After today, Nature Medicine will have one less Roxanne on its news team. For the past six months, our intern Roxanne Palmer has populated this blog and the pages of the journal with her insightful reporting on biomedicine, but this Friday we say goodbye.
Beyond having an ear for news, Roxanne has an ear for music. In case you missed the biomed-themed tunes she brought to the podcast, you can listen here to the melodies of DNA (jump to 14:42) and the sounds of the deadly HIV virus (jump to 5:06).
Roxanne must have been an etymologist in a former life, because she never resists the challenge of looking into the meaning of a word or phrase—be it the name of a disease or a clinical trial. She took on ‘post-abortion syndrome’ (A diagnosis that fails to deliver), and shed light on the changing view of CFS (Patients and doctors tire of ‘chronic fatigue syndrome’ name). In another story, Roxanne went on a historical tour to see how key ailments have been re-branded (A disease—or gene—by any other name would cause a stink). And word to the wise, she doesn’t fear acronyms either (Clinical trial names can be quite AMUSING, but they don’t include unicorns).
As Roxanne’s internship wraps up and she heads uptown to her new job, we wish her the best!