In the Name of Human Adaptation: Japanese American “Hybrid Children” and Racial Anthropology in Postwar Japan

By focusing on the emergence and integration of “hybrid children” (konketsuji) anthropology into the Human Adaptability section of the International Biological Program (HA-IBP) in Japan during the 1950s and 1970s, this paper presents how transnational dynamics and mechanisms played out in shaping and maintaining the racist aspects while simultaneously allowed them to be included in the HA-IBP framework. It argues that they operated a double play between their national and transnational spaces—that is, they attenuated racist aspects of their research in their international activities while authenticating race in their national work. This paper will conclude with reflections on the transnational nationalism of konketsuji anthropology.

Features of the performance exposure in girls involved in cyclic and acyclic sports

According to the definition adopted by the international biological program, physical performance is characterized by maximum oxygen consumption (MOC). Profession, lifestyle, and sport affect the value of the MOC. For anatomy and physiology, oxygen delivery to muscle tissue depends on the state of the respiratory and cardiovascular system, the amount and composition of blood. In this case, the leading role belongs to the cardiac activity, namely to the magnitude of the shock and minute volumes of blood in working conditions. High values of MOC and, consequently, a large work capacity are characteristic of athletes specializing in cyclic sports with moderate and high power. The purpose of the research was to evaluate the adaptive response of the cardiovascular system of girls involved in cyclic and acyclic sports as well as those not involved in sports. The study was conducted in 2018. During the research, we used pulse oximetry and determination of blood pressure according to N.S. Korotkov, as well as an assessment of the adaptation of the cardiovascular system according to the Ruffier Index. Studies have shown differences in the level of performance of girls involved in cyclic sports (athletics) and acyclic sports (karate and taekwondo), as well as non-sports. During the experiments, heart rate and blood pressure indicators were recorded at rest and after exercise, and the Ruffier Index, which reflects the level of performance of the participants, was calculated.

A Computational Design of a Programmable Biological Processor

Basic synthetic information processing structures, such as logic gates, oscillators and flip-flops, have already been implemented in living organisms. Current implementations of these structures are, however, hardly scalable and are yet to be extended to more complex processing structures that would constitute a biological computer.Herein, we make a step forward towards the construction of a biological computer. We describe a model-based computational design of a biological processor, composed of an instruction memory containing a biological program, a program counter that is used to address this memory and a biological oscillator that triggers the execution of the next instruction in the memory. The described processor uses transcription and translation resources of the host cell to perform its operations and is able to sequentially execute a set of instructions written within the so-called instruction memory implemented with non-volatile DNA sequences. The addressing of the instruction memory is achieved with a biological implementation of the Johnson counter, which increases its state after an instruction is executed. We additionally describe the implementation of a biological compiler that compiles a sequence of human-readable instructions into ordinary differential equations-based models. These models can be used to simulate the dynamics of the proposed processor.The proposed implementation presents the first programmable biological processor that exploits cellular resources to execute the specified instructions. We demonstrate the application of the proposed processor on a set of simple yet scalable biological programs. Biological descriptions of these programs can be written manually or can be generated automatically with the employment of the provided compiler.

The living organism: evolutionary design or an accident

The presented work discusses some evolutionary phenomena underlining the complexity of organism creation and surprisingly the short evolutionary time of this process in particular. Uncommonness of this process ensued from the necessary simultaneous combining of highly complicated biological mechanisms, of which some were generated independently before the direct evolutionary demand. This in conclusion points to still not fully understood biological program ensuring superiority of the permanent evolutionary progress over effects of purely random mutational changes as the driving mechanism in evolution.

The Life Sciences, 1900–2000: Analysis and Social Welfare from Mendel and Koch to Biotech and Conservation

The life sciences underwent a dramatic transformation during the twentieth century, with an expansion in fundamental knowledge of the process of evolution and its molecular basis, through advances in health care that greatly extended human life, and by the combination of these advances to address the problem of conserving the many forms of life threatened by expanding human society. The essay highlights the worldwide emphasis on social welfare in the years 1945–1980 and the expanding role of international collaboration, especially in the International Biological Program and its advances in ecology and the notion of the biosphere, and in the emergence of molecular biology. This was also the era of the Cold War, yet military confrontation had fewer implications for life sciences than for the natural sciences in that era. After 1980, deregulation and neoliberalism weakened programs for social welfare, yet links among the varying strands of life sciences continued to grow, bringing the development of genomics and its many implications, expanding epidemiology to include reliance on social sciences, and deepening ecological studies as the Anthropocene became more and more prevalent. In sum, the experience of the life sciences should make it clear to world historians that scientific advance goes beyond the achievements of brilliant but isolated researchers: those same advances rely substantially on social movements, migration, and the exchange of knowledge across intellectual and physical boundaries.

Missing Links in Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition: Long Non-Coding RNAs Enter the Arena

Cancer metastasis occurs through a series of sequential steps, which involves dissemination of tumor cells from a primary site and colonization in distant tissues. To promote the invasion-metastasis cascade, carcinoma cells usually initiate a cell-biological program called epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), which is orchestrated by a set of master regulators, including TGF-β, Snail, ZEB and Twist families. The biological activities of these molecules are tightly regulated by a variety of cell-intrinsic pathways as well as extracellular cues. Recently, accumulating evidence indicates that long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) represent some of the most differentially expressed transcripts between primary and metastatic cancers. LncRNAs including MALAT1, HOTAIR, H19, LncRNA-ATB, and LincRNA-ROR have been reported to be involved in the process of EMT, mainly through cross-talking with master regulators of EMT. Thus, understanding the different and precise molecular mechanisms by which functional lncRNAs switch EMT on and off is important for opening up new avenues in lncRNA-directed diagnosis, prognosis, and therapeutic intervention against cancer.