1. In the age of nanofluidics, the 24-hour urine collection may seem a curiosity, though much depends in metabolic studies on the accuracy of collecting these specimens. In an account worthy of Italian satirist Dario Fo, the authors Turner and Merlis1 recount the sources of errors during collections. They also compare working with human subjects to an enormous game of chess, and quote George Eliot's Felix Holt:
2. No such problems arose for the late Victor Herbert, the New York hematologist who experimented on himself. To understand folate deficiency, Herbert ate foods thrice boiled to extract folate,2 and he almost died from potassium deficiency. Nevertheless, he resumed self-experimentation and described the most fully documented sequence of laboratory and clinical events in dietary folate deficiency.
3. On one black day for rational thinking, Nature decided to publish a paper3 that seemed to validate homeopathy by claiming that water could 'remember' substances ...
