We all know that Charles Darwin arrived at the great synthesis of evolution working alone in the seclusion of Down House (yet even he encountered some publication problems!) and that Albert Einstein also worked in isolation in the Patent Office in Bern. Scientists working alone can continue to make great discoveries, but in the past half century the nature of much of scientific research has undergone major changes. These changes are partly due to the tremendous expansion of the research community and institutions, which in former times consisted of a handful of individuals, but have increased in size by one or more orders of magnitude.

There have been numerous fault-lines in society in the past due to religion, race, social class and nation. Current fault-lines relate to demography: the West has a falling population whereas many countries elsewhere in the world are undergoing large population growth; net emigration has been replaced by immigration. The previous Western dominance in economic activity has also changed and the balance has moved east. These and other factors are considered as pointers to the future.

This is an account of my experiences, personal and professional, of five different German regimes in the last century. I was born in Breslau in 1926 — so the first Germany I knew was the Weimar Republic — and lived under National Socialism until 1938 when I emigrated to the United States, where, by 1951, I was teaching German History. I travelled to the Federal Republic for the first time in 1950 and taught at the Free University in Berlin. I worked in the archives of the German Democratic Republic in 1961 and 1962 and participated in the first German historiographical controversy in 1964 and then lectured extensively in the fifth, unified Germany. This lecture was written and delivered at NIAS, Wassenaar, the Netherlands, in 1998 and it reflects on, and exemplifies, the relation between private memory and public history. The German past, in all its great and catastrophic complexity, is still present in German political and intellectual life and hence the work of the historian has a potential political and pedagogical impact. My basic approach to German history emerges in this essay, as it does even more pointedly in the lectures I give in Germany itself.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) had considerable influence on the ‘modern’ world but did not consider himself part of it. His search for a way of thinking, to give a deeper understanding than the science of his day, has considerable analogies with that of Goethe. He was less sanguine than Goethe about the possibility of a renewal of culture in his own day but his philosophical work, in its stress on restraint and concreteness, is permeated by the ethical ideals that he attempted to realize in his life and that of his friends. He also shows some kinship with Goethe's non-theistic mysticism. His philosophical work is a guide that, perhaps rightly, requires readers to find the answer for themselves.

The surprising fact about the 20th century was the return of the liberal free market, circling back to where it began. It was helped because liberalism, unlike socialism, was never a theory of history and could not be falsified by events. But, socialist historians still control the past, and it is still widely believed that the welfare state was created by socialism and that genocide is right-wing. In fact, socialist leaders, fearful of preserving capitalism, opposed the welfare state, which in Britain was the creation of Asquith. Between the wars, Labour had no national health plans, and it was the last of the British parties to accept the Beveridge report. Repetition and suppression have entrenched the myth, which is widely accepted, that welfare equals socialism. The first history of socialism, by a French radical, Alfred Sudre, was opposed to socialism as a conservative idea; Marx and Engels, Ruskin and Morris were openly conservative and the Bolsheviks proudly elitist.

The first pogrom documented in history took place in Alexandria in the year 38 CE. The only document describing this event is an eyewitness account by the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria. It is a problematic source because the concern of the author is largely theological and also because he fails to inform the reader about the causes of the violence. These causes must be sought in the combination of a growing tendency among Alexandrian intellectuals to depict Jews as criminal misanthropes, and the Jewish tendency to side with the Roman occupiers of Egypt.

The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, who lived from 1872 to 1945, is considered to be one of the greatest historians of the 20th century. His work has been translated into many languages. More than 80 years after its first appearance, his most famous book, The Waning of the Middle Ages, is still read the world over and regularly reprinted. Huizinga is now mainly read and admired by historians, although his book, Homo ludens, is also appreciated by anthropologists. In the 1930s, he was even more well-known but in a different capacity: not as a cultural historian but as a cultural critic. His book, In the Shadows of Tomorrow, which appeared in 1935, was soon translated into eight languages. It was as influential as Ortega y Gasset's, The Rebellion of the Masses, and made him ‘the most famous man of the Netherlands’. This paper will describe Johan Huizinga's transition from cultural historian to cultural critic and discuss how far his cultural criticism can be seen as an example of ‘the spirit of the 1930's’.

Demographers have traditionally been preoccupied with human reproduction and mortality, and with the links, at different levels of aggregation, between the two. Today, when in some regions of the world sexual intercourse carries with it the risk not just of pregnancy but of fatal infection with the human immunodeficiency virus, that traditional preoccupation acquires a special urgency.

The progressive elucidation of the structure of the human genome with the subsequent use of this information for various purposes, many of which will be of commercial value, raises questions about the ownership of the information. This article points out some of problems of defining the genome as property and explores the relevance of the usual criteria of patent law to this new situation.

Suggestive or misleading interrogation techniques may have the effect that innocent people start to remember having committed a serious crime. Confessions are therefore not the best possible evidence, especially not when it is obvious that the interrogation contained elements of suggestion and deception. The problem is illustrated by a case that has become famous in The Netherlands, because two innocent men were imprisoned for about eight years, after obviously false confessions. The confessions were obtained during long and repeated interrogations in which various types of psychological deception were used. In the end, the amount of contradiction, and even of sheer impossibilities, made it clear that the confessions were false and the men innocent. Some of the literature on the creation of false memories is reviewed. It is argued that the practice of criminal investigation may elicit even stronger effects, because empirical research is constrained by ethical limits. The objective of criminal investigation seems to put no limit on what is deemed acceptable, even though we know quite well that the elicitation of false confessions is a serious risk. European agreements about criminal interrogation techniques may provide an effective protection against undesirable practices; but it will not be easy to convince the European legislators of this.

Calcium is the major messenger inside cells that is responsible for muscle contraction, secretion and many other processes. This article outlines some of features of these activities and reports on an Academia conference in Heidelberg, Germany.

Clinical guidelines are not implemented in a simple linear way, their integration in clinical practice is an evolving process influenced by the doctor, the patient and society. Methodologically, it is not easy to evaluate definitively the impact of guidelines. The overall appraisal yields a pessimistic conclusion: in most cases, guidelines do not translate well enough into action (effect on physician behaviour) and are believed to express motivation rather than optimum care. To avoid an academic mirage, recommendations must be disseminated in ways that provide incentives for such action. Those to whom guidelines are directed must be remarkably receptive to, and already prepared to act on the message. There are some indications that the most successful strategy to change the behaviour of clinicians and general practitioners operates at a more local level, and with more careful targeting, than is feasible with a national or regional consensus exercise. In addition, a more forceful action plan and multi-pronged approach (e.g. including continuous medical education) is required.