It’s hard to escape the din of the nation’s prognostication industry coming to terms with its wrongness today, with so many teeth to gnash and garments to rend. But here in the world of science and medicine, the election of Donald Trump has left many trying to make sense of the vagaries, reversals, and red herrings that have marked his rhetoric on key issues from research funding to drug pricing. Here are five questions we have about what the Trump administration will mean for science. 1. WHAT’S HE GOING TO DO WITH THE NIH? The National Institutes of Health is still recovering from the deep cuts of sequestration in 2013, and China, paper tiger of many Trump talking points, is slated to outpace the US in science and technology R&D spending this decade, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. And yet Trump has said little of consequence about the issue. He told Scientific American that while “there are increasing demands to curtail spending and to...

The ultimate gift I never saw her face. I'll never know her name, what she did for a living or if she had any family. But I'm so grateful to the woman who helped me become a doctor. I remember clearly the day I 'met' my body. It was my first term at medical school and everyone was nervous about anatomy class. There was a strange mix of curiosity and anxiety. I’m quite a sensitive and emotional person – as well as worrying if I'd faint in front of my new colleagues, I was scared I might be overwhelmed by sadness. But once I got into the dissecting room, fascination took over any initial trepidation. During the course of the year, as we became familiar with the amazing structures of the human body, our respect grew for the people who had given us the ultimate gift. 2.Respect Medical students recall going into the dissection room for the first time. When you enter the dissection room you encounter a unique environment – bright lights, the strong smell of embalmin...