Decolonising drugs in Asia : the case of cocaine in colonial India

This article examines a drugs trade in Asia that has been largely forgotten by historians and policy-makers: cocaine. It will briefly trace some of the contours of this commerce and the efforts to control it. It will also assess how successful these efforts were. The article is designed to contribute fresh perspectives on recent controversies in the historiography of drugs in Asia to argue that the agendas and agency of consumers are central to understanding why markets have formed there for psychoactive substances in the modern period

‘The law of storms': European and indigenous responses to natural disasters in colonial India, c. 1800–1850

Focusing on collective response to storms and floods in early colonial India, the paper explores obstacles to successful disaster response with one example related to meteorology of cyclones and the other the use of embankments. In both these examples, there was an attempt to build public-private partnerships, which succeeded in the case of weather prediction and failed in river embankment. The failure is explained by two factors. Coordination and contracting were costly when the private partners had variable capacities and interests. Furthermore, whereas meteorology predicted nature, embankments interfered with nature, an intervention which carried social and economic costs

Structure and mechanism of proton transport through the transmembrane tetrameric M2 protein bundle of the influenza A virus

The M2 proton channel from influenza A virus is an essential protein that mediates transport of protons across the viral envelope. This protein has a single transmembrane helix, which tetramerizes into the active channel. At the heart of the conduction mechanism is the exchange of protons between the His37 imidazole moieties of M2 and waters confined to the M2 bundle interior. Protons are conducted as the total charge of the four His37 side chains passes through 2+ and 3+ with a pKa near 6. A 1.65 Å resolution X-ray structure of the transmembrane protein (residues 25–46), crystallized at pH 6.5, reveals a pore that is lined by alternating layers of sidechains and well-ordered water clusters, which offer a pathway for proton conduction. The His37 residues form a box-like structure, bounded on either side by water clusters with well-ordered oxygen atoms at close distance. The conformation of the protein, which is intermediate between structures previously solved at higher and lower pH, suggests a mechanism by which conformational changes might facilitate asymmetric diffusion through the channel in the presence of a proton gradient. Moreover, protons diffusing through the channel need not be localized to a single His37 imidazole, but instead may be delocalized over the entire His-box and associated water clusters. Thus, the new crystal structure provides a possible unification of the discrete site versus continuum conduction models