scholarly journals The past and present of developmental biology in India

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (1-2-3) ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Surendra Ghaskadbi ◽  
Vidyanand Nanjundiah

This issue of The International Journal of Developmental Biology (Int. J. Dev. Biol.) is devoted to contributions to developmental biology from India. The articles have been organized thematically, beginning with historical accounts and personal reminiscences, followed by surveys of areas to which the authors’ own contributions have been substantial, and ending with reports of original research. The articles selected for the ‘history’ section are by those who have witnessed events from close quarters, and in most cases have contributed to the work in question. The range of articles is vast but cannot claim to be comprehensive. Some areas may have been left out inadvertently, either because we were unable to find anyone to cover them, or maybe in part because of not looking in the right place. Other areas are missed out because, much to our regret, authors did not deliver promised manuscripts on time. In short, the Special Issue is indicative of what went on and is going on in the field of developmental biology in India, but it does have gaps.

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-259
Author(s):  
Jenny Fleming ◽  
Grahame Simpson

This issue of Brain Impairment celebrates the 40th anniversary of the Australasian Society for the Study of Brain Impairment through an invited Guest editorial by Dr Jan Ewing. Dr Ewing was a founding member of ASSBI, authored the first president's address to be published in Brain Impairment (Volume 1, Issue 1), and is the long-term chair of the ASSBI Publications Committee. Dr Ewing draws upon her long experience to address the theme ‘looking behind to look ahead’ in the Guest Editorial. A poem composed by Dr Ewing, titled Reminiscence, celebrates the past 40 years of ASSBI and is reproduced in this special issue. The remainder of this issue consists of five original research papers addressing stroke, followed by the presidential address and the usual other elements of each year's final issue including the abstracts from the 2017 ASSBI conference.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Lisa Maves

For this Special Issue “Zebrafish-A Model System for Developmental Biology Study,” we present a collection of studies, including original research papers and review articles, that focus on advances in developmental biology research and that take advantage of the zebrafish model organism [...]


Author(s):  
Eric Ritter

I am grateful to David LaRocca for inviting contributors to this special commemorative issue on the life and thought of Stanley Cavell. What follows is a brief philosophical reflection on what it means to think through the death of someone like Cavell, whose life and work continue to live on in so many respects and within so many people, as both this special issue and my experience in Stanley Cavell’s study bear witness to. I would argue that it is difficult to think through Cavell's death adequately (that is, to get the right sort of concepts in play). The cause of this difficulty is a productive tension within the extraordinary ordinariness of the concept of death itself: between the fact of cessation of biological life and the various respects in which Cavell has not ceased to exist, especially within the hearts and minds of so many. I aim in this piece to think with Cavell— that is, using tools he has provided—about (his own) death, thus performing the very productive tension which is the subject of the essay. I interweave some anecdotes from the past year spent working with the Cavell family to inventory and organize Cavell’s papers at the family’s home in Brookline, Massachusetts.


Cancers ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Costas A. Lyssiotis ◽  
Deepak Nagrath

Metabolic programs are rewired in tumors to support growth, progression, and immune evasion. A wealth of work in the past decade has delineated how these metabolic rearrangements are facilitated by signaling pathways downstream of oncogene activation and tumor suppressor loss. More recently, this field has expanded to include metabolic interactions among the diverse cell types that exist within a tumor and how this impacts the immune system. In this special issue, 17 review articles discuss these phenomena, and, alongside four original research manuscripts, the vulnerabilities associated with deregulated metabolic programming are highlighted and examined.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-124
Author(s):  
Philip L. Martin

Japan and the United States, the world’s largest economies for most of the past half century, have very different immigration policies. Japan is the G7 economy most closed to immigrants, while the United States is the large economy most open to immigrants. Both Japan and the United States are debating how immigrants are and can con-tribute to the competitiveness of their economies in the 21st centuries. The papers in this special issue review the employment of and impacts of immigrants in some of the key sectors of the Japanese and US economies, including agriculture, health care, science and engineering, and construction and manufacturing. For example, in Japanese agriculture migrant trainees are a fixed cost to farmers during the three years they are in Japan, while US farmers who hire mostly unauthorized migrants hire and lay off workers as needed, making labour a variable cost.


CounterText ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-32
Author(s):  
Norbert Bugeja

In this retrospective piece, the Guest Editor of the first number of CounterText (a special issue titled Postcolonial Springs) looks back at the past five years from various scholarly and personal perspectives. He places particular focus on an event that took place mid-way between the 2011 uprisings across a number of Arab countries and the moment of writing: the March 2015 terror attack on the Bardo National Museum in Tunis, which killed twenty-two people and had a profound effect on Tunisian popular consciousness and that of the post-2011 Arab nations. In this context, the author argues for a renewed perspective on memoir as at once a memorial practice and a political gesture in writing, one that exceeds concerns of genre and form to encompass an ongoing project of political re-cognition following events that continue to remap the agenda for the region. The piece makes a brief final pitch for Europe's need to re-cognise, within those modes of ‘articulacy-in-difficulty’ active on its southern borders, specific answers to its own present quandaries.


2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 58-66
Author(s):  
Giuliano Pancaldi

Here I survey a sample of the essays and reviews on the sciences of the long eighteenth century published in this journal since it was founded in 1969. The connecting thread is some historiographic reflections on the role that disciplines—in both the sciences we study and the fields we practice—have played in the development of the history of science over the past half century. I argue that, as far as disciplines are concerned, we now find ourselves a bit closer to a situation described in our studies of the long eighteenth century than we were fifty years ago. This should both favor our understanding of that period and, hopefully, make the historical studies that explore it more relevant to present-day developments and science policy. This essay is part of a special issue entitled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: HSNS at 50,” edited by Erika Lorraine Milam.


Commonwealth ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
John Arway

The challenges of including factual information in public policy and political discussions are many. The difficulties of including scientific facts in these debates can often be frustrating for scientists, politicians and policymakers alike. At times it seems that discussions involve different languages or dialects such that it becomes a challenge to even understand one another’s position. Oftentimes difference of opinion leads to laws and regulations that are tilted to the left or the right. The collaborative balancing to insure public and natural resource interests are protected ends up being accomplished through extensive litigation in the courts. In this article, the author discusses the history of environmental balancing during the past three decades from the perspective of a field biologist who has used the strength of our policies, laws and regulations to fight for the protection of our Commonwealth’s aquatic resources. For the past 7 years, the author has taken over the reins of “the most powerful environmental agency in Pennsylvania” and charted a course using science to properly represent natural resource interests in public policy and political deliberations.


1996 ◽  
Vol 35 (4I) ◽  
pp. 399-417 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W. Mellor

The right to the flow of income from water is vigorously pursued, protected, and fought over in any arid part of the world. Pakistan is of course no exception. Reform of irrigation institutions necessarily changes the rights to water, whether it be those of farmers, government, or government functionaries. Those perceived rights may be explicit and broadly accepted, or simply takings that are not even considered legitimate. Nevertheless they will be fought over. Pakistan has a long history of proposals for irrigation reform, little or none being implemented, except as isolated pilot projects. Thus, to propose major changes in irrigation institutions must be clearly shown to have major benefits to justify the hard battles that must be fought and the goodwill of those who might win those battles for reform. Proponents of irrigation institution reform have always argued the necessity of the reforms and the large gains to be achieved. Perhaps, however, those arguments have not been convincing. This paper will briefly outline the failed attempts at irrigation reform to provide an element of reality to the discussion. It will then proceed to make the case of the urgency of reform in a somewhat different manner to the past. Finally, current major reform proposals will be presented. This paper approaches justification of irrigation reform by focusing on the agricultural growth rate. It does so because that is the critical variable influencing poverty rates and is a significant determinant of over-all economic growth rates. The paper decomposes growth rates and suggests a residual effect of deterioration of the irrigation system that is large and calls for policy and institutional reform. The data are notional, suggesting the usefulness of the approach and paves the way for more detailed empirical analysis and enquiry for the future.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document