Continuing my search for biomedical black swans, based on the words newly cited in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) from 1970 to 2020, I now turn to terms relevant to […]
Jeff Aronson’s Words
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Black swans in genetics
The technique called optogenetics has been in the news this week, having been used to restore, or at least partially restore, the sight of a man with retinitis pigmentosa, a […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Pharmacological black swans 1970–2020
In his book The Black Swan (Random House, 2007), Nassim Taleb wrote “history does not crawl, it jumps”. Many important discoveries, he asserted, do not come about by careful planning; […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Words going viral
Biomedical words recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as having newly appeared during 1970–2020 have become scarcer and scarcer with the passing years (Figure 1). For 1970 I found […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . -omics
This week, as last week, in my pursuit of new biomedical words that have appeared in the last 50 years, I am investigating words first listed in the Oxford English […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Weighty words
As I observed in my last column, fewer and fewer new biomedical words can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as we go through the 1990s (and indeed, […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . A difficult infection
Surveying new biomedical words listed in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) since 1970, I have found fewer examples each year. For example, the 1970 list contained 61 words and the […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . New, and not so new, medical words
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is updated every three months (“on a quarterly basis” as they put it—they mean “quarterly”). The latest list of updates and additions, published in March […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Medical words of the 1980s
Since the start of the year I have been exploring biomedical words that are labelled in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as having first appeared in print in the 1980s. […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Self-experimentation
Self-experimentation, or autoexperimentation, is as old as experiments themselves. I have previously mentioned the case of Daniel Alcides Carrión, a medical student, who in 1885 had himself inoculated with an […]