Endogenous DNA Damage and Repair Enzymes—A short summary of the scientific achievements of Tomas Lindahl,Nobel Laureate in Chemistry 2015

Tomas Lindahl completed his medical studies at Karolinska Institute in 1970. Yet, his work has always been dedicated to unraveling fundamental mechanisms of DNA decay and DNA repair. His research is characterized with groundbreaking discoveries on the instability of our genome, the identification of novel DNA repair activities, the characterization of DNA repair pathways, and the association to diseases, throughout his 40 years of scientific career.     

Jure Piskur (1960—2014)

<正>Following a short struggle against an aggressive cancer,Prof.Jure Piskur(Fig.1),a professor of molecular genetics at Lund University(LU),Sweden,and the University of Nova Gorica(UNG),Slovenia,died in his home in Lund on 18 May 2014.He leaves behind his lifelong partner and wife,Judita Gartner,and their sons,Jan and Jure.Jure Piskur was born in 1960 in Slovenia,at that time part of Yugoslavia.Even when Jure’s research led him to many countries and the last quarter of a century to Scandinavia,he always kept close contact with his home country.He was proud to have participated in the Slovenian independence movement,which led to its international recognition as a sovereign state in     

Ke Hsin Kuo:A distinguished scientist and great mentor

Early years Professor Ke Hsin Kuo was bom in Beijing in 1923,and his childhood was spent in Harbin in northemstem China where his father worked as an engineer to build the local railroad.His early education was at best characterized by frequent disruptions,the first of which being the"9.18 Incidenf of 1931 when the Japanese Kwantung Army launched an assault in Shenyang(Mukden)on the local Chinese troops and quickly took control of all the Northeastern Provinces(Manchuria).He moved to Tianjin in the spring of 1936,where he continued his education by enrolling in the famous Nankai High School.However,his school life at Nankai was soon disrupted again by the eruption of full-scale war in July of 1937 after Japan attacked and occupied Peking.Together with his brothers,he fled to join his parents who had previously relocated to Chongqing.He studied in Chongqing for four more years to complete his high school education,during which classes were constantly being disrupted due to the frequent bombings of the city by Japanese airplanes.These bombings not only left him with long lasting memories of the war,but also bore him a permanent burn scar on his back as a result of a bomb that exploded just meters away from him.     

Professor Haowen Xu:The founder of exercise biochemistry in China

Professor Haowen Xu(许豪文,1935-2004) was a famous sports scientist and the founder of Exercise Biochemistry in China (Fig.1).He dedicated his life to the study of sports science and made tremendous contributions to the formation and growth of the field of Exercise Biochemistry in China.He was the first to use theories of exercise biochemistry and sports medicine to guide athletes' training and competition in China (Yu,2006).     

Profile of Dr. Shaojun Liu

正Dr. Shao-Jun Liu is an expert in fish genetic breeding, who was born in 1962 in Changsha, Hunan province, China. He received his B.S. in biology in 1986 and his M.S. in zoology in 1989 at Hunan Normal University. He obtained his Ph.D.in zoology in 2000 at Sun Yat-sen University. From 1998 to1999, he was supported by the China Scholarship Council to research fish molecular biology in France. In 2019, he was elected as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and currently, he is a Professor at Hunan Normal University and the Director of the State Key Laboratory of the Developmental Biology of Freshwater Fish.     

Profile of Dr. Hanzhong Wang

<正>Dr. Hanzhong Wang received his Bachelor’s degree in Huazhong Agricultural University in 1984. From 1984 to1990, he majored in crop genetics and breeding in Huazhong Agricultural University for his M.S. degree and Ph.D. degree(supervised by Prof. Houli Liu). From 1990 to 2015, he worked in the Oil Crops Research Institute (OCRI) of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Wuhan, Hubei,China, served as the Deputy Director of OCRI since 1994,     

From the new Editor-in-Chief

<正>It is both an honor and pleasure to have been appointed as the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Virologica Sinica from this volume.Professor Xinwen CHEN,who has dedicated to serve the journal as the Editor-in-Chief for15 years,concluded his term of service in the last volume.I would like to thank Prof.CHEN for his long-standing     

Ray Wu’s Golden Rules: How he achieved greatness in work, and in life

Overview When Ray Wu passed away on February 10, 2008, he was 79, working full-time in his lab at Cornell University, and was at or near the top of his long and noteworthy career. He had developed the first method for DNA sequencing and pioneered recombinant DNA technology. He had identified key genes related to stress tolerance in plants and was poised to apply these to boost crop yields of rice and other     

Profile of Dr. Shougong Zhang

正Dr. Shougong Zhang received his bachelor’s degree in agriculture (forestry) from Anhui Agricultural College, Hefei, China, in January 1982, and obtained his Ph.D. degree in agriculture (forest management) from Beijing Forestry University, Beijing, China, in 1990. From 1982 to 1986, he taught silviculture and forest mensuration in Anhui Agricultural University. From 1990 to 1997, he worked in the Research Institute of Forestry of the Chinese Academy of Forestry (CAF), Beijing, China, and served as the Deputy Director and then the Director of the Institute. He served as the Vice President of CAF in 1997, then the Executive Vice President in 2002, and has been the President since 2007.     

Applications - Some Influences of Engineering Ideas on Biology—— Being the fifth in a series of essays on the materials of nature

Ideas from engineering have helped the understanding of biological organisms for thousands of years. However, the mechanical aspects of biological materials and structures can, if properly interpreted and analysed, lead to a deeper understanding of the biology of organisms. Such an approach, although always current in some form, is nevertheless subject to the vagaries of fashion and the availability of analytical techniques. At present we are in a period of upturn. Areas of interest are deployable structures （applications in aerospace）, palaeontology （how little do we need to know in order to create a credible biosphere） and food science （we need a rational approach to the mechanics of food）.     

Hidde Ploegh: immunologist, journeyman. Interview by Nicole LeBrasseur

From the moment he finished his Ph.D., Hidde Ploegh has been a wanted man. Invited to join one institution after another, he always packed with him his keen interests in the immune system.     

Who was... Almroth Wright?

Sir Almroth Edward Wright CB MD FRS (1861-1947) was Britains first academic immunologist. He was qualified in both Arts and Medicine and commenced his professional life as a Physiologist, became Professor of Pathology and led the study of immunity to infectious diseases. He was often a controversial scientist and not always right in his views, hence his nickname 'Sir Almost Right'!     

Medical Care of the Alcoholic Patient

Alcoholism is an illness that constitutes a major health problem at all levels of society. The physician should accept his responsibility to prevent it and to care for the alcoholic. If he knows that one of his patients is drinking immoderately, he should warn him of the outlook. A patient''s acquired dependence on alcohol may be overt, or revealed only on examination for organic disease or emotional disturbance. The diagnosis may be accepted reluctantly, or denied despite positive evidence, but the patient should be persuaded to give up drinking. He may require psychiatric help or advice from a social worker. He may be so ill as to require treatment in hospital, and hospitals must recognize the urgency of such admissions. Discharge from hospital does not end treatment, for alcoholism is a chronic disease, requiring long-term planning, persistent follow-up and enduring sympathy by the physician, who must always be as available to his alcoholic patient as he is to his patient with diabetes, epilepsy or cardiac disease.     

Size-specific defensive structures in a horned weevil confirm a classic battle plan: avoid fights with larger opponents

A rigid sheath that extends deep into the prothorax of male Parisoschoenus expositus serves to receive the horns of opponents in battles over females. The male cannot use his own horn unless he receives his opponent's horn in his sheath. The length of a male's sheath is always approximately equal to the length of his own horns, so his body design is appropriate only for horn-locking battles with males whose horns are equal to or shorter than his own. Horn length and sheath length are dimorphic with respect to each other and to an indicator of body size. The switch points between morphs are very nearly the same for several relationships, so the different aspects of fighting morphology are tightly coordinated.     

A problem in the mathematical biophysics of interaction of two or more individuals which may be of interest in mathematical sociology

The behavior of an individual may be discussed in terms of a “satisfaction function”. An individual may be considered to always behave in such a way as to make his satisfaction function a maximum. The interaction of two individuals may consist in a cooperation in the production of any kind of objects of satisfaction. Those objects may be either material goods or anything else. The satisfaction of each individual is determined by his share in the total output as well as by the effort he makes. It is shown that for a prescribed method of sharing a behavior in which each individual attempts to maximize the total satisfaction of both individuals results in a greater output than a behavior in which each individual attempts to maximize his own satisfaction.     

Plant breeding and the vegetable industry

Beginning in prehistoric times, man has continuously sought to obtain vegetables of progressively greater productivity and better conformity to his ever increasing requirements. Today’s breeders must use the most modern knowledge and devices in efforts to keep abreast of new demands that grow out of our fast moving, mechanized, industrialized ways of working and living. Varieties are being modified more successfully than ever before to meet changing requirements, but always something more is desired.     

The Physician of the Future

The good physician of the future will need to master not only the basic and traditional medical skills but many new concepts and techniques as well. He will need to be, as always, a compassionate and intelligent man. If he is to retain his status as a healer in the eyes of his patients, he will have to be fully aware of what is happening in the social and technological environment, or he will run the risk of being relegated to the position of a high-grade technician.He will have new physical tools and new thinking tools to help him. To understand and use these, and also to understand the technical world of the future, he will need a sound knowledge of the physical sciences and some fluency in the language of modern mathematics.     

The Case of Paul Kammerer: Evolution and Experimentation in the Early 20th Century

To some, a misguided Lamarckian and a fraud, to others a martyr in the fight against Darwinism, the Viennese zoologist Paul Kammerer (1880–1926) remains one of the most controversial scientists of the early 20th century. Here his work is reconsidered in light of turn-of-the-century problems in evolutionary theory and experimental methodology, as seen from Kammerer’s perspective in Vienna. Kammerer emerges not as an opponent of Darwinism, but as one would-be modernizer of the 19th-century theory, which had included a role for the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Kammerer attempted a synthesis of Darwinism with genetics and the chromosome theory, while retaining the modifying effects of the environment as the main source of favorable variation, and he developed his program of experimentation to support it. Kammerer never had a regular university position, but worked at a private experimental laboratory, with sidelines as a teacher and a popular writer and lecturer. On the lecture circuit he held forth on the significance of his science for understanding and furthering cultural evolution and he satisfied his passion for the arts and performance. In his dual career as researcher and popularizer, he did not always follow academic convention. In the contentious and rapidly changing fields of heredity and evolution, some of his stances and practices, as well as his outsider status and part-Jewish background, aroused suspicion and set the stage for the scandal that ended his career and prompted his suicide.     

Responsibilities in elderly care: Mr Powell's narrative of duty and relations

In Western countries a considerable number of older people move to a residential home when their health declines. Institutionalization often results in increased dependence, inactivity and loss of identity or self-worth (dignity). This raises the moral question as to how older, institutionalized people can remain autonomous as far as continuing to live in line with their own values is concerned. Following Walker's meta-ethical framework on the assignment of responsibilities, we suggest that instead of directing all older people towards more autonomy in terms of independence, professional caregivers should listen to the life narrative of older people and attempt to find out how their personal identity, relations and values in life can be continued in the new setting. If mutual normative expectations between caregivers and older people are not carefully negotiated, it creates tension. This tension is illustrated by the narrative of Mr Powell, a retired successful public servant now living in a residential home. The narrative describes his current life, his need for help, his independent frame of mind, and his encounters with institutional and professional policies. Mr Powell sees himself as a man who has always cared for himself and others, and who still feels that he has to fulfil certain duties in life. Mr Powell's story shows that he is not always understood well by caregivers who respond from a one-sided view of autonomy as independence. This leads to misunderstanding and an underestimation of his need to be noticed and involved in the residential community.