10 yr) and aged adults (20-34 yr). Mean ± SD auto-antibody levels at 450 nm in juvenile, young adults and aged groups were 0.23 ± 0.18, 0.30 ± 0.28, and 0.55 ± 0.33, respectively. Statistically significant differences were noted in the autoantibody levels to Crt among the aged group and juvenile or young adults. This is the first report to demonstrate the expression of anti-Crt autoantibody in aged monkeys and indicates that cynomologous monkeys may serve as an appropriate nonhuman primate model for studies of age-related alteration of immune function in elderly humans. Though preliminary, this finding merits further investigation to determine the relationship between immunosenescence and expression of antibodies to Crt.