From syllabi accessed on tablets to journal articles read on laptops to medication apps viewed on smart phones, today’s medical students have myriad routes to medical resources on the internet. Two decades ago, the options were more limited but by no means nonexistent, as explored in the article, “Medical Resources on the World Wide Web,” by Robert E. Kuhn. In the opening paragraph, Kuhn declared, “The Internet has transformed education by facilitating access to information. A new subsystem of the net, the World Wide Web, has expanded the knowledge cornucopia to include pictures, audio, and even video.”

“Dentistry school discrimination case dismissed,” proclaimed the front page of Synapse 30 years ago. The accompanying article, by Charles Piller, discussed the U.S Department of Education Office for Civil Rights report clearing the UCSF School of Dentistry—and how not everyone was satisfied with the decision.

A single front-page headline, reading “the tuition battle—bleed for UC,” was starkly superimposed on a full-page photograph of a well-known politician, standing stern-faced at a lectern. The lower left corner of the page read simply, “In this corner … Ronald Reagan, governor of California.”

Today, those needing a bone-marrow transplant are likely to be able to find a reasonably well-matched, nonrelated donor. This is thanks largely to having a very large pool of potential donors to draw on; there are currently more than 10 million people registered with the National Marrow Donor Program in the United States. A generation ago, it was a far different story, especially for people of color.

The ongoing Ebola crisis in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone has been by far the deadliest Ebola outbreak in history with more than 8,000 deaths so far. This outbreak makes a front-page story of Synapse from 20 years ago seem especially timely. In “Science Fiction Turned Real,” Robert Rosenbloom reviewed “The Hot Zone,” a nonfiction thriller by Richard Preston about viral hemorrhagic fevers, including Ebola.

Concerns about the increasing frequency of C-sections is nothing new. Thirty-five years ago, Michael Bader reported on this trend in the article "Area cesarean rate tripled in 20 year." He wrote, "In California as a whole, the rate rose from 4.8 per cent in 1960 to 15.4 per cent in 1977." According to the California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development, 29.8 percent of deliveries were uncomplicated C-sections in 2013, a level that has remained steady for the past several years.

Today, a visitor to UC Berkeley can see a campus full of people recruiting, promoting, soliciting, tabling, proselytizing and otherwise communicating about political issues. Such political advocacy, however, was formerly banned on campus. The restriction was overturned in response to the Free Speech Movement, a series of student protests and negotiations with the administration in 1964–65.

To many students at UCSF today, Mount Zion is simply another campus, but until 25 years ago it was wholly separate, with more than 100 years as an independent, Jewish hospital.

Today, the most prominent divestment movement at UCSF is to withdraw from fossil-fuel companies. A generation ago, it was divestment from South Africa in protest of apartheid that was front and center.

"Technology and science, once worshipped as the gods of our secular society, have lately been found wanting. People are wondering how the human qualities can be restored to a field which is now dominated by technology.