揭开世界性系统农牧渔业基因组研究的序幕

以基因组测序为先导的农牧渔业系统基因组学研究是一项需要国际间进行协同攻关和紧密合作的重大项目计划。这种以应用为目的的基础科学研究项目无论是对发达国家还是对发展中国家而言都是非常重要和必要的。然而，我们必须清醒地意识到，当人类基因组和其他许多同人类健康相关的基因组以及一些模式生物基因组已经或即将被测序时，重要的农作物、牲畜、水产品基因组所受到的重视还远远不够。虽然我们正面对诸如政策制订、资金申请、地方发展重点、研究团体共识及技术革新等多方面的问题和挑战，人们还是提出了许多有关大规模测序及其投资收益的倡议或计划。由于大规模测序即全基因组鸟枪法(Wh01e Genome Shotgun or WGS)所产生的序列草图能覆盖整个基因组95％至99％的区域，从基因组草图中识别的基因连带其他资源比如分子标记、大片段插入克隆和cDNA序列的知识，为农牧渔业和环境生物学提供了丰富的信息和大量的工具。一旦这项重大计划得以实施并取得成功，所有国家的分子生物学家、遗传学家、实验生物学家。无论富裕或贫穷，都将站在同一科学起点上，基础基因组学信息的又一次大爆发将使我们的生活和环境拥有一个更美好的未来。我们热切呼吁全世界的各个研究基金会，也呼吁各个国家和国际政府机构与组织共同支持这场伟大的项目计划。     

The evolution of BioBike: Community adaptation of a biocomputing platform

Programming languages are, at the same time, instruments and communicative artifacts that evolve rapidly through use. In this paper I describe an online computing platform called BioBike. BioBike is a trading zone where biologists and programmers collaborate in the development of an extended vocabulary and functionality for computational genomics. In the course of this work they develop interactional expertise with one another’s domains. The extended BioBike vocabulary operates on two planes: as a working programming language, and as a pidgin in the conversation between the biologists and engineers. The flexibility that permits this community to dynamically extend BioBike’s working vocabulary—to form new pidgins—makes BioBike unique among computational tools, which usually are not themselves adapted through the collaborations that they facilitate. Thus BioBike is itself a crucial feature—which it is tempting to refer to as a participant—in the developing interaction.     

Mathematics Sent Across the Channel and the Atlantic: British Mathematical Contributions to European and American Scientific Journals, 1835–1900

This paper will consider the range of British participation in mathematics internationally during the nineteenth century through an analysis of British mathematical contributions to scientific journals outside of Britain. Viewing scientific papers contained in journals as significant indicators of research, we consider scientists who authored or read and responded in print to papers in a given area within a given group of journals to constitute a publication community. The extent of publication by British mathematicians in these journals can help characterize the role of foreign publication in nineteenth-century British mathematics. Moreover, the isolation of educational, societal, and personal circumstances which motivated British mathematicians to present their work to foreign journals highlights limited but concentrated groups of mathematicians committed to developing and strengthening international mathematical ties with Britain.     

On Joseph Fourier: the man,the mathematician and the physicist

In 1793 Lord Macartney arrived in China as ambassador of King George III. The aims of his embassy were largely directed towards the enlargement of British trade with the far east, and especially with China. The embassy also had a diplomatic and cultural mission, to impress the Chinese with British achievements. They were to do so largely by distributing presents of British manufactures, chief among them being scientific instruments. The Chinese refused the embassy's requests, and clearly regarded the gifts of instruments as merely ingenious toys. This paper describes the role of instruments in the embassy, and contrasts British expectations with Chinese attitudes to scientific instruments. The embassy's failure is shown to reveal fundamental differences in British and Chinese eighteenth-century responses to science, and has wide cultural implications.     

The biological indication of SO2

Conclusion The biological indication approach is necessary in environmental management, and should go hand in hand with conventional analytical-chemical techniques. It is essential that the characterization of environmental quality should also include the observations of skilled biologists. If not, we are likely in the future to face many unforeseen environmental problems at a very late stage of their development. The use of biological indicators represents one aspect of the biologist's characterization of environmental quality.     

British Acoustics and its Transformation from the 1860s to the 1910s

Between the 1860s and the 1910s, British acoustics was transformed from an area of empirical research into a mathematically organized field. Musical motives—improving musical scales and temperaments, making better musical instruments, and understanding the nature of musical tones—were among the major driving forces of acoustical researchers in nineteenth-century Britain. The German acoustician, Helmholtz, had a major impact on British acousticians who also had extensive interactions with American and French acousticians. Rayleigh's acoustics, reflecting all these features, bore remarkable fruit in his treatise The Theory of Sound, which successfully subjected empirical acoustics to analytical mathematics. His accomplishments made British acoustics a subfield of physics, thus distinguishing it from the ‘new acoustics’ in early twentieth-century America.     

英国国家科技创新政策的战略规划

在世界新科技革命迅猛发展,经济全球化趋势日益增强的背景下,一个国家的科技政策愈来愈明显地表达出国家竞争战略的意志,可以说科技实力的竞争已演变成为国际竞争的焦点。时代主题的变换与新科技的冲击同样为英国的发展提供了机遇与挑战。英国科技创新战略应运而生,并在实践中取得显著效果,为英国构建国家创新体系奠定了坚实的基础。本文试图通过解读英国科技创新政策的战略规划,为我国制定科技政策提供借鉴与参考。     

The Pontifex Minimus: William Willcocks and Engineering British Colonialism

Sir William Willcocks (1852–1933) was a prominent British irrigation engineer who served in various British colonies. Best known as the chief designer of the Old Aswan Dam, Willcocks was born and trained in India, achieved prominence with his contribution to the development of centralized and perennial irrigation in Egypt, and was hired at the end of his career by the Ottomans to restore the ancient irrigation works of Mesopotamia (which was then on the verge of being acquired by the British). In this article, I follow Willcocks' voyages across the British Empire and show how hydraulic science moved from one colonial centre to another, and how this movement contributed to the construction and maintenance of colonialism on the ground. Often sent to newly acquired territories with ambitious projects to redesign the landscapes of property and agriculture, Willcocks and other engineers who gained their expertise in the colonies relied on lessons from their day-to-day struggle with the land and other social actors' competing agendas to develop the daily techniques that helped establish colonial rule. As the reception of Willcocks' work in London illustrates, it was in the metropole that engineers' practices were translated into a colonial symbolism that had large-scale technical systems as the right tools for the job of subordinating unruly waters and Nature writ large.     

Charles Darwin and group selection

The question of the levels at which natural selection can be said to operate is much discussed by biologists today and is a key factor in the recent controversy about sociobiology. It is shown that this problem is one to which Charles Darwin addressed himself at some length. It is argued that apart from some slight equivocation over man, Darwin opted firmly for hypotheses supposing selection always to work at the level of the individual rather than the group. However, natural selection's co-discoverer, Alfred Russel Wallace, endorsed group selection hypotheses.     

Essay Review: The Historicity of Sound and Hearing

This paper investigates the extent of overseas migration by British chemists over the period 1887–1971. Notwithstanding the ‘brain drain’ alarms of the 1960s, overseas employment was characteristic of some 19% of British chemists’ careers throughout our period, though its nature changed considerably. Our study examines the overseas employment histories of four cohorts of members of the [Royal] Institute of Chemistry in the ‘Chemists’ Database’ at the Open University. Those employed abroad were not only highly qualified but also both geographically mobile and occupationally versatile. Over the period, the pattern of chemists’ migration was broadly similar to that of British migration trends more generally. Except in the interwar years, chemists’ rate of migration was relatively constant. However, the length of time they spent abroad declined markedly over the period: long-term migration became less characteristic than short-term overseas employment for purposes of career development. From the late nineteenth century, British chemists staffed the Empire, but also found employment in the expanding US economy. After 1945, chemists’ destinations shifted more markedly towards North America, including Canada, and later also to Europe. Our work thus provides a new perspective on the dynamics of scientists’ migration and contributes to studies on the brain drain.     

Introduction: invertebrate axons find their way

The mechanisms that generate the immense complexity of synaptic connections within the developing nervous system have fascinated biologists for decades. Analysis of nervous system development in simple systems, such as insects, has made a major contribution to our understanding of the cellular and molecular mechanisms that control the formation of axon pathways and precise connections. This enterprise has a long, interesting, and somewhat controversial history. This collection of reviews on axon guidance in insects provides a brief update to integrate current molecular and developmental insights in a number of areas from initial axon pathfinding to the recognition of synaptic partners.     

Trust in expert testimony: Eddington's 1919 eclipse expedition and the British response to general relativity

The 1919 British astronomical expedition led by Arthur Stanley Eddington to observe the deflection of starlight by the sun, as predicted by Einstein's relativistic theory of gravitation, is a fascinating example of the importance of expert testimony in the social transmission of scientific knowledge. While Popper lauded the expedition as science at its best, accounts by Earman and Glymour, Collins and Pinch, and Waller are more critical of Eddington's work. Here I revisit the eclipse expedition to dispute the characterization of the British response to general relativity as the blind acceptance of a partisan's pro-relativity claims by colleagues incapable of criticism. Many factors served to make Eddington the trusted British expert on relativity in 1919, and his experimental results rested on debatable choices of data analysis, choices criticized widely since but apparently not widely by his British contemporaries. By attending to how and to whom Eddington presented his testimony and how and by whom this testimony was received, I suggest, we may recognize as evidentially significant corroborating testimony from those who were expert not in relativity but in observational astronomy. We are reminded that even extraordinary expert testimony is neither offered nor accepted entirely in an epistemic vacuum.     

Asexual reproduction: Genetics and evolutionary aspects

Reproduction is essential to all organisms if they are to contribute to the next generation. There are various means and ways of achieving this goal. This review focuses on the role of asexual reproduction for eukaryotic organisms and how its integration in a life cycle can influence their population genetics and evolution. An important question for evolutionary biologists as to why some organisms reproduce sexually, as opposed to asexually, is addressed. We also discuss the economic and medical importance of asexual organisms. Received 4 December 2006; received after revision 25 January 2007; accepted 20 February 2007     

Life without myoglobin

Hemoproteins are widely distributed among prokaryotes, unicellular eukaryotes, plants and animals [1]. Myoglobin, a cytoplasmic hemoprotein that is restricted to cardiomyocytes and oxidative skeletal myofibers in vertebrates, has been proposed to facilitate oxygen transport to the mitochondria [1-3]. This cytoplasmic hemoprotein was the first protein to be subjected to definitive structural analysis and has been a subject of long-standing and ongoing interest to biologists [1-3]. Recently, we utilized gene disruption technology to generate mice that are viable and fertile despite a complete absence of myoglobin [4]. This unexpected result led us to reexamine existing paradigms regarding the function of myoglobin in striated muscle.     

Stem cells and their niche: a matter of fate

Embryonic stem cells provide an in vitro model for developmental biologists to study cell fate decisions during ontogenesis, while somatic stem cells allow physiologists to understand tissue homeostasis in the adult. The behavior of stem cells is dependent on an intimate relationship with a supportive niche. This brief review highlights some of the most important recent trends in stem cell biology, focusing in particular on the supportive microenvironments for both embryonic and adult stem cells. Known intrinsic and extrinsic molecular players from the best-characterized stem cell types are summarized, illuminating a number of shared environmental cues among tissues originating from all three embryonic germ layers. Received 6 October 2005; received after revision 27 December 2005; accepted 17 January 2006     

The social roots of Einstein's theory of relativity

In its infancy the British Association for the Advancement of Science derived a good deal of its inspiration from the writings of Francis Bacon. But the pursuit of Baconian policies brought with it attendant dangers which critics from Charles Dickens to the Times were not slow to magnify. Although the situation was further complicated by the sensitiveness of institutional Christianity at the start of Victoria's reign, some of the hazards which the Association endured had to be accepted simply as consequences of the attempt to provide a secure platform for British science.     

Scientists and bureaucrats in the establishment of the John Innes horticultural institution under William Bateson

Research in Mendelian heredity was first given permanent institutional support in the U.K. at the John Innes Horticultural Institution. The path by which this was achieved is described. It is shown that Brooke-Hunt in the Board of Agriculture played a decisive part in redirecting the John Innes Bequest from a school for gardeners as intended by the testator to an institute given to research on plants of importance to the horticultural trade. The choice of William Bateson as the institute's first director is traced to the influence of a lobby of academic biologists led by J. B. Farmer. The effects of Bateson's appointment on the shape taken by the new institute and on its subsequent history are described.     

Chemistry and slavery in the Scottish Enlightenment

ABSTRACT

The Scottish Enlightenment has long been identified with abolitionism because of the writings of the moral and economic philosophers and the absence of slaves in Scotland itself. However, Scots were disproportionately represented in the ownership, management, and especially medical treatment of slaves in the British Caribbean. Sugar and cotton flowed into Glasgow and young, educated Scots looking for work as traders, bookkeepers, doctors made the return trip back to the Caribbean to manage the plantations. Chemically trained doctors and agriculturalists tested their theories in the plantations and developed new theories based on their experimentation on the land and slaves. In foregrounding the participation of Scottish trained chemists in the practice of slavery, I argue that the development of eighteenth-century chemistry and the broader intellectual Enlightenment were inextricably entangled with the economic Improvement Movement and the colonial economy of the British slave trade.     

Biomimetic actuators: where technology and cell biology merge

The structural and functional analysis of biological macromolecules has reached a level of resolution that allows mechanistic interpretations of molecular action, giving rise to the view of enzymes as molecular machines. This machine analogy is not merely metaphorical, as bio-analogous molecular machines actually are being used as motors in the fields of nanotechnology and robotics. As the borderline between molecular cell biology and technology blurs, developments in the engineering and material sciences become increasingly instructive sources of models and concepts for biologists. In this review, we provide a--necessarily selective--summary of recent progress in the usage of biological and biomimetic materials as actuators in artificial environments, focussing on motors built from DNA, classical cellular motor systems (tubulin/kinesin, actin/myosin), the rotary motor F1F0-ATPase and protein-based 'smart' materials.     

Hydra – ancient model with modern outfit

The control of growth and differentiation is a central question not only for developmental biologists but increasingly for medical research as well. The freshwater polyp hydra was one of the first organisms to be used as a model system for the study of this question. It was chosen because of its simple body plan and because it is made up of only seven to eight different cell types. Recent research has shown that despite their simple body plan, cnidarians already exhibit an impressive repertoire of molecular tools which are responsible for the control of growth and differentiation and amongst which peptides appear to play an important role. Received 25 April 2007; received after revision 31 July 2007; accepted 28 August 2007