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Were it not for the imminent Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), life would be verging on the tolerable. The RAE is something with which our National Health Service colleagues need not concern themselves, but think of it as an audit meeting on a national scale (frightening if one considers how much sleep one local audit meeting can induce). It is something that is probably driving every academic in the UK to distraction. Up front, it is an excellent idea: our research activities are judged nationally and graded against an unspecified gold standard (category C evidence?). Grants, students, papers, measures of esteem (inside leg not included) are noted; research groups who barely speak to one other (or worse, actively avoid speaking to each other) become collaborating colleagues, suddenly intimately dependent on each others' existence for the very oxygen of research as the university does the ‘Hans Christian Andersen’ bit for the judging panels.
I have to confess to feeling a bit hurt, isolated, unloved even. As a group working in male fertility, our natural home is perhaps not obvious (apparently). We have been squeezed into ‘Laboratory-based Sciences’ (well, I've eaten my lunch off the benches with the best of them in my day); we've been shoehorned into ‘Inflammation’, but the idea of testicular inflammation left the grey-suited men deciding our destination unable to cross their legs or sit comfortably. We were moved again and are now part of Respiratory Medicine — if one considers the sharp intake of breath associated with our testicular biopsies, suddenly the grouping becomes obvious — and we're off on a whole new fairy tale (JK Rowling, look out).
Unlike the RAE, in this issue JK Rowling and her ilk are nowhere to be seen. As always, excellent evidence-based clinical wisdom is laid before you by the experts in the field. After all that has been written in this journal and others about the use of tapes to elevate prolapsed pelvic organs, Geoff McCracken and Guylaine Lefebvre revisit mesh-free vaginal wall repair, including a beautiful exposition on the anatomy of the area. Winston Justin and his colleagues offer their deliberations on the myriad options available for endometrial ablation, showing us that, unlike the egg, there is more than one way to boil the endometrium! Radwan Faraj and Martin Steel take us through interstitial pregnancy while, for the oncologists, we offer Hans Nagar and Stephen Dobbs on early-stage epithelial ovarian cancer, S Nasim Ali and Jonathan Ledermann on chemotherapy for ovarian cancer and Nigel Acheson on sentinel node mapping—no TomTom® for them, then...
Catherine Coulson is a brave woman: she takes on the topic of psychosexual disorders in women for our readership and goes a long way to explaining the high incidence of headaches in this country around midnight. Nick Nicholas deals with confidentiality and access to medical records: the Freedom of Information Act versus the Data Protection Act. This is an excellent, clear, concise article of interest to us all, wherever we practise (it might even be of use to the university mandarins in dealing with the RAE)...
All joking aside, for an exposition on jokes from the absolute master of that art, it is, of course, ‘And finally...’ with Professor Drife (an article, something tells me, that the university mandarins will not be returning for him in the RAE!).
Neil McClure, Editor-in-Chief
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