Garland Allen,Thomas Hunt Morgan,and Development

Garland E. Allen’s 1978 biography of the Nobel Prize winning biologist Thomas Hunt Morgan provides an excellent study of the man and his science. Allen presents Morgan as an opportunistic scientist who follows where his observations take him, leading him to his foundational work in Drosophila genetics. The book was rightfully hailed as an important achievement and it introduced generations of readers to Morgan. Yet, in hindsight, Allen’s book largely misses an equally important part of Morgan’s work – his study of development and regeneration. It is worth returning to this part of Morgan, exploring what Morgan contributed and also why he has been seen by contemporaries and historians such as Allen as having set aside some of the most important developmental problems. A closer look shows how Morgan’s view of cells and development that was different from that of his most noted contemporaries led to interpretation of his important contributions in favor of genetics. This essay is part of a special issue, revisiting Garland Allen's views on the history of life sciences in the twentieth century.     

Could a "philosophical fitness landscape" foster Wilsonian consilience in biosystems debates?

A digital interpretation of Edward O. Wilson's principle of "consilience"-knowledge will grow out of interdisciplinary accommodation-is attempted by modeling it with 32 pixels on a "philosophical fitness landscape" (PFL). This approach partially answers a need expressed by Wilson to develop useful consilience methodology, including maps and other orientation devises. Responding also to his call for more imagination, a "virtual roundtable" discussion is convened among 13 scientific luminaries to debate the meaning of biological life and its origin. This is done to test (subjectively) the null hypothesis that a PFL would be insensitive to the diversity of perspectives engaged in such a debate. Rejecting the null hypothesis, an argument is made that an appropriate PFL might help to foster Wilsonian consilience in biosystems debates, where it is needed most.     

Political Optics and the Occlusion of Intimate Knowledge

In Seeing Like a State (1998), James Scott provides a comprehensive understanding of the optics of state power. He also shows how the bureaucratic logic of high-modernist official planning occludes the social and cultural worlds both of marginalized citizenries and of the bureaucrats themselves, and accurately pinpoints the pernicious reductionism that has accompanied the modernist state's self-proclaimed "cult of efficiency." As in his earlier work, however, Scott overgeneralizes the idea of "resistance"; he also, and concomitantly, underestimates bureaucrats' complicity with local populations and the consequent modification of bureaucratic schemes (including the construction of national heritage) in actual practice. These absences reflect a relative lack of ethnographic specificity in the analysis as well as a partially uncritical endorsement of the master narrative of Western history.     

Kinship vis-à-vis Myth Contrasts in Lévi-Strauss' Approaches to Cross-Cultural Comparison

The enormous secondary literature which relates Lévi-Strauss' comparative studies to different schools of thought has failed sufficiently to emphasize the major discontinuity within his own work. This paper characterizes the basic methodological differences in his approaches to "kinship" and to "myth." It then suggests how, by concentrating on the kinship/myth distinction, we might constructively refine various structuralist concepts, such as distinctive feature analysis and the logical foundations of the "elementary" kinship structures. Only by concentrating on the few inconsistencies in Lévi-Strauss' remarkably coherent corpus of work can an adequate critique of his theories of comparison be commenced.     

Adventures in Neural Plasticity, Aging, and Neurodegenerative Disorders Aboard the CWC Beagle

This article recounts some of the scientific endeavors of Carl W. Cotman (CWC) during his journeys through the cellular circuitry of the mammalian brain. I have selected for consideration his findings that have been an important impetus for my own research; in several cases our different experiments have provided complementary data to support an hypothesis. Three examples are (i) Carl's studies of the roles of glutamate in synaptic transmission and plasticity in the adult brain and my studies of how glutamate regulates neurite outgrowth and cell survival in brain development; (ii) his and our studies of the mechanisms whereby amyloid -peptide damages and kills neurons; and (iii) Carl's evidence that physical activity regulates neurotrophin levels in the brain and our evidence that dietary restriction has similar effects and is neuroprotective. In case you have not yet realized how I chose a title for this article it is because Carl has a (very distant) connection with Charles Darwin—Darwin sailed on a vessel called the Beagle and Carl has studied beagle dogs, establishing them as a model for understanding the neurobiology of human brain aging.     

Where do you know what you know? The representation of semantic knowledge in the human brain

Mr M, a patient with semantic dementia--a neurodegenerative disease that is characterized by the gradual deterioration of semantic memory--was being driven through the countryside to visit a friend and was able to remind his wife where to turn along the not-recently-travelled route. Then, pointing at the sheep in the field, he asked her "What are those things?" Prior to the onset of symptoms in his late 40s, this man had normal semantic memory. What has gone wrong in his brain to produce this dramatic and selective erosion of conceptual knowledge?     

Molecular organisms

Protistology, and evolutionary protistology in particular, is experiencing a golden research era. It is an extended one that can be dated back to the 1970s, which is when the molecular rebirth of microbial phylogeny began in earnest. John Archibald, a professor of evolutionary microbiology at Dalhousie University (Nova Scotia, Canada), focuses on the beautiful story of endosymbiosis in his book, John Archibald, One Plus One Equals One: Symbiosis and the Origin of Complex Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). However, this historical narrative could be treated as synecdochal of how the molecular revolution has changed evolutionary biology forever, and that is how Archibald has structured his book. I will address the encompassing theme of molecular methods in detail, but also pay careful attention to the endosymbiosis thread in its own right.     

Three Voices in a Norwegian Living Room: An Encounter from Physiotherapy Practice

This article demonstrates how uses of the body regulate togetherness and availability in clinical encounters. A first encounter between a physiotherapist and a married couple in their home is analyzed. The husband suffers from functional consequences of a stroke. The therapist's job is to assess his functional capacity and determine how he can best be helped. The article centers on the process of interaction, specifically on verbal and bodily actions pertaining to developing role negotiations. Comprehensive excerpts demonstrate that a struggle is going on between the husband and his wife over the management of information about his condition. This imposes dilemmas of control and caring on the therapist. The article describes the maneuvering of the parties and shows how the therapist manages her professional tasks. Emphasis is placed on the particular predicaments that a clinical encounter can generate in a private residence, and on how clinical tasks are embedded in social processes. Finally, the article questions the (often tacit) analytical assumption that "interaction" and "diagnostics" are separate phenomena, and shows how the understanding of both can be advanced if seen as mutually constitutive processes, [clinical encounters, communication, embodiment, physiotherapy, visiting practice]     

Sinai Tschulok (1875–1945)—a pioneer of Cladistics

Sinai Tschulok emigrated from the Ukraine to Switzerland, where he studied natural sciences, in particular biology. He founded and managed his own high school, which prepared students for entry to university-level education. This left him little time for research, which may explain why his work largely fell into oblivion. He did publish two influential books, however (Tschulok, S., 1910, Das System der Biologie in Forschung und Lehre, Gustav Fischer, Jena and Tschulok, S., 1922, Deszendenzlehre, Gustav Fischer, Jena), which were cited and commented upon favourably by both Walter Zimmermann and Willi Hennig. The most important point, in their opinion, was how Tschulok's explication of biological systematics had turned the "natural system" into a proof for the "Theory of Descent". The influence of Walter Zimmermann on Willi Hennig and the development of phylogenetic systematics is well known. Here some parts of Tschulok's writings are discussed that render him a pioneer in Cladistics.
© The Willi Hennig Society 2009.     

Sercarzian immunology--In memoriam. Eli E. Sercarz, 1934-2009

During his long career as a principal investigator and educator, Eli Sercarz trained over 100 scientists. He is best known for developing hen egg white lysozyme (HEL) as a model antigen for immunologic studies. Working in his model system Eli furthered our understanding of antigen processing and immunologic tolerance. His work established important concepts of how the immune system recognizes antigenic determinants processed from whole protein antigens; specifically he developed the concepts of immunodominance and crypticity. Later in his career he focused more on autoimmunity using a variety of established animal models to develop theories on how T cells can circumvent tolerance induction and how an autoreactive immune response can evolve over time. His theory of "determinant spreading" is one of the cornerstones of our modern understanding of autoimmunity. This review covers Eli's entire scientific career outlining his many seminal discoveries.     

Paradigm change in evolutionary microbiology

Thomas Kuhn had little to say about scientific change in biological science, and biologists are ambivalent about how applicable his framework is for their disciplines. We apply Kuhn's account of paradigm change to evolutionary microbiology, where key Darwinian tenets are being challenged by two decades of findings from molecular phylogenetics. The chief culprit is lateral gene transfer, which undermines the role of vertical descent and the representation of evolutionary history as a tree of life. To assess Kuhn's relevance to this controversy, we add a social analysis of the scientists involved to the historical and philosophical debates. We conclude that while Kuhn's account may capture aspects of the pattern (or outcome) of an episode of scientific change, he has little to say about how the process of generating new understandings is occurring in evolutionary microbiology. Once Kuhn's application is limited to that of an initial investigative probe into how scientific problem-solving occurs, his disciplinary scope becomes broader.     

The Development of Motor Acts with Objects in the Preschool Child

Through the influence of his educative environment, the preschool child gradually learns to subjugate his actions to voluntary control. When the child has developed so far that he is able (at least partially) consciously to subordinate his actions to a specific goal, we can say that he has made an important step toward consciously assimilating the knowledge and complex skills he learns in school.     

Life Sciences and the web: a new era for collaboration

The World Wide Web has revolutionized how researchers from various disciplines collaborate over long distances. This is nowhere more important than in the Life Sciences, where interdisciplinary approaches are becoming increasingly powerful as a driver of both integration and discovery. Data access, data quality, identity, and provenance are all critical ingredients to facilitate and accelerate these collaborative enterprises and it is here where Semantic Web technologies promise to have a profound impact. This paper reviews the need for, and explores advantages of as well as challenges with these novel Internet information tools as illustrated with examples from the biomedical community.     

Known by the society he keeps: an interview with Robert Ruffolo

By his own admission, Robert R. Ruffolo, Head of Research and Development at Wyeth-Ayerst, is a bit of a nerd. Opting to spend seven nights per week with his textbooks at the expense of all else, he earned his pharmacy degree summa cum laude, and his PhD in pharmacology in just over three years. He speaks with unabashed enthusiasm for the pharmaceutical industry, for biomedicine, and particularly for the future of pharmacology. Even if you don't know Ruffolo, you've probably seen him-if not at a science symposium, then surely as the lead "actor" in televised promotions that ran throughout 1999 on behalf of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA; scenes reproduced here, with permission). "Actor" belongs in quotation marks, because if there is such a thing as type casting, then Ruffolo is certainly an example in the PhRMA ads: passionate about good drugs and the people who need them; proud of his profession and his contributions; dedicated to science as well as to his colleagues; and grateful for the opportunities he has had to contribute. The commercial's requisite happy ending, where three generations of a coronary-prone farm family ride off into the sunset, reflects Ruffolo's own success story in helping to bring carvedilol to market. In all of this, however, Ruffolo's sincerity transcends the hokey as well as the nerdy. His devotion to science includes a mission to help others, and he would argue that in this and most ways, he is not so different from his academic colleagues.     

Neuroscience was not even a word: an interview with Floyd Bloom

Floyd Bloom says that he grew up, surrounded by doctors and pills, in a drug store in Dallas, where his father and uncles were pharmacists. He is a natural storyteller, readily recalling the people and events that have shaped his career. His narrative skills were apparent as early as high school, where he was encouraged, partially on the basis of aptitude tests, to pursue a career in journalism or public relations, and to stay away from hard subjects like math and science. In college, he majored in German literature, although he pursued premedical studies in accordance with his father's wishes. During his medical school and residency experiences in St. Louis, he recounts, he always attempted to carry in his mind an organized way of explaining his academic and clinical activities to the professors and attending physicians that might quiz him. His subsequent research into the central nervous system similarly benefited from his ability not only to anticipate and formulate questions, the answers to which often required the development of new methods, technologies, and alliances, but also to place his findings in novel contexts where they could be conceptually appreciated and utilized. The prospect of telling good scientific stories was one of the factors that later drew Bloom to the position of Editor-in-Chief of Science magazine (1995-2000). While there, he was instrumental in widening the contexts in which the magazine presents science, and in shaping the ways that scientific information is electronically disseminated across the globe. Currently on sabbatical from Scripps, Floyd Bloom continues to explore, as CEO of a startup company in La Jolla, the entrepreneurial contexts in which his own research can be applied.     

Vaccines,emerging viruses,and how to avoid disaster

Rino Rappuoli is a graduate of Siena University, where he also earned his PhD before moving to the Sclavo Research Center, the Italian vaccine institute, also in Siena. He then spent two years in the USA, mostly at Harvard with John Murphy and Alwin Pappenheimer working on a new diphtheria vaccine based on a non-toxic mutant of diphtheria toxin which has since become the basis for conjugate vaccines against haemophilus, meningococcus, and pneumococcal infections, before returning to the Sclavo Research Center where he developed an acellular vaccine based on a mutant pertussis toxin. With many achievements in vaccine development to his credit, he is now Global Head of Vaccines Research and Development for Novartis Vaccines in Siena, and has most recently pioneered reverse vaccinology, in which the genome of the pathogen is screened for candidate antigenic and immunogenic vaccine components. We spoke to him about the potential for outbreaks of the kind we are now seeing with Ebolavirus in West Africa, and what can be done to prevent them.     

Scientific research at the Laboratoire Arago (Banyuls, France) in the twentieth Century: Edouard Chatton, the "master", and André Lwoff, the "pupil"

Edouard Chatton (1883–1947) began his scientific career in the Pasteur Institute, where he made several important discoveries regarding pathogenic protists (trypanosomids, Plasmodium, toxoplasms, Leishmania). In 1908 he married a "Banyulencque", Marie Herre; from 1920, he focused his research on marine protists. He finished his career as Professor at the Sorbonne (Paris) and director of the Laboratoire Arago in Banyuls-sur-mer, where he died in 1947. André Lwoff (1902–1994) lived several scientific lives in addition to his artistic and family life. But it is the study of protists that filled his first life after he encountered the exceptional Master who was Chatton. Lwoff's father was a psychiatrist and his mother an artist sculptor. He became a Doctor of Medicine in 1927 and then a Doctor of Sciences in 1932, his thesis dealing with biochemical aspects of protozoa nutrition. He met Chatton in 1921 and – until Chatton's death – their meetings, first in Roscoff and then in Banyuls-sur-mer, were numerous and their collaboration very close. Their monograph on apostome ciliates was one of the peaks of this collaboration. In 1938, Lwoff was made director of the Microbial Physiology Department at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where he began a new life devoted to bacteria, and then to viruses, before pursuing his career as director of the Cancer Research Institute in Villejuif (France). Lwoff was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965. He died in Banyuls in 1994. "Master" and "pupil" had in common perseverance in their scientific work, conception and observation, a critical sense and rigor but also a great artistic sensibility that painting and drawing in the exceptional surroundings of Banyuls-sur-mer had fulfilled. Electronic Publication     

The ‘Psychic Surgeon’ and the schizophrenic patient: Crisis in a ‘Medicodrama’

This paper is concerned with a Filipino psychic surgeon confronted by a particularly challenging case of a kind perhaps unprecedented in his practice. The paper describes and analyzes how the practitioner modified his usual clinical performance and adapted his actions to demands of an extremely difficult situation. The case is viewed in wider perspective relative to the significance of performative acts of healing in a pluralistic medical setting.     

Teaching bioethics as a new paradigm for health professionals

In The Clouds by Aristophanes, Strepsiades brings his son before Socrates so that he could learn Philosophy for he has heard that this science teaches how to overcome the most difficult causes with reasons. And Strepsiades wants his son to learn the art of failing to pay debts. Regarding medical education in our time, Edmund Pellegrino has noted that the educational philosophy of medical schools determines what a "good" physician is. Thus, teaching bioethics to future health professionals makes us face old problems now: What teaching method to choose among all the possible various ones? What should teaching aim at? Which will be our educational philosophy? Therefore I shall introduce here the epistemological basis of our Bioethics teaching program in Argentina and its implementing strategies in the undergraduate curriculum and the post-graduate level.