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.     

Sherborn’s foraminiferal studies and their influence on the collections at the Natural History Museum,London

Sherborn’s work on the Foraminifera clearly provided the initial spark to compile the major indexes for which he is famous. Contact and help from famous early micropalaeontologists such as T. Rupert Jones and Fortescue William Millett led Sherborn to produce his Bibliography of Foraminifera and subsequently a two-part Index of Foraminiferal Genera and Species. Edward Heron-Allen, whose mentor was Millett, was subsequently inspired by the bibliography to attempt to acquire every publication listed. This remarkable collection of literature was donated to the British Museum (Natural History) in 1926 along with the foraminiferal collections Heron-Allen had mainly purchased from early micropalaeontologists. This donation forms the backbone of the current NHM micropalaeontological collections. The NHM collections contain a relatively small amount of foraminiferal material published by Sherborn from the London Clay, Kimmeridge Clay and Speeton Clay. Another smaller collection reflects his longer-term interest in the British Chalk following regular fieldwork with A. W. Rowe. Other collections relating to Sherborn’s early published work, particularly with T. R. Jones, are not present in the collections but these collections may have been sold or deposited elsewhere by his co-workers.     

Sex Education in the Schools— The Doctor's Role

Physicians may be asked to act as consultants in the development of sex education programs in the schools or to contribute as professional experts. As most medical libraries contain very little material on this subject, the doctor must turn to public libraries, which have books ranging from useless to excellent. These must be examined critically. In his role of healer, the doctor may minimize his roles of teacher and community model, and thereby lose many opportunities to communicate with members of other professions and thus extend health education beyond the limits of his practice.     

Ezenwa-Ohaeto: Chants and the Minstrel

Ezenwa-Ohaeto’s life encapsulates what the critic and novelist Isidore Okpewho has described as the “dignity of intellectual labour.” This becomes clear as we take into consideration, the range of his production as a poet, scholar, and occasional journalist. Ezenwa-Ohaeto’s work grapples with a vast range of areas of specifically Nigerian literature and culture in the 20th century, but in general with the literature of the postcolonial world as they have come to express distinct, recognizable moral and aesthetic values. His untimely death in 2005 therefore, has implication for the study of this literature, particularly because it marks the closure of the questic imagination of a poet/scholar whose interventions were critical in the formation of the critical values of contemporary African writing. This paper examines Ezenwa-Ohaeto’s contributions in the light of this, and puts in some perspective, aspects of his life and work, and its implications in the formal canon that he helped to shape and stabilize.     

Cytochrome c and superoxide: a reply

In his comments, W.H. Koppenol criticizes our article with respect to our conclusions and procedures. In this answer, we respond in detail to his objections, demonstrating that the approaches used are commonly accepted in the literature and that he makes a number of assumptions regarding our proposed mechanism that are not justified. Our study is thus a contribution to the ongoing investigation of the behavior of cytochrome c.     

Transformation in <Emphasis Type="Italic">Dang</Emphasis>-<Emphasis Type="Italic">ki</Emphasis> Healing: The Embodied Self and Perceived Legitimacy

Since spirit possession in mediumship and shamanism resembles psychotic symptoms, early researchers perceived spirit mediums and shamans as psychiatric patients whose psychopathology was culturally sanctioned. However, other researchers have not only challenged this assumption, but also proposed that spirit possession has transformative benefits. The idiom of spirit possession provides cultural meanings for spirit mediums and shamans to express and transform their personal experiences. The present case study focuses on dang-ki healing, a form of Chinese mediumship practiced in Singapore, in which a deity possesses a human (i.e., dang-ki) to offer aid to supplicants. This study seeks to explore whether involvement in dang-ki healing is transformative; and if so, how the dang-ki’s transformation is related to his self and the perceived legitimacy of his mediumship. At a shrine, I interviewed 20 participants, including a male dang-ki, 10 temple assistants, and nine clients. The results obtained were supportive of the therapeutic nature of spirit possession. First, there is a relationship between his self-transformation and the perceived legitimacy of his mediumship. As his clients and community have recognized his spirit possession as genuine, and the healing power of his possessing god, he is able to make use of mediumship as a means for spiritual development. Second, he has developed his spirituality by internalizing his god’s positive traits (e.g., compassion). Deities worshipped in dang-ki healing can be conceptualized as ideal selves who represent a wide range of positive traits and moral values of Chinese culture. Thus, the possession of a deity is the embodiment of an ideal self. Finally, the dang-ki’s transformation may run parallel to his god’s transformation. In Chinese religions, gods have to constantly develop their spirituality even though they are already gods. An understanding of the god’s spiritual development further sheds light on the dang-ki’s self-transformation.     

The World Health Organisation. Interview with the director general. Interview by Fiona Godlee.

Dr Hiroshi Nakajima was elected director general of WHO in 1988. Born in Japan, he trained as a psychiatrist before joining WHO in 1973. He was WHO''s regional director for the Western Pacific from 1979 to 1988. His term of office has been marked by criticism of his management style and allegations of misuse of WHO''s funds. I spoke to him at WHO''s headquarters in Geneva in July. I have presented the interview in the form of questions and answers. It would be misleading, however, not to make clear that in doing so I have transcribed conversation which was at times extremely difficult to follow. I feel that it is important to emphasise this in the context of an interview with an international leader, one of whose primary tasks must be to communicate his views on health to people across the world. The interviews gave me first hand experience of the difficulties in communication that staff, diplomats, and others, including Japanese leaders, have consistently commented on since Dr Nakajima took office.     

Still going strong: Leeuwenhoek at eighty

At age 80, Antony van Leeuwenhoek was a world-famous scientist who came from a prosperous Delft family with a heritage of public service. He continued that tradition by serving in paid municipal offices. Self-taught, he began his scientific career in his 40s, when he began making hundreds of tiny single-lens microscopes. Pioneering the use of now-common microscopic techniques, he was the first human to see microbes and microscopic structures in animals, plants, and minerals. Over 50 years, he wrote only letters, more than 300 of them, and published half of them himself. More than a hundred were published in translation in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions. Today, Leeuwenhoek is considered in the lesser rank of scientists and is not well known outside of his homeland. Recent archival research in Delft has contributed new information about his life that helps to contextualize his science, but much remains to be learned.     

Ami Boué (1794–1881), géoscientifique du XIXe siècle

Born on 16 March 1794 in Hamburg as a son of a Huguenot family whose members made big fortune as ship-owners, Ami Boué took his doctor’s degree in medicine in 1817 at the University of Edinburgh. During the following years, he completed his knowledge in the field of natural sciences, especially in Geoscience. In 1830, after having founded, with other scientists, among whom Constant Prévost and Gérard-Paul Deshayes, the Geological Society of France, in which Boué became the first president, he left Paris in 1835 and settled in Vienna. In 1836, 1837 and 1838 he crossed the Balkans. In his masterpiece La Turquie d’Europe (Paris, 1840, four volumes), he published the results of this research. In his study, Ami Boué intended to join the Austrian empire with Turkey by railways. Anyway, Boué’s works concerning the Balkans were fundamental for the future generations of Austrian geoscientists.     

Considerations of specimen damage for the transmission electron microscope, conventional versus scanning

We have previously shown that the transmission scanning electron microscope is capable of giving a resolving power equal to that of a conventional electron microscope, that it can be used to provide all the same contrast modes, but that it offers the advantage of new forms of contrast and can provide direct numerical outputs (Crewe &; Wall, 1970a,b; Crewe et al. 1970; Crewe, 1970).One question that we have not previously discussed is that of specimen damage, but in view of the similarity in performance between the two types of machine it has become important to do so.Recent remarks of Scherzer (1971) have been widely misinterpreted as indicating that the scanning microscope causes more specimen damage. However, he has confined his attention to the highest conceivable resolution of 0·4 Å, where we agree with his general conclusion (barring advances in scanning microscope technology). As we will demonstrate, the conclusion is not valid for normally attainable resolutions.     

“Realism” and “relevance” in gaming simulations

How useful are gaming simulations for the study of problems that interest human ecologists? Anatol Rapoport, a principal contributor to the development of game theory, raised this issue with the editors of Human Ecology,who in turn invited him to express his views in print. In brief, Dr. Rapoport calls into question the real-world applicability of gaming simulations, and explores its limitations. The educational function of simulation, he argues, should not be confused with the research aims of laboratory experimentation. The addition of “realistic” conditions in a gaming simulation merely complicates the experiment and reduces its theoretical significance. It does, however, have some pedagogical utility, whose implications have not yet been adequately taken into account. Dr. Rapoport considers this matter with reference to the problem of “social traps,” such as the “tragedy of the commons,” an issue which concerns many human-ecology researchers.     

Paul Ehrlich--in search of the magic bullet

In 2004, we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of Paul Ehrlich, considered the founder of immunology. His life and work can be divided into three creative periods: first, he developed histological staining, then he accomplished his ground-breaking work on immunology, and eventually invented chemotherapy. Paul Ehrlich can be perceived as a man whose success was not the consequence of a will to power, but of his substantial interest in science.     

From Darkness to Light

Not so long ago I happened to treat a Jewish eighth-grade gymnasium student brought to Petrograd from a province. It was fall and the following spring he was to take his qualifying examinations. The young man, who belonged to a prosperous family, had brilliant abilities and graduated from each class with excellent grades—what would you think his illness was? He suffered—in his own words—from the throes of creative writing. Days and nights he poured over a notebook with his compositions in search of the best form to express his thoughts. Only after applying incredible efforts could one tear him away from his note-books and send him to bed at five or six o'clock in the morning, and this happened on a daily basis. With each day his mental health grew worse. It was clear that the young man undermined his health by overstudying, and that he had reached the point where he needed to worry about his health, not his studies, because a serious mental illness was descending upon him. The young man was well liked by everyone in his high-school. The teachers considered him the best student, and having learned about his illness, they promised to petition to grant him the right to graduate from school without the final examination and with a certificate of excellent. But none of that helped. The young man could not relax, spending days and nights over his compositions and constantly tormenting himself with his "throes of creative writing."     

Dan Salah Tawfik (1955‐2021)—A giant of protein evolution

It was with great sorrow that we have learned of the untimely death of our friend, mentor, collaborator, and hero, Dan Tawfik. Danny was a true legend in the field of protein function and evolution. He had an incredibly creative mind and a breadth of knowledge—his interests spanned chemistry and engineering to genetics and evolution—that allowed him to see connections that the rest of us could not. More importantly, he made solving biochemical mysteries fun: He was passionate about his work, and his face lit up with joy whenever he talked about scientific topics that excited him (of which there were a lot). Conversations with Danny made us all smarter by osmosis.Danny’s own evolution in science began with physical organic chemistry and biochemistry. His PhD at the Weizmann Institute of Science, awarded in 1995, was on catalytic antibodies under the supervision of Zelig Eshhar and Michael Sela. It was followed by a highly productive period at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Protein Engineering, first as a postdoctoral fellow with Alan Fersht and Tony Kirby, and then as a senior researcher. Among his many achievements during his time in Cambridge was the demonstration that off‐the‐shelf proteins—the serum albumins—could rival the best catalytic antibodies in accelerating the Kemp elimination reaction due to non‐specific medium effects. This work was an early example of unexpected catalytic promiscuity, and it sowed the seed for Danny’s later fascination with “esoteric, niche enzymology” that went far beyond convenient model systems.It was also in Cambridge where Danny first realized the power of the then new field of directed evolution, both for biotechnology and for elucidating evolutionary processes. He and Andrew Griffiths pioneered emulsion‐based in vitro compartmentalization. The idea of controlling biochemical reactions in separate aqueous droplets inspired emulsion PCR and next‐generation sequencing technologies, whereas Danny used it to solve a long‐standing problem in directed evolution; in vitro selection techniques had always been good at identifying ligand‐binding proteins, but compartmentalization finally enabled the directed evolution of ultra‐fast catalysts.Danny returned to Israel in 2001 to join the faculty of the Weizmann Institute of Science where his scientific trajectory further evolved, diverged, and even “drifted”. He developed new methods for enzyme engineering and applied his evolutionary insights into de novo protein design efforts. In this context, Danny’s interest was always focused on how proteins evolve, particularly the connection between promiscuity, conformational diversity, and evolvability. His depth of understanding underpinned both applied research, such as engineering enzymes to detoxify nerve agents, and fundamental research, such as the evolution of enzymes from non‐catalytic scaffolds.Through it all, Danny retained his sense of joy and wonder at the “beautiful aspects of Nature’s chemistry”. This includes his discovery of an exquisite molecular specificity mechanism mediated by a single, short H‐bond that enables microbes to scavenge phosphate in arsenate‐rich environments. In recent years, he deciphered the biosynthetic mechanism of dimethyl sulfide, “the smell of the sea”, and homed in on the interplay between the evolution of an enzyme, its host organism, and environmental complexity. His insights into how the first proteins emerged caused tremendous excitement in the field. He established the roots of two common enzyme lineages, the Rossmann and P‐loop NTPases, as simple polypeptides, and suggested ornithine as the first cationic amino acid. Prior to his death, he published the results of another tour de force: evidence that the first organisms to utilize oxygen may have appeared much earlier than thought.His work impacted many research fields, and he won many significant awards. Most recently, Danny was awarded the EMET Prize for Art, Science and Culture (2020), informally dubbed “Israel’s Nobel Prize”. He was an active and valued member of the EMBO community, having been elected in 2009, and, until his passing, served on the Editorial Advisory Board of EMBO Reports.Danny was also a superb science communicator. Both his research articles and reviews are a joy to read. What stood out just as much as his brilliance was his personality, as he embodied the Yiddish concept of being a true “mensch”. Danny was humble, was down‐to‐earth, and treated all his colleagues—including the most junior members of our research teams—as equals. He championed the careers of others, both those who worked directly for him and those who were lucky enough to be “just” his friends and collaborators. He believed in us even when we did not believe in ourselves, and he was always there to answer questions both scientific and professional. While he loved to share his own ideas, he would be just as excited about ours. Despite his own busy schedule, he always found the time to help others. He was also excellent company, with a great, very dry, sense of humor, and endless interesting stories, including from his own colorful life. In the days after his untimely death, an often‐repeated phrase was “he was my best friend”. Danny’s former group members have gone on to be highly successful in both industry and academia, including more than 15 former doctoral and postdoctoral researchers who are now faculty. The network of researchers Danny has trained, mentored, or influenced is broad, and this legacy is testament to his qualities as both a scientist and a person.Danny was born in Jerusalem to an Iraqi Jewish family, and his Arabic Jewish identity was important to him. He believed strongly in coexistence and peace, and very much valued the Arabic part of his heritage. In his own words: “I am an Israeli, a Jew, an Arab, but first and foremost a human being”. He would often speak of the achievements of his children with immense pride. Danny also had a passion for being outdoors, especially climbing and hiking—when the best discussions were often to be had (Fig ​(Fig1).1). One of the easiest ways to persuade him to come for a seminar, a collaborative visit, or a conference was to have access to high‐quality climbing in the area. He passed away in a tragic rock‐climbing accident, doing what he loved most outside of science. Our thoughts are with his partner Ita and his children, and we join the much broader community of friends, collaborators, and colleagues whose hearts are broken by his sudden loss.Open in a separate windowFigure 1Dan Salah Tawfik (1955–2021)Photo courtesy of Prof. Joel Mackay, The University of Sydney.     

Mendel's experiments: A reinterpretation

Conclusion My conclusion is that Mendel deliberately, though without any real falsification, tried to suggest to his audience and readers an unlikely and substantially wrong reconstruction of the first and most important phase of his research. In my book I offer many reasons for this strange and surprising behavior,⁵³ but the main argument rests on the fact of linkage. Mendelian genetics cannot account for linkage because it was based on the idea of applying probability theory to the problem of species evolution. Central to the theory is the law of probability according to which the chance occurrence of a combination of independent events is the product of their separate probabilities. This is the common basis of Mendel's first and second laws, but this is why Mendel's second law on independent assortment is enunciated in too general a way. From Morgan's work we now know that characters may not always be independent if their genes are located very close one to the other on the same chromosome. And this was also the basis of Mendel's personal drama: he surely observed the effects of linkage, but he had no theoretical tools with which to explain it. So he presented his results in a logical structure consistent with the central idea of his theory. Had he described the real course of his experiments he would have had to admit that his law worked for only a few of the hundreds of Pisum characters — and it would thus have been considered more of an exception than a rule. This is why he insisted on the necessity of testing the law on other plants, and this is why in his second letter to Carl Nägeli he admits that the publication of his data was untimely and dangerous.⁵⁴.We can argue that already in 1866 Mendel was less confident that his so-called second law had the same general validity as the first — and that later he lost his confidence altogether. Contemporary testimony indicates that in the end he became as skeptical as all his contemporaries as to the scientific relevance of his theory.⁵⁵ But he was wrong. His research is in no way the fruit of methodological mistakes or forgery, and it remains a landmark in the history of science. He was only the victim of a strange destiny in which the use of probability theory was responsible, at the same time, for the strength and for the weakness of his theory. We must still consider him the father and founder of genetics.     

Moral Darwinism: Ethical evidence for the descent of man

Could an ethical theory ever play a substantial evidential role in a scientific argument for an empirical hypothesis? InThe Descent of Man, Darwin includes an extended discussion of the nature of human morality, and the ethical theory which he sketches is not simply developed as an interesting ramification of his theory of evolution, but is used as a key part of his evidence for human descent from animal ancestors. Darwin must rebut the argument that, because of our moral nature, humans are essentially different in kind from other animals and so had to have had a different origin. I trace his causal story of how the moral sense could develop out of social instincts by evolutionary mechanisms of group selection, and show that the form of Utilitarianism he proposes involves a radical reduction of the standard of value to the concept of biological fitness. I argue that this causal analysis, although a weakness from a normative standpoint, is a strength when judged for its intended purpose as part of an evidential argument to confirm the hypothesis of human descent.