Evolutionary biology and feminism

Evolutionary biology and feminism share a variety of philosophical and practical concerns. I have tried to describe how a perspective from both evolutionary biology and feminism can accelerate the achievement of goals for both feminists and evolutionary biologists. In an early section of this paper I discuss the importance of variation to the disciplines of evolutionary biology and feminism. In the section entitled “Control of Female Reproduction” I demonstrate how insight provided by participation in life as woman and also as a feminist suggests testable hypotheses about the evolution of social behavior—hypotheses that are applicable to our investigations of the evolution of social behavior in nonhuman animals. In the section on “Deceit, Self-deception, and Patriarchal Reversals” I have overtly conceded that evolutionary biology, a scientific discipline, also represents a human cultural practice that, like other human cultural practices, may in parts and at times be characterized by deceit and self-deception. In the section on “Femininity” I have indicated how questions cast and answered and hypotheses tested from an evolutionary perspective can serve women and men struggling with sexist oppression. Patricia Adair Gowaty studies the evolution of social behavior, particularly mating systems and sex allocation, primarily in birds. She is most well-known for her long-term studies of eastern bluebirds, which began in 1977 and are on-going. She was an undergraduate at H. Sophie Newcomb College of Tulane University (1963–1967). In the late sixties and early seventies, while employed at the Bronx Zoo (New York Zoological Society), she belonged to a feminist “consciousness-raising” group. She started graduate school in 1974 at the University of Georgia and received her Ph.D. from Clemson University (1980). She had a postdoctoral position at the University of Oklahoma (1982–1983) and a visiting faculty position at Cornell University through the Visiting Professorships for Women NSF program (1983–1984) before returning to her bluebird study sites at Clemson in 1985. She has supported herself and her research efforts throughout her academic career on a series of awards and grants. She is currently (1990–1995) supported by a Research Scientist Development Award from The National Institute of Mental Health.     

Buchbesprechungen

Abstract

“Tracing and treating mineral disorders in dairy cattle“. Herausgegeben vom Komitee für Mineral-stoffernährung Den Haag, erschienen bei Centre for Agricultural Publishing and Documentation Wageningen 1973. 61 Seiten, 10 Tabellen, Format: 19,4 × 13,4 cm, kartoniert, Preis: 8,50 Dfl. Reviewed by H. Bergner.

D. Giesecke und H. K. Henderickx: Biologie und Biochemie der mikrobiellen Verdauung. Erschienen in der BLV Verlagsgesellschaft München, Bern, Wien, 1973. 373 Seiten, 123 Abbildungen (Fotos, Zeichnungen) und über 100 Tabellen. Format: 17 ×24,4 cm, Leinen, Preis: 198,- DM. Reviewed by H. Bergner.

The Rowett Research Institute — Annual Report of Studies in Animal Nutrition and Allied Sciences. Vol. 29 1973, 146 Seiten, Broschur, Preis: 80 p. bzw. $ 2.00 (USA) Internationale Standard-Buch-Nr.: 0902297074. Reviewed by A. Püschner.     

Red deer farming

An experimental deer farm has been in operation on heather dominant upland in Kincardineshire since 1970 where the Rowett Research Institute and the Hill Farming Research Organisation have been exploring the possibility of intensifying venison production from such land. Six years' experience indicates that a tame foundation stock of red deer is a feasible basis for making good use of such land for the production of lean deer meat.     

Inbreeding,eugenics, and Helen Dean King (1869–1955)

Helen Dean King’s scientific work focused on inbreeding using experimental data collected from standardized laboratory rats to elucidate problems in human heredity. The meticulous care with which she carried on her inbreeding experiments assured that her results were dependable and her theoretical explanations credible. By using her nearly homozygous rats as desired commodities, she also was granted access to venues and people otherwise unavailable to her as a woman. King’s scientific career was made possible through her life experiences. She earned a doctorate from Bryn Mawr College under Thomas Hunt Morgan and spent a productive career at the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology in Philadelphia where she had access to the experimental subjects which made her career possible. In this paper I examine King’s work on inbreeding, her participation in the debates over eugenics, her position at the Wistar Institute, her status as a woman working with mostly male scientists, and her involvement with popular science.     

Social roles,prestige, and health risk

Selection pressure from health risk is hypothesized to have shaped adaptations motivating individuals to attempt to become valued by other individuals by generously and recurrently providing beneficial goods and/or services to them because this strategy encouraged beneficiaries to provide costly health care to their benefactors when the latter were sick or injured. Additionally, adaptations are hypothesized to have co-evolved that motivate individuals to attend to and value those who recurrently provide them with important benefits so they are willing in turn to provide costly care when a valued person is disabled or in dire need. Individuals in egalitarian foraging bands can provide a number of valuable benefits, such as defense, diplomacy, food, healing, information, technical skill, or trading savvy. We therefore expect that humans have evolved psychological mechanisms motivating the pursuit and cultivation of a difficult-to-replace social role based on the provisioning of a benefit that confers a fitness advantage on its recipients. We call this phenomenon social niche specialization. One such niche that has been well-documented is meat-sharing. Here we present cross-cultural evidence that individuals cultivate two other niches, information and tool production, that serve (among other things) to buffer health risk. Michelle Scalise Sugiyama studied at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she received her Ph.D. in literature in 1997. She is currently an affiliate of the English Department and the Institute for Cognitive and Decision Sciences at the University of Oregon, Eugene, and also directs the Cognitive Cultural Studies branch of the Human Universals Project at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology. Her work attempts to understand narrative and other art behaviors in terms of the cognitive architecture that underlies them and the ancestral conditions under which they emerged; published results can be found in Human Nature, Evolution and Human Behavior, Philosophy and Literature, and Mosaic. Lawrence Sugiyama holds a joint appointment in the Anthropology Department and the Institute for Cognitive and Decision Sciences at the University of Oregon, Eugene. He did his graduate work at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he cofounded the Human Universals Project and the Ecuadorian Oriente Research Station, which he now directs. His research among the Shiwiar, Yora, and Yanomamo examines health risk, cooperation, reciprocity, subsistence, and life history patterns among contemporary forager-horticulturalists, with the ultimate goal of furthering our understanding of pat selection pressures and the psychology evolved to surmount them. Published results can be found in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, and Adaptation and Human Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective.     

An Autonomic Reservoir Framework for the Stochastic Optimization of Well Placement

The adequate location of wells in oil and environmental applications has a significant economic impact on reservoir management. However, the determination of optimal well locations is both challenging and computationally expensive. The overall goal of this research is to use the emerging Grid infrastructure to realize an autonomic self-optimizing reservoir framework. In this paper, we present a policy-driven peer-to-peer Grid middleware substrate to enable the use of the Simultaneous Perturbation Stochastic Approximation (SPSA) optimization algorithm, coupled with the Integrated Parallel Accurate Reservoir Simulator (IPARS) and an economic model to find the optimal solution for the well placement problem. Wolfgang Bangerth is a postdoctoral research fellow at both the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, and the Institute for Geophyics, at the University of Texas at Austin. He obtained his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of Heidelberg, Germany in 2002. He is the project leader for the deal.II finite element library (http://www.dealii.org). Wolfgang is a member of SIAM, AAAS, and ACM. Hector Klie obtained his Ph.D. degree in Computational Science and Engineering at Rice University, 1996, he completed his Master and undergraduate degrees in Computer Science at the Simon Bolivar University, Venezuela in 1991 and 1989, respectively. Hector Klie's main research interests are in the development of efficient parallel linear and nonlinear solvers and optimization algorithms for large-scale transport and flow of porous media problems. He currently holds the position of Associate Director and Senior Research Associate in the Center for Subsurface Modeling at the Institute of Computational Science and Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Klie is current member of SIAM, SPE and SEG. Vincent Matossian obtained a Masters in applied physics from the French Université Pierre et Marie Curie. Vincent is currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree in distributed systems at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers University under the guidance of Manish Parashar. His research interests include information discovery and ad-hoc communication paradigms in decentralized systems. Manish Parashar is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers University, where he also is director of the Applied Software Systems Laboratory. He received a BE degree in Electronics and Telecommunications from Bombay University, India and MS and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Engineering from Syracuse University. He has received the Rutgers Board of Trustees Award for Excellence in Research (2004–2005), NSF CAREER Award (1999) and the Enrico Fermi Scholarship from Argonne National Laboratory (1996). His research interests include autonomic computing, parallel & distributed computing (including peer-to-peer and Grid computing), scientific computing, software engineering. He is a senior member of IEEE, a member of the IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitor Program (2004–2007), and a member of ACM. Mary Fanett Wheeler obtained her Ph.D. at Rice University in 1971. Her primary research interest is in the numerical solutions of partial differential systems with applications to flow in porous media, geomechanics, surface flow, and parallel computation. Her numerical work includes formulation, analysis and implementation of finite-difference/finite-element discretization schemes for nonlinear, coupled PDE's as well as domain decomposition iterative solution methods. She has directed the Center for Subsurface Modeling, The University of Texas at Austin, since its creation in 1990. Dr. Wheeler is recepient of the Ernest and Virginia Cockrell Chair in Engineering and is Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering & Engineering Mechanics and in the Department of Petroleum & Geosystems Engineering of The University of Texas     

In memoriam Dr Marlene Deluca

The untimely death of Marlene DeLuca in 1987 has deprived the scientific community of an outstanding expert on bioluminescence. Earlier in that year she was honoured as thethirty-ninth recipient of the Otto Mitchell Smith Lectureship Award at Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, Oklahoma. On 20 March 1987 Dr DeLuca presented a scientific lecture entitled ‘Firefly Luciferase-Mechanism of Action, Cloning, and Expression of the Active Enzyme’ and a popular lecture at the banquet that evening entitled ‘Light and Life’. She was selected for her excellence in research, her oral presentation ability, and her personableness. Marlene was the first woman so honoured. To honour Dr Otto M. Smith the Alpha Delta Chapter of Phi Lambda Upsilon, a national chemistry honorary organization, inaugurated The Otto Mitchell Smith Lectureship in 1948 at Oklahoma State University. Former awardees include Nobel Laureates H. C. Brown, Stanford Moore, and Arthur Kornberg and the following prominent biochemists/molecular biologists: Robert A. Alberty, University of Wisconsin; Daniel E. Koshland, Brookhaven National Laboratory; Sol Spiegelman, University of Illinois; Carl Djerassi, Stanford University; and John T. Edsall, Harvard University. The lectureship honours Dr O. M. Smith, who was Director of the Research Foundation, professor, and Head of the Departments of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. As a tribute to Dr DeLuca's outstanding contibution to bioluminescence we reproduce here the edited text of her Otto Mitchell Smith Lectureship and a selected bibliography of her work on firefly bioluminescence.     

Population genetical study of natural hybridization betweenPapio anubis andP. hamadryas

The natural hybridization betweenPapio anubis andP. hamadryas in central Ethiopia was studied from a population genetical perspective. Studies were made using electrophoretical blood protein variations as markers in order to clarify the genetic relationship between them. A total of 563 samples from ten populations which were collected in the field studies with a socioecologist in 1976 and 1979 were examined for 34 blood protein loci. Ten of the 34 loci showed polymorphism. The Tf, PA-2 and Es were found to be effective for discriminating between the anubis and hamadryas. Genetic variability, hybridization rate, genetic distance, migration rates and correlations between genetical and morphological and between genetical and behavioral indices were computed and analyzed. The results of the present genetic survey revealed that most of the populations from which the author collected blood samples were more or less hybridized. The Nei's (1975) genetic distance between the two species was estimated to be 0.0679 at most. As this value is too small to consider these species as real biological species, it is supposed that the natural hybrid zone is fairly wide and still expanding now. This work was supported in part by Grants in aid for scientific research (Overseas scientific research, 1975) and of the Overseas Special Research Programme of the Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University in 1978 by Ministry of Education, Science and Culture.     

A molecular,isozyme and morphological map of the barley (Hordeum vulgare) genome

A map of the barley genome consisting of 295 loci was constructed. These loci include 152 cDNA restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP), 114 genomic DNA RFLP, 14 random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD), five isozyme, two morphological, one disease resistance and seven specific amplicon polymorphism (SAP) markers. The RFLP-identified loci include 63 that were detected using cloned known function genes as probes. The map covers 1,250 centiMorgans (cM) with a 4.2 cM average distance between markers. The genetic lengths of the chromosomes range from 124 to 223 cM and are in approximate agreement with their physical lengths. The centromeres were localized to within a few markers on all of the barley chromosomes except chromosome 5. Telomeric regions were mapped for the short (plus) arms of chromosomes 1, 2 and 3 and the long (minus) arm of chromosomes 7.This research was also supported by other members of the NABGMP: K. Kasha, Department of Crop Science, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada NIG 2W1; W. Kim, Agriculture Canada Research Station, 195 Dafoe Road, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada R3T 2M9; A. Laroche, Agriculture Canada Research Station, P.O. Box 3000 Main, Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada,TU 4B1; S. Molnar, Plant Research Centre Agriculture Canada, Central Experimental farm, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1A 0C6; G. Scoles, Department of Crop Science, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada S7N OWOThis research is part of the North American Barley Genome Mapping Project, R. A. Nilan and K. Kasha, Coordinator and Associate Coordinator, respectively Permanent address: Department of Plant Genetics, NI Vavilov Institute of General Genetics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow     

Intracranial arachnoid cysts in a chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes)

An intracranial arachnoid cyst was detected in a 32-year-old, 44.6-kg, female chimpanzee at the Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT) were performed and the cognitive studies in which she participated were reviewed. MRI revealed that the cyst was present in the chimpanzee’s right occipital convexity, and was located in close proximity to the posterior horn of the right lateral ventricle without ventriculomegaly. CT confirmed the presence of the cyst and no apparent signs indicating previous skull fractures were found. The thickness of the mandible was asymmetrical, whereas the temporomandibular joints and dentition were symmetrical. She showed no abnormalities in various cognitive studies since she was 3 years old, except a different behavioural pattern during a recent study, indicating a possible visual field defect. Detailed cognitive studies, long-term observation of her physical condition and follow-up MRI will be continued.     

Does observed fertility maximize fitness among New Mexican men?

Our objective is to test an optimality model of human fertility that specifies the behavioral requirements for fitness maximization in order (a) to determine whether current behavior does maximize fitness and, if not, (b) to use the specific nature of the behavioral deviations from fitness maximization towards the development of models of evolved proximate mechanisms that may have maximized fitness in the past but lead to deviations under present conditions. To test the model we use data from a representative sample of 7,107 men living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, between 1990 and 1993. The model we test proposes that low fertility in modern settings maximizes number of grandchildren as a result of a trade-off between parental fertility and next generation fertility. Results do not show the optimization, although the data do reveal a trade-off between parental fertility and offspring education and income. We propose that two characteristics of modern economies have led to a period of sustained fertility reduction and to a corresponding lack of association between income and fertility. The first is the direct link between costs of investment and wage rates due to the forces of supply and demand for labor in competitive economies. The second is the increasing emphasis on cumulative knowledge, skills, and technologies in the production of resources. Together they produce historically novel conditions. These two features of modern economies may interact with evolved psychological and physiological mechanisms governing fertility and parental investment to produce behavior that maximizes the economic productivity of lineages at the expense of fitness. If cognitive processes evolved to track diminishing returns to parental investment and if physiological processes evolved to regulate fertility in response to nutritional state and patterns of breast feeding, we might expect non-adaptive responses when returns from parental investment do not diminish until extremely high levels are reached. With high economic payoffs from parental investment, people have begun to exercise cognitive regulation of fertility through contraception and family planning practices. Those cognitive processes maynot have evolved to handle fitness trade-offs between fertility and parental investment. A preliminary presentation of this data was published in R. I. M. Dunbar, ed.,Human Reproduction Decisions: Biological and Social Perspectives. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Support for the research project, “Male Fertility and Parenting in New Mexico,” began with two seed grants from the University of New Mexico’s Biomedical Research Grants Program, 1988 and 1989, and one from the University of New Mexico Research Allocations Committee, 1988. Further seed money as well as interim funding came from the William T. Grant Foundation (#89130589 and #91130501). The major support for the project came from the National Science Foundation from 1990 to 1993 (#BNS-9011723 and #DBS-911552). Both National Science Foundation grants included Research Experience for Undergraduates supplements. Hillard S. Kaplan is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. His earlier research and publications focused on food sharing, time allocation, parental investment, and reproductive strategies among Ache hunter-gatherers in Paraguay, Machiguenga and Piro forager-horticulturalists in Peru, and villagers of several ethnicities in Botswana. New research and theory concern fertility, parental investment, and mating strategies in developed and developing nations. This research formulates a new theory of reproductive decision-making and the demographic transition, integrating human capital and parental investment theory in a synthesis of economic and evolutionary approaches. Jane B. Lancaster is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. Her research and publications are on human reproductive biology and behavior, especially human parental investment; women’s reproductive biology of pregnancy, lactation, and child-spacing; and male fertility and investment in children. Current research with Hillard S. Kaplan is on male life history strategies among a large sample of men in New Mexico. She has coedited three books on human parental investment:School-Age Pregnancy and Parenthood (with B. Hamburg),Parenting across the Life Span (with J. Altmann, A. Rossi, and L. Sherrod), andOffspring Abuse and Neglect (with R. Gelles). She is scientific editor of a quarterly journal,Human Nature: An Interdisciplinary, Biosocial Perspective published by Aldine de Gruyter. She is also a council member of the newly formed Human Behavior and Evolution Society. John A. Bock is Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Epidemiology and Population Health at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, The Australian National University. His research focuses on the allocation of parental investment and the determinants of children’s activities, integrating aspects of economic and evolutionary theory. He has ongoing field research with Bantu and Bushmen agro-pastoralists and forager-horticulturalists in the Okavango Delta, Botswana. He is also collaborating with Lancaster and Kaplan on the determinants of progeny distribution and homosexuality among New Mexican men. Sara E. Johnson is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of New Mexico. Her major research trajectory focuses on trade-offs in life history characters. Her research experience includes participation in a study of variation in growth and development among children in a multi-ethnic community in the Okavango Delta, Botswana, in addition to her dissertation work on individual variation in growth and mortality among juvenile baboons. She is collaborating with Lancaster and Kaplan on the association between survival and fertility among Albuquerque men.     

Exploiting redundancy to boost performance in a RAID-10 style cluster-based file system

While aggregating the throughput of existing disks on cluster nodes is a cost-effective approach to alleviate the I/O bottleneck in cluster computing, this approach suffers from potential performance degradations due to contentions for shared resources on the same node between storage data processing and user task computation. This paper proposes to judiciously utilize the storage redundancy in the form of mirroring existed in a RAID-10 style file system to alleviate this performance degradation. More specifically, a heuristic scheduling algorithm is developed, motivated from the observations of a simple cluster configuration, to spatially schedule write operations on the nodes with less load among each mirroring pair. The duplication of modified data to the mirroring nodes is performed asynchronously in the background. The read performance is improved by two techniques: doubling the degree of parallelism and hot-spot skipping. A synthetic benchmark is used to evaluate these algorithms in a real cluster environment and the proposed algorithms are shown to be very effective in performance enhancement. Yifeng Zhu received his B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering in 1998 from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China; the M.S. and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from University of Nebraska – Lincoln in 2002 and 2005 respectively. He is an assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at University of Maine. His main research interests are cluster computing, grid computing, computer architecture and systems, and parallel I/O storage systems. Dr. Zhu is a Member of ACM, IEEE, the IEEE Computer Society, and the Francis Crowe Society. Hong Jiang received the B.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering in 1982 from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China; the M.A.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering in 1987 from the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada; and the PhD degree in Computer Science in 1991 from the Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA. Since August 1991 he has been at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA, where he is Professor and Vice Chair in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. His present research interests are computer architecture, parallel/distributed computing, cluster and Grid computing, computer storage systems and parallel I/O, performance evaluation, real-time systems, middleware, and distributed systems for distance education. He has over 100 publications in major journals and international Conferences in these areas and his research has been supported by NSF, DOD and the State of Nebraska. Dr. Jiang is a Member of ACM, the IEEE Computer Society, and the ACM SIGARCH. Xiao Qin received the BS and MS degrees in computer science from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 1992 and 1999, respectively. He received the PhD degree in computer science from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2004. Currently, he is an assistant professor in the department of computer science at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. He had served as a subject area editor of IEEE Distributed System Online (2000–2001). His research interests are in parallel and distributed systems, storage systems, real-time computing, performance evaluation, and fault-tolerance. He is a member of the IEEE. Dan Feng received the Ph.D degree from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China, in 1997. She is currently a professor of School of Computer, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China. She is the principal scientist of the the National Grand Fundamental Research 973 Program of China “Research on the organization and key technologies of the Storage System on the next generation Internet.” Her research interests include computer architecture, storage system, parallel I/O, massive storage and performance evaluation. David Swanson received a Ph.D. in physical (computational) chemistry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) in 1995, after which he worked as an NSF-NATO postdoctoral fellow at the Technical University of Wroclaw, Poland, in 1996, and subsequently as a National Research Council Research Associate at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, from 1997–1998. In 1999 he returned to UNL where he directs the Research Computing Facility and currently serves as an Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. The Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, and the State of Nebraska have supported his research in areas such as large-scale scientific simulation and distributed systems.     

It’s Not About You: A Simple Proposition for Improving Biology Education

THE Genetics Society of America’s Elizabeth W. Jones Award for Excellence in Education recognizes significant and sustained impact on genetics education. Consistent with her philosophy of linking research and education, the 2014 Awardee Robin Wright includes undergraduate students in all of her research. She seeks to teach how to think like and to actually be a biologist, working in teams and looking at real-world problems. She emphasizes a learner-centered model of classroom work that promotes and enhances lifelong skills, and has transformed biology education at the University of Minnesota through several efforts including developing the interactive, stimulating Foundations of Biology course sequence, encouraging active learning and open-ended research; supporting the construction of Active Learning Classrooms; and establishing Student Learning Outcomes, standards that measure biology education. She serves as founding editor-in-chief of CourseSource, focusing national effort to collect learner-centered, outcomes-based teaching resources in undergraduate biology.Open in a separate windowRobin Wright     

Effect of Alternaria solani culture filtrate on adventitious shoot regeneration in potato

Summary The effect of Alternaria solani culture filtrate on adventitious shoot regeneration from tuber discs was evaluated using five potato cultivars, which were selected based on their field reaction to Alternaria solani and which represented a range of disease reactions. The culture filtrate stimulated regeneration, a response that could prove to be very useful in the wider utilization of transformation and in vitro selection technology.Research conducted at the Scottish Crop Research Institute during a transfer of work of the senior author     

50 years ago The cautious recognition of the protein nature of some hormones

Professor Dorothea Raacke, Boston University, is well known for her research on protein hormones and on protein synthesis, starting at the University of California, Berkeley. She pioneered in studies of the function of ribosomes. More recently she has written extensively in the history of biology, and the lives of biologists.     

An interview with Olivia Gude about connecting school and community arts practice

ABSTRACT

Olivia Gude has a long and distinguished career as both a public artist and an art educator. She is currently the Angela Gregory Paterakis Professor and Chair of Art Education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where she works with graduate and undergraduate students to prepare for working as artist educators in school and community settings. Her scholarly work includes a number of articles and book chapters about art education and community art. Prof. Gude has worked as a community public artist for many years and has created over 30 large-scale mural and mosaic projects, working with intergenerational groups, teens, elders, and children. I interviewed Prof. Gude at the SAIC building in downtown Chicago to discuss how her school, university, and community art engagement as well as her work with the National Coalition for Core Arts Standards, might offer suggestions for transforming arts education for the twenty-first century and provide authentic connections between school and community. Prof. Gude discusses important enduring understandings and big ideas from the new Visual Arts National Core Arts Standards, the Spiral Workshop youth art and research project she created while at University of Illinois at Chicago, and how her experience as a community artist informs her work with students in classroom settings.     

Profiles of Pioneer Women Scientists: Katherine Esau

“Profiles of Pioneer Women Scientists: Katherine Esau” tells the story of a noted botanist, plant anatomist, and electron microscopist who was born in the Russian Ukraine (in 1898), forced to flee the Bolshevik Revolution with her family—her father a mayor of Ekaterinoslav under the Czar—to Germany, where she received a bachelor’s degree in agriculture, education she put to good use in America. Beginning in a sugarbeet field in Salinas, California, she progressed through the doctoral degree at the University of California at Davis (UC Davis) and there began her exceptional research on plant anatomy and plant viral diseases. Her textbookPlant Anatomy became known among college students as “Aunt Kitty’s Bible,” and all of her textbooks have gone into second, and some to third, editions. Transferring to the University of California at Santa Barbara (with its new Chancellor, V. I. Cheadle) only two years before retirement, she blossomed anew, producing some of her best work there and obtaining National Science Foundation support for a new electron microscope and other research funds through her 89th year. Katherine Esau started accruing awards and honors at a relatively early age (Faculty Research Lecturer at age 50, election to the National Academy of Sciences at 59) and has never stopped (the President’s Medal of Science at age 91, a UC Santa Barbara building named for her at age 93). It has been her good fortune to live to enjoy these honors. The short autobiography of her father, a truly enterprising engineer, is included here, as are the recollections of Celeste Turner Wright. Celeste, who arrived at UC Davis the same year as Katherine Esau, became an acclaimed poet, and chaired the English Department for many years. She has added a lively reminiscence of the days she and Katherine spent at UC Davis. The introduction to the book by one of Esau’s former graduate students, Ray Franklin Evert, himself a renowned plant pathologist, provides a heartfelt tribute to his greatly admired professor.     

Coevolution: Mathematical analysis of host-parasite interactions

An SIS epidemic transmitted by two similar strains of parasite acting on a host population of three genotypes which differ in their reaction to the disease is modelled and analyzed. Singular perturbation techniques are used to reduce the original system of nine differential equations to a coupled system of two equations describing the slowtime coevolution of gene frequency and parasite strain frequency.Karen Christine Beck died June 25, 1983 at home.Born February 8, 1952 in Madison, Wisconsin, She received a B.A. degree in 1974 from Luther College, Decorah, Iowa and a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1980 from the University of Iowa. Since that time she has been an instructor in the Mathematics Department at the University of Utah. She was to become an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas, Arlington, beginning Autumn, 1983. Dr. Beck's areas of specialization in mathematics were Mathematical Analysis and Mathematical Biology. She published numerous research articles that resolved various problems in these areas.     

Isolation of mutants of Aspergillus awamori with enhanced production of extracellular xylanase and β-xylosidase

Plate screening tests were designed for the selection and isolation of mutant strains of the fungus Aspergillus awamori CMI 142717 showing over-production and constitutive synthesis of xylanase and -xylosidase. Following mutation by N-methyl-N-nitro-N-nitrosoguanidine, nitrous acid and UV (254 nm), two generations of mutants were isolated and cultured in shake fiasks containing glucose, ball-milled oat straw or oat speit xylan as carbon source. Growth of a number of selected mutants in shake flask culture on medium containing oat spelt xylan produced the highest titres of xylanase and -xylosidase. Thus, xylanase producton by mutant AANTG43 was 132 U/ml when the Somogyl-Nelson (alkaline copper) method of measuring reducing sugar released was used, or 1160 U/ml using the dinitrosalicylic acid method of reducing sugar analysis. These values were 8-fold higher than those produced by the wild type. A 20-fold improvement in -xylosidase production was produced by mutant AANO19 (3.51 U/ml). The titres for these two enzyme activities are the highest recorded so far in the literature. Mutant AANTG43 also produced high levels of xylanase (49.8 U/ml) in submerged culture in a fermenter and showed a substantial improvement in the overall productivity of enzyme compared to the wild type strain.The authors are with the Rowett Research Institute, Bucksburn, Aberdeen AB2 9SB, UK.