Letter from the editors

摘要

A Utopian view of modern humans is that they are all created equal. This is surely one of the most important concepts ever introduced into our cultural and social fabric. But we must keep in mind exactly that. This is a political statement that is spelled out in the Constitution of the United States and many other documents throughout the world.But we have made the mistake in the past of pursuing the practice of medicine and its teaching as if this ethical statement also is applicable to our physiology and susceptibility to disease. Of course, we recognize the obvious differences between men and women and various ethnic groups and races throughout the world, but this has only been at a very superficial level where these differences were so obvious that they could not be ignored.