For Francisco Varela: explorer of the phenomenal world

Francisco Varela was an innovative thinker and researcher as well as a pioneer in the present dialog between science and Buddhism. In this essay, I will first speak briefly about some of Francisco's contributions to the world at large and then relate a few vivid moments from my own interactions with him.     

Tribute to Tinbergen: Public Engagement in Ethology

Public engagement in research, called citizen science, has led to advances in a range of fields like astronomy, ornithology, and public health. While volunteers have been making and sharing observations according to protocols set by researchers in numerous disciplines, citizen science practices are less common in the field of animal behavior. We consider how citizen science might be used to address animal behavior questions at Tinbergen's four levels of analysis. We briefly review resources and methods for addressing technical issues surrounding volunteer participation—such as data quality—so that citizen science can make long‐standing contributions to the field of animal behavior.     

Engineering of molecular and cellular biocatalysts: selected contributions by James E. Bailey

James (Jay) E. Bailey was a pioneer in biotechnology and biochemical engineering. During his 30 years in academia he made seminal contributions to many fields of chemical engineering science, including catalysis and reaction engineering, bioprocess engineering, mathematical modeling of cellular processes, recombinant DNA technology, enzyme engineering, and metabolic engineering. This article celebrates some of his contributions to the engineering of molecular and cellular biocatalysts, and identifies the influence he had on current and future research in biotechnology.     

In Silico Analysis of Crop Science： Report on the First China-UK Workshop on Chips, Computers and Crops

A workshop on ＂Chips, Computers and Crops＂ was held in Hangzhou, China during September 26-27, 2008. The main objective of the workshop was to bring together China and UK scientists from mathematics, bioinformatics and plant molecular biology communities to exchange ideas, enhance awareness of each others＇ fields, explore synergisms and make recommendations on fruitful future directions in crop science. Here we describe the contributions to the workshop, and examine some conceptual issues that lie at the foundations and future of crop systems biology.     

Towards an Autopoietic Redefinition of Life

In this paper we develop the autopoietic approach to the definition of the living developed by Maturana and Varela in the Seventies. Starting from very simple observations concerning the phenomenology of life, we propose a reformulation of the autopoietic original definition of life which integrates some of the contemporary criticism to it. Our definitional proposal, aiming to stimulate the further development of the autopoietic approach, expresses what remains implicit in the definition of the living originally given by Maturana and Varela: life, as self-production, is a process of cognitive coupling with the environment.     

Vegetation patterns and their underlying processes: where are we now?

This Special Feature of the Journal of Vegetation Science contains ten contributions from the 56th Symposium of the International Association for Vegetation Science (IAVS), which was held in Tartu, Estonia, 26–30 Jun 2013, and focused on processes underlying vegetation patterns. These contributions give an overview of recent advances in vegetation science, with topics ranging from the introduction of new methods and ideas to comprehensive analysis of vegetation patterns on a global scale. The focus of these Special Feature contributions indicates that vegetation science is becoming more global, more complex and more interdisciplinary. It is likely that progress in methods and accumulation of data have led vegetation science into a ‘new era of discovery’.     

The Invisible Prevalence of Citizen Science in Global Research: Migratory Birds and Climate Change

Citizen science is a research practice that relies on public contributions of data. The strong recognition of its educational value combined with the need for novel methods to handle subsequent large and complex data sets raises the question: Is citizen science effective at science? A quantitative assessment of the contributions of citizen science for its core purpose – scientific research – is lacking. We examined the contribution of citizen science to a review paper by ornithologists in which they formulated ten central claims about the impact of climate change on avian migration. Citizen science was never explicitly mentioned in the review article. For each of the claims, these ornithologists scored their opinions about the amount of research effort invested in each claim and how strongly the claim was supported by evidence. This allowed us to also determine whether their trust in claims was, unwittingly or not, related to the degree to which the claims relied primarily on data generated by citizen scientists. We found that papers based on citizen science constituted between 24 and 77% of the references backing each claim, with no evidence of a mistrust of claims that relied heavily on citizen-science data. We reveal that many of these papers may not easily be recognized as drawing upon volunteer contributions, as the search terms “citizen science” and “volunteer” would have overlooked the majority of the studies that back the ten claims about birds and climate change. Our results suggest that the significance of citizen science to global research, an endeavor that is reliant on long-term information at large spatial scales, might be far greater than is readily perceived. To better understand and track the contributions of citizen science in the future, we urge researchers to use the keyword “citizen science” in papers that draw on efforts of non-professionals.     

The Nobel Prize as a Reward Mechanism in the Genomics Era: Anonymous Researchers,Visible Managers and the Ethics of Excellence

The Human Genome Project (HGP) is regarded by many as one of the major scientific achievements in recent science history, a large-scale endeavour that is changing the way in which biomedical research is done and expected, moreover, to yield considerable benefit for society. Thus, since the completion of the human genome sequencing effort, a debate has emerged over the question whether this effort merits to be awarded a Nobel Prize and if so, who should be the one(s) to receive it, as (according to current procedures) no more than three individuals can be selected. In this article, the HGP is taken as a case study to consider the ethical question to what extent it is still possible, in an era of big science, of large-scale consortia and global team work, to acknowledge and reward individual contributions to important breakthroughs in biomedical fields. Is it still viable to single out individuals for their decisive contributions in order to reward them in a fair and convincing way? Whereas the concept of the Nobel prize as such seems to reflect an archetypical view of scientists as solitary researchers who, at a certain point in their careers, make their one decisive discovery, this vision has proven to be problematic from the very outset. Already during the first decade of the Nobel era, Ivan Pavlov was denied the Prize several times before finally receiving it, on the basis of the argument that he had been active as a research manager (a designer and supervisor of research projects) rather than as a researcher himself. The question then is whether, in the case of the HGP, a research effort that involved the contributions of hundreds or even thousands of researchers worldwide, it is still possible to “individualise” the Prize? The “HGP Nobel Prize problem” is regarded as an exemplary issue in current research ethics, highlighting a number of quandaries and trends involved in contemporary life science research practices more broadly.     

Investment in plant research and development bears fruit in China

Recent rapid progress in plant science and biotechnology in China demonstrates that China’s stronger support for funding in plant research and development (R&D) has borne fruit. Chinese groups have contributed major advances in a range of fields, such as rice biology, plant hormone and developmental biology, genomics and evolution, plant genetics and epigenetics, as well as plant biotechnology. Strigolactone studies including those identifying its receptor and dissecting its complex structure and signaling are representative of the recent researches from China at the forefront of the field. These advances are attributable in large part to interdisciplinary studies among scientists from plant science, chemistry, bioinformatics, structural biology, and agronomy. The platforms provided by national facilities facilitate this collaboration. As well, efficient restructuring of the top–down organization of state programs and free exploration of scientists’ interests have accelerated achievements by Chinese researchers. Here, we provide a general outline of China’s progress in plant R&D to highlight fields in which Chinese research has made significant contributions.     

Putting together the pieces of polio: how Dorothy Horstmann helped solve the puzzle

Dr. Dorothy Horstmann, epidemiologist, virologist, clinician, and educator, was the first woman appointed as a professor at the Yale School of Medicine. Horstmann made significant contributions to the fields of public health and virology, her most notable being the demonstration that poliovirus reached the central nervous system via the bloodstream, upsetting conventional wisdom and paving the way for polio vaccines. In 1961, she was appointed a professor at Yale School of Medicine, and in 1969, she became the first woman at Yale to receive an endowed chair, which was named in honor of her mentor, Dr. John Rodman Paul. In this review, the major scientific contributions of Dr. Dorothy Horstmann will be highlighted from her more than 50-year tenure at Yale School of Medicine.     

You say you want an evolution? A role for scientists in science education

We conducted a national survey of likely U.S. voters to examine acceptance of evolution, attitudes toward science and scientists, and opportunities for promoting science education. Most respondents accepted that life evolved, many accepted that it evolved through natural processes, and more favored teaching evolution than creationism or intelligent design in science classes. The majority ranked developing medicines and curing diseases as the most important contributions of science to society, and they found promoting understanding of evolutionary science's contribution to medicine to be a convincing reason to teach evolution. Respondents viewed scientists, teachers, and medical professionals favorably, and most were interested in hearing from these groups about science, including evolution. These data suggest that the scientific community has an important role to play in encouraging public support for science education.     

Towards a science of informed matter

Over the last couple of decades, a call has begun to resound in a number of distinct fields of inquiry for a reattachment of form to matter, for an understanding of 'information' as inherently embodied, or, as Jean-Marie Lehn calls it, for a "science of informed matter." We hear this call most clearly in chemistry, in cognitive science, in molecular computation, and in robotics-all fields looking to biological processes to ground a new epistemology. The departure from the values of a more traditional epistemological culture can be seen most clearly in changing representations of biological development. Where for many years now, biological discourse has accepted a sharp distinction (borrowed directly from classical computer science) between information and matter, software and hardware, data and program, encoding and enactment, a new discourse has now begun to emerge in which these distinctions have little meaning. Perhaps ironically, much of this shift depends on drawing inspiration from just those biological processes which the discourse of disembodied information was intended to describe.     

Skin field formation: morphogenetic events

This chapter is mostly a review of the pioneering work of the Philippe Sengel school in Grenoble carried out in the late sixties and the seventies. The questions raised concerning the morphogenesis of feather tracts were approached by means of microsurgery on chick embryos. P. Sengel and his wife M. Kieny had the feeling that proteins synthesized by the neural tube were required for the formation of feather fields. It was my pleasure to carry on the story from the beginning. Although some clarifications concerning this morphogenesis have been contributed by my group and by a few other laboratories interested in this subject, the most important contributions to recent research have been the elucidation of the nature of the required messages, which will be explored further in other papers in this Issue.     

A Multifaceted Approach to Ichnology

Trace fossils link paleontology and sedimentology in ways that most body fossils cannot achieve. A multifaceted approach to ichnology helps to bridge the gap the biologic and geologic standpoints, to connect different levels of analysis (conceptual framework, explanatory schemata and applications), and to reconcile dichotomic views (e.g., adaptationist vs. interactionist approaches, time's arrow vs, time's cycle perspectives) by integrating the multiple aspects of the science of animal-substrate interactions. In this context, ichnologic investigations provide important links among numerous different fields. Analysis of specific ichnofaunas using this integrated approach may result in important and meaningful contributions to our understanding of paleoecology, sedimentology, sequence stratigraphy, reservoir characterization, biostratigraphy, evolutionary paleoecology, paleoceanography, and paleoclimatology.     

Applied ethology

Behavioural knowledge is essential in dealing with animal problems that result from our exploitation of other animals, competition between ourselves and other species, and in relation to the spread of disease. The science of ethology contributes methods, theories and facts to the solution of such problems in which the ethologist has an important role to play, usuall in co-operation with spoeciealists in other disciplines. These applications of ethology are illustrated in this review by eamining specific examples in the fields of productivity and welfare, and pest control. In particular, ethological contributions to the design of improved housing systems for pigs, and in dealing with the expanding population of herring gulls in Bratian, are described.     

The Forgotten Promise of Thiamin: Merck, Caltech Biologists, and Plant Hormones in a 1930s Biotechnology Project

The physiology of plant hormones was one of the most dynamic fields in experimental biology in the 1930s, and an important part of T. H. Morgan's influential life science division at the California Institute of Technology. I describe one episode of plant physiology research at the institution in which faculty member James Bonner discovered that the B vitamin thiamin is a plant growth regulator, and then worked in close collaboration with the Merck pharmaceutical firm to develop it as a growth-boosting agrichemical. This episode allows one to draw continuities between certain fields of life science in the United States circa 1940 and the biotechnology industry today, and also foregrounds a number of similarities between plant physiology of the late 1930s and the molecular biology of the period. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Palaeontology and Evolutionary Developmental Biology: A Science of the Nineteenth and Twenty–first Centuries

A wind of change has swept through palaeontology in the past few decades. Contrast Sir Peter Medawar’s dismissive: ‘palaeontology is a particularly undemanding branch of science’ (as recalled by John Maynard Smith in Sabbagh 1999, p. 158) with ‘Palaeontology: grasping the opportunities in the science of the twenty–first century’, the title of a contribution to a special issue of Geobios by the Cambridge palaeontologist, Simon Conway Morris (1998a). The winds of change have come partly from palaeontologists seeking to broaden the impact of their studies and partly from biologists (neontologists) realizing the contributions that palaeontology can make to their disciplines. Consequently, impressions of past life preserved in stone are coming alive. Fossils are being described and analyzed using new tools and languages as the static fossil record becomes a record of transitions in patterns that can be explained and related to biological, ecological, climatic and tectonic changes. The latest addition is evolutionary developmental biology, or ‘evo–devo’, whose language provides a new basis upon which to interpret anatomical change, both materially and mechanistically. In this review I examine the major contributions made by palaeontology, how palaeontology has been linked to evolution and to embryology in the past, and how links with evo–devo have enlivened and will continue to enliven both palaeontology and evo–devo. Closer links between the two fields should illuminate important unresolved issues related to the origin of the metazoans (e.g. Why is there a conflict between molecular clocks and the fossil record in timing the metazoan radiation; were Precambrian metazoan ancestors similar to extant larvae or to miniature adults?) and to diversification of the metazoans (e.g. How do developmental constraints bias the direction of evolution; how do microevolutionary developmental processes relate to macroevolutionary changes?).     

关爱解剖学教师生命，远离肿瘤

解剖学是重要的基础医学学科之一。由于解剖学教师常年接触福尔马林,长期在弥散有甲醛的环境中工作,这类人群恶性肿瘤发病率明显高于正常人群。关爱这一特殊战线上默默奉献的的生命,让他们远离肿瘤是我们需要重视的问题。     

Parasitoids, predators and PCR: the use of diagnostic molecular markers in biological control of Arthropods

Abstract:  The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) revolutionized the field of diagnostics, and today it has routine applications in medical, veterinary, forensic and botanical sciences. The fields of biological control and insect pest management have generally been slow to adopt PCR-based diagnostics in comparison with other fields of science. However, there has been increasing interest in the use of molecular diagnostic tools in arthropod biological control. In applied entomology, molecular techniques have generally been used for insect identification and systematics; however, PCR-based techniques are increasingly becoming recognized as valuable tools in ecological studies. Here, we review research that has used PCR-based techniques for parasitoid and predator/prey identification and detection, and place these studies in the context of their contributions to biological control of arthropods. The status and future directions of diagnostic molecular markers in applied entomology and insect pest management are also discussed.