The Tangled Field: Barbara McClintock’s Search for the Patterns of Genetic Control
... From now on, it seems to me, there must be a phase of integration where the various isolated phenomenon are drawn together and where the biochemical, histochemical, chromosomal, cytological, developmental etc. phases are more clearly integrated. My material may help in making this revaluation" Barbara McClintock, 1950 (Nobel Prize Winner 1983) [1], in a personal letter to Marcus Rhoades 1 A new post-genomic era has started in biology after the completion of Human Genome Project as predicted by the American geneticist Barbara McClintock with more than 50 years in advance [1]. We thought that once we mapped all genes of our human specie, we would decipher the main mechanisms of the diseases that afflict us. ...
... From now on, it seems to me, there must be a phase of integration where the various isolated phenomenon are drawn together and where the biochemical, histochemical, chromosomal, cytological, developmental etc. phases are more clearly integrated. My material may help in making this revaluation" Barbara McClintock, 1950 (Nobel Prize Winner 1983) [1], in a personal letter to Marcus Rhoades 1 A new post-genomic era has started in biology after the completion of Human Genome Project as predicted by the American geneticist Barbara McClintock with more than 50 years in advance [1]. We thought that once we mapped all genes of our human specie, we would decipher the main mechanisms of the diseases that afflict us. ...
... From now on, it seems to me, there must be a phase of integration where the various isolated phenomenon are drawn together and where the biochemical, histochemical, chromosomal, cytological, developmental etc. phases are more clearly integrated. My material may help in making this revaluation" Barbara McClintock, 1950 (Nobel Prize Winner 1983) [1], in a personal letter to Marcus Rhoades 1 A new post-genomic era has started in biology after the completion of Human Genome Project as predicted by the American geneticist Barbara McClintock with more than 50 years in advance [1]. We thought that once we mapped all genes of our human specie, we would decipher the main mechanisms of the diseases that afflict us. ...
It is urgent to formulate a more comprehensive synthesis regarding the pathophysiology of mental diseases in light of more contemporary evidences and theories stemming from cellular, molecular biology and evolution theory. The field of epigenetics has arisen as one of the most important scientific axis to understand development, physiology and pathophysiology in all areas of medicine with special impact in psychiatry a field that has been historically dominated by today obsolete biological models and theories. In this short review I try to reflect upon the impacts these new understandings about nature may help us to approach and threat psychic diseases.
... Barbara McClintock's discovery of "controlling elements" in maize in the late 1940s marked the critical departure from the earlier vision of the constant character of the genome (Comfort 1999, 2001, McClintock 1948, 1951, 1956, 1984. Now known as transposable elements (TEs) or transposons, these discrete segments of DNA capable of integrating into a new location in the genome remain phenotypically invisible unless specifically looked for or presented with a chance to cause an observable change in an organism such as variegated coloring of maize kernels studied by McClintock. ...
... The functionality of transposable elements has been and remains one of the most exciting and contentious questions that go back to the original ideas of McClintock. In fact, contrary to the wide-spread belief it was not the mere existence of transposons but rather McClintock's vision of them as "controlling elements" that received an overwhelmingly cold reception by contemporaries (Comfort 1999(Comfort , 2001. In the early days of the molecular biology era, evolutional considerations and the C-value paradox of marked disparity between size of the genome and morphological complexity of the organism raised a strong argument that transposable elements are most likely "selfish", "parasitic" or "junk" bits of modern genomes (Doolittle andSapienza 1980, Orgel andCrick 1980). ...
... Taking this argument back to where it all started-Keller's biography of McClintock-Nathaniel Comfort (2011) (Shah 2018, chapter 5;2016), but what I want to highlight here is that Comfort repeatedly shows in his biography that McClintock's theories were rejected, not listened to, ignored by the wider scientific peers not because she was a woman or that she had a holistic views of her scientific objects that challenged the maledominated dogma, but because her arguments were speculative, because she did not have adequate data to substantiate them. McClintock' science was bunch of ideas, empirically it was not-yet-science (Comfort 2001). Long story short, methodologically and epistemologically, especially when we are speaking of hard or physical sciences, there cannot be good or bad science-there is science or none-science. ...
In this review essay, I discuss how, in writing this book on how thinking is feeling, Donovan Schaefer is having a passionate love affair with an idea, how he pulls the bow string as far and still not enough to the point of breaking. I have three remarks/points of concern/comments specific to the outline of cogency theory. First, how thinking is feeling? If thinking is feeling is a process, how does it happen? Second, where does reframing science/knowledge as thinking is feeling take us? How can it reframe what we mean by science? And last, who is the thinking-feeling scientist-subject?
... .participate in the practice of scientific method and use the results of their craft to test and argue the differential credibility of hypotheses to explain pattern, process, adaptation, mechanism, geographic distribution, history, etc." [62]. Activities that could fall under the title Fox Keller used for her biography of Barbara McClintock [63] (but see also [64]) one could say that taxonomists have a "feeling for the clade" and, in many cases, intuition. At present, AI lacks both, and that is why we still need taxonomists. ...
Confusion between the means and ends, specifically between technological achievements and their users, has been evident in taxonomy’s history since the end of the last century. Following a current of thought implicit in Anglo-Saxon culture, this trend aligns with the idea of inevitability. It is inevitable, so it is thought, that what a human organism can do, a machine will be able to do at some point in time. This will ultimately lead to dispensing with the human element for things they do not wish to do themselves. Despite certain misunderstandings about what has become known as the Turing Test, the general idea is to determine whether a machine can analyze data as meaningfully as a human does and make decisions based on that analysis. In the case of taxonomy, the initial aim of using machines was to efficiently replace a researcher for identification purposes. The situation later evolved to include the discovery of new entities in addition to identification. In this essay, I provide a brief overview of some milestones along this trajectory and its current state and discuss the influence of artificial intelligence (AI) in taxonomy.
... Her sole photo is a group picture of Monod in 1946 with the comment: "Monod was greatly tempted to become a proselyte to phage." Nevertheless, McClintock has been the focus of two influential biographies- Keller (1983a) illuminates her view of science; Comfort (2001b) illustrates her research. McClintock has received great attention from historians and sociologists, appearing on the cover page of Rossiter's Women Scientists In America (1995). ...
Barbara McClintock (1902–1992), the renowned American maize geneticist, received the 1983 Nobel Prize “for her discovery of mobile genetic elements,” becoming the seventh woman scientist to receive a Nobel Prize. However, Nathaniel Comfort points out that McClintock viewed her primary contribution as the elucidation of control systems, rather than the discovery of mobile elements. McClintock’s interest in control systems dates back to the 1940s, and this paper investigates her 1961 conversation with François Jacob and Jacques Monod, where she sought to shape the interpretation of her work by drawing parallels between maize control systems and a bacterial system they had recently discovered. Despite McClintock’s efforts, Jacob and Monod rejected her parallels and suggested that her contribution was limited to mobile elements. Through an examination of their published papers, I argue that Jacob and Monod’s rejection stemmed from their failure to fully comprehend maize control systems. Disciplinary discrepancy helps explain Jacob and Monod’s lack of comprehension: they were molecular geneticists working on bacteria, while McClintock was a classical geneticist studying maize. I further argue that gender played a role, as McClintock experienced the Matilda effect—the under-recognition of her contribution, reinforced by the reactions of two male geneticists, and ironically, by the award of the Nobel Prize. Control systems, stemming from McClintock’s reverence for organisms, embodied what Evelyn Fox Keller defines as “gender-neutral science.” This divergent view of science provides insight into why Jacob and Monod failed to grasp McClintock’s work in 1961.
... If either of these is untrue, let alone both, the conclusion is incorrect [124]. There now is a wealth of evidence that transposed elements are active contributors to genome biology and components of regulatory networks [11], as predicted by Barbara McClintock [125] and Britten and Davidson [21]. The most highly conserved sequences in Xist are its repeats [39,126]. ...
RNA has long been regarded primarily as the intermediate between genes and proteins. It was a surprise then to discover that eukaryotic genes are mosaics of mRNA sequences interrupted by large tracts of transcribed but untranslated sequences, and that multicellular organisms also express many long 'intergenic' and antisense noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs). The identification of small RNAs that regulate mRNA translation and half-life did not disturb the prevailing view that animals and plant genomes are full of evolutionary debris and that their development is mainly supervised by transcription factors. Gathering evidence to the contrary involved addressing the low conservation, expression, and genetic visibility of lncRNAs, demonstrating their cell-specific roles in cell and developmental biology, and their association with chromatin-modifying complexes and phase-separated domains. The emerging picture is that most lncRNAs are the products of genetic loci termed 'enhancers', which marshal generic effector proteins to their sites of action to control cell fate decisions during development.
... may constitute the physical basis of the Mendelian law of heredity" (Sutton, 1902). The year Sutton published his treatise on the role of chromosomes in heredity, Barbara McClintock was born (for a detailed account of McClintock's life, see Keller, 1983;Campbell, 1993;Comfort, 2001). She made her first significant discovery 29 years later, when she and her student Harriet Creighton described the relationship between meiotic recombination and crossovers between homologous chromosomes (Creighton and McClintock, 1931). ...
The evolution of eukaryotic genomes is accompanied by fluctuations in chromosome number, reflecting cycles of chromosome number increase (polyploidy, centric fissions) and decrease (chromosome fusions). Although all chromosome fusions result from DNA recombination between two or more non-homologous chromosomes, several mechanisms of descending dysploidy are exploited by eukaryotes to reduce their chromosome number. Genome sequencing and comparative genomics have accelerated the identification of inter-genome chromosome collinearity and gross chromosomal rearrangements and have shown that end-to-end chromosome fusions (EEFs) and nested chromosome fusions (NCFs) may have played a more important role in the evolution of eukaryotic karyotypes than previously thought. The present review aims to summarize the limited knowledge on the origin, frequency, and evolutionary implications of EEF and NCF events in eukaryotes and especially in land plants. The interactions between non-homologous chromosomes in interphase nuclei and chromosome (mis)pairing during meiosis are examined for their potential importance in the origin of EEFs and NCFs. The remaining open questions that need to be addressed are discussed.
... 12 A similar ambiguity can be pointed out in the case of Nobel Prize laureate and cytogenetics pioneer Barbara McClintock (1902McClintock ( -1992, who worked mostly with maize. Whereas Evelyn Fox Keller (1983) in her biography foregrounds the affective and sensitive aspects of McClintock's research practice, Nathaniel Comfort (2001) emphasises rationality, systematicity and the strive for control. Aristotle (1980) experienced nature as φύσις, i.e.: that which emerges, comes forward on its own accord, that which has its own inherent principles of movement and change, that which is there without our doing: the first "moment" (dialectically speaking) of the human-nature relationship (M 1 ). ...
The key objective of this volume is to allow philosophy students and early-stage researchers to become practicing philosophers in technoscientific settings. Zwart focuses on the methodological issue of how to practice continental philosophy of technoscience today.
This text draws upon continental authors such as Hegel, Engels, Heidegger, Bachelard and Lacan (and their fields of dialectics, phenomenology and psychoanalysis) in developing a coherent message around the technicity of science or rather, “technoscience”. Within technoscience, the focus will be on recent developments in life sciences research, such as genomics, post-genomics, synthetic biology and global ecology. This book uniquely presents continental perspectives that tend to be underrepresented in mainstream philosophy of science, yet entail crucial insights for coming to terms with technoscience as it is evolving on a global scale today.
This is an open access book.
... 12 A similar ambiguity can be pointed out in the case of Nobel Prize laureate and cytogenetics pioneer Barbara McClintock (1902McClintock ( -1992, who worked mostly with maize. Whereas Evelyn Fox Keller (1983) in her biography foregrounds the affective and sensitive aspects of McClintock's research practice, Nathaniel Comfort (2001) emphasises rationality, systematicity and the strive for control. Aristotle (1980) experienced nature as φύσις, i.e.: that which emerges, comes forward on its own accord, that which has its own inherent principles of movement and change, that which is there without our doing: the first "moment" (dialectically speaking) of the human-nature relationship (M 1 ). ...
Dialectics is a philosophical method developed by Hegel (1770–1831), but building on an intellectual tradition whose origins can be traced back to ancient Greece. Dialectics was initially practiced as an educational technique for conducting philosophical discussions. For Hegel, however, dialectical processes can be discerned in the dramatic unfolding of nature, history and human thinking as such. The first dialectical thinker, in the genuine sense of the term, according to Hegel (1971), was Heraclitus (535 – c. 475 BC), in whose “obscure” aphorisms Hegel recognises the awareness that dialectics is more than merely a technique to foster critical reflection. Heraclitus already refers to a basic logic guiding the dynamics of nature as such, to a λόγος at work in actual processes of becoming and change, giving rise to contrasting and contradictory developments (“objective dialectics”, as Hegel phrases it). For dialectical thinkers, the dialectical method is fundamentally in tune with nature, because nature as such is inherently dialectical. Hegel considered Aristotle as ancient philosophy’s most thoroughly dialectical thinker, as we have seen, while Hegel himself is regarded as a modern Aristotle (Beiser, 2005, p. 57; Pippin, 2019, p. 301).
... I hold that those empirical and biographical instances that we know of, where gifted scientist came up with theoretical models that render at least part of reality truthfully in highly abstract models, were instances of individual consciousness or mental activity diving into the unity of reality and gaining insights about its structures. Examples are physical theories like relativity theory or quantum theory, biological models like evolutionary theory, or Barbara McClintock who discovered jumping genes by "becoming one" with her plants (Comfort, 2001;Keller, 1983Keller, /2003, or mathematical insights like those of Ramanujan and others (Hardy, 1937;Kanigel, 1991). It might be possible to glean even more such insights about deep reality using this mode more conspicuously and systematically. ...
Ontology, the ideas we have about the nature of reality, and epistemology, our concepts about how to gain knowledge about the world, are interdependent. Currently, the dominant ontology in science is a materialist model, and associated with it an empiricist epistemology. Historically speaking, there was a more comprehensive notion at the cradle of modern science in the middle ages. Then “experience” meant both inner, or first person, and outer, or third person, experience. With the historical development, experience has come to mean only sense experience of outer reality. This has become associated with the ontology that matter is the most important substance in the universe, everything else—consciousness, mind, values, etc., —being derived thereof or reducible to it. This ontology is insufficient to explain the phenomena we are living with—consciousness, as a precondition of this idea, or anomalous cognitions. These have a robust empirical grounding, although we do not understand them sufficiently. The phenomenology, though, demands some sort of non-local model of the world and one in which consciousness is not derivative of, but coprimary with matter. I propose such a complementarist dual aspect model of consciousness and brain, or mind and matter. This then also entails a different epistemology. For if consciousness is coprimary with matter, then we can also use a deeper exploration of consciousness as happens in contemplative practice to reach an understanding of the deep structure of the world, for instance in mathematical or theoretical intuition, and perhaps also in other areas such as in ethics. This would entail a kind of contemplative science that would also complement our current experiential mode that is exclusively directed to the outside aspect of our world. Such an epistemology might help us with various issues, such as good theoretical and other intuitions.
... appeared nearly twenty years after Keller's, took Keller to task for perpetuating a myth, arguing powerfully among other things based on notebooks and cor- respondence that had not been available to Keller -as well as with the distance from a now deceased McClintock which Keller lacked -that contrary to the claim of an "intuitive" style of science-making, if anything McClintock with her so-called "controlling elements" could just as easily be cast as advancing "masculine" modes of thinking, and that, in any case, she had never been neglected and marginalized, but was rather celebrated, if sometimes misunderstood, and justly challenged. Comfort, Govoni suggests, however self-reflective (Comfort 2001(Comfort , 2011), may himself have been attracted to the corn geneticist precisely because he was married at the time to Carol Greider, who together with her PhD supervisor Elizabeth Blackburn had helped create in their University of California lab the precise "gen- der-free" environment which led to the discovery of telomerase and, ultimately, a shared Nobel Prize ( Govoni 2014, 20-22). ...
An original review of Scientific Biography for the Handbook of the Historiography of Biology
... Others showed that the genome was a reactive, dynamic organ rather than a fixed set of instructions. These, most famously, included plant geneticists working with maize: Barbara McClintock, who observed the effects of transposons, small pieces of DNA that could change their position in the genome, and Alexander Brink, who described paramutation where one allele heritably changed the expression of the other allele on the same locus (Brink 1968, Comfort 2003. ...
... 26. Other possible factors include, presentation and communication style, particular and advanced research background, gender discrimination, etc. (Keller 1983;Comfort 2001). ...
Scientific communities as social groupings and the role that such communities play in scientific change and the production of scientific knowledge is currently under debate. I examine theory change as a complex social interaction among individual scientists and the scientific community, and argue that individuals will be motivated to adopt a more radical or innovative attitude when confronted with striking similarities between model systems and a more robust understanding of specialised vocabulary. Two case studies from the biological sciences, Barbara McClintock and Stanley Prusiner, help motivate the idea that sharing of models and specialised vocabulary fill the gap between discovery and scientific change by promoting the dispersal of important information throughout the scientific community.
... Entre as 12 premiadas da área, ela foi a única que recebeu sozinha o prêmio. Além das fontes já citadas, sua instigante trajetória pessoal e científica foi também objeto de reflexão em outras obras, como, por exemplo, em duas biografias -uma escrita por Evelyn Fox Keller (1983) e outra pelo historiador da ciência Nathaniel Comfort (2003) -e no artigo de Howard Green (2014). ...
The article discusses the path of the five women scientists who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, between 1947 and 1988, regarded as pioneers in this area in the course of this award created in 1901. In a perspective marked by advances in feminist criticism of science, in the fields of gender and science and the history of science, this article summarizes various aspects linked to the origins and education of these women, focusing on gender interference in the construction of their careers. The discussion aims to contribute to the debate about feminization. Several sources have been consulted, including the award site with their autobiographies as well as their speeches and lectures during the award ceremonies.
... and ''what is science and how it is done? '' In this commentary I want to engage with two biographies, one by Evelyn Fox Keller and second by Nathaniel Comfort, of the Noble Prize winning molecular biologist Barbara McClintock to revisit the myth and truth about her life and science (Comfort 2001;Keller 1983). Although both biographies are relatively old by now, and although they have already been reviewed sufficiently, my intention in this commentary is to explore the relationship between the two contradictory levels outlined above-the scientist's subjectivity and its relationship with the making of objective science. ...
Evelyn Fox Keller wrote first biography of the Nobel Prize winning geneticist Barbara McClintock in which Keller discussed how McClintock felt being rejected by her peers in the 1950s because she questioned the dominant idea of the particulate gene and instead proposed that the genetic material jumped positions on the chromosome which indicated that the gene did not control but was controlled by the cellular environment. Keller’s story of McClintock’s life is an account of a woman scientist’s conception of science and how her unorthodox views isolated her from the main stream science. Keller’s biography was read by many in a way that made McClintock a feminist icon by showing how women scientists “see” scientific objects differently and how their science is holistic and hence radically different from the reductionism of male-dominated science. The second biographer Nathaniel Comfort calls this story a myth. In his detailed intellectual biography, Comfort embarks on an energetic journey to separate fact from fiction to dismantle what he calls the McClintock myth. The difference between two biographers is not entirely about evidences or about separating fact from fiction but about their adoption of two contrasting paradigms of scientist’s subjectivity: Keller foregrounds McClintock’s affective self and Comfort her rational. In this commentary I have closely and comparatively read both biographies to revisit Keller’s “myth” and Comfort’s “truth” and to provide yet another interpretation of McClintock’s life and work from the perspective of object relations theories in psychoanalysis. Instead of figuring out the extent to which the myth bears truth as Comfort does, I have asked questions: How and why this private myth was in the making throughout McClintock’s life and work? How this private myth was related to the making of her science? By using developmental psychoanalytical approach, I show that what Comfort calls McClintock’s private myth was not something that was partly fictional and hence incorrect or wrong but it emerged from a deeply and compellingly affective place in McClintock’s life. This so called myth was integral to and fundamentally formative of who she was, a woman and a scientist, and that this myth formatively shaped McClintock’s relationship with science’s objects and science’s subjects. This commentary aims to show the relevance and usefulness of psychoanalytical theories for understanding scientific subjectivities and provides a revision to the neo-Kantian idea of scientist subject—a unified and wilful, self-determined, self-regulated, active, autonomous, and rational subject wilfully driven by social and scientific ethos—generally popular among historians of science.
... However, this isn't the entire story. Nathaniel Comfort (2001) describes how she took a break from her work, went for a walk, and sat down to think about what she had been seeing. That's when the solution came to her. ...
... There is an ongoing clash of world-views, with some wanting to believe that single mutations predominately drive outcome while others are explicitly acknowledging the importance of substantial phenotypic modification via genetic background and/or environmental infiuence(s) (Beaudet, 2013;Bernal and Jirtle, 2010;Burga et al., 2011;Casanueva et al., 2012;Comfort, 2001Comfort, , 2012Dolinoy et al., 2006;Keller, 2010;Weinhouse et al., 2011). Some recent population-based sequencing efforts have shown the complexity of demonstrating how much any one genetic variant contributes to disease in any one particular individual, and we disagree with overly simplistic and artificial categorizations of mutations as "causative," "pathogenic" or "nonpathogenic" (Andreasen et al., 2013a;Andreasen et al., 2013b;Refsgaard et al., 2012;Risgaard et al., 2013). ...
This chapter traverses contemporary understandings of the genetic architecture of human disease, and explores the clinical implications of the current state of knowledge. Many different classes of genetic mutations have been implicated as being involved in predisposition to certain diseases, and researchers are continually uncovering other means by which genetics plays an important role in human disease, such as with somatic genetic mosaicism. Putative “de novo” mutations can represent cases of parental mosaicism (including in the germline), which could be revealed by careful genotyping of parental tissues other than peripheral blood lymphocytes. There is an increasingly rich literature regarding rare mutations with seemingly large phenotypic effects. Privacy concerns have added to the difficulties of implementing genomics-guided medicine. With the advent of exome and whole genome sequencing (WGS), one needs to focus again on families over several generations, so as to attempt to minimize genetic differences, locus heterogeneity and environmental influences.
The peak Pico de São Tomé on the island of São Tomé (São Tomé and Príncipe, Gulf of Guinea) is a locality where many specimens that became types of vascular plant names were collected during colonial times. Determining the routes the collectors took to ascend the peak will help determine some collecting localities. Gustav Mann was the first collector to explore the region; his itinerary is analysed and mapped based on his correspondence. The itineraries of ten further expeditions that ascended the peak are analysed. Collections that became types of vascular plant species names are recorded. "Increasingly, the task of the historian of recent science is becoming like that of the medievalist: We get all the documents we can, then scrabble for any shard of pottery or piece of flint that can fill a gap in our fragmentary tale." Comfort (2003: 12)
Societal Impact Statement
Maize is one of the most consumed grains worldwide. Its production and international trade are expected to continue increasing because of its use as animal fodder and direct human food. Although maize's history spans millennia, in the last century it underwent significant changes due to genetic engineering, particularly during the Green Revolution. Due to maize's importance for current food security and energy production, it is fundamental to understand this engineering process to assess the implications of current styles of maize production for local and global landscapes, scientific institutions, and transnational networks of agricultural science.
Summary
This article aims to explain how Mexican agricultural expertise contributed to the development of cytogenetics as a specialized field in the study of the diversity of maize within the framework of the Green Revolution. To this end, the article follows the work of Mexican agronomist Takeo Ángel Kato Yamakake within the activities of the Inter‐American Maize Improvement Program (IMIP), formally established in 1960. By reconstructing the debate on the genetic implications of chromosomal structure and function, this study contributes to the historiography devoted to the role played by local experts in the classification, experimentation, and conservation of maize.
The article is based on sources from Mexico and the United States, an interview with Kato, and the consultation of the database “Rockefeller Fellows. Individual Mobility Awards at Rockefeller‐endowed Organizations, 1914‐1970.”
Kato's trajectory provides an overview of agronomy in Mexico and shows the relevance of transnational exchange in the establishment of plant cytogenetics. Kato's academic activity features collaborations with key figures such as Edwin Wellhausen, Albert Longley, Barbara McClintock, W. Gallinat, Czeslawa Prywer, and Almiro Blumenschein.
A Green Revolution era quest to unravel the origin of maize as a way of perfecting its genetic manipulation fueled the interest in establishing cytogenetics in Mexico. However, the irruption of the molecular approach made the study of the position of chromosomal knobs less of a priority. Despite this, classical cytogenetics, under Kato's leadership, remains a field that contributed to the knowledge of the vegetal genome, even when the IMIP disappeared and the logic of the Green Revolution lost its centrality.
A variety of quantitative studies I will discuss below confirm that the integrated or transdisciplinary approaches long called-for by practitioners in science and technology studies are increasingly being adopted. From nanotechnology to neuroscience, from artificial intelligence to climate, cancer and “one health” studies, a growing number of research groups are moving beyond speaking only their own specialist dialect. Efforts are being made to understand, if not actually to speak, the languages of neighboring fields, in order to draw from these fields both inspiration and data useful for rounding out their own understanding. There is an increasingly shared awareness that complex problems require multiple tools to be tackled: indeed, this notion has become so often repeated that some argue it is becoming a risky cliché. Exchanges between different fields, some even quite distant, provide confirmation of an insight science studies began to develop long ago: the interactions between different contents and contexts play a crucial role in the process of building innovative (natural) knowledge. From climate change to the spread of viral epidemics, from the increase in average life expectancy to the rise in cognitive abilities every phenomenon involving humanity is at the intersections of natural, technological, and social spheres. In order to be understood, these phenomena must often be studied using both the natural sciences and the social sciences: the kind of integrated approach typical of studies on gender and science.
Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)‐based “active genetic” elements developed in 2015 bypassed the fundamental rules of traditional genetics. Inherited in a super‐Mendelian fashion, such selfish genetic entities offered a variety of potential applications including: gene‐drives to disseminate gene cassettes carrying desired traits throughout insect populations to control disease vectors or pest species, allelic drives biasing inheritance of preferred allelic variants, neutralizing genetic elements to delete and replace or to halt the spread of gene‐drives, split‐drives with the core constituent Cas9 endonuclease and guide RNA (gRNA) components inserted at separate genomic locations to accelerate assembly of complex arrays of genetic traits or to gain genetic entry into novel organisms (vertebrates, plants, bacteria), and interhomolog based copying systems in somatic cells to develop tools for treating inherited or infectious diseases. Here, we summarize the substantial advances that have been made on all of these fronts and look forward to the next phase of this rapidly expanding and impactful field. Active genetics bypasses the rules of traditional Mendelian inheritance permitting the development of powerful new tools such as gene‐drive systems to combat insect borne diseases, allelic drives to bias inheritance of preferred allelic variants, self‐amplifying systems reversing antibiotic resistance in bacteria, and systems promoting corrective interhomolog repair in somatic cells.
It has now been more than thirty years since Joan Wallach Scott (1986) argued that gender is a legitimate and necessary category of historical analysis that applies to all fields, including genetics. In the intervening years, a substantial body of work has appeared that adds women to the historiography of genetics. While this is a necessary component for including gender as a category of analysis in genetics, it is not sufficient. Gender analysis involves the broader goal of integrating gender into the interrogation of how social factors within research practices and institutional organization influence scientific work and knowledge production in genetics. This article argues for the imperative for inclusion—including both women and gender analysis—which, taken together, not only provide a more equitable and informative picture of the discipline's development, but also yield a historiography that more faithfully reflects the activity of doing science.
Dr. Bert Sakmann (b. 1942) studied at the Universities of Tuebingen, Freiburg, Berlin, Paris, and Munich, graduating in 1967. Much of his professional life has been spent in various institutes of the Max Planck Society. In 1971, a British Council Fellowship took him to the Department of Biophysics of University College London to work with Bernard Katz (1911–2003). In 1974, he obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Goettingen and, with Erwin Neher (b. 1944) at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, began work that would transform cellular biology and neuroscience, resulting in the 1991 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. In 2008, Dr. Sakmann returned to Munich, where he headed the research group “Cortical Columns in Silico” at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried. Here, their group discovered the cell-type specific sensory activation patterns in different layers of a column in the vibrissal area of rodents’ somatosensory cortices.
Dans son testament, Alfred Nobel indique les paramètres à utiliser pour distribuer son héritage (Sohlman 2008). Il établit très clairement que la valeur essentielle pour attribuer chacun des prix est la qualité de l’œuvre du candidat et qu’il doit constituer une récompense à ceux qui «ont rendu les plus grands services à l’humanité» (Sohlman 2008, p. 110). Jamais il n’y est question du genre du lauréat. Cependant, les femmes ayant reçu le prix Nobel dépassent à peine 5% du nombre total des primés de 1901 à 2016.
Dans cette recherche, nous étudions comment la Fondation Nobel, sous une apparente posture équitable, ne contribue pas à la juste reconnaissance des femmes (Hedin 2014; Kerner et Casanova 1992; Laroche 2012; Lévy 2001). Du point de vue méthodologique, nous prenons en considération que tout prix possède une structure triangulaire qui implique l’institution qui le décerne, les lauréats et les perdants (Corngold 2016). Spécifiquement, à travers l’exploitation de l’information disponible sur le site officiel du prix Nobel, nous étudions la sous-représentation des femmes. Premièrement, nous nous penchons sur la constitution des comités responsables de l’attribution des récompenses. Deuxièmement, nous analysons en détail le pourcentage décerné aux lauréates, en nombre et en parts de prix. Nous soulignons, finalement, le fonctionnement du processus de nomination qui renforce le sexisme. Nous constatons ainsi que la Fondation ne suit pas toujours les valeurs qui ont animé Alfred Nobel dans son testament, dans la mesure où elle ne respecte pas nécessairement les principes épistémologiques, esthétiques et éthiques qui devraient prévaloir dans ses choix. En ce sens, la Fondation Nobel rate, année après année, la possibilité de faire ressortir la participation des femmes à l’avancement du savoir, à l’enrichissement de la culture et en tant que bâtisseuses de la paix. Elle envoie, plutôt, un message biaisé quant au rôle des femmes dans le monde.
We identify and discuss the phenomenon of narrative stability, in the context of current methodological literature on interviewing. It derives from two independent studies, undertaken fifteen years apart, of members of the same genetics research group who were interviewed by different researchers. The first (‘Discovery’) interviews were collected very soon after the breakthrough was first published. The second (‘Legacy’) interviews were based on informants looking back at those events. Some strikingly similar narrative episodes across those accounts suggest strong narrative stability. In the course of interviews, informants reproduce biographical stories that are well sedimented. Not all interview materials, therefore, should be thought of exclusively in terms of co-production between interviewer and informant.
FOREWORD by Nelson M. Vaz MD, PhD
Who is he, what is Vitor Pordeus? An incendiary, a prophet, a clown, an actor, a declamator, a Brazilian psychiatrist born in the suburb of Realengo in the city of the wonderful southern zone, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Founder of the Madness Hotel. Lover of Nise da Silveira and Baruch Spinoza. Vitor is one of these rare people who is very known by very few people, is very successful among them, but is avoided by those who do not know him. Some enchant, some frighten. Free, he suffers the tortures of freedom, indecision from where to go, what improvise now.
I did not mention on purpose that Vitor is an immunologist, because he is not, although he knows the history of immunology and his techniques very closely. The beginner immunologists are surprised by him, the famous ones find him ridiculous. As they say, Vitor is ahead of his time and immunology is a science deeply rooted in the past; their basic ideas - vaccines, antibodies, allergies - were created at the turn of the nineteenth century to twenty; are obsolete. The dominant theory in immunology was created in 1959 and is hegemonic until today, although everything has changed around it. How is this possible? Exactly because everything has changed, the new immune theory will have to account for all of this and no one has dared to date. Except Vitor. It's explained why they do not listen to him. They literally do not listen. If they listened, they might understand. Maybe not.
With this collection of texts, Vitor closes his stay in Montreal, Canada, where in addition to the cold and improper darkness for a tropical being like him, he faced other demons. He installed an affiliate of his Madness Hotel. The reading of what is recorded here, at best, is like a trip to the immediate future; at worst, is an academic thesis. Good luck my friend; my musketeer. Good luck.
Nelson Monteiro Vaz, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, Feb 16th 2018
Professor Emeritus of Immunology, Minas Gerais Federal University, Belo Horizonte &
Member of the Brazilian Academy of Science, Brazil
The fast evolving field of epigenetics is currently generating interest and excitement, but also controversy. With its main proposition that environmental influences, from food to stress, can be rapidly inherited through molecular mechanisms that supplement or modulate information contained in DNA, some have come to see epigenetics as a bridge between social and natural sciences, reigniting the nature/nurture debate. Others, however, argue that epigenetics, while important, is part and parcel of genetics and not paradigm-changing. These contrasting views go along with opposing historical narratives and understandings of future promise of epigenetics. I examine these different histories and juxtapose these different meanings, to sketch how epigenetics came to high public prominence and what kind of larger developments in science and society this prominence indicates.
The encounter in the 1960s between molecular biology and evolutionary biology had short- and long-term consequences. Comparison of protein sequences suggested that evolution proceeded at a regular pace, obeying a molecular clock. It rapidly led evolutionary biologists to give neutral variations a larger role in their models. The development of genetic engineering technologies opened the door to progressive replacement of the abstract notions of gene and gene mutation hitherto used by evolutionary biologists by precise molecular descriptions. The precise structural and functional characterization of mutations assumed an increasing role and supported the introduction of a hierarchy between genes and between gene mutations that is clearly visible in evolutionary developmental biology. I will examine how far the accumulation of molecular data has challenged the Modern Synthesis established in the 1940s. In particular, different molecular mechanisms have been successively proposed to support a Lamarckian form of evolution. My conclusion will be that molecularization of evolutionary biology is still in its infancy, and that the Modern Synthesis will be replaced by a functional synthesis in which models of evolutionary biology and a description of molecular mechanisms will be intimately dovetailed.
Contemporary accounting conceptual frameworks depict reporting entities as self-evident stand-alone units whose current activities are likely to continue. That representation is revisited in light of Veblen’s (1904) sabotage thesis that managers routinely utilize mechanisms that disrupt underlying markets. Credit default swaps played a significant role in the 2008 subprime financial crisis, blurring the boundaries of entities to create entanglements that threatened the global financial infrastructure. The reporting entity and going concern concepts developed in a climate of philosophical pragmatism operating from a flawed premise that a scientific approach assures objective, value-free data. The conventional treatment of reporting entities is contrasted with emerging conversations that paint ‘the firm’ as a legal fiction functioning within a dynamic and potentially unstable matrix. The paper argues that a distorted view on the underlying nature of the firm masks significant public interest issues, making it difficult to address problems inherent in interdependent institutional structures.
Transposable elements are found in all plant genomes and have enormous influence on genome architecture. They are powerful mutagens, and are a disruptive force when they insert and often leave characteristic footprints when they exercise. Major classes of transposable elements are the retrotransposons (RNA elements), the cut-and-paste transposons (DNA elements), and the Helitrons. Because the retrotransposons transpose by replication, they can accumulate rapidly and their numbers correlate with genome size. The DNA elements are varied in their structure, mechanism of transposition, and their effects on the genome. Many of these have become valuable tools for genetic research. Transposon-induced mutations have been identified in starch biosynthetic pathways and in regulators of pigment production. In addition, transposons have moved genes from their original position to a position inside another gene where they come under the control of new regulatory sequences.
The introduction to this special issue argues that network breakdowns play an important and unacknowledged role in the shaping and emergence of scientific knowledge. It focuses on transnational scientific networks from the early modern Republic of Letters to 21st-century globalized science. It attempts to unite the disparate historiography of the early modern Republic of Letters, the literature on 20th-century globalization, and the scholarship on Actor-Network Theory. We can perceive two, seemingly contradictory, changes to scientific networks over the past four hundred years. At the level of individuals, networks have become increasing fragile, as developments in communication and transportation technologies, and the emergence of regimes of standardization and instrumentation, have made it easier both to create new constellations of people and materials, and to replace and rearrange them. But at the level of institutions, collaborations have become much more extensive and long-lived, with single projects routinely outlasting even the arc of a full scientific career. In the modern world, the strength of institutions and macro-networks often relies on ideological regimes of standardization and instrumentation that can flexibly replace elements and individuals at will.
Compared to many other angiosperms, the grasses are not noted for the diversity of their secondary compounds. However, as indicated below, this may simply reflect lack of investigation. A wide range of secondary compounds is reported, but in general the data come from a handful of taxa that are particularly important for grazing or field crops; the taxonomic distribution of most compounds is thus largely unknown. Secondary compounds may be produced by roots or by above ground tissue, and production may be constitutive, or be triggered by herbivore attack, or be produced in response to the presence of particular bacteria or fungi. Of the 2400 species in a database of plants with pest-control properties (Grainge and Ahmed 1988), about 50 are grasses; documentation of the chemicals produced by these plants and their effects on other organisms varies considerably in quality. Compounds produced in response to pathogens are sometimes called phytoalexins, a term that refers to their inducibility rather than their chemical composition. A number of grass species harbor fungal endophytes that produce secondary compounds that serve as plant defense; in this case the defense compound is in fact a product of the fungus rather than the plant. Finally, cell walls in the grasses have a distinctive chemical composition; whether it is adaptive in any way is unknown. The material presented here is not intended to be a comprehensive review, but will provide some hint of the phytochemical diversity to be explored in the family.
Barbara McClintock was a pioneer in cytogenetics, winning the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Studying corn (Zea mays or maize) as a model organism, with a penetrating intellect, outstanding powers of observation, and excruciating attention to detail, she mapped the entire set of corn chromosomes, observed meiosis, and matched heritable traits to specific chromosomes. Crucially, she documented rare but important instances of the transposition of genes along the length of newly replicating chromosomes. She foresaw that while the cell's chromosomal copying mechanisms generally created identical copies, these seemingly random “jumping genes” would ultimately result in mutations. This finding formed part of the foundation of modern genetics.
Discoveries over the past decade portend a paradigm shift in molecular biology. Evidence suggests that RNA is not only functional as a messenger between DNA and protein but also involved in the regulation of genome organization and gene expression, which is increasingly elaborate in complex organisms. Regulatory RNA seems to operate at many levels; in particular, it plays an important part in the epigenetic processes that control differentiation and development. These discoveries suggest a central role for RNA in human evolution and ontogeny. Here, we review the emergence of the previously unsuspected world of regulatory RNA from a historical perspective.
In this chapter,we describe traditional historical accounts of the gene and gene concepts and raise some issues from recent revisionist historiography dealing with this topic. Histories of the gene and genetics are still in their infancy. Until the mid-1970s, most histories were written by scientists and reflected the viewpoints of the victors in scientific controversies. Only recently have professional historians contested traditional accounts and probed deeply into lost aspects of the history of the gene. Recent biological work has raised doubt whether there is such an entity as “the” gene. Historians now disagree about whether the gene should count as an invention or a discovery, whether the history involved is fundamentally continuous or discontinuous, and how technical and theoretical developments in genetics are connected to larger social issues, including eugenics, genetic medicine, and biotechnological “interference” with nature.
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