Contribution of late Professor T. C. Tung to the experimental embryology of Amphioxus

Professor T. C. Tung (Fig. 1) was a prominent experimental embryologist in China. He was born in Jin County, Zhejiang Province, China in 1902. After he obtained his Bachelor's degree from the Department of Biology, Fudan University, Shanghai in 1927, he was appointed as a teaching assistant in that department until he moved to Belgium in 1930. He studied as a graduate student in Professors A. Brachet and A. M. Dalcq's laboratory at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium and obtained his Doctor of Science degree there in 1934. During that period, he made two short working visits to the Institute of Marine Biology in France and took one training course at Cambridge University (UK). In 1934, he was invited to return to China as a Full Professor to teach at several Chinese universities, (Shandong University in Qingdao, Shandong Province; the National University in Nanjing; and Fudan University in Shanghai). He spent 1 year at Yale University (USA) between 1948 and 1949 as an invited scientist in a joint research project and finally returned to China in 1949. He was Chairman of the Department of Zoology, Shandong University in Qingdao (1949-1952), Vice-President of Shandong University (1952-1960), Director of the Marine Biological Institute, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Qingdao (1949-1958), Director of the Institute of Oceanology (CAS) in Qingdao (1959-1966), Director of the Institute of Zoology (CAS) in Beijing (1960-1962), member of CAS since 1955, Vice-Chairman of the Biological and Geographical Division of CAS (1955-1958), Chairman of the Biological Division of CAS (1959-1979) and Vice-President of CAS in Beijing (1978-1979). In spite of his administrative duties, he spent most of his life conducting bench work in his laboratories at the Institutes of Oceanology and Zoology, CAS, respectively, until he passed away in March 1979. Professor Tung's main research interest was with classic experimental studies on the determination of the egg axis and symmetry planes of fertilized eggs, early differentiation and organizing substances of egg cytoplasm, induction between embryonic cells and cytoplasm in embryogenesis, immunological studies on nuclear transplanted eggs, and cell fusion etc., in several types of animals. He conducted his experiments on a number of invertebrates (ascidians and Amphioxus) and vertebrates (fish and amphibians) by means of very skillful microsurgical operations and the nuclear transplantation method. Among these topics, his studies on the organization and developmental potency of Amphioxus eggs were unique. His important contribution to this research field involved not only establishing a practical method for collecting and using this rare animal for experimental purposes, but also clarifying controversy about the nature and early development of its eggs. He also provided conclusive evidence to determine its evolutionary position between invertebrates and vertebrates. The present article briefly reviews the main results obtained by Professor Tung and his colleagues on Amphioxus. Although their original articles were written both in Chinese and English, many international readers may not even know those original works because they were only published in scientific journals inside China from the 1950s. Comments and discussion on the experimental results of Amphioxus research by Tung's group and those from other earlier authors are also included.     

Q & A. [interview

Elaine and Gary Ostrander spent their youth in New Jersey and New York before heading to Nebraska for their teen years and eventually Washington State for High School and college, as their father moved around in library administration. Elaine was an undergraduate at the University of Washington, a graduate student at the Oregon Health Sciences University and a postdoc with James Wang at Harvard, studying DNA supercoiling. She next went to Berkeley, where she began the canine genome project, initiating the meiotic linkage map and working on human chromosome 21 at the Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. In 1993 she moved to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center where she is now a Member of the Divisions of Clinical Research and Human Biology. She is also an Affiliate Professor of Genome Sciences and Biology at the University of Washington, and heads the Program in Genetics at the Hutchinson Center. Gary completed his undergraduate degree in Biology at Seattle University, a M.S. degree at Illinois State University and a Ph.D at the University of Washington in Ocean and Fisheries Science. He went on to be a postdoc in the Department of Pathology at the University of Washington Medical School while being mentored by Senitroh Hakomori of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Eric Holmes of the Pacific Northwest Research Foundation. His work focused on using novel aspects of the biology of fishes to address fundamental questions about cancer. He subsequently held both faculty and administrative positions at Oklahoma State University. Since 1996, he has been at the Johns Hopkins University, where he currently holds academic appointments in the Departments of Biology and Comparative Medicine and is the Associate Provost for Research.     

Q & A. Carl R. Woese. [interview

Carl R. Woese was born and raised in Syracuse, New York. His undergraduate training was at Amherst College (AB 1950) and graduate work at Yale University (PhD 1953). He is currently the Stanley O. Ikenberry University Professor and Center for Advanced Study Professor of Microbiology at the University of Illinois (Champaign-Urbana), where he has been for the past forty years. He was trained as a biophysicist and molecular biologist. He views himself as a molecular biologist in search of Biology. Consequently, his career has been devoted to using molecular methods to approach evolutionary problems. His most notable accomplishments have been determining the universal phylogenetic tree, through molecular sequence analysis, and the discovery of the Archaea, the so-called ‘third form’ of life. For these he has received numerous awards, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Award, the Leeuwenhoek Medal 1990 (Netherlands Royal Academy), the Waksman Award (National Academy of Science USA), and the Crafoord Prize (Swedish Royal Academy). At present he works on the evolution of cellular organization.     

Q & A

Gregory A. Petsko is Gyula and Katica Tauber Professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry and Director of the Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center at Brandeis University. He did his undergraduate work at Princeton and his graduate work as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. He held faculty positions at Wayne State University School of Medicine and MIT before moving to Brandeis in 1990. A structural biologist, he is best known for his work, together with his colleague Dagmar Ringe, on the structural basis of enzyme catalytic power and the role of protein dynamics in protein function. He writes a regular opinion column for the journal Genome Biology.     

怀念伍献文所长

1985年4月3日,我们敬爱的老所长、我国鱼类学和水生生物学的奠基人之一、著名的动物学家伍献文教授安详地离开了人世。伍献文教授的一生是为发展中华民族文化科学事业而奋斗的一生,他的历史业绩将永远为人们所缅怀。       

Q & A. Philip Ingham

Philip Ingham grew up in Liverpool and graduated from Cambridge University in 1977. He did his D.Phil in Developmental Genetics at Sussex University and postdoctoral work in Strasbourg, France before joining the laboratory of David Ish-Horowicz at the ICRF Mill Hill Laboratories. Here he applied the emerging technique of tissue in situ hybridisation to the analysis of the Drosophila segmentation genes. After a short spell at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, he rejoined the ICRF as a Research Scientist at the Developmental Biology Unit in Oxford. His group pioneered the analysis of the Hedgehog signalling pathway in Drosophila and in collaboration with the labs of Andy McMahon and Cliff Tabin at Harvard University, discovered the Hedgehog gene family in vertebrates. In 1996 he was appointed Professor of Developmental Genetics at the University of Sheffield where he has established the Centre for Developmental Genetics.     

Potential of adenovirus as a vector for sustained gene expression

Inder Verma received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel, in 1971, and was a postdoctoral fellow (with David Baltimore) in the Department of Biology, Massachussetts Institute of Technology. He is currently American Cancer Society Professor of Molecular Biology, Chair of the Laboratory of Genetics at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Biology, University of California at San Diego. Inder Verma is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA). He is a member of the editorial boards of The Journal of Gene Medicine, Journal of Virology and Gene, and serves on several other scientific advisory boards. His major fields of interest are molecular analysis of oncoproteins, and suppressor genes, gene therapy involving retroviral, adenoviral, AAV vectors, and generation of novel lentiviral vectors. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An interview with Dr. Frank Slack on his highly cited paper published in Cell Cycle

Frank Slack received his B.Sc from the University of Cape Town in South Africa, before completing his Ph.D in molecular biology at Tufts University School of Medicine. He started work on microRNAs as a postdoctoral fellow in Gary Ruvkun’s laboratory at Harvard Medical School, where he co-discovered the second known microRNA, let-7. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at Yale University. The Slack laboratory studies the roles of microRNAs and their targets in development, disease and aging.     

A preliminary biography of Armand de Ricqlès (1938–), the great synthesizer of bone histology

Armand de Ricqlès has had a long, successful career. From his start as an Assistant in the University of Paris in 1961, he defended his doctoral thesis in 1963, became Maître-Assistant (Assistant Professor) in 1970 (tenured 1971), defended his “doctorat d’état” (habilitation thesis) in 1973, was nominated Professor in the University Paris 7, was promoted to first class (Full Professor) in 1987, and was finally nominated to the prestigious chair “Biologie Historique et Évolutionnisme” (Historical and Evolutionary Biology) of the Collège de France in 1996. He lectured on a wide range of topics, especially in comparative and evolutionary biology, and assumed important administrative responsibilities, including responsibility of various master's programs, leadership of the team “Formations squelettiques” (1973–2002; till Professor Jacques Castanet took over leadership of the team), involvement in various committees, and in organizing scientific meetings. He served on several editorial committees and was co-editor of the “Annales des Sciences Naturelles”, as well as co-editor-in-chief of the “Comptes Rendus Palevol”. His scientific research always emphasized bone histology, especially paleohistology, but he also made contributions to systematic paleontology, phylogenetics, history of paleontology, and biological nomenclature, in decreasing order of importance. He has so far published over 100 scientific papers and 120 semi-popular papers.     

Proteomics data mining

Marc Wilkins completed his undergraduate and doctoral studies at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. During his doctoral studies, he defined the concept of the proteome and coined the term. After postdoctoral studies in Geneva, Switzerland, during which he co-edited the first book on proteomics, he returned to Australia, where he cofounded the company Proteome Systems. More recently, Marc took a position as Professor of Systems Biology at the University of New South Wales. He has established and directs the NSW Systems Biology Initiative, and is currently researching the role that protein post-translational modifications play in the regulation of protein-interaction networks.     

Philip Cohen

Philip Cohen trained at University College London and, after postdoctoral research at the University of Washington, joined the University of Dundee Scotland, in 1971, where he has worked ever since. He is a Royal Society Research Professor and Director of the Medical Research Council Protein Phosphorylation Unit. His main contributions have been in the area of protein phosphorylation and its role in cell regulation and human disease. In 1998, he was knighted for his contributions to biochemistry and the development of Life Sciences at Dundee.     

Bacterial rhodopsins: evolution of a mechanistic model for the ion pumps

Walther Stoeckenius received a MD degree at the University of Hamburg, Germany in 1950. After 18 months of clinical work as an intern, he began postdoctoral work on the development of pox viruses at the Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg using mainly electron microscopy techniques. After two years he moved as Assistant Professor to the Department of Pathology at the University of Hamburg and became Docent for Pathology in 1958. In addition to teaching and routine pathology work, he continued to use electron microscopy to explore the fine structure of cells and developed an interpretation of the triple-layered appearance of membranes in electron micrographs in terms of molecular structure and the chemistry of osmium tetroxide fixation. In 1959 he obtained a position as Research Associate in Keith Porter's laboratory at Rockefeller University. This was changed after a few months to Assistant Professor and he stayed there, later as Associate Professor, for eight years. The work on membrane structure continued, and a model was developed that described the membrane as a lipid bilayer with embedded protein domains. In efforts to isolate such domains, the purple membrane and bacteriorhodopsin were discovered. In 1966, the lure of California became irresistible and Dr. Stoeckenius accepted a professorship at the University of California at San Francisco. The work on bacteriorhodopsin continued there with the emphasis changing from electron microscopy to spectroscopy and biochemical techniques. He is now Professor Emeritus there in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics and the Cardiovascular Research Institute.     

John Wakeley discusses theoretical population genetics

John R. Wakeley is Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Biology at the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University (http://www.oeb.harvard.edu/). His research is theoretical population genetics and molecular evolution, with a focus on the analysis of DNA sequence data, with particular interest in models of population subdivision and the divergence of populations and species. Prof. Wakeley develops statistical models to study genetic and demographic components in the evolution of subpopulations within species. Born in Berkeley, CA, USA, Wakeley obtained a BS and MS in Biology from Stanford University in 1989; he then went on to do a PhD in Integrative Biology from the University of California, Berkeley (1994). Following this, he went to the National Institute of Genetics in Mishima, Japan (1994–1995), then on to do an NIH postdoc at Rutgers University (1995–1998) and moved to Harvard in 1998.     

Shigeo Yamanouchi (1876–1973): A noted Japanese phycologist

Dr Shigeo Yamanouchi was born in Yamagata Prefecture and completed his secondary education at Tokyo Higher Normal School (THNS) where he was also a professor until 1904. In 1905, he went to the University of Chicago in the USA and earned a PhD in Botany in 1907. He is best noted for his excellent research on the cytology and life histories of the marine algae Polysiphonia, Fucus, Cutleria, Aglaozonia and Zanardinia, published between 1906 and 1921 while he was associated with the University of Chicago. He also described the freshwater green alga Hydrodictyon africanum. In 1910, he returned to THNS as a Professor and wrote several botanical textbooks, receiving his DSc degree in 1911 and traveling in England and the USA as an advisor for the Japanese Ministry of Education during 1911–1913. For much of the time between 1920 and 1942 he remained in the USA, returning to Japan following the advent of World War II, During his later life, he was in obscurity, and sadly there is very little recorded of his activities in the post-war years. He died in Tokyo on 2 February 1973 at the age of 96.     

The manzanar project: Towards a solution to poverty, hunger, environmental pollution, and global warming through sea water aquaculture and silviculture in deserts

Summary Dr. Gordon Sato is a former Editor-in-Chief of In Vitro Cellular and Developmental Biology, President of the Tissue Culture Association (now Society for In Vitro Biology), and Director of the W. Alton Jones Cell Science Center (now Adirondack Biomedical Center). He began pilot experiments on the Manzanar Project at test sites in the Salton Sea while a Professor of Biology at the University of California, San Diego and continued the project in the laboratory at the Cell Center in Lake Placid, NY and at Eritrean test sites during their war of independence. Since 1994, he spends up to 10 mo. per yr in Eritrea where he directs the Manzanar Project and trains young Eritrean scientists in the field in the area of what he refers to as “low-tech biotech.” The name of the Manzanar Project was inspired by the camp in California where Dr. Sato and his family were interned during World War II.—The Editor     

A Conversation About Health Care Reform

Professor Victor R. Fuchs is the Henry J. Kaiser Jr Professor at Stanford (California) University, where he applies economic analysis to social problems of national concern, with special emphasis on health and medical care. He holds joint appointments in the Economics Department and the School of Medicine''s Department of Health Research and Policy. Professor Fuchs is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association and a member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He was the first economist to receive the Distinguished Investigator Award of the Association for Health Services Research and has also received the Baxter Foundation Health Services Research Prize. Professor Fuchs is president-elect of the American Economic Association. His latest book, The Future of Health Policy, was published by Harvard University Press in 1993.The following edited conversation between Professor Fuchs and Linda Hawes Clever, MD, Editor of the journal, took place on April 8, 1994.     

纪念戴芳澜教授诞辰九十周年

戴芳澜教授(1893.5.4—1973.1.3)是我国真菌学的创始人,也是我国植物病理学的主要奠基人之一。他为祖国培养了大量人才。为纪念他的光辉业绩,值戴教授诞辰九十周年、逝世十周年之际,特发表他的一篇评论性论文;戴教授的主要著作目录;俞大绂、陈鸿逵、周家炽、裘维蕃、相望年等教授的怀念性文章和他一生中各时期的照片两版,以资纪念。     

How do babies know their friends and foes?

The study of infant social cognition is the study of how human infants acquire information about people. By examining infants’ sensory abilities and the stimulus characteristics of people, research can determine what information is available to infants from their social world. We can then consider what social environments are appropriate for infants of different ages. This paper examines the sociocognitive competencies of human infants during the first 6 months of their lives and asks how these competencies are functional in the daily social ecology of the human infant. Select examples of research with other species are used to illustrate how the adaptive significance of sociocognitive abilities could be more fruitfully explored in studies of human infancy. Lonnie R. Sherrod is Vice President for Program at the William T. Grant Foundation. Formerly, he was Assistant Dean at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research and before that, Staff Associate at the Social Science Research Council. He received a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Yale University in 1978, an M.A. in Biology from the University of Rochester in 1974; and a B.A. in Zoology and Psychology from Duke University in 1972. He has taught at New York University and the New School and has published numerous articles and edited volumes on infant social cognition, on adolescence, and on child development from a life-span and biosocial perspective. Examples includeInfant Social Cognition (1981), edited with Michael Lamb;The Life Course and Human Development: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (1986), edited with Aage B. Sorensen and Franz E. Weinert; and “Changes in Children’s Social Lives and the Development of Social Understanding” authored with Judith Dunn (1988), in E.M. Hetherington, M. Perlmutter, and R. Lerner (eds).,Child Development in Life-Span Perspective.     

Improving the performance of I/O-intensive applications on clusters of workstations

Load balancing in a workstation-based cluster system has been investigated extensively, mainly focusing on the effective usage of global CPU and memory resources. However, if a significant portion of applications running in the system is I/O-intensive, traditional load balancing policies can cause system performance to decrease substantially. In this paper, two I/O-aware load-balancing schemes, referred to as IOCM and WAL-PM, are presented to improve the overall performance of a cluster system with a general and practical workload including I/O activities. The proposed schemes dynamically detect I/O load imbalance of nodes in a cluster, and determine whether to migrate some I/O load from overloaded nodes to other less- or under-loaded nodes. The current running jobs are eligible to be migrated in WAL-PM only if overall performance improves. Besides balancing I/O load, the scheme judiciously takes into account both CPU and memory load sharing in the system, thereby maintaining the same level of performance as existing schemes when I/O load is low or well balanced. Extensive trace-driven simulations for both synthetic and real I/O-intensive applications show that: (1) Compared with existing schemes that only consider CPU and memory, the proposed schemes improve the performance with respect to mean slowdown by up to a factor of 20; (2) When compared to the existing approaches that only consider I/O with non-preemptive job migrations, the proposed schemes achieve improvements in mean slowdown by up to a factor of 10; (3) Under CPU-memory intensive workloads, our scheme improves the performance over the existing approaches that only consider I/O by up to 47.5%. Xiao Qin received the BSc and MSc 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. His research interests include parallel and distributed systems, storage systems, real-time computing, performance evaluation, and fault-tolerance. He served on program committees of international conferences like CLUSTER, ICPP, and IPCCC. During 2000–2001, he was on the editorial board of The IEEE Distributed System Online. He is a member of the IEEE. 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 Associate Professor and Vice Chair in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. His present research interests are computer architecture, parallel/distributed computing, computer storage systems and parallel I/O, performance evaluation, middleware, networking, and computational engineering. He has over 70 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 and ACM SIGCOMM. Yifeng Zhu received the B.E. degree in Electrical Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 1998 and the M.S. degree in computer science from University of Nebraska Lincoln (UNL) in 2002. Currently he is working towards his Ph.D. degree in the department of computer science and engineering at UNL. His main fields of research interests are parallel I/O, networked storage, parallel scheduling, and cluster computing. He is a student member of IEEE. 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 early 1999 he returned to UNL where he has coordinated 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 parallel simulation and distributed systems.