Nevertheless, very few people take this seriously. The complexity of the problem is so great that you can't comprehend it in the language I've been using you can't comprehend it in the language of the textbooks, because it has become a mathematical problem. There are several different molecular influences acting on this complex of cyclin and Cdk which is what actually triggers off the cell division. Coli to divide into two, and maybe just twenty minutes is up. If, for example, you have an ordinary bacterial cell going through the process of cell division, it may be prompted to do that by some external signal in the environment it may be prompted to do it simply because time has passed - twenty minutes is the length of time it takes the E. It seems to me high time that people recognize that the complexity of this system is so great that it can't really be dealt with in the simple way in which textbooks ordinarily deal with description, i.e. One of them is the replication of the cell's DNA the other is the actual fission of the cell into two daughter cells. Cdk plus cyclin activates two successive steps essential to the cell cycle. You have proteins called cyclins, which are meant to interact with another protein called Cdk. In a field like cell biology, everyone now has a clear picture of how the cell cycle is driven. Let me give an illustration of what I mean. By following the flow of the stimulus through the brain from the stimulus processing pathways to the response control networks, it's possible to identify the basic neural circuits involved. For fear, you can easily create experimental situations where the onset of a simple stimulus that warns of impending danger elicits a set of stereotyped responses in an animal, like a rat, that are very similar to the kinds of responses that occur in a human facing danger. It's always easier to study brain functions that involve clearly defined stimuli and responses than those that don't. Fear is a relatively tractable emotion, unlike love or hope which are difficult to pin down. The most successful efforts have come from the study of fear. This relates to another question that hasn't been given enough attention in recent years: when on earth is biology going to become a quantitative science, like physics and chemistry - when there's good evidence to believe that it can't make progress in some fields without becoming much more quantitative. MADDOX: There's an extremely interesting question that seems to me to be very urgent: how on earth is science going to cope with the accumulation of data, on a huge scale, of recent years. JB: Let's talk about the questions you're asking yourself. Remains to be Discovered: The Agenda for Science in the Next Century.Įdge Link: Sir John Maddox: 1925-2009 His books include Revolution in Biology, The Doomsday Syndrome, Beyond the Energy Crisis, and What Royal Commissions on environmental pollution and genetic manipulation. MADDOX, who served 22 years as the editor of Nature, was a trained physicist, who has served on a number of In this discussion he talks about what we need to be concerned about: the increasing accumulation of data on a huge scale, lack of quantitative progress in biology, infection, impact, cloning, and the stability of the human genome. During the past 23 years he managed to build Nature into the premier publication of its kind, while still retaining the respect of the international science community for his intellect and writing. John Maddox, who recently stepped down as editor of Nature, occupies a unique place in today's culture. And, if you like, the hell with the rest of the ecosystem. To which my guess is the full-throated answer would be, sorry, the human race has taken a decision, and that decision is to survive. A still, small voice may at that stage ask, but what right does the human race have to claim precedence for itself. My guess is that if the question of human extinction is ever posed clearly, people will say that it's all very well to say we've been a part of nature up to now, but at that turning point in the human race's history, it is surely essential that we do something about it that we fix the genome, to get rid of the disease that's causing the instability, if necessary we clone people known to be free from the risk, because that's the only way in which we can keep the human race alive.
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