The biomedical use of silk: past, present, future

Humans have long appreciated silk for its lustrous appeal and remarkable physical properties, yet as the mysteries of silk are unraveled, it becomes clear that this outstanding biopolymer is more than a high-tech fiber. This progress report provides a critical but detailed insight into the biomedical use of silk. This journey begins with a historical perspective of silk and its uses, including the long-standing desire to reverse engineer silk. Selected silk structure-function relationships are then examined to appreciate past and current silk challenges. From this, biocompatibility and biodegradation are reviewed with a specific focus of silk performance in humans. The current clinical uses of silk (e.g., sutures, surgical meshes, and fabrics) are discussed, as well as clinical trials (e.g., wound healing, tissue engineering) and emerging biomedical applications of silk across selected formats, such as silk solution, films, scaffolds, electrospun materials, hydrogels, and particles. The journey finishes with a look at the roadmap of next-generation recombinant silks, especially the development pipeline of this new industry for clinical use

Outlook Magazine, Spring 2002

https://digitalcommons.wustl.edu/outlook/1145/thumbnail.jp

Originalism, Official History, and Perspectives versus Methodologies

This paper addresses a well-worn topic: originalism, the theory that judges should interpret the Constitution in a manner consistent with the intent of its framers. I am interested in the real-world effects of originalism. The primary effect advanced by originalists is the tendency of the approach to constrain the discretion of judges. However, another effect of originalism that I identify is the creation of official histories, a practice that imposes a hidden tax on society. Another question I consider is whether originalism should be considered a methodology of analyzing the law or a perspective on the law. I argue that originalism is closer to a perspective than a methodolog

Essentials on Dark Matter

The modern roots on the dark matter problem were basically launched in the 30s, with Zwicky's observations on a notorious discrepancy of mass in coma cluster that presented 500 times the mass than expected using the Newtonian theory (Virial theorem). Curiously, almost 90 years have passed, and the dark matter problem persists and is one of the most common challenges in both observational and theoretical physics. The Dark Matter is a rapid communication on the status-quo of the dark matter phenomenology as well as a presentation of new discussions on the theme