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The sciences of recognition and population thinking
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Views | Duration | ||
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31. 'Making an organism is a pretty horrendously complex thing' | 395 | 01:40 | |
32. Ed Lewis | 349 | 00:37 | |
33. The sciences of recognition and population thinking | 530 | 01:44 | |
34. An original thought at Zurich airport | 2 | 672 | 02:52 |
35. The Neurosciences Research Program | 556 | 03:53 | |
36. Why I don't think the brain is a computer | 1366 | 03:51 | |
37. The theory of neural Darwinism | 1603 | 05:14 | |
38. The idea of re-entry | 1 | 1089 | 03:40 |
39. The idea of value | 797 | 03:43 | |
40. Response to criticism of Neural Darwinism | 749 | 05:08 |
It's true that Nusslein-Volhard and Wieschaus developed in a most extensive and precise way the variety of these genes and showed how it relates to... related to the so-called syncytium – the fertilized egg of a fruit fly – but it was in fact Ed Lewis of Caltech who was the first one who dealt with the Hox gene and Pax gene with his work on fruit flies, and he had this remarkable observation that the ordering of the actual structures had its mirror in the ordering of these genes.
US biologist Gerald Edelman (1929-2014) successfully constructed a precise model of an antibody, a protein used by the body to neutralise harmful bacteria or viruses and it was this work that won him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1972 jointly with Rodney R Porter. He then turned his attention to neuroscience, focusing on neural Darwinism, an influential theory of brain function.
Title: Ed Lewis
Listeners: Ralph J. Greenspan
Dr. Greenspan has worked on the genetic and neurobiological basis of behavior in fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) almost since the inception of the field, studying with one of its founders, Jeffery Hall, at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, where he received his Ph.D. in biology in 1979. He subsequently taught and conducted research at Princeton University and New York University where he ran the W.M. Keck Laboratory of Molecular Neurobiology, relocating to San Diego in 1997 to become a Senior Fellow in Experimental Neurobiology at The Neurosciences Institute. Dr. Greenspan’s research accomplishments include studies of physiological and behavioral consequences of mutations in a neurotransmitter system affecting one of the brain's principal chemical signals, studies making highly localized genetic alterations in the nervous system to alter behavior, molecular identification of genes causing naturally occurring variation in behavior, and the demonstration that the fly has sleep-like and attention-like behavior similar to that of mammals. Dr. Greenspan has been awarded fellowships from the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation, the Searle Scholars Program, the McKnight Foundation, the Sloan Foundation and the Klingenstein Foundation. In addition to authoring research papers in journals such as "Science", "Nature", "Cell", "Neuron", and "Current Biology", he is also author of an article on the subject of genes and behavior for "Scientific American" and several books, including "Genetic Neurobiology" with Jeffrey Hall and William Harris, "Flexibility and Constraint in Behavioral Systems" with C.P. Kyriacou, and "Fly Pushing: The Theory and Practice of Drosophila Genetics", which has become a standard work in all fruit fly laboratories.
Tags: Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, Eric F Wieschaus, Ed Lewis
Duration: 37 seconds
Date story recorded: July 2005
Date story went live: 24 January 2008