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The post-war reconstruction era was marked by numerous planning exhibitions which provide a window on the contemporary nature of communication and consultation in planning practice. The 1943 Exhibition of the County of London Plan prepared by J.H. Forshaw and Patrick Abercrombie was a major event with the king and queen making a high-profile visit. This article describes the making of the exhibition, considers its content, design and historical significance and reflects on its importance as a high water mark in the culture of twentieth-century town planning promotion generally and exhibition culture specifically. Archival research reveals how the London County Council (LCC) negotiated for resources from the central government and the local boroughs in hosting and organizing the event and how crucial these negotiations were in its eventual staging, marketing and impact.

This paper examines Melbourne's first statutory metropolitan planning scheme in 1954 in terms of its origins, production, promotion and reception. While a cautious trend-tidying template, it represented a landmark in Melbourne's planning history and established permanently a metropolitan planning apparatus at the state government level. Metropolitan planning initiatives in Australia before World War Two were few and far between. The scale of thinking, resourcing and implementation was beyond most state governments with a notable exception being the 1929 report of the Melbourne Metropolitan Town Planning Commission. This was shelved during the depression years but by the 1940s an active planning movement in Melbourne and development by major infrastructure agencies highlighted the need to revisit a coordinative metropolitan strategy and ensure it did not sit on the shelf. The agency officially charged with devising, promoting and implementing a new regional-scale planning scheme in 1949 was the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works (MMBW), a legacy public utility from the 1890s. The paper examines the grafting of planning functions onto the MMBW and in particular the appointment of E.F. Borrie as Chief Planner. Two intertwined themes thread through the development and eventual marketing of the plan to the wider community and key stakeholders including local authorities and developers. One was an early retreat from visionary planning towards a more politically-pragmatic and business-like incrementalism. The second was the endeavour to secure broad citizen acceptance of the proposals through selling them as necessary common-sense solutions to emerging issues such as employment distribution, transport congestion, and open space provision. Key agents of the MMBW's propaganda campaign were a series of public exhibitions held in 1953-54 along with other public relations initiatives including endorsements from leading planners from overseas. The paper revisits these and other key events in the narrative to establish metropolitan planning oversight on a secure footing in Melbourne. The campaign proved successful. The MMBW was confirmed as Melbourne's regional planning authority in December 1954 and hence became part of the bureaucratic machinery of state government. From that point, planning debate shifted decisively from the general case of for and against to even more challenging and controversial issues of implementation.

Pharmacogenomics (PGx) and pharmacogenetics (PGt) are emerging interdisciplinary areas recently defined by the regulatory authorities at an international level as 'the investigation of variations of DNA and RNA characteristics as related to drug response' (PGx), and the study of 'the influence of variations in DNA sequence on drug efficacy and toxicity' (PGt). In recent years a number of studies have in fact produced growing evidence that, besides the effects of age, sex, diseases, and different drugs interactions, genetic factors play a role in the inter-individual variability of drugs response. The increasing genomic knowledge has also raised the profile and role of the so called 'genomic biomarkers' (GBs) in drug development, approval, and clinical use. The aims of this review are to (a) revisit the general understanding of the role of genomics and genetics in drug response, (b) provide an update on the definition and classification criteria of GBs as recently defined at a global level by regulatory agencies such as the European Medicines Agency and the Food and Drug Administration, and (c) illustrate with some examples current and potential applications of biomarkers in clinical practice and in drug development.