Behavioral changes of a juvenile gorilla after a transfer to a more naturalistic environment

Play behavior and stress-associated behavior of a captive juvenile gorilla were observed before and after his transfer to a larger and more natural environment. The gorilla was observed for 4 months after the transfer and at 1 and 4 years after the transfer. Throughout his first month in the new environment play decreased dramatically. Although play subsequently increased again 2 months and 1 year after the transfer, it never reached the levels of play in the old environment. Four years after the move his play had decreased again to the low level of his first month in the new environment. Two of his stress-associated behaviors, coprophagy and regurgitation/reingestion, decreased after the transfer. Self-clasping behavior increased initially in the new environment and remained at high levels 1 year after the move. Four years after the move his self-clasping behavior was significantly less than at 1 year after the move; however, it continued to be significantly greater than in the old environment. These findings suggest that larger and more natural environments do not necessarily result in more play activity or a reduction in all stress-associated behavior.     

Interactions among adult males and females before and after the death of the alpha male in a free-ranging troop of Japanese macaques

This report documents the social interactions among adult Japanese macaques in a free-ranging troop before and after the death of the alpha male, who died at 28 years of age after occupying his rank position for 17 years. The alpha male’s physical condition had deteriorated due to his extreme age for several months before his death. However, he maintained his alpha position. When he was attacked by the second-ranking adult male, he was rescued by the alpha female. Thereafter, whenever the second-ranking male approached him, the alpha male screamed for the alpha female’s support. The number of adult females to whom the alpha male maintained proximity during his last four months was similar to that during the same period of the previous year. Prior to his death, the alpha male was observed in close proximity to the alpha female much more frequently than was the second-ranking male. These results indicate that the alpha male maintained his position by depending on female support and particularly that of the alpha female.     

Knowledge from the Margins: W. Montague Cobb's Pioneering Research in Biocultural Anthropology

W. Montague Cobb became the first African American to receive a doctorate in physical anthropology in the United States (1932). He was also among the first U.S. physical anthropologists to demonstrate a commitment to biocultural integration and racial equality in his research. Nonetheless, very few European American physical anthropologists responded to or utilized Cobb's work. This continued after bioanthropology took on a more biocultural focus in the 1980s, some 50 years after Cobb's first studies of this kind. In this essay, I highlight Cobb's research and writing from the first decades of his career to illustrate his contribution to developing biocultural perspectives in physical anthropology. As a result, I hope to move Cobb from the margins to the center of discussions about methodological and theoretical developments in bioanthropology over the past 30 years.     

Advances in sedimentation velocity analysis.

On February 20, 1996, a workshop titled "Advances in Sedimentation Velocity Analysis" was held at the Biophysical Society meeting in Baltimore, Maryland, in honor of Professor David Yphantis's 65th birthday. Although he is known more for his work with sedimentation equilibrium, David's work on instrumentation and data analysis is the foundation for many of the recent advances in both equilibrium and velocity sedimentation. Over the years he has trained numerous graduate students, most of whom have gone on to emphasize the use of analytical ultracentrifugation to answer biochemical questions involving macromolecular assembly. His laboratory was one of very few that continued to use and develop analytical ultracentrifugation during its nadir in the 1970s and early 1980s. The rebirth and resurgence of analytical ultracentrifugation owe a great deal to his persistence and enthusiasm. These efforts have borne fruit. In the last five years, through his work at the National Analytical Ultracentrifugation Facility, he has helped train nearly 100 individuals in the delicate art of nonlinear least-squares analysis of equilibrium sedimentation data. Furthermore, the number of researchers using the ultracentrifuge and the number of papers published has skyrocketed in the last few years. This workshop, then, was a way to thank David for his years of devotion to analytical ultracentrifugation.     

Forty years of Mitchell's proton circuit: From little grey books to little grey cells

It is more than forty years since Peter Mitchell published his first 'little grey book' laying out his chemiosmotic hypothesis. Although ideas about the molecular mechanisms of the proton pumps have evolved considerably since then, his concept of 'coupling through proton circuits' remains remarkably prescient, and has provided the inspiration for the research careers of this author and many others. This review is a personal account of how the proton circuit has been followed from the little grey book, via brown fat and calcium transport to investigations into the life and death of neurons, Hercule Poirot's 'little grey cells'.     

An enigmatic disease in Gregor Mendel's life

The great value of the experimental and theoretical work of Gregor Mendel has been recognized more than thirty five years after its publication; in this article, we suggest that his personality has still to be rediscovered.     

Flora was His Interest and Prime Course of Study: A Botanical Career for W.E. Ricker Disappears

Synopsis Bill Ricker’s career went through many twists in his academic years. He had taken botany in his senior matriculation year at high school and he had collected over 100 species of flora before commencement of university life. At the conclusion of his first university year, he set out over the summer to collect a much larger sample of species, primarily from the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence ecoregion, to fulfil a requirement for a second year botany course (spermatophytes). He identified about 390 species, and some 254 were collected and pooled with those from previous years to make a final submission of 354 spermatophyte species. Field plant identification continued in each academic year thereafter, in concert with collections and identifications of aquatic invertebrates in his summer projects while under the employment of the Ontario Fisheries Research Laboratory. At the conclusion of his undergraduate years, Bill had taken more courses in botany than in zoology, and it was the summer employment that had really prepared him for postgraduate work in fisheries biology, which was ecologically oriented. When Bill left Ontario in the autumn of 1931 he had identified over 600 species of plants, excluding lower cryptogams, but including many aquatic species of higher plants. In western North America Bill’s botanical career began at Cultus Lake in 1931. He again studied all aspects of the basin while employed with the federal government, and from the work he assembled a Ph.D. thesis. At the time of thesis completion he had identified over 300 species of flora, including alpine plants at timberline, 1500 – 1800 m above lake level, and planktonic algae in its water column. In 1939, after more field fisheries work in the Fraser River basin of British Columbia, Bill accepted a position with the biological staff at Indiana University. In this period which concluded in 1950 he identified another 50 – 110 species of flora, all in the Carolinian ecoregion, and hitherto not seen by him. Considering all floral classes, Bill’s eastern North American repertoire had by then added up to 791 species, representative of more than 112 families of plants. Returning west for the remainder of his life, new identifications elsewhere added to his Cultus Lake list which slowly added up to about 1000 species for the west coastal region of North America. Flora was also identified elsewhere in the mid-continental region of North America, in Eurasia where the Abisko region of Lappland was a highlight, and in South America and New Zealand. Records of his botanical prowess, were kept primarily in his diaries, which began in 1923 and were maintained consistently to the end of 1934, and thereafter intermittently to 1949. The diaries reveal that his career as a budding botanist was subtly hijacked by a wily Professor W.H.K. Harkness in the rival Biology Department who out-manoeuvred Drs. R.B. Thompson and R.A. Sifton in the Botany Department. The former always managed to employ Bill in summer and keep him occupied in the department’s labs during the autumn and winter and spring, tying up any free time when the botanist had approached him on lab work. Certainly, the botany courses taken and which he excelled at were more appropriate for his aquatic ecological pursuits. Salesmanship won the day for the zoologists, but Bill was a life-long botanist regardless of whatever else he studied or managed throughout his professional career. The last days of his life had a botanical conclusion.     

Endocrine and developmental correlates of unilateral cryptorchidism in a wild baboon

A wild, group-living 8.5-year-old adult baboon was found to have only a single palpable testicle, the only case of cryptorchidism found among more than 200 males that we have examined. This young adult had an unusually small body size for his age, one that was comparable to that of immature males two years younger, and during maturation his body mass was increasingly small for his age. As a young adult, he also had very low testosterone concentrations, which, in combination with his small size, history of impaired growth, and the absence of any obvious scars around the scrotum, suggest that this is a case of spontaneous unilateral cryptorchidism of unknown cause rather than one of monorchidism arising from injury. Despite striking differences in his growth, adult body size, and testosterone levels, the male's cryptorchidism seemed to have relatively little effect on his social and sexual maturation in his natal group. Nonetheless, it may be related to his inability to gain entry into another group after dispersal.     

Brainstem structures responsible for paradoxical sleep onset and maintenance

This paper is dedicated to our mentor, Michel Jouvet who inspired our career and transmitted to us his passion for the study of the mechanisms responsible for paradoxical sleep genesis and also that of its still mysterious functions. We expose in the following the progresses in the knowledge in this field brought during 40 years by Michel Jouvet and his team and more recently by the members of a new CNRS laboratory in which we aim to pursue in the path opened by Michel Jouvet.     

Ikenna Nzimiro, Anthropologist, Sociologist and Iconoclast: On the Intellectual Legacies of a Radical Nationalist

Ikenna Nzimiro was politically and intellectually active from 1948 through the next 50 years in the most momentous phase of the African emergence, and from the mid 1960s on to the last burst of intellectual output in his declining years, very much engaged. Nzimiro’s three-phase series of works will come to be seen as a contribution to the intellectual history of post-colonial Africa from a non-Marxist standpoint. Along with Coser’s ‘Men of Ideas’, African radical Leftists in that peasant environment, were more like the ‘French Ideologues’ of the pre-Napoleonic (post-Voltaire) era, than the ?scientific Marxist-Leninists’ many knew they had to be, to claim the then self-avowed path. Interestingly was Nzimiro’s attack on the ‘Eurocentric notion of class’ – in the process blurring the distinction between class and status. He was much more than a distinguished analyst, taking his calling as a radical public sociologist and Marxist advocate seriously. Yet, shielded by his historic role as an anti colonialist freedom fighter, the power elite considered him, in ironic contradiction, as one of their own. In the end, he was a genuine nationalist in search of a radical, even if less than textbook-revolutionary, revamping of the moribund postcolonial nation his peers ran, and to which he was on principle, very much opposed.     

Replication origin plasticity, Taylor-made: inhibition vs recruitment of origins under conditions of replication stress

Among his many contributions to the field of chromosome structure and dynamics, J. Herbert Taylor showed that eukaryotic cells have many more potential replication origins than they use, which they can recruit when replication forks are slowed to complete S-phase in a timely fashion. Thirty years later, his findings raise an important but largely overlooked paradox. Although new data have confirmed his results, a larger body of data has revealed that slowing replication forks activates an S-phase checkpoint cascade that inhibits initiation from unfired origins until the stress is relieved. In this paper, in celebration of Taylor’s work published in Chromosoma 30 years ago, I draw attention to this paradox and offer some plausible models to explain how replication stress can both inhibit and recruit new origins. I hope that this essay will stimulate further experimentation into the basis of Taylor’s original findings.     

中国狗寄生虫名录

1.本文将中国已发现之狗寄生虫,列成名录。 2.迄目前止,中国已知之狗寄生虫自然感染者有原虫12种、线虫18种、吸虫34种、絛虫17种、蛭1种,蜱25种、螨4种、舌形虫2种、昆虫18种,计131种;实验感染者有线虫2种、棘头虫1种、吸虫13种,计16种,共147种。 3.上海发现的马氏斜睾吸虫Plagiorchis(M.)massino Petrov and Tichonov,1927及Alaria sp.均为国内狗寄生虫之新纪录。     

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.     

Cell volume regulation and ischemic tissue damage

Over years of friendly meetings with Professor Aharon Katzir-Katchalsky, many topics of mutual interest were discussed. He was the ideal person to come to with a problem. After being subjected to his critical, analytic mind, most research problems seemed simple, more clearly defined and understandable. His broad biologic and scientific background grew from an apparently insatiable interest in all natural phenomena. He generously shared his knowledge and imparted his wisdom with a share of his own infectious excitement. He was quick to sense the significance of understanding of biological processes to their practical application. For this reason it seems appropriate to relate the progress made in the understanding of cell volume regulation, which had been discussed on several occasions with him, to its possible significance as a factor in disease processes.Dr. Frega is a Fellow of the National Kidney Foundation, Inc., 1972–73.     

The physician,the parent and the retarded child

The problem of the retarded child and his parents is one confronting practicing physicians more and more frequently. Current estimates indicate that state hospital facilities for retarded persons in California are short nearly 6,000 beds. There are long waiting lists for available facilities. Many families are in desperate need of help. To advise a family to send their child to a State hospital is not a real solution nor one possible in the great majority of instances. The responsibility of the physician goes beyond this. Parents' groups have developed in the last few years and are making a real contribution to a resolution of the problem. Local community resources have increased and will further increase. A more accurate clinical understanding of the retarded child has been formed and his treatment needs more clearly defined. Physicians, parents, community and State agencies must work together to effect a coordinated program.     

Roderick K. Clayton: a life,and some personal recollections

Roderick K. Clayton passed away on October 23, 2011, at the age of 89, shortly after the plan for this dedicatory issue of Photosynthesis Research had been hatched. I had just written a lengthy letter to him to re-establish contact after a hiatus of 2 or 3 years, and to suggest that I visit him to talk about his life. It isn’t clear whether he saw the letter or not, but it was found at his home in Santa Rosa, California. Fortunately, Rod has written two memoirs for Photosynthesis Research that not only cover much of his research on reaction centers (Photosynth Res 73:63–71, 2002) but also provide a humorous and honest look at his personal life (Photosynth Res 19:207–224, 1988). I cannot hope to improve on these and will try, instead, to fill in some of the gaps that Rod’s own writing has left, and offer some of my own personal recollections over the more recent years.     

PLAINS FACTS

Abstract

A report of one of the first attempts to date an archaeological site in the United States by dendrochronological methods. Dr. Manesseh Cutler in 1888 attempted to establish the antiquity of the Marietta, Ohio earthworks by dating the largest trees which covered them. On the largest sound trees he counted from 300 to 400 concentric circles with the maximum age of 463 years. He concluded the works to have been deserted more than 900 years ago and if occupied for 100 years to have been erected more than 1000 years ago. By modern dating methods his estimate is conservative but is nonetheless based upon meticulous observations.     

Kurt Schaffner: from organic photochemistry to photobiology

Kurt Schaffner turned 80 this year. This perspective highlights his contributions to the research on the plant photoreceptor phytochrome, as many of the findings on structure and function of this molecule are tightly linked to the Max-Planck-Institute for Radiation Chemistry, where he was effective as Max-Planck director for more than twenty years.     

The importance of the “Gegenbaur school” for German morphology

Summary The school Carl Gegenbaur cultivated at Heidelberg (1873–1901) was critical to the history of German morphology in multiple ways. During and after his lifetime, the school carried out detailed comparative anatomical and embryological investigations in an evolutionary framework, thereby contributing substantially to the project of vertebrate evolutionary morphology. Its members also defended their mentor when his ideas came under attack. After his death, they labored to perpetuate his program and his memory in the increasingly unwelcoming environment of medical education and research. While the senior members of the school did this largely through institutional means-seeking to place Gegenbaur sympathizers in academic and editorial positions-its junior members absorbed some of the criticisms of the school to develop a modified, more functional approach to evolutionary morphology. The school thus kept the Gegenbaur program alive and active in the German-speaking lands for over fifty years. This paper is drawn largely from Nyhart (1995), esp. chapter 7 (supported by NSF award no. 8910873). Information not otherwise documented derives from this book.