Carta do editor

Abstract

257 TesesDear readers, This issue of our journal is a veritable kaleidoscope, featuring almost all facets of the everchanging, polyhedral field of knowledge formed by the intersection of history with other sciences and health. Let us first look at the pages devoted to submissions.The biophysicist Darcy Fontoura de Almeida analyzes the reasons behind Carlos Chagas Filho's decision to shift away from his father's and brother's line of research -tropical pathology -and dedicate himself instead to the physics and chemistry of life processes, not at the institute that his father, Carlos Chagas, had long headed but within the university, at a time when academe was becoming an important space for scientific research.Ariadne Chloë Furnival and Sônia Maria Pinheiro, both information scientists, investigate the public's perception of the risks that GM crops present in the food chain, above all to our health and the environment. They also show how the public has been shut out of decisionmaking processes. Gabriela Marques Di Giulio, Newton Müller Pereira, and Bernardino Ribeiro de Figueiredo, researchers working in the environment and the geosciences, probe the perceptions and attitudes of residents of a city in Paraná who were exposed to serious lead contamination, in order to explore how the media influence the social construction of risk. The authors note how responses to this risk situation involved the interaction of psychological, social, institutional, and cultural processes.Virginia Bentes Pinto, who also works with IT, offers her thoughts on different models for handling and organizing images, with a view to recovering information and applying the models to the health field.