Alice C. Evans: breaking barriers

Despite severe and persistent criticism of her research, Alice Evans persevered in her pioneering work on the bacterial contamination of milk, identifying the organism that caused undulant fever and demonstrating that drinking unpasteurized cow's milk could transmit the disease, undulant fever, to humans. The opprobrium that Alice Evans endured was unrelenting, even after her election as the first President of the Society of American Bacteriologists, (now the American Society for Microbiology), but she remained undeterred, a true heroine of American microbiology and a magnificent public health worker.     

马丁·约翰·埃文斯

基因剔除(又称基因打靶)技术是遗传学和分子生物学研究的常用技术之一,自上世纪80年代出现以来显示出巨大的应用潜力,基因剔除小鼠成为生命科学研究和药物开发必不可少的工具之一.     

Resilience thinking: Interview with Brian Walker

Summary   This interview with Brian Walker, chair of the research-based Resilience Alliance, outlines the main concepts and propositions behind 'resilience thinking' and touches on the importance of this paradigm for individuals and organizations involved in managing complex social-ecological systems. It refers to the origins, work and publications of the Resilience Alliance, listing and elaborating the key case studies used to illustrate the Alliance's main proposition that complex social-ecological systems do not behave in a predictable linear fashion. Rather, research indicates it is normal for complex systems to go through cycles of increasing and decreasing resilience and to have potential to shift, (in a self-organising way) to potentially undesirable states or entirely new systems if certain component variables are severely impacted by management. Such shifts can be novel and 'surprising', and are often not beneficial or desirable for societies. This is particularly the case where small-scale solutions push the problem upwards in a system, causing loss of resilience at a global scale. Predicting thresholds is therefore important to managers and is a key research focus for members of the Resilience Alliance who are currently building an accessible database to support decision-making in global natural resource management.     

Scripps Florida

A new division of The Scripps Research Institute that is dedicated to biomedical research and drug discovery is taking shape on the shores of southern Florida.