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The Resilience of the Human Spirit: A Journey Through the Hardships of Life
In the vernal season of 1994, Mo Yan’s progenitor succumbed to an ailment. He couldn’t help but experience a gamut of sentiments as he recollected every minute detail of his bygone days, wherein his mother diligently toiled to nurture him and his three siblings, unflinchingly facilitating their education and literary pursuits. To commemorate his maternal figure, he conceived and penned the opus titled ‘Voluptuous Bosoms and Expansive Gluteal Regions,’ drawing inspiration from his mother’s life experiences. Wang Zengqi opined, ‘This is a solemn, earnest, and emblematic composition that encapsulates the extensive annals of China’s centennial history.’ Within the tome, Mo Yan intently focuses on the ill-fated matriarch, Lu Xuan’er, and…
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The Leningrad Symphony: A Musical Epic of Resistance
The winter in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1941 was an extremely cold and cruel winter. In the summer of that year, Hitler launched a lightning attack on the Soviet Union, and the German army turned to siege after being blocked in Leningrad. The Soviet government implemented a wartime emergency management of Leningrad. At night, the darkness under the blackout portends an ominous nightmare, and under the iron-grey night sky is the silence caused by martial law, which is only broken by the sudden German artillery attack. The cold winter is coming, the snow has no shins, the ice is thick, the temperature has dropped to minus 35 degrees Celsius,…
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How a Chance Encounter with a Stranger Saved Me from a Bad Mood
Everyone has bad times. The depression, boredom, and despair in such a poor state are really terrible, indescribable, and even gods cannot save them. Doctors and writers are both careers of thinking about people—I have these two professional habits, so I have become a person who likes thinking about people: When people are in a very bad state, what do they rely on for salvation? On this day, I was in a very bad state, my legs were heavy, and my head was dizzy. When I walked into Beijing West Railway Station, I saw that there were still more than two hours before the departure time of the…
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Behind the frequent emergence of new drugs for Alzheimer’s disease
Recently, Eli Lilly and Company announced that the Phase III clinical trial of the Alzheimer’s disease drug donamumab has achieved positive results. Donatumab slowed the rate of cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s patients by 35 percent compared to a placebo. Lilly said it will submit a marketing application for donamumab to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) this quarter. If approved, donamumab will become the third monoclonal antibody drug for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease in the United States. The first two are aducanumab and lencanezumab, which were approved by the FDA in June 2021 and January this year, respectively. ”Donatuzumab is not a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, but it,…
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The light we carry
When I was a kid, it occurred to me one day that my dad started using a cane to help me balance while I was walking. I can’t remember exactly when it showed up at our home on Chicago’s South Side—I was four or five years old, and suddenly, there it was, a smooth black wood cane, slender and strong. It was an early result of multiple sclerosis, which left my dad with a severe limp in his left leg. Slowly and silently, it erodes his central nervous system and weakens the strength of his legs. The disease had likely been taking its toll on Dad long before his diagnosis,…
