Plant intelligence: Why,why not or where?

The concept of plant intelligence, as proposed by Anthony Trewavas, has raised considerable discussion. However, plant intelligence remains loosely defined; often it is either perceived as practically synonymous to Darwinian fitness, or reduced to a mere decorative metaphor. A more strict view can be taken, emphasizing necessary prerequisites such as memory and learning, which requires clarifying the definition of memory itself. To qualify as memories, traces of past events have to be not only stored, but also actively accessed. We propose a criterion for eliminating false candidates of possible plant intelligence phenomena in this stricter sense: an “intelligent” behavior must involve a component that can be approximated by a plausible algorithmic model involving recourse to stored information about past states of the individual or its environment. Re-evaluation of previously presented examples of plant intelligence shows that only some of them pass our test.

“You were hurt?” Kumiko said, looking at the scar.Sally looked down. “Yeah.”“Why didn''t you have it removed?”“Sometimes it''s good to remember.”“Being hurt?”“Being stupid.”—(W. Gibson: Mona Lisa Overdrive)

Key words: intelligence, memory, learning, plant development, mathematical models, plant neurobiology, definition of terms     

Selfish Play Increases during High-Stakes NBA Games and Is Rewarded with More Lucrative Contracts

High-stakes team competitions can present a social dilemma in which participants must choose between concentrating on their personal performance and assisting teammates as a means of achieving group objectives. We find that despite the seemingly strong group incentive to win the NBA title, cooperative play actually diminishes during playoff games, negatively affecting team performance. Thus team cooperation decreases in the very high stakes contexts in which it is most important to perform well together. Highlighting the mixed incentives that underlie selfish play, personal scoring is rewarded with more lucrative future contracts, whereas assisting teammates to score is associated with reduced pay due to lost opportunities for personal scoring. A combination of misaligned incentives and psychological biases in performance evaluation bring out the “I” in “team” when cooperation is most critical.     

Patients' accounts of being removed from their general practitioner's list: qualitative study

Objective To explore patients'' accounts of being removed from a general practitioner''s list.Design Qualitative analysis of semistructured interviews.Setting Patients'' homes in Leicestershire.Participants 28 patients who had recently been removed from a general practitioner''s list.Results The removed patients gave an account of themselves as having genuine illnesses needing medical care. In putting their case that their removal was unjustified, patients were concerned to show that they were “good” patients who complied with the rules that they understood to govern the doctor-patient relationship: they tried to cope with their illness and follow medical advice, used general practice services “appropriately,” were uncomplaining, and were polite with doctors. Removed patients also used their accounts to characterise the removing general practitioner as one who broke the lay rules of the doctor-patient relationship. These “bad” general practitioners were rude, impersonal, uncaring, and clinically incompetent and lied to patients. Patients felt very threatened by being removed from their general practitioner''s list; they experienced removal as an attack on their right to be an NHS patient, as deeply distressing, and as stigmatising.Conclusions Removal is an overwhelmingly negative and distressing experience for patients. Many of the problems encountered by removed patients may be remediable through general practices having an explicit policy on removal and procedures in place to help with “difficult” patients.     

Preventive Psychiatry: The Psychiatric Team as Consultant to the Public Health Nurse

Various forms of collaboration between the disciplines of public health and psychiatry are briefly reviewed and the 25-year-old mental health program of the Vancouver Health Department is described. The public health nurse has prime responsibility in all children with emotional disorders. She is supported by a psychiatric team which provides active treatment and educational and consultative help for the nurse and the school. During the year 1963, six social workers had 2357 contacts with nurses and school personnel but only 1049 treatment interviews. Of 401 children referred to the psychiatric team, 138 received active clinic treatment, 141 remained under supervision by the public health nurse, and 122 were referred elsewhere. In addition, 1330 children were identified as “mental hygiene cases” in the caseload of the 170 public health nurses in the community. By close co-ordination, the public health nurse and the psychiatric team can enhance each other''s contributions to community mental health.     

Nitrous Oxide Inhalation as a Fad—Dangers in Uncontrolled Sniffing for Psychedelic Effect

“LAUGHING GAS is the newest thing for kids seeking kicks,” the Stanford Daily reports. “They sniff it.”So begins a news story in the Los Angeles Times of 26 January 1967. The story continues:“It''s the latest way to travel, or so say a growing group of devotees on the campus,” the university student paper said. “It can produce much the same effects as psychedelic drugs, they claim, and it''s cheaper to obtain.”“One student said he buys the gas, nitrous oxide, from a medical supply house. `They think I am anesthetizing rats,'' he explained.“Campus medical authorities said the gas, sniffed `in sufficient amounts... could produce all the states of anesthesia, including the final stage—death.''”     

MANDIBULAR HERPES ZOSTER—With Report on the Use of Cortisone in a Case with Geniculate Ganglion Symptoms

Herpes zoster, an acute specific viral infection, occurs more commonly than is generally supposed. It should be differentiated from other diseases involving the ear and skin; it must be considered as a possible etiologic agent in some palsies of the facial, glossopharyngeal or vagal nerves.The type of cephalic herpes zoster should be carefully differentiated; cases involving the “geniculate zone” may be other than “Ramsay Hunt''s syndrome.” This syndrome is now defined as a herpes zoster eruption of the external ear at the “geniculate zone” with involvement of the seventh or seventh and eighth nerves.The “topognostic” method is the best for determining the level at which the facial nerve has been affected.It is questioned whether there is a single outstanding therapeutic agent for this disease. Cortisone had no apparent therapeutic effect in a case reported herein.     

Pathological States and Criminal Responsibility

The doctor is embarrassed in court when asked to testify to the effects of illness on a defendant''s capability “of appreciating the nature and quality of an act or omission or of knowing that an act or omission is wrong”. The source of his difficulty is traced to the legal concepts of “guilt”, “crime” and “punishment” which imply a legal view of man at variance with our modern biological view. To abolish this discrepancy we need not accept a medical model for criminal law where “crime” is analogous to “disease”, and “punishment” to “treatment”. A pragmatic approach to the handling of the criminal could exclude the notions of “guilt” and “punishment” and yet fulfil the rational goals of protecting society from the criminal and of compensating his victims.     

“HIDDEN” ALCOHOLICS—Medical Implications of Undiscovered Addiction

“Hidden alcoholics”—those who drink surreptitiously to keep their addiction secret—far out-number the overt habitues of skid rows. The former rather than the latter should be considered “typical” alcoholics. Even though they have severe problems, they maintain fairly good employment stability and stability in marriage. Yet they steadily deteriorate.Often “hidden” alcoholics go to physicians because of symptoms referable to alcoholism but contrive to conceal their addiction and so make diagnosis difficult. Hence, physicians observing certain kinds of symptoms that cannot be attributed to a readily observable or demonstrable pathologic change should make searching inquiry as to the patient''s drinking habits. For not until the proper diagnosis is made in such cases can there be hope of effective treatment.     

Do Pressures to Publish Increase Scientists' Bias? An Empirical Support from US States Data

The growing competition and “publish or perish” culture in academia might conflict with the objectivity and integrity of research, because it forces scientists to produce “publishable” results at all costs. Papers are less likely to be published and to be cited if they report “negative” results (results that fail to support the tested hypothesis). Therefore, if publication pressures increase scientific bias, the frequency of “positive” results in the literature should be higher in the more competitive and “productive” academic environments. This study verified this hypothesis by measuring the frequency of positive results in a large random sample of papers with a corresponding author based in the US. Across all disciplines, papers were more likely to support a tested hypothesis if their corresponding authors were working in states that, according to NSF data, produced more academic papers per capita. The size of this effect increased when controlling for state''s per capita R&D expenditure and for study characteristics that previous research showed to correlate with the frequency of positive results, including discipline and methodology. Although the confounding effect of institutions'' prestige could not be excluded (researchers in the more productive universities could be the most clever and successful in their experiments), these results support the hypothesis that competitive academic environments increase not only scientists'' productivity but also their bias. The same phenomenon might be observed in other countries where academic competition and pressures to publish are high.     

Photodynamic-therapy Activates Immune Response by disrupting Immunity Homeostasis of Tumor Cells,which Generates Vaccine for Cancer Therapy

Photodynamic therapy (PDT), a regulatory approved cancer treatment, is reported to be capable of causing immunogenic apoptosis. The current data reveal PDT can cause the dysregulation of “eat me” and “don''t eat me” signal by generating reactive oxygen species (ROS) -mediated endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress. This dysregulation probably contribute to the increased uptake of PDT-killed Lewis lung carcinoma (LLC) cells by homologous dendritic cells (DCs), accompanied by phenotypic maturation (CD80^high, CD86^high, and CD40^high) and functional stimulation (NO^high, IL-10^absent) of dendritic cells as well as subsequent T-cell responses. Morevover, C57BL/6 mice vaccinated with dendritic cells (DCs) pulsed with PDT-treated LLCs (PDT-DCs) or PDT-treated LLCs alone (PDT-LLCs) exhibited potent immunity against LLC tumors. In the current study, the PDT-induced immune response was characterized as a process related with the dysregulation of “eat me” signal and “don''t eat me” signal, revealing the possibility for developing PDT into an antitumor vaccination strategy for personalized cancer immunotherapy.     

Practitioner attitudes in the United States and United Kingdom toward decisions at the end of life: are medical ethicists out of touch?

Objective To assess whether UK and US health care professionals share the views of medical ethicists about medical futility, withdrawing or withholding treatment, ordinary or extraordinary interventions, and the doctrine of double effect. Design, subjects, and setting Answers to a 138-item attitudinal questionnaire completed by 469 UK nurses studying the Open University course on “Death and Dying” were compared with those of a similar questionnaire administered to 759 US nurses and 687 US physicians taking the Hastings Center course on “Decisions Near the End of Life.” Results Practitioners accept the relevance of concepts widely disparaged by bioethicists: double effect, medical futility, and the distinctions between heroic and ordinary interventions and withholding and withdrawing treatment. Within the UK nurses'' group, the responses of a “rationalist” axis of respondents who describe themselves as having “no religion” are closer to the bioethics consensus on withholding and withdrawing treatment. Conclusions Professionals'' beliefs differ substantially from the recommendations of their professional bodies and from majority opinion in bioethics. Bioethicists should be cautious about assuming that their opinions will be readily accepted by practitioners.     

Darwin's Manufactory Hypothesis Is Confirmed and Predicts the Extinction Risk of Extant Birds

In the Origin of Species Darwin hypothesized that the “manufactory” of species operates at different rates in different lineages and that the richness of taxonomic units is autocorrelated across levels of the taxonomic hierarchy. We confirm the manufactory hypothesis using a database of all the world''s extant avian subspecies, species and genera. The hypothesis is confirmed both in correlations across all genera and in paired comparisons controlling for phylogeny. We also find that the modern risk of extinction, as measured by “Red List” classifications, differs across the different categories of genera identified by Darwin. Specifically, species in “manufactory” genera are less likely to be threatened, endangered or recently extinct than are “weak manufactory” genera. Therefore, although Darwin used his hypothesis to investigate past evolutionary processes, we find that the hypothesis also foreshadows future changes to the evolutionary tree.     

Commentary: Personal Renewal

After John Gardner''s presentation on “Self-Renewal” to THE WESTERN JOURNAL OF MEDICINE Editors'' Meeting, ^* Joseph Murphy, MD, Special Editor for Wyoming, asked the former Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, “Where are you in your life''s cycle?” Dr Gardner, who is 80 years old, answered, “When Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, was in his 90s, he was asked a similar question and said, `I''m like a race horse cantering along after the race is over, cooling down.'' Well, I''m nowhere near cantering! I''m still in the race, pushing the world.” race, pushing the world.”John Gardner, who received his undergraduate degree from Stanford and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, taught at the college level for several years before he joined the Carnegie Foundation. As president of Carnegie Corporation and Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, he began to “push the world” toward education and in 1964 received the country''s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He has also pushed it toward political reform by founding Common Cause, toward grass-roots political action by founding the Urban Coalition, toward leadership training by founding the White House Fellows program, and toward volunteerism by founding the Independent Sector (a coalition of for-profit and not-for-profit organizations and foundations). His books, including Excellence, Self-Renewal, No Easy Victories, and On Leadership, have pushed readers to new understanding of themselves and of organizations to higher levels of creativity and energy to get important work done. His current research focuses on discovering and defining the characteristics of healthy, vital communities. His call to “keep on keeping on,” indeed, to push the world, leads to constructive change. Active people become effective people, infused with the energy and optimism that good hard work inspires. I think you will find this paper as invigorating to read as it was to hear.     

CYTOLOGIC DETECTION OF CERVICAL CANCER—Four Years' Experience with Routine Smear Examination in Private Practice

Simplified Papanicolaou smear techniques appear to be adaptable to private clinical practice when experienced cytodetection laboratory facilities are available. A private physician''s office seems potentially an efficient, economical and practical place for detection of cervical cancer by use of the smear technique as a routine part of examination of patients.In a series here reported upon, examination of 11,207 cervical smears taken at the first examination of patients of all ages led to diagnosis of unsuspected malignant disease in 80 cases—in all instances at a stage when it should be easily curable. Cancer was not detected in examination of 6,060 smears taken later from women who had had a “negative” smear at the time of first examination, which seems to indicate that the first screening was reasonably accurate.In a few cases, early cancer was detected when smears were reported as “atypical” or “suspicious.” Such reports demand as careful follow-up as do “positive” reports.There are dangers and limitations in wide-spread clinical application of screening by this method. Care must be observed in the development of programs for its use lest the potential benefits in early detection be outweighed by the dangers from misuse.     

Putting the brakes on phagocytosis: “don't‐eat‐me” signaling in physiology and disease

Timely removal of dying or pathogenic cells by phagocytes is essential to maintaining host homeostasis. Phagocytes execute the clearance process with high fidelity while sparing healthy neighboring cells, and this process is at least partially regulated by the balance of “eat‐me” and “don''t‐eat‐me” signals expressed on the surface of host cells. Upon contact, eat‐me signals activate “pro‐phagocytic” receptors expressed on the phagocyte membrane and signal to promote phagocytosis. Conversely, don''t‐eat‐me signals engage “anti‐phagocytic” receptors to suppress phagocytosis. We review the current knowledge of don''t‐eat‐me signaling in normal physiology and disease contexts where aberrant don''t‐eat‐me signaling contributes to pathology.