Reflections on Scientific Lives: A microbiologist/biochemist surveys the changing scene

Current microbiology/biochemistry textbooks are encyclopedic tomes which include little information about the scientists in academia and non-profit research institutes who erected the extensive framework of our current knowledge. This essay discusses the dubious notion that a new major kind of “scientific life” is emerging in biotechnology…a blend of unfettered academic (“basic”) research and industrial (“applied”) research. Examples are given of outstanding academic scientists whose creativity in seeking new basic knowledge of cell (and virus) growth, biochemistry, and genetics led to the major tools of the applied biotechnology industry

Discovery and Exploration of the Microbial Universe: 1665 to "Modern Times"

Recent research has shown that the first observation and published depiction of a microorganism (Mucor) was made by Robert Hooke (1665), whose microscope expertise facilitated the later discovery of bacteria by Antoni v. Leeuwenhoek. In 1835, Agostino Bassi proved that an infectious disease of animals was caused by a microbe. Forty years later, Ferdinand Cohn's research ushered in the age of "modern microbiology," with major contributions from Robert Koch, Martinus Beijerinck, and Sergei Winogradsky. The present essay also highlights a number of subsequent investigators who discovered fundamental aspects of microbial (and virus) growth and biochemical mechanisms. Nowadays, scientists whose research provided the basis of microbial molecular biology are sometimes recognized by single-line entries in textbook tables

Historical Adventures in Scientific Discovery: Microbiology/Biochemistry

ERRATUM: on p.87 bottom, delete [see Figure 1].Recent textbooks are generally deficient in respect to the history of major discoveries in microbiology/biochemistry. These "Historical Adventures" focus on the backgrounds and contributions of a number of relatively unknown pioneering investigators, as well as some of the familiar "giants." This publication is part of "An Experiment in Scientific Biography". A companion part, "Associations with distinguished scientists ..." can be accessed at https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/2022/1083/1/Gestfinal.pdf

Prediction and prevention of the next pandemic zoonosis.

Most pandemics--eg, HIV/AIDS, severe acute respiratory syndrome, pandemic influenza--originate in animals, are caused by viruses, and are driven to emerge by ecological, behavioural, or socioeconomic changes. Despite their substantial effects on global public health and growing understanding of the process by which they emerge, no pandemic has been predicted before infecting human beings. We review what is known about the pathogens that emerge, the hosts that they originate in, and the factors that drive their emergence. We discuss challenges to their control and new efforts to predict pandemics, target surveillance to the most crucial interfaces, and identify prevention strategies. New mathematical modelling, diagnostic, communications, and informatics technologies can identify and report hitherto unknown microbes in other species, and thus new risk assessment approaches are needed to identify microbes most likely to cause human disease. We lay out a series of research and surveillance opportunities and goals that could help to overcome these challenges and move the global pandemic strategy from response to pre-emption

The Specific Characteristics of the Biophysical System Theory

Biophysical model can help to see certain phases more clearly and sharply giving way for experimentation. But by all means, the biophysical model is always suitable to correct faults and direct further investigations in the proper way. Another aspect which equally stresses the usefulness of the model on trial: once we keep a solution in hand we get a great number of testing chance through it as well. We can foretell on the basis of the model in what direction a given biological process shall deviate by changing single parameters. There is no sharp limit between compartments and the number of compartments can be increased or diminished by amplification and reduction, respectively. The enlargement and reduction of the compartments depend on the researcher and the compartmentization is confined by Heisenberg’s principle. With the living systems, too, even in the case of very much parameters there exists a critical point, for example the upper limit of the body temperature which goes around 43 oC in the human being. Similarly, there is a critical value for the blood pressure, for the oxygen concentration, etc. These problems belong to the most difficult tasks of the up-to-date science and evenly appear in the most various chapters of the natural sciences. The biogenesis in the univers shows scale behavi­our, too: of the cell it is characteristic to be living (it can be cultivated under laboratory conditions), organs built up of cells are living (organ transplantation is possible), organisms built up of organs are also living, according to the most universal law of the biogenesis, life appears on a certain evolutional stage of the universe, in different parts of the space. From the biological point of view the types of interactions are no more so clearly confinable. First of all we can consider the metabolism as a fundamental interaction which realizes the unity of the living organism with its environment. The life under study is disappearing as we proceed from the living whole towards the lifeless constituents. This means that the life does not equal to the sum of its constituents. The more we dissect these living units the farther we get from the biology and finally we reach the superb, eternal and universal physical laws of the lifeless matter

Reticulate evolution everywhere

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The Chemical Characterization of the Gene: Vicissitudes of Evidential Assessment

The chemical characterization of the substance responsible for the phenomenon of “transformation” of pneumococci was presented in the now famous 1944 paper by Avery, MacLeod, and McCarty. Reception of this work was mixed. Although interpreting their results as evidence that deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is the molecule responsible for genetic changes was, at the time, controversial, this paper has been retrospectively celebrated as providing such evidence. The mixed and changing assessment of the evidence presented in the paper was due to the work’s interpretive flexibility – the evidence was interpreted in various ways, and such interpretations were justified given the neophytic state of molecular biology and methodological limitations of Avery’s transformation studies. I argue that the changing context in which the evidence presented by Avery’s group was interpreted partly explains the vicissitudes of the assessments of the evidence. Two less compelling explanations of the reception are a myth-making account and an appeal to the wartime historical context of its publication