Biophysical Reviews: 2020—looking back,going forward

After first describing the issue contents (Biophysical Reviews—Volume 12 Issue 6), this Editorial goes on to provide a short round-up of the activities of the journal in 2020. Directly following this Editorial are two obituaries marking the recent deaths of Prof. Fumio Oosawa (Japan) and Dr. Herbert Tabor (USA)—two major figures in Biophysical/Biochemical science from the last 100 years.

With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 has been a testing year for all. Filled with a myriad combination of personal tragedies and work/life inconveniences, circumstances have required many difficult decisions to be made at the personal, family, organizational and society levels with the results of these difficult choices amplifying the general level of stress within communities. Scientists have certainly not been immune from such pressures. For working scientists, this year has presented a number of challenges. Those scientists heavily involved in teaching have had to engage with remote teaching methodologies and the necessarily rapid preparation of additional online teaching materials. Research-focused scientists have had to cope with the closing or restriction of work facilities and the loss of personnel, which has certainly impacted (and often disrupted) scientific progress. For the many itinerant working scientists living away from home and family, the restrictions on worldwide travel have caused additional dilemmas and necessitated difficult career decisions. Student scientists have had to deal with other problems. Oftentimes educational institutions have maintained the steep fee requirements associated with enrolment despite the year being a virtual write-off in terms of focusing on academic performance. Overseas students have also faced problems related to maintaining interdependent attendance and residence requirements.Irrespective of the stage of their career progression, scientists (like all members of society) have tried their best to make the most of a bad situation. In 2020, the Biophysical Reviews’ Editorial Board and the specifically dedicated professional officers from Springer-Nature have similarly pushed on with our journal related duties. From 2018, Biophysical Reviews moved to a six Issue per year format. The current Issue (Issue 6) is the last for 2020, and as such, the first duty of this Editorial is to describe the contents of the twelve articles appearing within it. After providing a precis of these articles, we then move on to describe some of the highlights of this year and finish by welcoming some new members to the Editorial Board.     

Lacepède’s Syncretic Contribution to the Debates on Natural History in France Around 1800

Lacepède was a key figure in the French intellectual world from the Old Regime to the Restoration, sinc e he was not only a scientist, but also a musician, a writer, and a politician. His brilliant career is a good example of the progress of the social status of scientists in France around 1800. In the life sciences, he was considered the heir to Buffon and continued the latter’s Histoire naturelle, but he also borrowed ideas from anti-Buffonian (e.g. Linnaean) scientists. He broached many important subjects such as the nature of man, the classification of animals, the concept of species, and the history of the Earth. All these topics led to tensions in the French sciences, but Lacepède dealt with them in a consensual, indeed even ambiguous way. For example, he held transformist views, but his concept of evolution was far less precise and daring than Lamarck’s contemporaneous attempts. His somewhat confused eclecticism allowed him to be accepted by opposing camps of the French scientific community at that time and makes his case interesting for historians, since the opinions of such an opportunistic figure can illuminate the figure of the French intellectual better than more original works could do. In turn, Lacepède’s important social and scientific position gave his views a significant visibility. In this sense, his contributions probably exerted an influence, in particular with regard to the emergence of transformist theories.     

Roy Walford and the immunologic theory of aging

Roy Walford died on April 27, 2004, at the age of 79. His contributions to gerontological research in such diverse areas as caloric restriction, genetics of lifespan, immunosenescence, DNA repair and replicative senescence were truly remarkable in their depth and innovation. Significantly, most of the areas that he pioneered during his illustrious research career remain the "hot" areas of current gerontological research. In this sense, he has achieved the most important type of immortality. His death was a major personal and professional loss to numerous scientists within the gerontological community. In launching this new journal on Immunity and Ageing, it is highly fitting, therefore, to remember him on the anniversary of his death by briefly reviewing the contributions of Roy Walford to this important facet of gerontology. Indeed, it was Roy who actually first coined the commonly used term "immunosenescence".     

Learning from Gobind Khorana: “The difficult we do today,the impossible tomorrow”

Prof. Har Gobind Khorana was one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century. Drawing on his strong roots in organic chemistry, he had a remarkable ability to select and focus his intellect on successfully addressing some of the most important challenges in modern biology in a career spanning nearly 6 decades. His pioneering contributions in gene synthesis and protein structure–function studies, and more broadly in what he termed “chemical biology,” continue to have a major impact on modern biomedical science.     

Still going strong: Leeuwenhoek at eighty

At age 80, Antony van Leeuwenhoek was a world-famous scientist who came from a prosperous Delft family with a heritage of public service. He continued that tradition by serving in paid municipal offices. Self-taught, he began his scientific career in his 40s, when he began making hundreds of tiny single-lens microscopes. Pioneering the use of now-common microscopic techniques, he was the first human to see microbes and microscopic structures in animals, plants, and minerals. Over 50 years, he wrote only letters, more than 300 of them, and published half of them himself. More than a hundred were published in translation in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions. Today, Leeuwenhoek is considered in the lesser rank of scientists and is not well known outside of his homeland. Recent archival research in Delft has contributed new information about his life that helps to contextualize his science, but much remains to be learned.     

Alfred Russel Wallace deserves better

During 2009, while we were celebrating Charles Darwin and his The origin of species, sadly, little was said about the critical contribution of Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) to the development of the theory of evolution. Like Darwin, he was a truly remarkable nineteenth century intellect and polymath and, according to a recent book by Roy Davies (The Darwin conspiracy: origins of a scientific crime), he has a stronger claim to the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection than has Darwin. Here we present a critical comparison between the contributions of the two scientists. Sometimes referred to as ‘The other beetle-hunter’ and largely neglected for many decades, Wallace had a far greater experience of collecting and investigating animals and plants from their native habitats than had Darwin. He was furthermore much more than a pioneer biogeographer and evolutionary theorist, and also made contributions to anthropology, ethnography, geology, land reform and social issues. However, being a more modest, self-deprecating man than Darwin, and lacking the latter’s establishment connections, Wallace’s contribution to the theory of evolution was not given the recognition it deserved and he was undoubtedly shabbily treated at the time. It is time that Wallace’s relationship with Darwin is reconsidered in preparation for 2013, the centenary of Wallace’s death, and he should be recognized as at least an equal in the Wallace-Darwin theory of evolution.     

Conception et suites de la Paléontologie française d’Alcide d’Orbigny

The whole formed by his Paléontologie française, his Prodrome, and his Cours élémentaire, which are closely linked, constitutes one of the major parts of Alcide d’Orbigny’s scientific production, in which he exposed his concept of Palaeontology as a science closely related with Zoology and as an indispensable tool for Stratigraphy. The result was a remarkable impulsion for palaeontological and stratigraphical research, which from that time developed on new scientific foundations. Two annexes complete this communication, the first concerning the ‘Comité de la Paléontologie française’ (1860–1893), the second specifying the publication dates of four volumes of the Paléontologie française.     

Darwinism and the Origin of Life

Historically, ideas on the origins of life have been mingled with evolutionary explanations. Darwin avoided discussing the origin of the very first species in public although he acknowledged the possibility that life originated by natural causes. Some of his followers adopted this materialistic position and advocated some sort of spontaneous generation in the distant past. Nevertheless, Pasteur??s experiments were a major obstacle for scientific acceptance of the sudden emergence of life. The scientific study of the origin of life, established in the 1920s, required abandoning the idea of a unique chance event and considering a view of life emerging as the result of a long evolutionary process. At the turn of the twentieth century, some authors adopted non-Darwinian views on the origin of life, exemplified in this paper by the neovitalism of some Catholic scientists. We propose that Darwinism represents a genuine example of an adaptive scientific framework. By recognizing the shift in the features characterizing Darwinism, we can understand its relationship with theories on the origin of life in a non-dogmatic line.     

The genius of Wilhelm Hofmeister: the origin of causal-analytical research in plant development

Friederich Wilhelm Benedikt Hofmeister (1824-1877) stands as one of the true giants in the history of biology and belongs in the same pantheon as Darwin and Mendel. Yet by comparison, he is virtually unknown. If he is known at all, it is for his early work on flowering plant embryology and his ground-breaking discovery of the alternation of generations in plants, which he published at age 27 in 1851. Remarkable as the latter study was, it was but a prelude to the more fundamental contributions he was to make in the study of plant growth and development expressed in his books on plant cell biology (Die Lehre von der Pfanzenzelle, 1867) and plant morphology (Allgemeine Morphologie der Gewächse, 1868). In this article we review his remarkable life and career, highlighting the fact that his scientific accomplishments were based largely on self-education in all areas of biology, physics, and chemistry. We describe his research accomplishments, including his early embryological studies and their influence on Mendel's genetic studies as well as his elucidation of the alternation of generations, and we review in detail his cell biology and morphology books. It is in the latter two works that Hofmeister the experimentalist and biophysicist is most manifest. Not only did Hofmeister explore the mechanisms of cytoplasmic streaming, plant morphogenesis, and the effects of gravity and light on their development, but in each instance he developed a biophysical model to integrate and interpret his wealth of observational and experimental data. Because of the lack of attention to the cell and morphology books, Hofmeister's true genius has not been recognized. After studying several evaluations of Hofmeister by contemporary and later workers, we conclude that his reputation became eclipsed because he was so far ahead of his contemporaries that no one could understand or appreciate his work. In addition, his basically organismic framework was out of step with the more reductionistic cytogenetic work that later came in vogue. We suggest that the translation of the cell and morphology books in English would help re-establish him as one of the most notable scientists in the history of plant biology.     

An Absolute Index (Ab-index) to Measure a Researcher’s Useful Contributions and Productivity

Bibliographic analysis has been a very powerful tool in evaluating the effective contributions of a researcher and determining his/her future research potential. The lack of an absolute quantification of the author’s scientific contributions by the existing measurement system hampers the decision-making process. In this paper, a new metric system, Absolute index (Ab-index), has been proposed that allows a more objective comparison of the contributions of a researcher. The Ab-index takes into account the impact of research findings while keeping in mind the physical and intellectual contributions of the author(s) in accomplishing the task. The Ab-index and h-index were calculated for 10 highly cited geneticists and molecular biologist and 10 young researchers of biological sciences and compared for their relationship to the researchers input as a primary author. This is the first report of a measuring method clarifying the contributions of the first author, corresponding author, and other co-authors and the sharing of credit in a logical ratio. A java application has been developed for the easy calculation of the Ab-index. It can be used as a yardstick for comparing the credibility of different scientists competing for the same resources while the Productivity index (Pr-index), which is the rate of change in the Ab-index per year, can be used for comparing scientists of different age groups. The Ab-index has clear advantage over other popular metric systems in comparing scientific credibility of young scientists. The sum of the Ab-indices earned by individual researchers of an institute per year can be referred to as Pr-index of the institute.     

A rendezvous with the queen of ion channels: Three decades of ion channel research by David T Yue and his Calcium Signals Laboratory

David T. Yue was a renowned biophysicist who dedicated his life to the study of Ca²⁺ signaling in cells. In the wake of his passing, we are left not only with a feeling of great loss, but with a tremendous and impactful body of work contributed by a remarkable man. David's research spanned the spectrum from atomic structure to organ systems, with a quantitative rigor aimed at understanding the fundamental mechanisms underlying biological function. Along the way he developed new tools and approaches, enabling not only his own research but that of his contemporaries and those who will come after him. While we cannot hope to replicate the eloquence and style we are accustomed to in David's writing, we nonetheless undertake a review of David's chosen field of study with a focus on many of his contributions to the calcium channel field.     

Prasanna K. Mohanty (1934–2013): a great photosynthetiker and a wonderful human being who touched the hearts of many

Prasanna K. Mohanty, a great scientist, a great teacher and above all a great human being, left us more than a year ago (on March 9, 2013). He was a pioneer in the field of photosynthesis research; his contributions are many and wide-ranging. In the words of Jack Myers, he would be a “photosynthetiker” par excellence. He remained deeply engaged with research almost to the end of his life; we believe that generations of researchers still to come will benefit from his thorough and enormous work. We present here his life and some of his contributions to the field of Photosynthesis Research. The response to this tribute was overwhelming and we have included most of the tributes, which we received from all over the world. Prasanna Mohanty was a pioneer in the field of “Light Regulation of Photosynthesis”, a loving and dedicated teacher—unpretentious, idealistic, and an honest human being.     

Beyond frontiers and time: the scientific and cultural heritage of Alcide d’Orbigny (1802–1857)

Alcide Dessalines d’Orbigny was born on 6 September 1802 in Couëron (near Nantes), France. In his early youth, he developed a life interest in the study of a group of microscopic animals that he named ‘Foraminifera’. In his first scientific work, devoted to this group, he established the basis of a new science, micropaleontology. All his life, he worked on foraminifera, but his concern in natural sciences widely exceeded the domain of micropaleontology. Impressed by his first work on foraminifera, published at the age of 23, the scientists of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle (MNHN) chose him as the naturalist explorer for an expedition to South America. Alcide d’Orbigny explored Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, and Peru from 1826 to 1833. He was a great humanist and applied the view of an ethnologist and historian to the communities with which he shared his daily life in South America. A precursor in biogeography and ecology, he contributed greatly to the advancement of knowledge of the animal and vegetal kingdoms by describing several thousand living species in the nine volumes of his ‘Voyage dans l’Amérique Méridionale’ (1835–1847). Back in France, he turned his research towards paleontology and stratigraphy. He undertook the immense task of describing all species of fossil invertebrates found in France in the eight volumes of ‘La Paléontologie française’ (1840–1860). He arranged 18 000 species in stratigraphic order in the three volumes of ‘Prodrome de Paléontologie stratigraphique’ (1850–1852), and published three volumes entitled ‘Cours élémentaire de paléontologie et de géologie stratigraphiques’ (1849–1852). These important works led him to create the first geological and stratigraphical scale. Many of the 27 stages established are still used in the standard chronostratigraphic scale. The Chair of Paleontology of the MNHN in Paris was created for him in 1853. He died on 30 June 1857 at the age of 55, in Pierrefitte (France), leaving behind him a huge scientific and cultural heritage. Alcide d’Orbigny bequeathed to posterity a collection of more than 100 000 vegetable and animal specimens. This exceptionally rich heritage, deposited in the MNHN, is an international reference collection, and it is actively consulted by specialists from around the world. The application of his work extends to various fields of academic research (such as earth history, paleoceanography and paleoclimatology), to economics and practical applications in stratigraphy and micropaleontology that greatly contribute to oil and other resource exploration as well as major earth construction. The bicentennial of the birth of Alcide d’Orbigny was celebrated in France during the year 2002 under the patronage of the highest authorities of the state, along with scientific and cultural institutions. A traveling exhibition presented the different facets of his life’s work and international congresses were held in the three places dearest to Alcide d’Orbigny: Santa Cruz (Bolivia), La Rochelle (France) and Paris (France). This year (2003) marks the 150th anniversary of his appointment to the Chair of Paleontology of the MNHN.     

A fortunate period of overlap with Prof. Haruki Nakamura

The author recounts a period of overlap with Prof. Haruki Nakamura that stretched from 2007 till the present day. Starting as a short-term research fellow in his laboratory, the author has also been a coauthor, academic colleague, and joint journal editorial board member of Prof. Nakamura.

I first met Prof. Haruki Nakamura in June of 2007 after coming to Osaka to talk with him about the possibility of taking on a short-term research position in his laboratory. At that stage, he was the Professor in charge of the Laboratory for Bioinformatics and Computational Structural Biology located within the Institute for Protein Research (IPR) at Osaka University as well as the Director of the Protein Data Bank in Japan (PDBj)—the Asian hub of the worldwide PDB. Since that time, he has been an interesting constant in my life and is someone that I have come to admire as much for his character and work ethic as for his scientific prowess, the latter of which is truly remarkable. In this Commentary, I thought I might recount some of the interesting ways my scientific career has intertwined with Prof. Nakamura’s, hopefully shining a light on some of the positive ways that scientists can interact with each other as well as highlighting some of the points that I genuinely admire about Prof. Nakamura.     

W. Montague Cobb (1904–1990): Physical Anthropologist, Anatomist, and Activist

William Montague Cobb's life and work reflect a profound integration of art, literature, social activism, and science. This article presents some of the highlights of his academic development and professional contributions. We have considered his early academic development within the contexts of the formative years of American physical anthropology, Howard University Medical School, and the social issues in American society that influenced Cobb. His approaches to teaching, anatomical and anthropological research, and medicine are unique, and yet are closely reasoned and creative reflections of the major currents of academe and the broader society with which he dealt. Imbued with a sense of social responsibility, Cobb's applied anthropology involved the accumulation of extensive data on the one hand, and the formation of organizations for social activism on the other. It was directed toward solving problems of health care and racism. His work thereby served to balance the widespread distortion and neglect of medical and racial problems facing A fro-America between 1930 and the present day. He was also a principal builder of black medical and scientific institutions, and he preserved the record of his coworkers' contributions through his many biographies. This work represents no more than a sketch of his rich and prolific career (during which he produced more than 1,100 publications); the emphasis of this biographical study has been to ascertain the circumstances and attitudes that helped mold the first Afro-American Ph.D. in physical anthropology.     

Scientific contributions of A. V. Hill: exercise physiology pioneer.

Beginning in 1910, A. V. Hill performed careful experiments on the time course of heat production in isolated frog muscle. His research paralleled that of the German biochemist Otto Meyerhof, who measured the changes in muscle glycogen and lactate during contractions and recovery. For their work in discovering the distinction between aerobic and anaerobic metabolism, Hill and Meyerhof were jointly awarded the 1922 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Because of Hill's interest in athletics, he sought to apply the concepts discovered in isolated frog muscle to the exercising human. Hill and his colleagues made measurements of O(2) consumption on themselves and other subjects running around an 85-m grass track. In the process of this work, they defined the terms "maximum O(2) intake," "O(2) requirement," and "steady state of exercise." Other contributions of Hill include his discoveries of heat production in nerve, the series elastic component, and the force-velocity equation in muscle. Around the time of World War II, Hill was a leading figure in the Academic Assistance Council, which helped Jewish scientists fleeing Nazi Germany to relocate in the West. He served as a member of the British Parliament from 1940 to 1945 and as a scientific advisor to India. Hill's vision and enthusiasm attracted many scientists to the field of exercise physiology, and he pointed the way toward many of the physiological adaptations that occur with physical training.     

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.     

Biology and war--American biology and international science

The German-born American scientist Jacques Loeb (1859-1924) was one of the most important promoters of experimental biology around 1900. He was best known for his physico-chemical explanations of psychological processes and his biotechnological approach to artificial parthenogenesis. At the start of the First World War, Loeb was deeply troubled by the deterioration of the international scientific community and the growing alienation of his German and American colleagues. The aim of this paper is to examine Jacques Loeb's activities aimed at advancing scientific internationalism before, during, and after the war. Loeb, for example, tried to negotiate the publication of German authors in American journals during the war, at a time when this was categorically rejected by publishers. Immediately after the war, he tried to create a specific system aimed at disseminating scientific literature and funding selected European colleagues, in order to overcome what he considered reactionary and hegemonic forces within German scientific institutions. His correspondence with eminent scientists from all over the world (amongst them Albert Einstein, Richard Goldschmidt, Otto Meyerhof, Otto Warburg, Paul Ehrlich, Wolfgang Ostwald, Wilhelm Roux, and Ross Harrison) will serve as a source for the analysis. Special emphasis will be placed on the question how Jacques Loeb integrated epistemology, his particular world view, and his social commitment into the workings of his own life and how he tried to extend his scientific goal of controlling biological systems to the sphere of international science.     

The young Ramón y Cajal as a cell-theory dissenter.

The intellectual development of scientists normally traverses several different phases as they mature in their professions. In many cases, strong support of certain ideas and theories gives way to more critical, productive views that set the stage for major theories and discoveries. This appears to have been the case of Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934). In his youth, he supported the protoplasmic theory of life, and as he matured he maintained a critical, yet open view of the cell theory, which postulated that life phenomena could not take place below the cellular level. In later years, however, an older and wiser Ramón y Cajal abandoned all traces of dissent and joined in fully supporting a refined version of cell theory, to which his own discoveries significantly contributed.     

Personal reminiscences about Morton Grossman and the founding of the Center for Ulcer Research and Education (CURE)

The Center for Ulcer Research and Education (CURE) from its onset was primarily the work of one man: Professor Morton Grossman, or "Mort" as he was known and called by all. Mort's legacy includes a large body of scientific publications, the first National Institutes of Health Digestive Diseases Center (CURE), and, most importantly, a group of scientists who have become academic leaders and who have made important contributions in the fields of upper gastrointestinal (GI) tract secretion, hormones and receptors, mucosal defense mechanisms, the design and conduct of randomized clinical trials, and ulcer epidemiology. Indeed, Mort is considered to be a founding father of modern academic GI research. I was fortunate to have known and worked with Mort and would like to memorialize his contributions so that his memory can inspire the next generation of academicians.