Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx®) Tech was the key diagnostics component of a three-pronged national strategy, including vaccines and therapeutics, to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. Unprecedented in the scale of its mission, its budget, its accelerated time frame, the extent of cross-government agency collaboration and information exchange, and the blending of business, academic, and investment best practices, RAD Tech successfully launched dozens of US Food and Drug Administration Emergency Use Authorization diagnostic tests, established a new model for rapidly translating diagnostic tests from the laboratory to the marketplace, and accelerated public acceptance of home-based diagnostic tests. This chapter provides an overview of the processes utilized by RADx Tech during the COVID-19 pandemic to improve clinical laboratory tests and identify, evaluate, support, validate, and commercialize innovative point-of-care and home-based tests that directly detected the presence of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus.

In the face of a rapidly emerging pandemic, there needs to be a concerted and organized response so that the pandemic can be stopped or slowed and patients can be accurately diagnosed and treated. As we learned with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), there was no prescribed roadmap to follow, leaving scientists and clinicians to plan and respond in real time. Although the efforts were heroic in nature, some decisions (if they could be made again) would have been different. In this chapter, we address the lessons learned from the individuals who were on the battlefield in their area of expertise as they chartered their own path. We capture and record the activities that took place so that, going forward, there will be an extensive pandemic response roadmap indicating the activities of this pandemic (including their chronology and duration) for future generations to use as a guiding document to build upon.

Elite friendship discourse in the Renaissance was shaped by a set of commonplaces inherited from classical antiquity according to which friends were virtuous, male, and few in number, and their relationships egalitarian and non-sexual. Neoplatonic love had the power to disrupt many of these received ideas. Ficino’s account of male friendship in his Lysis commentary emphasized the importance of spiritual desire in initiating relationships and foregrounded a pedagogical dimension more in keeping with a chaste version of Greek pederasty than the non-hierarchical models of friendship inherited from Aristotle and Cicero. In a poem on the Platonic androgyne, Antoine Héroët used the language of friendship to describe heterosexual unions as offering a potential step towards union with God. Bonaventure des Périers warned instead of the dangers of earthly erotic entanglements in a verse commentary to his translation of Plato’s Lysis, thereby concurring with the beliefs of his benefactor Marguerite de Navarre while suggesting that female community might offer the soul some solace before death provided the possibility of joining with God. Finally, Montaigne’s unorthodox account of his relationship with his deceased friend La Boétie engaged with the Neoplatonic tradition while eschewing the possibility it might facilitate spiritual ascent.

Botanical treatments have been used by persons with epilepsy, especially for convulsive seizures, dating from 6000 BC in India [1], from 3000 BC in China and in Peru, and for centuries in Africa and South America. In traditional Western medicine, botanical treatments were widely used to treat seizures before the advent of compounds such as bromide and phenobarbital. For instance, Gowers documented his use of Cannabis indica (see also section on Cannabis and its Derivatives) and digitalis, the latter derived from the Foxglove plant (Digitalis purpurea) [2].