Medicine’s holy grail
The race is on for an Aids vaccine. The prize? Big bucks, overnight fame - and millions of lives saved. So could a British lab be in the lead? Sarah Boseley reports.
Welcome to the baby lab
Joanna Moorhead explains why she allowed scientists to experiment on Catriona, her five-month-old daughter.
Topic of cancer
The Observer Profile: Richard Doll. He didn't want to be a doctor, but his brilliant medical research has saved more lives than a host of glamorous drug discoveries. Still working at 89, the credit for last week's plummeting cancer figures is entirely his.
Truth and its consequences
Simon Hattenstone on Sunbathing in the Rain by Gwyneth Lewis - a survivor's recollection of depression
Caring, but little sharing
Elaine Showalter finds that Adam Phillips's essays on the relationship between psychoanalysis and democracy, Equals, are more pithy than persuasive
In search of lost times
When the brilliant Renaissance scholar Sir John Hale had a stroke at the age of 69 he was written off by doctors as a hopeless case. His wife, Sheila Hale, refused to give up. In an extract from her moving new book, she recounts her painful battles with the NHS and her search to rediscover the husband she once knew.