Robert A. Weisberg (1937�C2011): a Bacteriophage Pioneer

With the untimely, sudden passing of Robert Weisberg on 1 September 2011, the bacteriophage community lost a shining light. Bob had a remarkable career and served his profession exceptionally well. He was an editor of the Journal of Virology (1983 to 1988) and the Journal of Bacteriology (1985 to 1995) and worked tirelessly to advance bacteriophage biology. He was my mentor when I was a Staff Fellow at the NIH in the mid-1970s. His long-time collaborator and colleague, Max Gottesman, has prepared a tribute to this stellar virologist.     

A taxonomy of application scheduling tools for high performance cluster computing

Application scheduling plays an important role in high-performance cluster computing. Application scheduling can be classified as job scheduling and task scheduling. This paper presents a survey on the software tools for the graph-based scheduling on cluster systems with the focus on task scheduling. The tasks of a parallel or distributed application can be properly scheduled onto multi-processors in order to optimize the performance of the program (e.g., execution time or resource utilization). In general, scheduling algorithms are designed based on the notion of task graph that represents the relationship of parallel tasks. The scheduling algorithms map the nodes of a graph to the processors in order to minimize overall execution time. Although many scheduling algorithms have been proposed in the literature, surprisingly not many practical tools can be found in practical use. After discussing the fundamental scheduling techniques, we propose a framework and taxonomy for the scheduling tools on clusters. Using this framework, the features of existing scheduling tools are analyzed and compared. We also discuss the important issues in improving the usability of the scheduling tools. This work is supported by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University under grant H-ZJ80 and by NASA Ames Research Center by a cooperative grant agreement with the University of Texas at Arlington. Jiannong Cao received the BSc degree in computer science from Nanjing University, Nanjing, China in 1982, and the MSc and the Ph.D degrees in computer science from Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA, in 1986 and 1990 respectively. He is currently an associate professor in Department of Computing at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong. He is also the director of the Internet and Mobile Computing Lab in the department. He was on the faculty of computer science at James Cook University and University of Adelaide in Australia, and City University of Hong Kong. His research interests include parallel and distributed computing, networking, mobile computing, fault tolerance, and distributed software architecture and tools. He has published over 120 technical papers in the above areas. He has served as a member of editorial boards of several international journals, a reviewer for international journals/conference proceedings, and also as an organizing/programme committee member for many international conferences. Dr. Cao is a member of the IEEE Computer Society, the IEEE Communication Society, IEEE, and ACM. He is also a member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Distributed Processing, IEEE Technical Committee on Parallel Processing, IEEE Technical Committee on Fault Tolerant Computing, and Computer Architecture Professional Committee of the China Computer Federation. Alvin Chan is currently an assistant professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He graduated from the University of New South Wales with a Ph.D. degree in 1995 and was subsequently employed as a Research Scientist by the CSIRO, Australia. From 1997 to 1998, he was employed by the Centre for Wireless Communications, National University of Singapore as a Program Manager. Dr. Chan is one of the founding members and director of a university spin-off company, Information Access Technology Limited. He is an active consultant and has been providing consultancy services to both local and overseas companies. His research interests include mobile computing, context-aware computing and smart card applications. Yudong Sun received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. He received Ph.D. degree from the University of Hong Kong in 2002, all in computer science. From 1988 to 1996, he was among the teaching staff in Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. From 2002 to 2003, he held a research position at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. At present, he is a Research Associate in School of Computing Science at University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. His research interests include parallel and distributed computing, Web services, Grid computing, and bioinformatics. Sajal K. Das is currently a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and the Founding Director of the Center for Research in Wireless Mobility and Networking (CReWMaN) at the University of Texas at Arlington. His current research interests include resource and mobility management in wireless networks, mobile and pervasive computing, sensor networks, mobile internet, parallel processing, and grid computing. He has published over 250 research papers, and holds four US patents in wireless mobile networks. He received the Best Paper Awards in ACM MobiCom’99, ICOIN-16, ACM, MSWiM’00 and ACM/IEEE PADS’97. Dr. Das serves on the Editorial Boards of IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, ACM/Kluwer Wireless Networks, Parallel Processing Letters, Journal of Parallel Algorithms and Applications. He served as General Chair of IEEE PerCom’04, IWDC’04, MASCOTS’02 ACM WoWMoM’00-02; General Vice Chair of IEEE PerCom’03, ACM MobiCom’00 and IEEE HiPC’00-01; Program Chair of IWDC’02, WoWMoM’98-99; TPC Vice Chair of ICPADS’02; and as TPC member of numerous IEEE and ACM conferences. Minyi Guo received his Ph.D. degree in information science from University of Tsukuba, Japan in 1998. From 1998 to 2000, Dr. Guo had been a research scientist of NEC Soft, Ltd. Japan. He is currently a professor at the Department of Computer Software, The University of Aizu, Japan. From 2001 to 2003, he was a visiting professor of Georgia State University, USA, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong. Dr. Guo has served as general chair, program committee or organizing committee chair for many international conferences, and delivered more than 20 invited talks in USA, Australia, China, and Japan. He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Embedded Systems. He is also in editorial board of International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking, Journal of Embedded Computing, Journal of Parallel and Distributed Scientific and Engineering Computing, and International Journal of Computer and Applications. Dr. Guo’s research interests include parallel and distributed processing, parallelizing compilers, data parallel languages, data mining, molecular computing and software engineering. He is a member of the ACM, IEEE, IEEE Computer Society, and IEICE. He is listed in Marquis Who’s Who in Science and Engineering.     

Potential of adenovirus as a vector for sustained gene expression

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

Introduction to the Nigel Barlow Symposium

Dr Nigel Barlow died on 4 June 2003 aged 53 in Christchurch, New Zealand. Nigel completed his PhD at the University of East Anglia in 1977 and emigrated to New Zealand in 1979 where he worked initially at Palmerston North and for the last 12 years for AgResearch at Lincoln. Nigel made an enormous contribution to New Zealand ecological science through the use of mathematically based models. In particular, he worked on insect pests such as grass grubs and vertebrate pests such as possums and rabbits, producing over 130 papers. Nigel’s models of bovine tuberculosis underpinned the current strategies and expenditure of over $50 million each year on the control of wildlife vectors on this disease. Nigel’s capabilities as a scientist were not only in the applied field but also reflected in his ability to win funds with his student John Kean from the prestigious Marsden Fund for basic research on the causes of rarity. He was Editor of the New Zealand Journal of Ecology from 1985 to 1990 and of the Journal of Applied Ecology. Nigel was awarded the New Zealand Ecological Society Award for his outstanding contribution to applied ecology in 1996 and posthumously in 2003 the Caughley Medal for lifetime contributions to wildlife management and ecology by the Australasian Wildlife Management Society. Nigel was a true polymath and enthusiast about all natural history. He had an interest in bird-winged butterflies and regularly vanished into the jungles of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea to study them. He was fascinated by crocodilians and anacondas, mountain climbing, landscape painting, and malt whisky. At work he was resistant to bureaucratic interference but happy to pass on his abilities and insights to his students and numerous colleagues.     

Reflections on Cellular Physiology as a Catalytic Framework for Medicine

These are the reflections of a retired physician who was introduced to cellular physiology in 1947 at the University of Pennsylvania. I majored in Zoology. I took the required major courses, which were interesting but not exciting. I was a premedical student at the time. Fortunately I was introduced to cellular physiology in 1947. The teacher was Professor Louis Heilbrunn, an amazing man dedicated to teaching and the love of his students. He had a number of graduate students at the time. The undergraduates were well integrated with these advanced students. We used his textbook of physiology and we were all proud of being his students. He gave us a new way of thinking about biology. It was exciting and we were treated as mature students. J. Cell. Physiol. 9999: 2596–2597, 2015. © 2015 The Authors. Journal of Cellular Physiology Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Classic limb patterning models and the work of Dennis Summerbell

Dennis Summerbell was a leading contributor to our understanding of limb patterning prior to the advent of molecular biology. He published several groundbreaking papers, including one that developed a key model for patterning the limb from the shoulder to the fingertips and another that presented the co-discovery of the effect of retinoids on limb morphogenesis. He brought detailed quantitative analyses to bear on these studies, as highlighted in two of his insightful papers published in the Journal of Embryology and Experimental Morphology, in which he provided elegant models that, today, remain relevant to limb patterning, as well as to many disciplines of developmental biology.     

School of the school of Leon Abgarovich Orbeli

In 2007, L. A. Orbeli would have been 125. He was distinguished by extremely wide scientific interrests; he created one of the most numerous and fruitful scientific schools. He authored prominent achievements in physiology of autonomic nervous system, evolutionary physiology, sensory physiology, renal physiology, physiology of underwater labor. Orbeli paid much attention to the scientific-organizational activity, he was academician-secretary of the Division of Biological Sciences of the USSR Academy of Sciences, President of the Society of Physiologists, Biochemists and Pharmacologists, Editor-in-Chief of the USSR Physiological Journal, etc. Principles of the scientific scholl founded by Orbeli are service to science and society, propity to scientific ethics, humanity.     

Robert Chambers and Thomas Henry Huxley, Science Correspondents: The Popularization and Dissemination of Nineteenth Century Natural Science

Robert Chambers and Thomas Henry Huxley helped popularize science by writing for general interest publications when science was becoming increasingly professionalized. A non-professional, Chambers used his family-owned Chambers' Edinburgh Journal to report on scientific discoveries, giving his audience access to ideas that were only available to scientists who regularly attended professional meetings or read published transactions of such forums. He had no formal training in the sciences and little interest in advancing the professional status of scientists; his course of action was determined by his disability and interest in scientific phenomena. His skillful reporting enabled readers to learn how the ideas that flowed from scientific innovation affected their lives, and his series of article in the Journal presenting his rudimentary ideas on evolution, served as a prelude to his important popular work, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Huxley, an example of the new professional class of scientists, defended science and evolution from attacks by religious spokesmen and other opponents of evolution, informing the British public about science through his lectures and articles in such publications as Nineteenth Century. He understood that by popularizing scientific information, he could effectively challenge the old Tory establishment -- with its orthodox religious and political views -- and promote the ideas of the new class of professional scientists. In attempting to transform British society, he frequently came in conflict with theologians and others on issues in which science and religion seemed to contradict each other but refused to discuss matters of science with non-professionals like Chambers, whose popular writing struck a more resonant chord with working class readers. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Species concepts and floras: what are species for?

In 1992, in a special paper in the American Journal of Botany, Ernst Mayr attempted to ‘prove’ the biological species concept (BSC) worked as well in plants as it did in animals by analyzing the flora of the Concord region of northern Massachusetts. He concluded that there were minimal difficulties when applying the BSC for the plants of this particular area, and concluded that botanists were misguided in not accepting the BSC. He suggested that what he called ‘typological’ thinking was prevalent in the taxonomic community, and that this was a factor in botanical resistance to the BSC. Typology, as defined by Mayr in his 1992 foray into botany, is to a certain extent a straw‐man and, by the late 20th Century, no longer a way of thinking in widespread use in the taxonomic community in any organismal group. Here, I examine his analysis in the light of current interest in plant diversity. Species can be characterized as hypotheses about the distribution of variation in nature, subject to test with new data of many kinds. Species concepts like the BSC, although of interest philosophically and to researchers looking at mechanisms of speciation, may actually get in the way of achieving a baseline understanding of the diversity of life on Earth. © 2008 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2008, 95 , 17–25.     

Retraction: Zhong H,Lu L,Wang Y,Yang H. Single layer molybdenum disulfide as an optical nanoprobe for 2 photon luminescence and second harmonic generation cell imaging. J. Biophotonics. 2018;11:e201700354.

The above article from the Journal of Biophotonics, published online on 9 January 2018 in Wiley Online Library as Early View ( https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jbio.201700354 ), and in Volume 11, e201700354, has been retracted by agreement between the authors (Hong Zhong, Lin Lu, Yuanhao Wang, Hongxing Yang), Prof. Sailing He, Prof. Jurgen Popp (Editor‐in‐Chief) and Wiley‐VCH GmbH & Co. KGaA. The retraction has been agreed because the submitting author Hong Zhong failed to acknowledge the true authorship of the presented study which was originally conducted by a group led by Prof. Sailing He in South China Normal University, Guangzhou of China. REFERENCE Zhong H, Lu L, Wang Y, Yang H. Single layer molybdenum disulfide as an optical nanoprobe for 2 photon luminescence and second harmonic generation cell imaging. J. Biophotonics  2018 ;11:e201700354. https://doi.org/10.1002/jbio.201700354     

JOSEPH D. HOOKER'S 1839 CABO VERDE COLLECTIONS

Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911) was 22 years old when he undertook his first natural history journey abroad. He was appointed ‘Assistant Surgeon’, under the command of James Clark Ross in the Antarctic Expedition 1838–1845, also known as the South Pole Magnetic Expedition. The two HMS ships The Terror and The Erebus made brief stops in the Macaronesian islands of Madeira, Tenerife (the Canaries), and Santiago (Cabo Verde) where Hooker took the opportunity to observe and collect animals, plants and minerals, so these were the first three collecting sites documented in his Antarctic Journal.     

C. O. Whitman and the American Society of Zoologists

C. O. Whitman (1842–1910) studied under Louis Agassiz,Anton Dohrn, and Rudolph Leuchart. Under the influence of E.S. Morse, Whitman served as the second professor of zoologyat the University of Tokyo (1880–81). For three yearshe was assistant to Alexander Agassiz at the Museum of ComparativeZoology. Between 1883 and 1886 Whitman was editor of the Departmentof Microscopy for the American Naturalist. He became the firstdirector of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole,serving until 1908, and built that institution into an internationallyfamous center for education and research. He also became firstprofessor of Zoology at the University of Chicago where he remainedfor life. In 1887 he founded the Journal of Morphology, andlater Biological Lectures, and Zoological Bulletin which becamethe Biological Bulletin. His own research was in the fieldsof embryology, heredity, and evolution. In 1890 he, with colleagues,founded the American Morphological Society which became theAmerican Society of Zoologists over a period of 13 years (1901–13)by the union of regional groups. Whitman played a leading rolein the founding and early history of the Society.     

A flexible multi-dimensional QoS performance measure framework for distributed heterogeneous systems

When users’ tasks in a distributed heterogeneous computing environment (e.g., cluster of heterogeneous computers) are allocated resources, the total demand placed on some system resources by the tasks, for a given interval of time, may exceed the availability of those resources. In such a case, some tasks may receive degraded service or be dropped from the system. One part of a measure to quantify the success of a resource management system (RMS) in such a distributed environment is the collective value of the tasks completed during an interval of time, as perceived by the user, application, or policy maker. The Flexible Integrated System Capability (FISC) measure presented here is a measure for quantifying this collective value. The FISC measure is a flexible multi-dimensional measure such that any task attribute can be inserted and may include priorities, versions of a task or data, deadlines, situational mode, security, application- and domain-specific QoS, and task dependencies. For an environment where it is important to investigate how well data communication requests are satisfied, the data communication request satisfied can be the basis of the FISC measure instead of tasks completed. The motivation behind the FISC measure is to determine the performance of resource management schemes if tasks have multiple attributes that needs to be satisfied. The goal of this measure is to compare the results of different resource management heuristics that are trying to achieve the same performance objective but with different approaches. This research was supported by the DARPA/ITO Quorum Program, by the DARPA/ISO BADD Program and the Office of Naval Research under ONR grant number N00014-97-1-0804, by the DARPA/ITO AICE program under contract numbers DABT63-99-C-0010 and DABT63-99-C-0012, and by the Colorado State University George T. Abell Endowment. Intel and Microsoft donated some of the equipment used in this research. Jong-Kook Kim is pursuing a Ph.D. degree from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University (expected in August 2004). Jong-Kook received his M.S. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Purdue University in May 2000. He received his B.S. degree in electronic engineering from Korea University, Seoul, Korea in 1998. He has presented his work at several international conferences and has been a reviewer for numerous conferences and journals. His research interests include heterogeneous distributed computing, computer architecture, performance measure, resource management, evolutionary heuristics, and power-aware computing. He is a student member of the IEEE, IEEE Computer Society, and ACM. Debra Hensgen is a member of the Research and Evaluation Team at OpenTV in Mountain View, California. OpenTV produces middleware for set-top boxes in support of interactive television. She received her Ph.D. in the area of Distributed Operating Systems from the University of Kentucky. Prior to moving to private industry, as an Associate Professor in the systems area, she worked with students and colleagues to design and develop tools and systems for resource management, network re-routing algorithms and systems that preserve quality of service guarantees, and visualization tools for performance debugging of parallel and distributed systems. She has published numerous papers concerning her contributions to the Concurra toolkit for automatically generating safe, efficient concurrent code, the Graze parallel processing performance debugger, the SAAM path information base, and the SmartNet and MSHN Resource Management Systems. Taylor Kidd is currently a Software Architect for Vidiom Systems in Portland Oregon. His current work involves the writing of multi-company industrial specifications and the architecting of software systems for the digital cable television industry. He has been involved in the establishment of international specifications for digital interactive television in both Europe and in the US. Prior to his current position, Dr. Kidd has been a researcher for the US Navy as well as an Associate Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School. Dr Kidd received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 1991 from the University of California, San Diego. H. J. Siegel was appointed the George T. Abell Endowed Chair Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Colorado State University (CSU) in August 2001, where he is also a Professor of Computer Science. In December 2002, he became the first Director of the CSU Information Science and Technology Center (ISTeC). ISTeC is a university-wide organization for promoting, facilitating, and enhancing CSU’s research, education, and outreach activities pertaining to the design and innovative application of computer, communication, and information systems. From 1976 to 2001, he was a professor at Purdue University. He received two BS degrees from MIT, and the MA, MSE, and PhD degrees from Princeton University. His research interests include parallel and distributed computing, heterogeneous computing, robust computing systems, parallel algorithms, parallel machine interconnection networks, and reconfigurable parallel computer systems. He has co-authored over 300 published papers on parallel and distributed computing and communication, is an IEEE Fellow, is an ACM Fellow, was a Coeditor-in-Chief of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, and was on the Editorial Boards of both the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems and the IEEE Transactions on Computers. He was Program Chair/Co-Chair of three major international conferences, General Chair/Co-Chair of four international conferences, and Chair/Co-Chair of five workshops. He has been an international keynote speaker and tutorial lecturer, and has consulted for industry and government. David St. John is Chief Information Officer for WeatherFlow, Inc., a weather services company specializing in coastal weather observations and forecasts. He received a master’s degree in Engineering from the University of California, Irvine. He spent several years as the head of staff on the Management System for Heterogeneous Networks project in the Computer Science Department of the Naval Postgraduate School. His current relationship with cluster computing is as a user of the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS), a numerical weather model developed at Colorado State University. WeatherFlow runs RAMS operationally on a Linux-based cluster. Cynthia Irvine is a Professor of Computer Science at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. She received her Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University and her B.A. in Physics from Rice University. She joined the faculty of the Naval Postgraduate School in 1994. Previously she worked in industry on the development of high assurance secure systems. In 2001, Dr. Irvine received the Naval Information Assurance Award. Dr. Irvine is the Director of the Center for Information Systems Security Studies and Research at the Naval Postgraduate School. She has served on special panels for NSF, DARPA, and OSD. In the area of computer security education Dr. Irvine has most recently served as the general chair of the Third World Conference on Information Security Education and the Fifth Workshop on Education in Computer Security. She co-chaired the NSF workshop on Cyber-security Workforce Needs Assessment and Educational Innovation and was a participant in the Computing Research Association/NSF sponsored Grand Challenges in Information Assurance meeting. She is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Information Warfare and has served as a reviewer and/or program committee member of a variety of security related conferences. She has written over 100 papers and articles and has supervised the work of over 80 students. Professor Irvine is a member of the ACM, the AAS, a life member of the ASP, and a Senior Member of the IEEE. Timothy E. Levin is a Research Associate Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School. He has spent over 18 years working in the design, development, evaluation, and verification of secure computer systems, including operating systems, databases and networks. His current research interests include high assurance system design and analysis, development of models and methods for the dynamic selection of QoS security attributes, and the application of formal methods to the development of secure computer systems. Viktor K. Prasanna received his BS in Electronics Engineering from the Bangalore University and his MS from the School of Automation, Indian Institute of Science. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Pennsylvania State University in 1983. Currently, he is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering as well as in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He is also an associate member of the Center for Applied Mathematical Sciences (CAMS) at USC. He served as the Division Director for the Computer Engineering Division during 1994–98. His research interests include parallel and distributed systems, embedded systems, configurable architectures and high performance computing. Dr. Prasanna has published extensively and consulted for industries in the above areas. He has served on the organizing committees of several international meetings in VLSI computations, parallel computation, and high performance computing. He is the Steering Co-chair of the International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium [merged IEEE International Parallel Processing Symposium (IPPS) and the Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing (SPDP)] and is the Steering Chair of the International Conference on High Performance Computing(HiPC). He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing and the Proceedings of the IEEE. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Computers. He was the founding Chair of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Parallel Processing. He is a Fellow of the IEEE. Richard F. Freund is the originator of GridIQ’s network scheduling concepts that arose from mathematical and computing approaches he developed for the Department of Defense in the early 1980’s. Dr. Freund has over twenty-five years experience in computational mathematics, algorithm design, high performance computing, distributed computing, network planning, and heterogeneous scheduling. Since 1989, Dr. Freund has published over 45 journal articles in these fields. He has also been an editor of special editions of IEEE Computer and the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing. In addition, he is a founder of the Heterogeneous Computing Workshop, held annually in conjunction with the International Parallel Processing Symposium. Dr. Freund is the recipient of many awards, which includes the prestigious Department of Defense Meritorious Civilian Service Award in 1984 and the Lauritsen-Bennet Award from the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command in San Diego, California.     

A conversation with John Sulston

Sir John Sulston was a co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2002. He won the prize for his discoveries concerning "genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death," along with his colleagues sydney Brenner and H. Robert Horvitz. Dr. Sulston was founding director of the Sanger Centre, Cambridge, England, which he headed from 1992 to 2000. From 1993 to 2000, he led the British arm of the international team selected to work on the Human Genome Project. He is co-author of the book The Common Thread: A Story of Science, Politics, Ethics, and the Human Genome, published by Joseph Henry Press in 2002.This interview was conducted on December 20, 2002, shortly after Dr. Sulston was awarded his Nobel Prize and was originally broadcast on that date on radio station WPKN-FM in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The interview was conducted by Valerie Richardson, the Managing Editor of The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine.Dr. Sulston has been an outspoken advocate against letting the data from the Human Genome Project become property of commercial interests that would charge the world's scientific community for its use. Since leaving the Sanger Institute, he has worked with OxFam, the Oxford Campaign for Famine Relief.     

Science, diplomacy, charity, politics... What is in common?--Academician Serhiĭ Komisarenko

The paper is dedicated to the history of creation and development of a new trend of scientific investigations in Palladin Institute of Biochemistry of NAS of Ukraine and Ukraine as a whole, - molecular immunology - in the context of scientific, scientific-organizational, pedagogical, social and political activity of Serhiy Vasyliovych Komisarenko. Professor S. V. Komisarenko, Director of Palladin Institute of Biochemistry, Full Member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and Academy of Medical Sciences of Ukraine, President of the Ukrainian Biochemical Society (since 1999), editor-in-chief Ukrainian Biochemical Journal (1989-1992 and since 1998), Academician-Secretary and Member of the Presidium of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (since April 2004) is a physician by education, molecular biologist by the calling, biochemist-immunologist by profession. He was one of the first researchers in our country who started systematic investigations in the field of molecular immunology, created a powerful world-famous scientific school, and made great contribution to solution of the acute problems of public health. He has proposed a new anti-tumor preparation MEBIFON which is produced at pharmaceutical firm Farmak in Kyiv. He was one of the first in the former USSR who introduced a hybridom technique for obtaining monoclonal antibodies. S. Komisarenko was awarded the State Prize of the Ukr. SSR (1979) for immunochemical investigation of milk for babies. He proved that small doses of total radiation cause essential inhibition of natural immunity, which he called "the Chernobyl AIDS". The collective of scientific workers of the Department of Molecular Immunology headed by S. Komisarenko was awarded the O. V. Palladin Prize of NAS of Ukraine (2003) for a cycle of works Immunochemical Analysis of Fibrin and Fibrinogen Polymerization Mechanisms. Serhiy Komisarenko combines successfully scientific, scientific-organizing activity with pedagogical work; he leads the division BIOTECHNOLOGY of the Department of Biochemistry at Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University. Under his supervision 6 doctors and 18 candidates of science have been prepared. He has above 400 scientific articles in the field of Biochemistry and/or Immunology, and more than 100 publications on Ukrainian culture and politics. Serhiy Komisarenko has performed great social and political work at the post of the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of Ukraine, Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine responsible for humanitarian sector (1990-1992), Ambassador of independent Ukraine in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and North Ireland (1992-1998). He is a trustee of activity of charitable organization of disabled children Special Olympics - Ukraine (since 2002). He was awarded a Diploma of the Supreme Council of Ukraine (2003), State Order of Merit (III degree - 1996, II degree - 1998), State Order of Prince Yaroslav the Wise (V degree - 2005). Serhiy Komisarenko was elected the Honorary Doctor of Kingston and North London Universities (1997). He has the Rank of Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Ukraine.     

The history of the Purine Club: a tribute to Prof. Geoffrey Burnstock

The international purinergic scientific community has lost its pioneer. Geoffrey Burnstock, born on the 10th of May 1929 in London, died on the 2nd of June 2020, aged 91, in Melbourne (Australia). Geoff was one of the most highly regarded scientists of his generation. In the 1960s and 1970s, he developed a radical and somehow heretical new theory and opened an entire new field of science, signalling via extracellular nucleotides (the “purinergic theory”), which revolutionized our understanding of how cells communicate between each other. Initially, his unconventional theory found a lot of resistance in the scientific community. Once, one scientist even threatened to devote his entire life to disproving Burnstock’s theory. Undeterred, Geoff went further on, and continued to accumulate evidence in favour of his hypothesis, and led the field ever since. He struggled to attract new scientists to this new field of research and, in the early 1990s, due to new molecular biology techniques making it possible to isolate and identify cell surface receptors for ATP and its breakdown product adenosine, did evidence emerge that eventually convinced the doubters. The number of spontaneous obituaries and messages honouring Geoff’s memory that have appeared on specialized Journals and in the public press throughout the world since last June indicates that many people are clearly affected by his death. Besides being a rigorous, ethical and extremely brilliant scientist, Geoff was an extraordinary human being, always eager to collaborate and share data, never jealous of his findings and capable of learning things even from young people. He was known for his enthusiasm, empathy and ability to motivate young scientists and promote their careers. After the establishment of the Purine Club back in the 1990s, numerous Purine Club Chapters have been formed around the world with Geoff’s help and encouragement. He has obviously also been the inspirator and founder of our Journal, Purinergic Signalling (PUSI). For this reason, Charles Kennedy, the current Editor of the Journal, and myself thought that it might be nice to invite representatives from all known Purine Clubs to send a few notes to be published in PUSI on the history of their club and how Geoff inspired, aided or supported them. Here, I have collected all their contributions and I share with the entire purinergic community my personal memories on how the Purine Club was born and developed thanks to the invaluable mentoring of Geoffrey Burnstock. I apologize in advance if I am missing some information or forgot to mention somebody, and I strongly encourage all readers to submit memories and additional information that I shall gather for future writing. Keeping alive the history of how the field developed will be the best tribute that we can play to celebrate Geoff’s work along the years.

     

The terminology and use of species–area relationships: a response to Dengler (2009)

Dengler ( Journal of Biogeography , 2009, 36 , 728–744) addresses issues regarding species–area relationships (SARs), but fails to settles those issues. He states that only certain types of sampling schemes should be used to construct SARs, but is not consistent in the criteria that he uses to include some sampling schemes but not others. He argues that a sampling scheme of contiguous plots will be more accurate in extrapolating beyond the sampled area, but logic tells us that a dispersed sampling scheme is likely to be more accurate. Finally, he concludes that the 'true' SAR is a power function, but this conclusion is inconsistent with his results and with the results of others. Rather than defining a narrow framework for SARs, we need to recognize that the relationship between area and species richness is scale- and system-dependent. Different sampling schemes serve different purposes, and a variety of functional relationships are likely to hold. Further theoretical and empirical work is needed to resolve these issues fully.     

Protein Design and Evolution for Biocatalysis

Cover illustration: Protein Design and Evolution for Biocatalysis. This special issue of Biotechnology Journal contains selected contributions from scientists participating to the ESF-EMBO Symposium which took place in October 2008 in San Feliu, Spain. Guest Editor is the chair and organizer of the meeting, Jiri Damborsky from Brno (Czech Republic). He highlights a variety of topics brought up in the meeting, ranging from new methods of rational design, directed evolution, metagenomics and single-molecule techniques, to construction of useful enzymes for industrial applications. Uwe Bornscheuer (Greifswald, Germany) authored a meeting report. Image colored pencils, © PhotoDisc, Inc.; Protein logo © ESF.