We live, according to some, in the century of biology, where we now understand ourselves in radically new ways as the insights of genomics and neuroscience have opened up the workings of our bodies...

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The Human Sciences in a Biological Age

Bacteria use a variety of mechanisms to direct RNA polymerase to specific promoters in order to activate transcription in response to growth signals or environmental cues. Activation can be due to factors that interact at specific promoters, thereby increasing transcription directed by these promoters. We examine the range of architectures found at activator-dependent promoters and outline the mechanisms by which input from different factors is integrated. Alternatively, activation can be due to factors that interact with RNA polymerase and change its preferences for target promoters. We summarize the different mechanistic options for activation that are focused directly on RNA polymerase.

Activating transcription in bacteria.

https://findresearcher.sdu.dk:8443/ws/files/87218550/Steffensen_2014_Language_Sciences.pdf

Ecolinguistics: The state of the art and future horizons

We live, according to some, in the century of biology where we now understand ourselves in radically new ways, as the insights of genomics and neuroscience have opened up the workings of our bodies and our minds to new kinds of knowledge and intervention. Is a new figure of the human, and of the social, taking shape in the twenty-first century? With what consequences for the politics of life today? And with what implications, if any, for the social, cultural and human sciences? These are the issues that are discussed in this paper, which argues that a new relation is required with the life sciences, beyond commentary and critique, if the social and human sciences are to revitalise themselves for the twenty-first century.

https://westernsydney.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/282484/ICS_Occasional_Paper_Series_3_1_Rose_Final.pdf

The human sciences in a biological age

The flagellated bacterium Escherichia coli is increasingly used experimentally as a self-propelled swimmer. To obtain meaningful, quantitative results that are comparable between different laboratories, reproducible protocols are needed to control, `tune' and monitor the swimming behaviour of these motile cells. We critically review the knowledge needed to do so, explain methods for characterising the colloidal and motile properties of E.coli, cells, and propose a protocol for keeping them swimming at constant speed at finite bulk concentrations. In the process of establishing this protocol, we use motility as a high-throughput probe of aspects of cellular physiology via the coupling between swimming speed and the proton motive force.

Escherichia coli as a model active colloid: a practical introduction

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Seriesto which Franqois Jacob's autobiography The Statue Within belongsi s a truly outstanding collection of books by such distinguished.authors as Freeman J. Dyson, Peter Medawar, Salvador Luria and Hendrik Casimir among others. The inspiration behind the series is well expressed in the common preface to all the books in these words: \"Science in this century has become a complex endeavour .. . . As scientific knowledge expands, the goal of general public understanding of science becomes increasingly difficult to reach. Yet an understanding of the scientific enterprise, as distinct from data, Concepts, and theories, is certainly within the grasp of us all . . . . Science is an enterprise with its own rules and customs, but an understanding of that enterprise is accessible, for it is quintessentially human\". This series, including Jacob's book, fulfills this expressed need of \"encouraging public understanding of science\" most handsomely. Apart fi'om reaching the general public, these books also help bridge the gap in communication between different areas of natural science. Frangois Jacob (hereafter in his own style 'J' for short) is one of the leading French geneticists who in the 50's and 60's contributed to the founding of the science of molecular biology and bacterial genetics. With Andr6 Lwoff and Jacques Monod he won the Nobel Prize in 1965 for their work on gene regulation. The Statue Within is a remarkable attempt to look for and capture an element of continuity running through the many eventful phases of J's life, a search for a unity behind what might otherwise seem ahnost disparate personalities, \"a kind of inner statue, a statue sculpted since childhood, that gives my life a continuity and is the most intimate part of me, the hardest kernel of my being\". Even though, to begin with, he declares that \"I see my life less as continuity than as a series of different selves ! might almost say, strangers\". Born on 17th June, 1920, to Jewish parents of modest means, J was an only child. His father was a partner with his brothers in a family real estate firm in Normandy, while his maternal grandfather had been an army general. The absence of siblings led to J inventing in solitude many games and pastimes to occupy and amuse himself, such as for instance, a habit of carefully reconstructing mentally the world around him bed, room, home, streets.., in all detail upon awakening each day; wondering upon waking up fi'om sleep why one has not changed but is the same as before; a love to play with words and their sounds and invent plausible new ones and so on. He also deyeloped an extremely close relationship with his mother as well as with his grandfather le g6n6ral. In school J was pretty much a loner, an outstanding incident he recalls being the time he, all alone, stood up to and downed a bully who

N. Mukunda

Papers

The statue within: An autobiography: FRAIÇOIS JACOB; Unwin Hyman Limited, London; 1988; pp. 326; Price £ 12·95

Mind from matter? An essay on evolutionary epistemology

Aspects of the interplay between physics and biology