Monday, June 16, 2003

The First Synergic Scientist Timothy Wilken, MD writes: As far as I have been able to discover, the first synergic scientist was an Austrian biologist named Paul Kammerer.  He was born in 1881 and died in 1926 at the age of 45 by suicide. By all reports, Kammerer was a remarkable and gifted scientist, but also a very controversial one. His life story forms the basis for the science classic The Case of the Midwife Toad by Arthur Koestler. What interests me however is not the controversy, but a little known book written by Kammerer and published under the title Das Gesetz der Serie (The Law of the Series) in 1919. This is the book in which Kammerer introduced the the idea of synergy. At the turn of the twentieth century, the understanding of ‘parts’ or ‘components’ in isolation has been well developed by classical science—this is the very definition of reductionism. But the studying of ‘wholes’ or ‘unities’ required a new inclusiveapproach, and new methods which would come to form the synergic sciences. This new approach was originated by Kammerer. Arthur Koestler described Kammerer's idea this way: "Side by side with the causality of classical physics, there exists a second basic principle in Universe which tends towards unity; a force of attraction comparable to universal gravity. But while gravity acts on all mass without discrimination, this other universal force acts selectively to bring like and like together both in space and in time; it correlates by affinity regardless whether the likeness is one of substance, form, function, or refers to symbols." (06/16/03) Broken Light Chris Floyd writes: Death won't stop, murder won't desert us, the biochemical frenzies that lurk in the mud of our monkey brains -- in every single one of us -- won't go away because some gregarious backslapper buys, lies or fast-talks his way into office, or because some angry exile in the British Library overdoses on Hegel, or because some caravan trader or carpenter's son begins hearing voices. You can surrender your will and your mind to anybody or anything, to any set of beliefs, sacred or secular -- but that surrender will leave you in the same black hole of ignorance and fear you started from. Not one of those beliefs will make everything "right." So do we counsel fatalism, a dark, defeated surrender, a retreat into bitter, curdled quietude? Not a whit. We advocate action, positive action, unstinting action, doing the only thing that human beings can do, ever: Try this, try that, try something else again; discard those approaches that don't work, that wreak havoc, that breed death and cruelty; fight against everything that would draw us down again into our own mud; expect no quarter, no lasting comfort, no true security; offer no final answer, no last word, no eternal truth, but just keep stumbling, falling, careening, backsliding, crawling toward the broken light. And what is this "broken light"? Nothing more than a metaphor for the patches of understanding -- awareness, attention, knowledge, connection -- that break through our darkness and stupidity for a moment now and then. (06/16/03) Engineering Better Food BBC Science -- On the sleepy hill tops of south Delhi sits Jawaharlal Nehru University. The sound of the mega-city's bustle evaporates away amid the woodlands of the campus. Only the crickets' chirps disturb the tranquil thoughts of the academics here. Among them are a group of Bengali scientists, husband and wife team Niranjan and Subra Chakrabarty and their leader and mentor Assis Datta. Fifteen years ago the research team began to pursue their dream of finding a way to improve the diets of the country's poor young street children. Six million of them are thought to be malnourished. The project was quite literally a labour of love; it was during the course of the research that Niranjan and Subra became engaged. Their idea was a simple one: take a gene from the protein-rich Amaranth plant and put it into a protein-poor potato. They were astonished by the results. The first crop was a bumper harvest - six times the normal yield. And the protein content was up by a third and it included high-quality essential amino acids lacking in the diet of the very poorest. But as any true scientist would, Assis, Niranjan and Subra tempered their initial excitement and waited to see if the same results could be achieved for the following crop. They were - the results were repeated year after year. The work caught the eye of India's head of biotechnology, Manju Sharma, who saw the work's potential and gave it her personal backing. Now she says she's "very confident" the potato will get regulatory approval in six months - and be fed to millions of poor children at state schools as part of the government's midday meal programme. (06/16/03) Who Did the Monkeys Eat? BBC Science -- A genetic study of SIV - the Aids-like virus that infects monkeys - suggests that HIV - the virus that causes Aids in humans - came about through the combination of two viruses in chimpanzees. Chimps could have been infected by other SIV-type viruses when they preyed on monkeys. The study confirms what has been established about the origin of Aids: it emerged from the forests of western Africa some time in the last century. Humans caught it from chimpanzees when they ate them as food, or became exposed to their blood in rituals.  We know more about the origin of Aids than most people think. Genetic studies have shown conclusively that HIV is a variant of the Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV) that is found in wild African monkeys and apes. At some time in the recent past, SIV entered humans and mutated to become HIV. From this incident sprang the epidemic which has killed 20 million people and infected 15 million more. Where this virus transfer took place is fairly well established: the Guinea-Bissau region of West Africa. Many scientists believe the transfer occurred more than once because of the multiple strains of Aids that infect humans. When it happened is more problematic. Significantly, millions of Africans were forcibly removed from their homes as slaves in the 19th Century, and none of them was infected. This suggests the origin of Aids is post-1860. (06/16/03) Nanotech under the Microscope BBC Science -- The UK Government has launched a study to look at the benefits and risks of nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is the science of manipulating atoms and molecules on the nanoscale - 80,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. It promises to be as big a business as the biotech industry and is emerging as equally controversial. "Nanotechnology has the potential to create huge benefits in many areas but we need to understand whether it raises new ethical, health and safety or social issues," said Science Minister Lord Sainsbury. The government has commissioned the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering to look at current and future developments in nanotechnology and report back on whether it will require new regulations. (06/16/03) New Food Safety Technology New Scientist -- Basil, one of the mainstays of Italian cuisine, might one day become a weapon in the battle against dangerous food bugs such as E. coli and listeria. A new plastic food wrapper for meat and cheese which slowly oozes anti-microbial chemicals extracted from the herb has been shown to increase the food's shelf life, and should also cut the risk of food poisoning. And it does not taint the food with basil flavour, either. Preliminary tests on the new wrapping show it keeps bacteria at bay in Cheddar cheese for a week longer than ordinary packaging. The finding was announced last week at a packaging research meeting in Spain by scientists at the Technion Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, and the Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia. "The wrapper demonstrates a positive anti-microbial effect against the bacteria that are of particular concern when packaging cheese," says Joseph Miltz, the group's lead researcher.  (06/16/03) 5:28:19 AM

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