PATH - A global health nonprofit organization in support of international vaccine manufacturing

PATH is a non-profit global health organization which - among other goals - supports vaccine manufacturers in developing countries by facilitating their entry into international public markets. Some of the most significant challenges for a domestic vaccine manufacturer in a developing country on the path towards expanding to the international public markets are meeting (1) GMP compliance, (2) clinical trial design, and (3) pharmacovigilance standards of international bodies such as WHO. This talk will cover programs to standardize international regulatory practices and examples from several domestic manufacturers working on the transition and the improvements necessary to meet the standards of WHO vaccine prequalificatio

Some Contributions of Fossil Study to the Problem of Vertebrate Origin

Prior to Darwin\u27s time there had been speculations regarding the origin and the relationships of the various plant and animal groups. Some of these were ingenious and some of them hit close enough to post-Darwinian ideas to have led some biologists to over-value them. To most biologists of those days, however, such problems were unimportant. They seem to have taken the animal and plant groups for granted. Similarities and differences were used in classification, but to their authors such concepts as archetypes, etc. probably had no special philosophic importance. A vertebrate archetype was like an alphabet, a composite of the characters shown by different vertebrates, these characters being grouped, rearranged, and varied in different forms, but such community of characters had only a function of convenience

An Upper Silurian Vertebrate Horizon

The earliest fossil fragments which have been positively identified as vertebrate come from the Upper Ordovician. They are fragments, the best known of which come from the Harding sandstone near Canon City, Colorado. Though fragmentary, study of the histological structure of the plates indicates that they were bony, therefore vertebrate, and that the bone structure agrees with that in the shields of the Heterostraci, one of the orders of Ostracoderms. (1) These are intriguing fragments, hints of the presence of vertebrates but inadequate to give us any idea of the body form or of any details of structure. · Following this early occurrence the fossil record is a blank through-out the long period between this and Upper Silurian. When the next record available thus far is examined it is found to contain a wealth of Ostracoderm forms. It is this next occurrence which I wish to discuss. I could only wish that I might be able to sketch the history of the group between Upper Ordovician and Upper Silurian, for somewhere in the rocks of that interval must lie the records of a very important chapter in vertebrate evolution

Some Paleoecoloical Speculations Regarding the Earliest Vertebrates

Vertebrate paleontology concerns itself mainly with bones. Seldom is there any fossilized remnant of other structures. Vertebrate paleoecology has a task like that of Ezekiel, to make those dry bones live, to try to reconstruct from the data available the habitat, the mode of life, and the associations of these creatures of the past. Unfortunately we are seldom able to accomplish our task by Ezekiel\u27s method of prophesying. There is call for a good play of imagination in the task and sometimes it is difficult to draw a line between what we like to call scientific imagination and the garden variety

Alien Registration- Robertson, George W. (Saint Agatha, Aroostook County)

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Some Attempts at Phylogeny of Early Vertebrates

There is an often-quoted reply of a mountain-climber to the question of his motives in mountain climbing. Why do I want to climb that mountain? Because it is there. The same characteristic of curiosity has driven men to investigate all sorts of things aside from mountains, and in many, perhaps most, cases we make the same reply if we are really honest. So in paleontology one generally starts with the small-boy motive and some fortunate souls continue with it. They are the rockhounds, the human pack-rats , like the famous Lauder Dick, the Baker of Thurso. For some of us the study of fossils becomes a more sophisticated business and we pursue that subject, still with the driving power of curiosity but with developing objectives beyond that. What sorts of animals existed in the past? Where did they live? What were the environmental conditions under which they lived? How were they related to each other and to the animals of today? The latter question, the genetic relationships among the animals of the past, is one of the two major topics of the study of Evolution, the other being the mechanism of evolution