The international standard for teicoplanin.

An international standard for teicoplanin has been established on the basis of a collaborative study. There were five participating laboratories in five countries. The activity of the contents of each ampoule of the international standard for teicoplanin is defined as 51,550 IU of teicoplanin.     

The neuronal basis for consciousness.

Attempting to understand how the brain, as a whole, might be organized seems, for the first time, to be a serious topic of inquiry. One aspect of its neuronal organization that seems particularly central to global function is the rich thalamocortical interconnectivity, and most particularly the reciprocal nature of the thalamocortical neuronal loop function. Moreover, the interaction between the specific and non-specific thalamic loops suggests that rather than a gate into the brain, the thalamus represents a hub from which any site in the cortex can communicate with any other such site or sites. The goal of this paper is to explore the basic assumption that large-scale, temporal coincidence of specific and non-specific thalamic activity generates the functional states that characterize human cognition.     

The need for sublethal studies.

In problems of waste management, the preoccupation of the would-be manager is the means whereby waste may be released to the environment without impairing the health of the biota inhabiting the receiving waters. In such a situation, measurements based upon acute poisoning are unhelpful since they tell nothing of the impact that the much lower concentrations found at some distance from the waste source have upon the ability of the affected organisms to undertake the responses necessary to ensure survival and more particularly to reproduce successfully. Such responses can only be investigated with organisms not at the point of death, i.e. in truly sublethal studies.     

The case for reverse translation.

The theoretical and experimental evidence for a “reverse translation” mechanism in animal cells is reviewed. Mekler's (1967) theory is presented as the most likely means for reverse translation. This theory is shown to be consistent with the postulate of the “central dogma” that molecular information does not pass out of protein molecules once it has gotten in.The importance of nucleic acid changes in: (1) the immune response, (2) evolution, (3) cancer, (4) cell differentiation, and (5) learning in animal brains is mentioned and each topic is related to the reverse translation hypothesis. Because of the intense research effort in immunology, the experimental data which indicate an active role for antigen in antibody formation and the data indicating the importance of RNA in the immune response are dealt with more thoroughly.