Why a Symposium on Biology at Johns Hopkins?

From its inception in 1876, Johns Hopkins University has stoodout as an institution where the laboratory and experimentationhave been accorded the highest respect and priority, and wherethe most capable people have been chosen to occupy positionsof authority. The first president of the University, DanielGilman, was able to guide and shape the university unencumberedby outside influences and began the tradition of hiring thebest men to work with him. H. N. Martin and W. K. Brooks inbiology were two of these leaders in the early period of theuniversity (1876–1908). During the middle years (1909–1939), expansion dilutedfaculty and diverted them away from research and toward teaching.Herbert Spencer Jennings headed the Zoology Department duringthis middle period and in spite of the general trend away fromquality research activities, maintained a standard of excellencein his department. Another leader during this period and onewhom some consider more influential than Jennings was BurtonE. Livingston, chairman ofthe Plant Physiology Department. The modern period began in 1939 and saw some rebuilding of thebiological sciences after World War II, combining of the Zoology,Botany, and Plant Physiology Departments into one Biology Department,the building of the Mergenthaler Laboratory for Biology, themodernization of the department into one oriented toward molecularbiology, and a host of quality appointments. Most of these accomplishmentscan be attributed to H. B. Willier who headed the departmentfrom 1940 to 1955. Presently the Department of Biology at Johns Hopkins Universityis one of this country's leading centers of molecular biology.     

An interview with Dr. Heiko Hermeking on his highly cited paper published in Cell Cycle

Heiko Hermeking holds a professorship for Experimental and Molecular Pathology at the Pathology Institute of the Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich in Germany. He also received his Ph.D. from this university, working in Dirk Eick’s laboratory, where he discovered that p53 mediates c-MYC-induced apoptosis. He then carried out four years of postdoctoral studies in Bert Vogelstein and Ken Kinzler’s laboratory at the Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, MD, where he used the SAGE technique, which had just been developed in this laboratory, to identify important p53 (14-3-3 ) and c-MYC (CDK4) target genes. Then he was an independent group leader at the Max-Planck-Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried near Munich. His current work focuses on the analysis of genes, microRNAs and pathways that are regulated by c-MYC or p53.     

Welch, Sedgwick, and the Hopkins model of hygiene

William H. Welch and William T. Sedgwick, two of the founding fathers of American public health, were both early generation "Hopkins Men." Sedgwick was part of the first group of graduate students to attend Johns Hopkins University, and Welch was part of the initial faculty at the University's medical school. While they never worked together as colleagues at Hopkins, both became interested in the exciting new discoveries of the microbial nature of human disease and developed similar public health programs based on this information. Sedgwick expanded upon these investigations in the new sanitary science program at MIT, where academic public health first emerged in the United States following Sedgwick's appointment in 1883. Welch, who had been exposed to European research in microbiology, promoted microbial research in pathology in Baltimore in 1884. His laboratory-based investigations expanded until they led to the formation of the country's first school of public health in 1916. Thus, a "Hopkins Model" for hygiene and public health emerged from the efforts of both Welch and Sedgwick.     

H. N. Martin and W. K. Brooks: Exemplars for American Biology?

The Johns Hopkins University offered the first modern, American,research-oriented programin biology when it opened in 1876.The program included both physiological and morphological work,so that students could choose either for their advanced degrees.Physiologists studied with Henry Newell Martin, morphologistswith William Keith Brooks. Yet students took courses in bothareas, and the unique exposure to two lines of research andto two very different sorts of teachers made the Johns Hopkinsprogram exceptional. This paper outlines the dual characterof biology at Hopkins, and the particular contributions of bothMartin and Brooks. It also argues that the impact of that uniquedual offering on four of the more famous students, E. B. Wilson,T. H. Morgan, E. G. Conklin, and R. G. Harrison, strongly influencedthe successful and progressive program of research that eachchose.     

Edwin Grant Conklin

Son of a country physician, Edwin Grant Conklin grew up in centralOhio and was educated along traditional lines. A decision toenter biology as a profession came only after three years ofteaching a variety of subjects in a private school. Graduatestudy at Johns Hopkins and summer research opportunities atWoods Hole were the doors to a richly productive career as scholar,author and administrator. His research works in embryology andcytology gained him great eminence. An important theme in muchof his work was the role of the cytoplasm in development. Hewrote extensively on evolution and other subjects of generalinterest, among them science and religion, and the nature ofman.     

The early years of coeducation at the Yale University School of Medicine.

The Yale School of Medicine began accepting women as candidates for the degree of medicine in the fall of 1916. This decision was consistent with the trend in medical education at the time. While Yale was not the first prestigious Eastern medical school to admit women, joining Johns Hopkins (1893) and the University of Pennsylvania (1914), it was not one of the last. Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons admitted women a year later, but Harvard Medical School held out until 1945. The years 1916--1920 saw the number of women enrolled in medical school almost double. Yale''s decision to admit women seems to have been made with little resistance from the faculty. The final decision was made through the encouragement and financial help of Henry Farnam, a professor of economics at Yale, who agreed to pay for the women''s bathrooms. His daughter, Louise, was in the first class of women. At graduation she was awarded the highest scholastic honors, the Campbell Gold Prize. From Yale she travelled to the Yale-sponsored medical school in Changsha, China, where she became the first female faculty member, a position she held for twelve years. The impressions of Ella Clay Wakeman Calhoun, the only woman to graduate in the second class of women, are presented here. Since 1916 the Yale School of Medicine has undergone extensive physical and philosophical changes, developments in which women have participated.     

Understanding contemporary social movements

Ananta Giri is a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University, and currently teaches sociology at Jamia Millia Islami, New Delhi, India.     

Contractile protein biochemistry in the Pollard Lab in Baltimore

We describe our search for the molecular mechanisms of cell motility with personal recollections of bucket biochemistry in Tom Pollards Lab at the Johns Hopkins, circa 1980.     

David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel

While attending medical school at McGill, David Hubel developed an interest in the nervous system during the summers he spent at the Montreal Neurological Institute. After heading to the United States in 1954 for a Neurology year at Johns Hopkins, he was drafted by the army and was assigned to the Neuropsychiatry Division at the Walter Reed Hospital, where he began his career in research and did his first recordings from the visual cortex of sleeping and awake cats. In 1958, he moved to the lab of Stephen Kuffler at Johns Hopkins, where he began a long and fruitful collaboration with Torsten Wiesel. Born in Sweden, Torsten Wiesel began his scientific career at the Karolinska Institute, where he received his medical degree in 1954. After spending a year in Carl Gustaf Bernhard's laboratory doing basic neurophysiological research, he moved to the United States to be a postdoctoral fellow with Stephen Kuffler. It was at Johns Hopkins where he met David Hubel in 1958, and they began working together on exploring the receptive field properties of neurons in the visual cortex. Their collaboration continued until the late seventies. Hubel and Wiesel's work provided fundamental insight into information processing in the visual system and laid the foundation for the field of visual neuroscience. They have had many achievements, including--but not limited to--the discovery of orientation selectivity in visual cortex neurons and the characterization of the columnar organization of visual cortex through their discovery of orientation columns and ocular-dominance columns. Their work earned them the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1981, which they shared with Roger Sperry.     

A brief history of ASPET on its centennial anniversary

On December 28, 1908, eighteen men met in the pharmacology lecture room of the Johns Hopkins University Medical School to establish the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET). In 2008, ASPET celebrates its Centennial, presenting an appropriate occasion for a look back at its history.     

Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran's Islamic Revolution

Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran's Islamic Revolution. Haleh Esfandiari. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.234pp.     

Human Evolution through Developmental Change.

Human Evolution through Developmental Change. Nancy Minugh-Purvis and Kenneth J. McNamara. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. 508 pp.     

William McElroy, the McCollum–Pratt Institute, and the Transformation of Biology at Johns Hopkins, 1945–1960

In 1948, a dynamic junior member of the Johns Hopkins Biology Department, William McElroy, became the first director of the McCollum–Pratt Institute for the Investigation of Micronutrient Elements. The Institute was founded at the university to further studies into the practicalities of animal nutrition. Ultimately, however, the Institute reflected McElroy’s vision that all biological problems, including nutrition, could be best investigated through basic biochemical and enzyme studies. The Institute quickly became a hub of biochemical research over the following decade, producing foundational work on metabolism and a respected series of symposia. In this paper, I argue that McElroy’s biochemical vantage on biology also permeated the traditionally morphological and embryological Biology Department at Hopkins. Largely due to the activity of McElroy and the Institute, the faculty, course offerings, and research underwent a radical reorientation toward biochemistry and molecular biology in the 1950s, even while maintaining a commitment to developmental biology. While the history of postwar biology is often told as the ascendancy of the “new” biology over “traditional” biology, the case of McElroy and the McCollum–Pratt Institute affords an opportunity for historical examination of biochemical and molecular science as a lens through which all branches of biology at an institution were reconceived and unified.     

Restoration of whole body movement: toward a noninvasive brain-machine interface system

This article highlights recent advances in the design of noninvasive neural interfaces based on the scalp electroencephalogram (EEG). The simplest of physical tasks, such as turning the page to read this article, requires an intense burst of brain activity. It happens in milliseconds and requires little conscious thought. But for amputees and stroke victims with diminished motor-sensory skills, this process can be difficult or impossible. Our team at the University of Maryland, in conjunction with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and the University of Maryland School of Medicine, hopes to offer these people newfound mobility and dexterity. In separate research thrusts, were using data gleaned from scalp EEG to develop reliable brainmachine interface (BMI) systems that could soon control modern devices such as prosthetic limbs or powered robotic exoskeletons.     

Science and Ideology

Abstract

Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt. Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. 315 pages. $25.95 hardback.     

The 2011 ming k jeang award for excellence in cell & bioscience

Two research groups led by Dr T.C. Wu of Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions and Dr P. Liu of National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health, respectively, have won the 2011 Ming K Jeang Award for Excellence in Cell & Bioscience.     

An accessible guide to the primates

Review of Walker’s Primates of the World by Ronald M. Nowak. Introduction by Russell A. Mittermeier, Anthony B. Rylands, and William Konstant. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999, 232 pp, 180 fig., 13 tab., $19.95.     

American Indian Health: Innovations in Health Care, Promotion, and Policy

American Indian Health: Innovations in Health Care, Promotion, and Policy. Everett R. Rhoades. M.D., ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. xxiii. 459 pp.     

Taphonomies of Topography: From the Death of "Place" to Its Hyphenated Apotheosis

Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Marc Augé. London: Verso, 1995. 122 pp.
Landscape and Power in Vienna. Robert Rotenberg. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. 385 pp.
Imagineering Atlanta: The Politics of Place in the City of Dreams. Charles Rutheiser. London: Verso, 1996. 322 pp.