Brian Nation - A Dictionary of Biomedicine

One of the most active research interfaces is that between medicine and the molecular biosciences, and rapid progress is being made in understanding the molecular basis of many diseases. Huge amounts of money have been, and are being, spent, and there are probably more people working at this interface than in any other research area. Inevitably, the interface provides opportunities for confusion, since the vocabularies of clinicians and molecular bioscientists do not necessarily overlap. Biomedicine has no clear boundaries, and yet this dictionary sets out to provide definitions of things that are relevant to those coming from either side. The approach has been inclusive rather than exclusive: some headwords may appear to belong to other disciplinesyet somewhere there will be a biomedical researcher using the term (I expect).

There is much more information available than can possibly be packed into a brief definition, and there are astonishingly rich online resources, freely available, that can be consulted. What the dictionary aims to provide is a succinct definition, a digested version of the more extensive information that exists on the internet and in the literature. I have drawn heavily on the suite of databases managed by the US National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), in particular PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez) for accessing the primary literature and OMIM (Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=omim for information about those diseases for which a molecular basis is known (and some others). Another important source for information about proteins has been the Universal Protein Resource (UniProt: http://www.uniprot.org/uniprot).

Although the Human Genome Project has provided a rich source of data, linking nucleotide sequence to protein function and mutation to disorder requires considerable further effort, and understanding the molecular basis of a disorder does not automatically lead to a therapy or a drug to treat the disease. For those diseases that involve an infectious agent, the molecular bioscientist must struggle with the development of resistance, and the pharmaceutical arms race with pathogens is far from over. The latter is even more relevant as we approach the third decade of the twenty-first century and look forward with hope that the second Longitude Prizeto find a solution to antimicrobial resistancewill bear fruit.

It is, however, important to acknowledge the fact that a dictionary can never be a finished product, and this second editionupdated and now in electronic format rather than printreflects a specific point in biomedical evolutionary time and, by that very fact, is almost immediately out of date. That said, the original author, Dr John Lackie, is to be commended for his efforts in creating a comprehensive work that sits as well in 2019/2020 as it did when he handed the dictionary over almost a decade ago in March 2010.

Brian Nation, April 2019