Some Notes on David Nicholson's Contributions to Modelling Adsorption

Abstract

During his career David has built up a very large number of scientific contacts throughout the world. Many of these became friends and collaborators. Imperial College was, of course, a good place to start from: R.M. Barrer was from New Zealand and John Petropoulos from Greece. Subsequently, he collaborated with scientists from other European Union countries, especially from France and Germany as well as more researchers from Greece. He also made many contacts in the US. A very important example was the sabbatical he had with W.A. Steele at Penn State, where he made his first big incursion into intermolecular forces. He also had very useful exchanges of visits with K.E. Gubbins, which led to joint work. More recently he developed working relationships with scientists from Japan and from South Korea. The scientific value of these contacts may be gauged from the large number of his publications, which involve researchers from these countries as co-authors. However, I am sure the readiness with which overseas researchers participated was in part also due to the friendly and helpful manner with which David received them here.     

Impact of Admission and Cache Replacement Policies on Response Times of Jobs on Data Grids

Caching techniques have been used widely to improve the performance gaps of storage hierarchies in computing systems. Little is known about the impact of policies on the response times of jobs that access and process very large files in data grids, particularly when data and computations on the data have to be co-located on the same host. In data intensive applications that access large data files over wide area network environment, such as data-grids, the combination of policies for job servicing (or scheduling), caching and cache replacement can significantly impact the performance of grid jobs. We present preliminary results of a simulation study that combines an admission policy with a cache replacement policy when servicing jobs submitted to a storage resource manager.The results show that, in comparison to a first come first serve policy, the response times of jobs are significantly improved, for practical limits of disk cache sizes, when the jobs that are back-logged to access the same files are taken into consideration in scheduling the next file to be retrieved into the disk cache. Not only are the response times of jobs improved, but also the metric measures for caching policies, such as the hit ratio and the average cost per retrieval, are improved irrespective of the cache replacement policy used. Ekow Otoo is research staff scientist with the scientific data management group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley. He received his B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana and a post graduate diploma in Computer Science from the University of Ghana, Legon. In 1977, he received his M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne in Britain and his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from McGill University, Montreal, Canada in 1983. He joined the faculty of the School of Computer Science, Carleton University, in 1983 and from 1987 to 1999, he was a tenured faculty member of the School of Computer Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. He has served as research consultant to Bell Northern Research, Ottawa, Canada, and as a research project consultant to the GIS Division, Geomatics Canada, Natural Resources Canada, from 1990 to 1998. Ekow Otoo is a member of the ACM and IEEE. His research interests include database management systems, data structures and algorithms, parallel I/O for high performance computing, parallel and distributed computing. Doron Rotem is currently a senior staff scientist and a member of the Data Management group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. His research interests include Grid Computing, Workflow, Scientific Data Management and Paralled and Distributed Computing and Algorithms. He has published over 80 papers in international journals and conferences in these areas. Prior to that, Dr Rotem co-founded and served as a CTO of a startup company, called CommerceRoute, that made software products in the area of workflow and data integration and before that, he was an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Canada. Dr. Rotem holds a B.Sc degree in Mathematics and Statistics from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Arie Shoshani is a senior staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He joined LBNL in 1976. He heads the Scientific Data Management Group. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1969. From 1969 to 1976, he was a researcher at System Development Corporation, where he worked on the Network Control Program for the ARPAnet, distributed databases, database conversion, and natural language interfaces to data management systems. His current areas of work include data models, query languages, temporal data, statistical and scientific database management, storage management on tertiary storage, and grid storage middleware. Arie is also the director of a Scientific Data Management (SDM) Integrated Software Infrastructure Center (ISIC), one of seven centers selected by the SciDAC program at DOE in 2001. In this capacity, he is coordinating the work of collaborators from 4 DOE laboratories and 4 universities (see: http://sdmcenter.lbl.gov). Dr. Shoshani has published over 65 technical papers in refereed journals and conferences, chaired several workshops, conferences, and panels in database management; and served on numerous program committees for various database conferences. He also served as an associate editor for the ACM Transactions on Database Systems. He was elected a member of the VLDB Endowment Board, served as the Publication Board Chairperson for the VLDB Journal, and as the Vice-President of the VLDB Endowment. His home page is http://www.lbl.gov/arie.     

Sir Charles Edward Saunders, Dominion cerealist.

Charles Edward Saunders was born in London, Ontario, in 1867. His father, Sir William Saunders, was the first director of the Dominion Experimental Farms (1886-1911). Charles received his B.A. with honours in science from the University of Toronto in 1888 and his Ph.D. in chemistry from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1891. He attempted a career in music, his first love, from 1893 to 1902. With his father, Charles attended the 1902 International Conference on Plant Breeding and Hybridization in New York, where he learned of Mendel's theories of inheritance and their applicability to plant breeding. When he began work in 1903 in the Division of Cereal Breeding and Experimentation at the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa, he used the knowledge he had gained at that conference. It was Charles's goal to achieve "fixity" in the varieties that had been bred and released using phenotypic mass selection, prior to his tenure as Cerealist. He selected four heads from the wheat variety Markham and in the winter of 1904 he performed a "chewing test" to select for gluten elasticity and colour. Seeds from two heads were chosen, and seeds from one went on to produce the variety Marquis after extensive yield trials on the Prairies. Marquis was 7 to 10 days earlier than Red Fife, the standard bread wheat of the Prairies. The earliness and tremendous yield of Marquis wheat resulted in the rapid and successful settlement of the Great Plains and countless billions of dollars in revenue to Canada. By 1923, 90% of the spring wheat in Canada and 70% in the USA was Marquis. Charles continued as Dominion Cerealist until his retirement in 1922. He was knighted in 1934, and died in 1937.     

Advances in molecular mechanisms of neurological disorders. Abstracts of the 14th Meeting of the European Society for Neurochemistry. Warsaw,Poland, 1-4 June 2003

Stan Tu?ek was a neurochemist of international stature whose research encompassed the whole cholinergic field. His collaborations with eminent scientists in Canada, France, the UK and the USA gave him a truly global vision. During the time when contacts between scientists in Eastern Europe and the rest of the world were severely restricted for political reasons, Stan managed to facilitate such contacts, exemplified by the international symposium he organised in 1978 on ‘The Cholinergic Synapse’ in Western Bohemia, where many established cholinergists from the East and West were able to meet for the first time. He was an enthusiastic member of ESN Council, becoming our President in 1984. In 1986 he hosted a most successful meeting of the ESN in Prague at a time of the utmost political difficulty. It was typical of Stan's dedication and ability to work quietly behind the scenes that international political problems were overcome without fuss. As an acknowledged leader in neuroscience he is sorely missed by his many friends throughout the world.     

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.     

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.     

Direct physical formation of anatomical structures by cell traction forces. An interview with Albert Harris by Lev Beloussov

Albert Harris was educated at The Norfolk Academy, Norfolk, Virginia, USA (1961). He then earned a Batchelor of Arts Degree in Biology from Swarthmore College, in Pennsylvania, USA (1965), followed by a Ph.D. in Biology (1971) from Yale University, where his Dissertation Advisor was the great John Phillip Trinkaus. He held a Damon-Runyon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Cancer Research in 1970-72, under Michael Abercrombie, FRS, at the Strangeways Research Laboratory of Cambridge University, England. Then he accepted a position as Assistant Professor in the Zoology Department of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, N.C. USA. In 1977, he was promoted to Associate Professor of Zoology, and in 1983 was promoted to Full Professor of Biology. In Oct.-Nov. 1991 he was honored to be Distinguished Visiting Professor of Zoology at the University of California at Davis.     

Dysfunction of the ubiquitin–proteasome system in Parkinson's disease

Stan Tuček was a neurochemist of international stature whose research encompassed the whole cholinergic field. His collaborations with eminent scientists in Canada, France, the UK and the USA gave him a truly global vision. During the time when contacts between scientists in Eastern Europe and the rest of the world were severely restricted for political reasons, Stan managed to facilitate such contacts, exemplified by the international symposium he organised in 1978 on 'The Cholinergic Synapse' in Western Bohemia, where many established cholinergists from the East and West were able to meet for the first time. He was an enthusiastic member of ESN Council, becoming our President in 1984. In 1986 he hosted a most successful meeting of the ESN in Prague at a time of the utmost political difficulty. It was typical of Stan's dedication and ability to work quietly behind the scenes that international political problems were overcome without fuss. As an acknowledged leader in neuroscience he is sorely missed by his many friends throughout the world.     

A Concept of Educational Activity for Schoolchildren

About two years ago, on a cool Southern California day, Vasili Davydov addressed a group of social scientists at the University of California, San Diego. He began his talk with a paradox. He had come, he said, to tell us about educational activity. He promised to exhibit principles that promote educational activity, and applied programs deriving from those principles. Then he laughed. "But you'll never see educational activity in the school," he said, and laughed again.     

Dieter Eckstein – A cornerstone of European dendrochronology

On November 10th 2021, Dieter Eckstein passed away at age 82. Born and raised as a forester’s child, his entire life was connected to trees and wood. He grew up to become a dedicated scientist and teacher. His legacy includes both his own considerable research accomplishments as well as his founding of a growing network of tree biologists and wood scientists. From his doctoral degree onwards, the concepts and applications of dendrochronology were his passion, motivated by great curiosity in environmental influences on tree growth. He proved that dendroarchaeology can be accurate and precise, even for timber grown in the mild European maritime climate. He pioneered both techniques and concepts of xylogenesis and quantitative wood anatomy and advanced the potential for tropical dendrochronology. In all of these accomplishments, Dieter collaborated with students and colleagues from all over the world. His Dendrochronological Laboratory at the University of Hamburg hosted both young and experienced scientists from many countries. The European Working Group on Dendrochronology, which he founded in the early 1990s, was his natural habitat and playground to invent and present new research activities. We and the entire dendrochronology community have lost an inspiring colleague and visionary.     

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.     

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.     

Thudichum’s Successors

This paper describes the work of five scientists who, among others, carried on the work of J. L. W. Thudichum, the pre-eminent investigator of brain chemistry in the latter half of the 19th century, after his death in 1901. This paper is dedicated to my friend Moussa Ben-Hur Youdim, who spent three years (1963–1966) in my laboratory, as a graduate student in the Department of Biochemistry, McGill University. During this time, Moussa purified monoamine oxidase of rat liver, and provided the first evidence of its multiplicity. He also contributed to the recognition of iron and riboflavin as constituents of the enzyme.     

Spectroscopic Studies of Carboxypeptidase: the Work of Bert L. Vallee

The Role of Zinc in Carboxypeptidase (Vallee, B. L., Rupley, J. A., Coombs, T. L., and Neurath, H. (1960) J. Biol. Chem. 235, 64–69)Metallocarboxypeptidases (Coleman, J. E., and Vallee, B. L. (1960) J. Biol. Chem. 235, 390–395)Bert Lester Vallee (1919–2010) was born in Germany and grew up in Luxembourg. He received his B.S. in 1938 from the University of Bern in Switzerland, after which he came to the United States as the first (and only) fellow of the League of United Nations International Student Service. He was admitted to New York University and worked with Richard Courant, receiving his M.D. from the New York University College of Medicine in 1943.Open in a separate windowBert L. ValleeDuring World War II, Vallee was assigned to the joint Harvard Medical School-MIT blood preservation project, directed by Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) Classic authors Edwin Cohn (1) and John Edsall (2). This experience shaped Vallee''s future career in biochemistry and biophysics. At MIT, he became interested in the metabolism of iron and other metals such as zinc and copper. Little was known about this topic at the time, and he recognized the potential of spectroscopy, particularly emission and arc spectroscopy, for the detection of metals in biological systems. He decided to focus his research on the subject and was awarded a National Research Council Fellowship to pursue these studies in the physics and biology departments at MIT under the direction of John R. Loofbourow and George R. Harrison.In 1954, Vallee joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School where he established the Biophysics Research Laboratory. He was named assistant professor of medicine in 1956 and rose swiftly through the ranks to become the Paul C. Cabot Professor of Biological Chemistry in 1965 and the Edgar M. Bronfman Distinguished Senior Professor in 1980 (a title he held until his death in 2010).At Harvard, Vallee continued the work that he initiated at MIT, focusing on the design and construction of new spectrochemical instruments for use in biology. He built a flame spectrometer to detect and quantify sodium, potassium, magnesium, and calcium in biological samples. At that time, these elements could not be measured accurately in physiological concentrations. This early spectrometer became the prototype for later instruments capable of monitoring these elements in clinical samples.Vallee''s laboratory soon became a world center for the analysis of trace metals in biological samples. He continued his efforts to define, develop, and evaluate new spectroscopic flame sources for the excitation and spectral emission of atoms and to make biological spectroscopy an intrinsic part of modern biological and medical science. Because of his work on the role of metals in biological systems, many consider him to be the “father of metallobiochemistry.”Vallee''s own research centered on the identification of zinc in various metalloproteins and enzymes. One of the many zinc proteins he studied was carboxypeptidase. Vallee carried out careful and extensive mechanistic studies of the enzyme using spectroscopy, stopped-flow kinetics, and chemical modification. He was able not only to elucidate its reaction mechanism but also to provide structural information on the enzyme, including particular roles of specific amino acids. When the x-ray structure of carboxypeptidase was ultimately deduced, Vallee''s results proved to be remarkably accurate.The two JBC Classics reprinted here were both published in 1960 and contain some of Vallee''s early observations on carboxypeptidase. In the first Classic, Vallee and several of his colleagues, including JBC Classic author Hans Neurath (3), examined the roll of zinc in carboxypeptidase. Vallee and Neurath had previously determined that each carboxypeptidase molecule contained one atom of zinc and that the zinc was necessary for enzymatic activity (4). They followed up these initial observations by showing that enzymatic activity lost by zinc dialysis is exactly proportional to the amount of zinc removed. They also discovered that the loss of activity could be reversed by the addition of zinc and several other ions, including Cr³⁺, Ni²⁺, Co²⁺, Fe²⁺, and Mn²⁺.Later that year, Vallee and Joseph E. Coleman published the second JBC Classic, which explores the relationship between pH and the restoration of activity by the addition of metal ions to carboxypeptidase. Vallee discovered that the degree to which activity is restored is a critical function of pH. Because pH could influence enzymatic activity either by affecting the binding of the metal to the apoenzyme or by influencing the rate of catalysis, Vallee and Coleman attempted to separate these two effects by exposing the enzyme to the metal ions at a given pH but assaying it under standard conditions at pH 7.5. They determined that the restoration of activity was a direct function of the binding of metal to the apoprotein. They also learned that the apoenzyme had at least two binding sites for metals but that only one of the sites was essential for activity.Vallee also studied the zinc-containing alcohol dehydrogenase and the role the enzyme plays in alcohol metabolism and alcohol addiction. He showed that genetics are an important determinant of alcoholism, and his work has led to clinical trials of drugs for the treatment of this disease, including daidzin, which he isolated from the kudzu plant.Since Vallee started working on zinc-containing proteins, scientists have found that up to 10% of the human proteome may be composed of zinc proteins, and as of April 2007, there are nearly 400 x-ray and NMR structures of zinc proteins available.Vallee was widely recognized for his scientific achievements. He received many awards, including the Warner-Chilcott Award (1969), the Linderstrom-Lang Medal (1980), the Willard Gibbs Medal from the American Chemical Society (1981), and the William C. Rose Award from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (1982). He also was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Wanting to give back to science, Vallee and his wife established the Vallee Foundation to foster originality, creativity, and leadership in science. The Foundation funds honorary Vallee Professorships, which allow accomplished scientists to explore new areas and to establish close interactions with other successful senior investigators that might lead to new knowledge.     

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.     

Revisiting Metchnikoff's work in light of the COVID-19 pandemic

Revisiting Metchnikoff''s work in light of the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates how much this amazing scientist was a polymath, and one could speculate how much he would have been fascinated and most interested in following the course of the pandemic. Since he coined the word “gerontology”, he would have been intrigued by the high mortality among the elderly, and by the concepts of immunosenescence and inflammaging that characterize the SARS-CoV-2 infection. While Metchnikoff''s work is mainly associated with the discovery of the phagocytes and the birth of cellular innate immunity, he regularly invited his closest collaborators to investigate humoral immunity, and it was in his laboratory that Jules Bordet made his major discovery of the complement system. While Metchnikoff and his team investigated many infectious diseases, he also contributed to studies linked to vaccination, such as those on typhoid fever performed in chimpanzees, illustrating that non-human primates can provide animal models which are potentially helpful for understanding the pathophysiology of the COVID-19 virus. In the present review, we illustrate how much his own work and the investigations of his trainees were pertinent to this new disease.     

Herbert Tabor (1918–1920): obituary.

This invited Letter commemorates the life and scientific legacy of Dr. Herbert Tabor (1918–1920), a leading scientist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda Maryland and former Chief Editor of the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

Dr. Herbert Tabor in his second floor laboratory of Building 8 taken in 2005 (photo credit Dr. Harry Saroff).Herbert Tabor was born in New York City on November 28th, 1918, at the start of the “Spanish Flu” pandemic. After attending public schools in the city, he matriculated in 1935 to Harvard College, where he studied biochemical science and he entered Harvard Medical School in 1937. In his final year, Herb worked in the Department of Biological Chemistry with A. Baird Hastings to determine the ionization constant of MgHPO4. This work was published in The Journal of Biological Chemistry, marking the beginning of his long involvement with the journal.After graduation in 1942, Herb held an internship at Yale-New Haven Hospital, where he engaged in some laboratory work in clinical chemistry. While there, Herb performed the first therapeutic injection of penicillin in the USA, rapidly curing the patient of severe septicemia. The country being at war, in January 1943, he was commissioned in the US Public Health Service and served as medical officer on a US Coast Guard cutter, which was providing escort service to North Atlantic convoys. The following September, he was transferred to The National Institutes of Health, which had just moved to a new site in Bethesda Maryland, then a small town outside of Washington D.C. Herb was assigned to work with Sanford Rosenthal, who was interested in the electrolyte imbalance response to trauma and burn injuries and how these might be treated by administration of saline solution. In 1946, Herb married Celia White, who he had met in Boston, some years earlier. That same year, he helped form a lunch time seminar group to discuss the biochemical literature. Founding members included other biochemist luminaries such as Leon Heppel, Bernie Horecker and Arthur Kornberg.Meetings were held every day and the seminar lasted for many years through many changes in participants. In the early 1960’s, during a casual conversation at the seminar, Herb was surprised to discover the origin of the penicillin which he had administered in 1942. It had been prepared by an NIH colleague, Gil Ashwell, who had worked at Merck at the time. The drug was considered so precious, that Gil also had the job of its recovery from the patient’s urine. Herb and Celia moved into commissioned officer housing, conveniently located on the NIH campus in 1949. This was just 10 min from the laboratory. This is where they raised their family and stayed for over 70 years. Celia left George Washington University in 1952 and joined Herb at NIH. They began their work together on the biosynthesis, function and genetics of polyamines in normal and cancerous cells. This would occupy the rest of their careers. Sanford Rosenthal retired in 1961 and Herb took over as chief of the Laboratory of Biochemical Pharmacology, NIAMD (as it then was). He held this position until 1999.It is impossible to write about Herb Tabor without remembering his long association with The Journal of Biological Chemistry. He served on the editorial board from 1961 to 1966 and was appointed as an executive editor in 1968. Following the resignation of William Stein, he was promoted to editor in chief in 1971. Herb was devoted to all aspects of publishing the journal, though he did say that he was pleased that restrictions on his primary role as a civil servant got him out of many telephone calls from disgruntled authors. During his tenure, the annual output of published papers increased more than fourfold, with accompanying increases in the size of the editorial board. He was the moving force behind changing the journal to an electronic format. Initially this involved parallel publication of papers on CD-ROM in 1992. Finally, in 1995 the journal was moved onto the internet. J. Biol. Chem. was one of the first biological journals to make this move. Herb stood down as executive editor in 2010, assuming the title of co-editor.During his career, Herb received many prestigious awards. Notably, in 1971, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 1977, to the National Academy of Sciences and in 1986, the Hillebrand Award from the American Chemical Society. Montgomery County, MD recognized his scientific achievements, by naming November 28th 2018, his hundredth birthday, as Dr. Herbert Tabor Day. Celia retired from NIH in 2005 and died in 2012. Herb never talked about retirement. Publishing his last scientific paper in 2019 (Keller et al. 2019) he passed away in his sleep on August 20th 2020, at his home on the NIH campus. He is survived by his four children, Edward, Marilyn, Richard and Stanley, together with 10 grandchildren and 6 great-grandchildren.     

Q & A. [interview

Joel Rosenbaum was born and grew up in Massena, New York state, on the St Lawrence River border with Ontario, Canada. He received his undergraduate and PhD degrees from Syracuse University, and a Masters Degree in high school biology teaching at St Lawrence University. His PhD work was done with the protozoologist, George Holz Jr, and his post doctoral research on cilia and flagella was at the University Of Chicago with Frank Child and Hewson Swift. He has been at Yale University for 37 years where he has taught Cell Biology. His research has been on the synthesis and assembly of the proteins of cilia and flagella, showing that the flagellar axoneme assembles at the distal tip and that detachment of the flagella upregulates the genes for flagellar proteins. More recently his group has shown that this tip assembly process is facilitated by a rapid kinesin and cytoplasmic dynein-mediated motility underneath the flagellar membrane called ‘intraflagellar transport’. He is a runner with more than 20 marathons under his belt.     

Sowing the seeds for a career in medicine: reflections and projections

Dr. George Lister delivered the following presentation as the Lee E. Farr Lecturer on May 8, 2011, which served as the culmination of the annual Student Research Day at Yale School of Medicine. He is the Chair of Pediatrics at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School and Pediatrician-in-Chief at Children's Medical Center of Dallas. In his lecture to the medical students, who had just completed their research theses, Dr. Lister discusses his own work on sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), demonstrating the complexity of clinical research and proving insight into the traits required of physician scientists. Committed to medical education and recognized by several awards for his mentorship, he ends the talk by imparting valuable advice on future physicians.