bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Perceived knowledge gained from school-based sexuality education – results from a national population-based survey among young people in Sweden
Authors: Schindele Anna ChuChu , Källberg Henrik , Areskoug Josefsson Kristina , Lindroth Malin
Published: November 2023

Background School-based sexuality education is a core component of securing young people’s right to attain health equity regarding sexual and reproductive health and rights. This paper aims to explore how perceived knowledge (sufficient or insufficient) of taking care of one’s sexual health is associated with knowledge gained from school-based sexuality education and social determinants. Methods The data material is drawn from a population-based survey conducted in Sweden in 2015. The survey had 7755 respondents and a response rate of 26%. To explore the aim descriptive statistics and logistic regression models were used. Results Our results show that perceived insufficient knowledge from school-based sexuality education was associated with higher odds of reporting not being able to take care of one’s sexual health. The highest significant excess risk for insufficient knowledge was found among young people from sexual minorities. Conclusions Young people in Sweden do not have equal abilities to receive knowledge needed to take care of their sexual health and thus attain sexual health literacy. There is an unequal distribution of perceived knowledge, and LGBTQI+ youth particularly face barriers in using school-based sexuality education as a resource for sexual health literacy.
Perspective of medical undergraduates in India towards the LGBTQIA+ population: a short insight into changes in the medical curriculum
Authors: Roy Asitava Deb , Pramanik Parijat , Chatterjee Anirban , Barik Sitanshu
Published: November 2023

Background Understanding the attitudes of medical students towards individuals from the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex and asexual (LGBTQIA+) community is a prerequisite for informing competencies-based medical education (CBME) guidelines to make them LGBTQIA+ inclusive. The present study was conducted to assess the attitudes of medical undergraduate students from Indian medical colleges towards the LGBTQIA+ community. Methods An online cross-sectional survey was conducted in medical undergraduate students across India, which measured the opinions, beliefs, and acceptance of LGBTQIA+ people using a structured questionnaire uploaded on Google Forms. After data collection, the datasheet was downloaded, cleaned, and anonymised before being imported into RStudio for analysis. Results A total of 273 valid entries were assessed from the online survey. There was significant gender-based differences on most traditional opinions and beliefs regarding the LGBTQIA+ population (P < 0.05). The female participants appeared to be more accepting of and comfortable with all denominations of LGBTQIA+. Many of the participants believed that members of the LGBTQIA+ community are more prone to sexually transmitted diseases, especially HIV/AIDS. However, a few participants also opined that the increased susceptibility to HIV/AIDS may be due to increased prevalence of intravenous drug abuse in the LGBTQIA+ community. Conclusions There are some misconceptions about the LGBTQIA+ community among medical students. Therefore, in order to ensure LGBTQIA+ sensitive healthcare provision, there needs to be a concerted, informed effort to incorporate necessary changes in the CBME curriculum.
The AIRN lncRNA is imprinted and paternally expressed in pigs
Authors: Ahn Jinsoo , Hwang In-Sul , Park Mi-Ryung , Hwang Seongsoo , Cho In-Cheol , Lee Kichoon
Published: November 2023

Genomic imprinting plays critical roles during the development of mammalian species and underlying epigenetic mechanisms frequently involve long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs). The paternal transcription of the antisense Igf2r RNA noncoding (Airn) is responsible for paternal silencing of the mouse insulin-like growth factor 2 receptor (Igf2r) gene and maternal Igf2r expression. Although the corresponding maternal DNA methylation imprint is conserved in humans and pigs, the orthologous AIRN lncRNA has been identified in humans but not in pigs. Here, we aimed to examine imprinted allelic expression of the porcine AIRN lncRNA along with a corresponding differentially methylated region (DMR) and to analyze allelic expression of AIRN and IGF2R in pigs. By comparing parthenogenetic and control porcine embryos, we identified a maternally methylated DMR and a significantly higher expression of AIRN lncRNA in control embryos (P < 0.05) indicating its paternal expression. Further analyses revealed that the expression of AIRN lncRNA was enriched in the pig brain and its subregions, and it was monoallelically expressed; whereas, IGF2R was expressed biallelically suggesting an absence of allele-specific transcriptional regulation. Our findings will lead to further investigations into the role of the imprinted porcine AIRN lncRNA during pig development.
Implementation of an Mpox Vaccination Program at a Large Sexual Health Clinic in the Bronx—Lessons in Vaccine Equity
Authors: Irshad Usama , Bishop Derek , Mullis Caroline , Toro Justin , Zingman Barry S , Meyerowitz Eric A
Published: November 2023

Mpox caused a global outbreak in 2022. Among 249 people who received mpox vaccination at a sexual health clinic in the Bronx, New York, those with private vs public insurance were more likely to complete the series. No mpox cases were seen during follow-up at a median 121 days (IQR, 97–139).
Occupational health services for small-scale industries
Authors: B.R. Reverente Jun
Published: November 2023

The rapid rate of industrialization in developing countries has brought a wave of new occupational health problems to workers. These problems are particularly more acute in the emerging industrialized nations of east Asia and some others in Latin America. Jeyaratnam (1984) recognized the fact that developing countries are a disparate group of nations, geographically scattered, and with diverse cultural heritages in various stages of development. Owing to this lack of homogeneity, it is extremely difficult to review and report accurately on occupational health conditions in all the developing countries.
Campylobacteriosis
Authors: Skirrow M B
Published: November 2023

The only form of campylobacteriosis of major public health importance is Campylobacter enteritis due to Campylobacter jejuni and C. coll It is the most frequently identified form of infective diarrhoea in industrialized countries, with incidences in the region of 1 per cent per year. It causes economic losses amounting to many millions of pounds annually. Campylobacter jejuni and C. coli inhabit the intestinal tracts of wild birds and domestic animals. Poultry, in particular, become heavily colonized, and most broiler chickens sold in shops are contaminated. Red meats and offal are contaminated to a lesser degree. Human infection, which is mostly sporadic, may be acquired directly from animals or their products, by eating their meat raw or undercooked, or by eating foods that have become crosscontaminated from the raw product. Raw milk and contaminated water are sources that have given rise to major outbreaks of infection. Prevention depends on controlling infection in food-producing animals, especially poultry, reducing contamination during slaughter and processing, and correctly handling the raw products during food preparation. Education of the public on the basic principles of hygiene and safe food handling is an important adjunct.
Chlamydiosis
Authors: Caul E 0. , Sillis M
Published: November 2023

Chlamydiosis is a systemic, bacterial zoonotic disease associated with significant mortality if untreated. The clinical manifestations are diverse. The causative agent is Chlamydia psittaci, an intracytoplasmic obligate ‘energy’ parasite. It has a unique, complex developmental cycle involving the infectious elementary body and the vegetative, non-infectious reticulate body. Human chlamydiosis occurs worldwide, mainly affecting persons exposed to infected psittacine and other birds, especially ducks, turkeys, and pigeons, and less commonly to animals, particularly sheep. Outbreaks occur amongst aviary workers, poultry processing workers, and veterinarians.
Verocytotoxin-Producing Escherichia Coli Vtec) Infections
Authors: Nelson S , Clarke, R C , Karmali M A
Published: November 2023

Verocytotoxin (VT)-producing Escherichia coli (VTEC) infection is associated with a distinct illness, the clinical spectrum of which includes non-specific diarrhoea, haemorrhagic colitis, and the haemolytic uraemic syndrome (HUS). HUS is the leading cause of acute renal failure in children.
Lyme Disease
Authors: White Dennis J
Published: November 2023

Lyme disease is caused by infection with the spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi and is transmitted to humans through the bite of an infected tick of the Ixodes ricinus complex, especially lx. scapularis, lx. pacificus, lx. ricinus and lx. persulcatus. Borrelia burgdorferi infection is acquired by immature Ixodes ricinus complex ticks, from infected small mammal reservoirs, a cycle responsible for the maintenance of this disease in nature. Prolonged feeding of infected nymphal, or occasionally adult, ticks on a human, can result in disease.
Epidfmic And Murine Typhus
Authors: Sexton D J , Brcit.schwerdt E B , ti, I Bea , Raoult D
Published: November 2023

Typhus group rickettsiae produce three distinct clinical illnesses: epidemic typhus, a louse-borne disease caused by Rickettsia prowazekii} scrub typhus, a chigger- borne disease caused by Orientia tsutsugamushi} and murine typhus, a flea-borne disease caused by Rickettsia typhi. All three pathogens typically cause an acute illness with skin rash, headache, myalgias, fever, and chills. Epidemic typhus may relapse after apparent recovery, even 30 years or more after primary infection, resulting in an illness known as Brill-Zinsser disease.
Scrub Typhus
Authors: Beati Lorenza , Raoult Didier , Sexton, Daniel J , Breitschwerdt Edward
Published: November 2023

The presence of tsutsugamushi disease and its association with chigger bites has been recognized by some of the native populations of Japan and China for centuries. The term ‘akamushi’, the origin of the Japanese name for this rickettsiosis, means ‘red chigger’. Rural residents of these countries often knew that the best way to avoid being infected was to avoid areas infested by these arthropods (Weiss 1981; Walker 1991). Early Chinese and Japanese investigators suspected that the illness was related to small mites.
Yersiniosis And Plague
Authors: Butler Thomas
Published: November 2023

The discoveries of Y. enterocolitica and F. pseudotuberculosis were not attended by the same excitement and drama as the discovery of Y. pestis, and Alexandre Yersin certainly had nothing to do with characterizing these species. Human infection by Y. enterocolitica was first reported in 1939 by Schleifstein and Coleman. It was then called Bacterium entero colit icum but was renamed Pasteurella X by Daniels and Goudzwaard in 1963 and finally was grouped in the genus Yersinia by Frederiksen in 1964.
Mosquito-Borne Arboviruses
Authors: Leake Colin J
Published: November 2023

Human infections caused by mosquito-borne arboviruses range from numerous inapparent infections, through non-fatal but debilitating fevers, to life-threatening severe haemorrhagic complications and shock, or acute encephalitis with high mortality and serious neurological after-effects in survivors. Similarly, frequent inapparent infections occur in animals, with overt disease ranging to the severe end of the scale, with haemorrhage, encephalitis, abortion, and birth defects as principal symptoms.
Rift Valley Fever
Authors: Swanepoel R
Published: November 2023

Rift Valley fever (RVF) is an acute disease of domestic ruminants in mainland Africa and Madagascar, caused by a mosquito-borne virus and characterized by necrotic hepatitis and a haemorrhagic state. Large outbreaks of the disease in sheep, cattle and goats occur at irregular intervals of several years when exceptionally heavy rains favour the breeding of the mosquito vectors, and are distinguished by heavy mortality among newborn animals and abortion in pregnant animals. Humans become infected from contact with tissues of infected animals or from mosquito bite, and usually develop mild to moderately severe febrile illness, but severe complications, which occur in a small proportion of patients, include ocular sequelae, encephalitis, and fatal haemorrhagic disease. Modified live and inactivated vaccines are available for use in livestock, and an inactivated vaccine is made available on an experimental basis for use in humans with regular occupational exposure to infection.
African Trypanosomosis
Authors: Gibson W
Published: November 2023

The African trypanosomoses are diseases of both man and his livestock. There are two forms of human trypanosomosis or sleeping sickness: Gambian or Rhodesian sleeping sickness, roughly corresponding to a West/Central or East African distribution respectively. Gambian sleeping sickness runs a more protracted and chronic course than the Rhodesian form; nevertheless, human trypanosomosis is invariably fatal if not treated. Animal reservoir hosts, both wild and domestic, assume greater importance for Rhodesian sleeping sickness than Gambian sleeping sickness, and the former is often an occupational hazard of those working in wildlife areas, e.g. hunters. Animal trypanosomosis transmitted by tsetse is generally referred to as Nagana..
Blastocystiosis
Authors: Boreham Peter F L , Stenzel Deborah J
Published: November 2023

Blastocystis is a poorly investigated member of the Protista and there are large gaps in our knowledge of all aspects of the parasite and the disease which it is reputed to cause. Vague gastrointestinal symptoms have been associated with infection but none of the putative symptoms are pathognomonic of the infection. There is debate as to whether Blastocystis is a zoonosis and can be acquired by humans from animals. Parasites morphologically similar to the human parasite are found in a wide range of animals and this led Garavelli and Scaglione (1989) to suggest that B. hominis is a zoonotic infection. The only data to support this conclusion are in a study by Doyle et al. (1990), which reported that 44 per cent of 121 patients infected with B. hominis had a history of exposure to domestic or farm animals. Only in the past few years has it been possible to suggest the life cycle for this organism based on detailed ultrastructural observations. The parasite is widespread in humans, other mammals, birds, and reptiles, but to date there have been few studies to determine whether this represents one or more species. The organism is most probably transmitted by faecal contamination, with the recently described cyst form as the infective agent.
Trichostrongylidosis
Authors: Nolan T J
Published: November 2023

Trichostrongylidosis is an infection involving nematodes of the superfamily Trichostrongyloidea, mainly those of the genus Trichostrongylus. Infections are usually asymptomatic, but when heavy a variety of gastrointestinal symptoms, including abdominal pain and diarrhoea, can be present. Infections are initiated by the ingestion of third-stage larvae. There is no parenteral migration and the adults are usually found in the mucosa of the duodenum. Eggs pass out with the faeces, hatch in about 1 day and the larvae develop to the infective stage in 2 or 3 days. Human infections with Trichostrongylus spp. have been reported worldwide, and are particularly common in southern Asia. Infections respond well to anthelminitics and periodic dosing of livestock is the chief method of control.
Histoplasmosis
Authors: Clinkenbeard K D
Published: November 2023

The dimorphic fungus Histoplasma capsulatum is a facultative intracellular pathogen of the mononuclear phagocytic system of human beings and animals and causes disease with high morbidity but low mortality. Histoplasma capsulatum var. capsulatum is a saprophytic soil fungus of temperate climates, particularly North America. High levels of soil contamination with Histoplasma organisms is associated with bird roosting areas and bat-infested caves. Infection is by inhalation of microconidia or mycelial fragments resulting in a clinically inapparent pulmonary infection or a transient ‘flu-like’ pneumonitis. More severe disseminated histoplasmosis can be a sequela to pulmonary histoplasmosis in immunocompromised hosts or from high exposure to Histoplasma organisms.
Ringworm (Dermatophytosis)
Authors: Sparkes A H
Published: November 2023

Ringworm or dermatophytosis is an infection of the keratinized tissues (stratum corneum, hair, or nails) with a fungus from the Epidermophyton, Microsporum, or Trichophyton genera. Around 40 indivdual dermatophyte species are recognized and classified as antropo- philic, zoophilic, or geophilic, depending on their major reservoir in nature (humans, animals, and soil, respectively). Zoophilic dermatophytes may result in zoonoses when humans are exposed to these organisms, and dermatophytosis is considered to be one of the most common zoonotic diseases.
Introduction
Authors: Gildea Robert
Published: November 2023

This is a concise study of French national identity, culture, obsessions, and aspirations since the end of the Second World War. The starting point of 1945 is no doubt of less significance in French history than 1944, the year of the Liberation of France from German Occupation, or 1946, date of the constitution of the Fourth Republic. Neither does the period form a bloc: it has seen two republics, a period of economic growth followed by one of economic stagnation, the recovery of great-power status, but also a loss of national confidence. It may also be argued that these have not been the most exciting years of French history: no European wars, no revolutions. Wars of course there have been, notably the Algerian war of 1954-62, while the events of May June 1968 may be considered France’s last great revolution. But it has been a period of immense challenges for the French: constructing a new European order, building a modern economy, searching for a stable political system. It has also been one of anxiety and doubt. The French have had to come to terms with the legacy of the German·Occupation, with the loss of Empire, with the influx of foreign immigrants, with the rise of Islam, with the destruction of traditional rural life, with the threat of AngloAmerican culture to French language and civilization.
Crisis in the State
Authors: Gildea Robert
Published: November 2023

In 1944 there was a revolutionary situation in France. It was the likeliest opportunity for a Communist seizure of power that the country had seen or would ever see. The German army of occupation was in retreat. The Vichy authorities that had been propped up by it were discredited and in collapse. The French Committee of National Liberation, which became the provisional government only just before the Normandy landings, was based in Algiers with a provisional Consultative Assembly, and had yet to assert its control in metropolitan France. The key presence on the ground were the combined forces of the Resistance, the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (French Forces of the Interior, or FFls), backed up by milices patriotiques of citizens mobilized for national insurrection.
Thirty Glorious, Twenty-five Inglorious Years
Authors: Gildea Robert
Published: November 2023

In 1979 Jean Fourastié, a former official of the economic planning agency, the Commissariat Général au Plan, published a book entitled Les Trente glorieuses ou la Révolution invisible. The thirty glorious years, by analogy with the three glorious days of the July Revolution of 1830, were those of unparalleled growth and prosperity in France after the Second World War. He began by describing two villages, one backward and one developed, only to reveal that they were two snapshots of the same village, one in 1946, the other in 1975. He then set out a few eloquent statistics to highlight the changes in France as a whole between 1946 and 1975. The population grew from 40.5 million to 52.6 million, and · average life expectancy rose from 62 to 69 for men and from 67 to 77 for women. The proportion of those employed in agriculture fell from 36 to IO per cent of the working population, while that employed in industry rose from 32 to 39 per cent and that employed in the service sector grew from 32 to 5I per cent. The standard of living measured in income per head of population increased (for a baseline of roo in 1939) from 125 to 320, and the number of private cars in circulation rose from one million to over 15 million.
The One and Indivisible Republic?
Authors: Gildea Robert
Published: November 2023

There were four cardinal principles of the French Republic. The first was that education was universal, secular, compulsory, and free, providing both a uniform education for all future citizens and an equality of opportunity that opened careers to talent alone. The second was that all citizens were equal under the law, and that the law dealt equitably with all, whatever their class, race, or gender. The third was that France was a centralized, unitary state and One and Indivisible Republic, in which the laws made by a single legislature, articulating the will of the sovereign people, were applied equally in all parts of France. The fourth was that the French were not, like the Germans, a Volk, bound together by ties of blood, but a body of citizens who had come together at the French Revolution to establish a new social contract that would guarantee the rights of man and the citizen, found out by reason.

These principles of equality were the founding myths of the Republic. They were powerful and persuasive, defined the content and parameters of French political discourse, and made the questioning of those principles extremely difficult. In fact they disguised, and were intended to disguise, radical inequalities.
Cultural Revolutions
Authors: Gildea Robert
Published: November 2023

The French have always prided themselves as a nation on their intelligence. Their education system, as we have seen, makes a virtue of intellectual elitism. Professions such as teaching, lecturing, the liberal professions, advertising, journalism, and careers in the arts are known as ‘intellectual professions’. Certain writers, artists, or academics with a wider role of criticism and moral leadership in society, known as ‘intellectuals’ since the Dreyfus Affair, have been the objects of public reverence and national pride. But France has also experienced the development of a mass culture in the fields of cinema, television, reading matter, and music. Often American in origin, it has threatened to destroy art and literature and French art and literature in particular, replacing it by a homogeneous culture accessible to all, irrespective of differences in levels of education. In response to this the French state has developed a cultural policy in order to confront mass culture, intended to democratize high culture and defend French culture. These three elements—the rise and fall of the French intellectual, the challenge of mass culture, and the response of official policy—and the tensions between them form the substance of this chapter.
The Republic of the Centre
Authors: Gildea Robert
Published: November 2023

Whereas between 1945 and 1968 the French state had repeatedly been in crisis, after the fall of de Gaulle it enjoyed a period of unprecedented stability. The constitution of the Fifth Republic, which had been shaped by de Gaulle for his own purposes, came to be accepted by the Left as well as by the Right. A regime that was intended to be enfeoffed to the Gaullist majority adapted itself to the alternation of Right and Left in power, becoming a healthy pluralist democracy, and also survived the coexistence of Left and Right in power at the same time. The guerrilla war of Left and Right, fought as if the French Revolution were still going on, became attenuated. People voted on the Right or on the Left but were governed from the Centre. Parties of the Left and Right were seldom able to govern alone, and sought to broaden the majorities on which they were based by ouverture or bridgebuilding to include parties of the Centre in government. Moreover, the alternation of Right and Left in power became less problematic as consensus was established under which governments of both persuasions accepted the mixed economy and a certain level of health and social-security benefits as given, and not to be tampered with from one government to the next. The dominant ideologies were less statist Gaullism or statist socialism but a liberalism that had had a poor track record in France since the Revolution but that now penetrated the thinking of all the major parties.
France in Search of a World Role
Authors: Gildea Robert
Published: November 2023

Valéry Giscard d’Estaing had the honesty to confess during his presidency that France was now a medium-sized power. This did not mean that it no longer had pretensions to grandeur. It fought hard to retain its permanent seat on the Security Council of the United Nations, struggled to ensure its hegemony in Europe, and proved both stubborn in relinquishing the last vestiges of its empire and remarkably inventive in perpetuating different forms of neocolonial power. Over time, however, many of these ambitions bore bitter fruit. When Soviet power collapsed, France found it increasingly difficult to stand up to the United States. The unification of Germany threatened its leading role in Europe and cooled the European fervour of many French people. In Africa the French lost their ability to arbitrate effectively, while within Francophone countries they gradually lost the initiative to a new rival, Canada.
Introduction to Michael Ignatieff
Authors: Ash Timothy Garton
Published: November 2023

It is a great pleasure to introduce Michael Ignatieff’s lecture. If I had to sum up Michael in one word it would be ‘intellectual’. He is in fact one of our leading liberal intellectuals. Now ‘intellectual’ is a word viewed with some suspicion in Britain. It is regarded as strange and intrinsically foreign. I remember an obituary of Karl Popper, which began with the sentence, ‘Like most British intellectuals of his generation, Karl Popper was born in Vienna.’ Michael wasn’t born in Vienna. He was born in Canada. His education was initially in Canada, then in Cambridge (England), then Cambridge (Massachusetts). He was a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, and then became a freelance writer and an extremely well-known broadcaster. He held a number of visiting fellowships, not least the Alastair Horne Fellowship at St Antony’s College, Oxford, while he was writing his biography of Isaiah Berlin. He is currently at the Carr Center for Human Rights at the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard.
Introduction to Gitta Sereny
Authors: Glover Jonathan
Published: November 2023

We academics, toiling away in our libraries, writing our books, tend to use the word ‘journalist’ in a somewhat condescending way. We like to think that we write deep, scholarly, researched works, and that ‘journalism’ has a slight tinge of the superficial about it. But it has to be said that Gitta Sereny has written far more profound books than most of us academics. When I read her books, I feel I wouldn’t mind my own work having a journalistic tinge. Her books are not always an unadulterated pleasure to read, because they touch on some very dark things. She asks difficult questions, particularly about the psychological roots of human cruelty.
Introduction to Eva Hoffman
Authors: Foster Roy
Published: November 2023

With her classic study Lost in Translation (1989), Eva Hoffman established her mastery as an analyst of recovered memory and deferred emotion-and also of the way that what we leave behind us follows us around. Her subsequent books dealt with interactions between past and present in Eastern Europe, and demonstrated her Geiger-counter sensitivity to rifts within societies, the stratagems by which they are circumvented, and the ways that they are projected into the future. These preoccupations are clear in her Amnesty lecture, which explores the transmission of remembered wrongs into the future. In dealing with the ‘return of the repressed past’ she avoids, on the one hand, the danger of simply applying the language of individual psychotherapy to the complex question of social consciousness; and, on the other, the equally simplistic assumption that rectification is ever possible for horrific injustices against the dead. The word she prefers to stress is ‘recognition’, which recurs throughout this thoughtprovoking meditation.
Response to Chomsky
Authors: Ryan Alan
Published: November 2023

Professor Chomsky’s essay provides, as always, an invigorating blast of fresh air that will blow away any complacency about the world’s progress towards implementing a serious human rights regime. Much that he says about the violence and brutality either directly employed by the United States in Indochina and elsewhere or employed by those whom the United States had armed, encouraged, and assisted, is well taken. It is also very hard to resist a good deal of what he says about the failure of the US economy to extend the benefits of prosperity to anything more than the top 10 per cent or so of its own population.
On Writing Rights
Authors: Bhabha Homi K
Published: November 2023

Wherever you live, whoever you may be, once the lights dim in a movie theatre, or the screen lights up on your TV or PC, you become, more or less, a part of the global world. Many of the keywords of twenty-first-century political and cultural life embrace such a worldwide perspective: the global market as the touchstone of ‘free enterprise’; democratic capitalism, as the watchword of the crusade against alternative, socialist systems; or, more recently, the ‘Coca-Colonization’ of the world, that catchword of global theorists, which suggests that from a curvaceous bottle with the profile of a 1950s Vargas model there emerges the genie of the postmodern dream: youth, entertainment, cool technologies, and hot financial markets. A time-worn, singular figure, however, bears contrary witness to the whirligig of our global age fraught, as it is, with the fever of frantic speeds, appetites for expanding size, and the vanity of vast numbers. It is the figure of the human being tethered to the spirit of writing/literature.
Why Read Marx Today?
Authors: Wolff Jonathan
Published: November 2023

In recent years we could be forgiven for assuming that Marx has nothing left to say to us. Marxist regimes have failed miserably, and with them, it seemed, all reason to take Marx seriously. The fall of the Berlin Wall had enormous symbolic resonance: it was taken to be the fall of Marx as well as of Marxist politics and economics. This book argues that we can detach Marx the critic of current society from Marx the prophet of future society, and that he remains the most impressive critic we have of liberal, capitalist, bourgeois society. It also shows that the value of the 'great thinkers' does not depend on their views being true, but on other features such as their originality, insight, and systematic vision. On this account too Marx still richly deserves to be read.
Home Life Among The Sarts And Kirghiz
Authors: Nazaroff Paul
Published: November 2023

THE domestic life of the Central Asiatic peoples is very little known to Europeans, for few have had the opportunity of observing at close quarters the family life of the Moslems, so jealously screened from outside eyes. Quite apart from my prolonged stay with a Sart family already described, I have had many an opportunity of seeing their intimate affairs during my numerous wanderings in Turkestan and the Kirghiz steppe. and so I venture to interrupt the thread of my story with au account of some of what I have soon. Not Europeans only but even Russians who live in the towns of Turkestan are inclined to look upon the womenfolk among the Sarts, Kirghiz and Turcomans, and the women of Khiva, Bokhara and Kashgar, as nothing more than slaves completely subject to the caprice of their lords and masters, sitting all their life in harems. They think that the natives treat their wives like cattle, that in these lands there is a regular slave trade in women, and they even quote cases where girls have been sold.
Alone With Nature
Authors: Nazaroff Paul
Published: November 2023

ONE thing caused me anxiety. The friends who had organised my disguise considered that I should have difficulty in concealing my ‘non-proletarian’ origin in spite of the beard which I had let grow freely, as my face certainly did not have anything like a’ proletarian’ look. I had learnt, too, under interrogation, that these savage ‘proletarians’ are angered and irritated by the appearance of an educated man. Later, during my wanderings in Semirechie, I was unable to conceal the fact that I belonged to the educated classes. Bolsheviks and Rusman peasants and Kirghiz could all scent out that I was not a ‘proletarian,’ and behaved accordingly, their attitude being hostile or friendly and respectful, as the case might be.
In Semirechie
Authors: Nazaroff Paul
Published: November 2023

MY first expedition was into the mountain forests up the valley of the Chu and in the valley of its tributary the Keben. It was a glorious September day when we drove out of the town and headed for the east. The horses were fresh and made a good pace at a brisk trot along the level road, and the light cart bowled along easily. I felt relieved in my mind, and looked around with interest at a country that was new to me. On my left was the Chu with its water meadows and thickets; on the right the mountains stood out sharply and clearly in the clean morning air, their snowy crest glistening like molten silver, cut by the dark and mysterious clefts of the numerous gorges. After driving through several Russian villages with their inevitable quagmires of mud we came to a slight elevation covered with the extensive ruins of an ancient town, Balasugun. In the dry, clayey, barren soil I could clearly pick out the traces of streets and places where houses had once stood, the irrigation canals and larger buildings. The remains of the city walls were quite distinguishable, and of the towers, fortresses and palaces. In the Middle Ages this was a populous and prosperous city, a mass of gardens and handsome buildings, conducting a busy trade with Western Europe on the west and distant China on the east. Its warehouses were crammed with costly merchandise, embroideries of the east and other rich treasures.
Culture clash
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

August Kekulé von Stradonitz was one of the founders of structural organic chemistry. Born in Darmstadt in 1829, he studied at the University of Giessen with Justus von Liebig, greatest of all organic chemists, then in France, and finally in England. He later took the chair of chemistry at the University of Ghent and then in 1865 he moved to Bonn, where he remained for the rest of his life. Kekulé was a noted teacher, but is now mainly remembered for his celebrated dreams, in which came to him the two inspirations that changed the face of chemistry.
Metchnikoff restored to life
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Ilya (later Élie) Metchnikoff was a Russian, born in the Ukraine in 1845, who spent most of his working life at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. During a stay in Italy he discovered the phenomenon of phagocytosis, when he observed amoeba-like cells surging towards a foreign body (a thorn) thrust into a translucent starfish larva. In the human body the phagocytes—white blood cells—are the first line of defence against invaders, such as bacteria, which they engulf and destroy. In later years Metchnikoff was captivated by the notion that our phagocytes run riot when we age and that all symptoms of senescence result from their destructive action. He believed this was fomented by waste products formed in the gut; these, he proclaimed, could be eliminated by promoting the proliferation of benign bacteria. All we needed to do was to ingest massive quantities of ‘kephir’ or yogurt, which would ensure a thriving population of Lactobacillus bulgaricus in the gut. Metchnikoff presumably followed his own prescription to avert the ravages of age, but died nevertheless at seventy-one.
Farmyard themodynamics
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Walther Nernst, born in 1864, was one of the German moguls of physics and physical chemistry. His most famous contributions were in thermodynamics (of which he formulated the Third Law) and in electrochemistry. In 1920, he acquired Zibelle, an extensive estate in East Prussia. There were cows, pigs, a pond with carp, and a thousand acres of land, which included fields of cereals and other crops. Nernst pursued his new interest in farming with characteristic single-mindedness.
Newton ponders
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) attracted many legends. His nature in maturity was sour and ungenerous; he was jealous of contemporaries and ferociously competitive. In his interminable dispute with his Hanoverian contemporary Gottfried Leibniz over who had first hit on the differential calculus, he was ruthless to the point of dishonesty. At the end he exulted that he had finally ‘broken Leibniz’s heart’. John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal (1646-1719), and himself no easy character, was once heard to sigh: ‘I dreamt Newton was dead.’
Rutherford finds a solution
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Ernest Rutherford, later Lord Rutherford of Nelson, was born in 1871 on a sheep farm in New Zealand. ‘Always’, one of his contemporaries greeted him, ‘on the crest of the wave, eh Rutherford’, he was responsible for a remarkable series of discoveries in atomic structure, which made him arguably the preeminent experimental physicist of his generation. ‘Well, I made the wave, didn’t I?’ had been his response. A. V. Hill [115], the physiologist, recalled how Rutherford had remarked to him one day, without preamble: ‘I’ve just been reading some of my early papers; and when I’d read them for a bit I said to myself, “Ernest my boy, you used to be a damned clever fellow”.’ Modesty was never a weakness of Rutherford’s: he was a boisterous extrovert, and so good- natured that he seems never to have incurred envy or malice.
But what use is it?
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

When Chancellor of the Exchequer William Gladstone, having witnessed Michael Faraday’s demonstration of the newly discovered phenomenon of electromagnetic induction, asked: ‘But what use is it?’ Faraday famously replied, ‘l don’t know, but one day, sir, you maybe able to tax it’. (According to another version, however, or perhaps even on a different occasion, his riposte was supposed to have been, ‘What use is a newborn baby?’)
Of life and death
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Isidor Rabi, born in Poland in 1898, grew up in some poverty in New York and became one of the world’s great physicists. He won a Nobel Prize in 1944 for discovering a phenomenon that led ultimately to nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, one of the most powerful methods for the study of molecular structure and later of generating images of living tissue. This involved observing the flip in an oscillating field of atomic nuclei, which had been discovered to possess a magnetic moment, like minuscule bar magnets.

Rabi, who spent most of his working life at Columbia University in New York, became after his Nobel Prize a statesman of science. His enthusiasm for the laboratory seemed to have deserted him; he once said of the Nobel Prize: ‘Unless you are very competitive you aren’t likely to function with the same vigour afterwards. It’s like the lady from Boston who said, “Why should I travel when I’m already there?” The prize also attracts you away from your field because other avenues open up.’
Mathematical peril
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

George Gamow, the physicist [81] who escaped to the United States from Stalinist Russia, tells the following tale of what can befall an innocent scholar in times of political turbulence.

Here is a story told to me by one of my friends who was at that time a young professor of physics in Odessa. His name was Igor Tamm (Nobel Prize laureate in Physics, 1958). Once when he arrived in a neighbouring village, at the period when Odessa was occupied by the Reds, and was negotiating with a villager as to how many chickens he could get for half a dozen silver spoons, the village was captured by one of the Makhno bands, who were roaming the country, harassing the Reds. Seeing his city clothes (or what was left of them), the capturers brought him to the Ataman, a bearded fellow in a tall black fur hat with machine-gun cartridge ribbons crossed on his broad chest and a couple of hand grenades hanging on the belt.

‘You son-of-a-bitch, you Communistic agitator, undermining our mother Ukraine! The punishment is death.’
Lordlv disdain
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Lord Rutherford of Nelson I16], Cavendish Professor of Physics in Cambridge, was a majestic figure. Here is how he dismissed a theory he simply did not care for. The setting is the Clarendon Laboratory in Oxford and the writer, R. V. Jones [106].

Rutherford came across occasionally from Cambridge, and his lectures were always memorable. In the question session after one of them E. A. Milne [64] [a noted theoretician and cosmologist] asked for his views on what was known as the Tutin atom. This concept had been started by a Dr Tutin, who argued that the Rutherford model of the atom [the planetary system, with a nucleus, made up of protons and neutrons, as the sun, and the electrons in orbits around it at defined radii] was all wrong, for everyone knew that if you spin a mixture of light and heavy particles, the heavy ones fly to the outside while the light ones stay close to the centre. So in an atom the electrons should be in the middle with the protons orbiting outside. The theory had achieved notoriety because F. W. Soddy [149], the Professor of Inorganic Chemistry, who had given isotopes their name, had communicated Tutin’s paper to the Chemical Society, which had refused to publish the paper in its Journal, whereupon Soddy had resigned from the Society and had promptly advertised the sale of all his volumes of Journal of the Chemical Society in Nature. Milne asked Rutherford how he could be sure that Tutin was wrong and he was right. I can still see Rutherford, who was a big man, bending over towards Milne, who was a small one, and booming ‘When you’ve got an elephant and a flea, you assume it’s the flea that jumps’.
A martyr to science
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Pliny the Elder, or Gaius Plinius Secundus, was the author of Natural History, the most comprehensive survey of scientific learning in the ancient world. He met his end, a martyr to scientific curiosity, during the eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum in ad 79. The disaster was vividly described by his nephew, Pliny the Younger. The family was at Misenum on the other side of the Bay of Naples and the elder Pliny had command of the fleet, then stationed in the bay. He was made aware of a large and rapidly growing cloud, ascending on a column of smoke, which was ramifying, dike a Mediterranean pine tree’. ‘My uncle,’ the nephew recorded, ‘who was a great scholar, just could not keep away.’ He took ship and headed for the source of the smoke. As the ship approached Pompeii hot ash and pumice rained down, but Pliny would not turn back and ordered his helmsman to sail on into the gathering gloom until the ship became trapped in the shallows by an unfavourable wind. His nephew continues:
Pythagoras’s theme
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Pythagoras of Samos (d. 510 BC), known to every schoolchild for the square on the hypotenuse, founded a great school of mathematics, dedicated to both practical and philosophical ends. The Pythagorean Brotherhood consisted of some 600 votaries, who abjured worldly ambitions and dedicated themselves to the advancement of learning. Pythagoras is now viewed by historians as a shadowy figure of uncertain identity (which appears to imply that Pythagoras’s theorem may have been discovered not by Pythagoras but by another scholar of the same name). Yet Porphyry, the philosopher, wrote a biography of Pythagoras, admittedly some 800 years later, full of circumstantial detail. Pythagoras’s fame rests not only on his mathematics but also on his discovery of the laws of music—the numerical relation between the intervals of the harmonic scale. According to legend and the account of one of Porphyry’s followers, lamblichus, he happened to pass by a brazier’s shop, where he heard the hammers beating out a piece of iron on an anvil, producing sounds that harmonised, except one. But he recognised in these sounds the concord of the octave, the fifth and the fourth. He saw that the sound between the fourth and the fifth [the augmented fourth, as we would now call it] was a dissonance, and yet completed the greater sound among them.
The trick of the tick
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

David Keilin (1887-1963) was a highly respected Russian-born biologist, who spent most of his working life in Cambridge. His fame rested on his early studies of parasitic insects and, more especially, on his investigations of the iron-containing haem proteins. The following reminiscence comes from an affectionate memoir of Keilin by Max Perutz [88].

In 1931, when Keilin had succeeded Nuttall as Quick Professor of Biology, an elderly lecturer called Warburton complained that he had been appointed before the University Superannuation Scheme had been instituted, so that he had no pension and would have to die in harness. When Keilin told the University Treasurer that Warburton was in his late seventies and had no pension, the Treasurer agreed that in view of Warburton’s advanced age the University could afford to be generous. He failed to foresee that 24 years later we would celebrate Warburton’s 100th birthday! On that occasion he told us a wonderful story. In his prime Warburton had been the world’s authority on ticks. One day in the twenties, some of his students were eating their lunch of bread and cheese when they found a tick in their butter.
Comfort in adversity
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Physical handicap has been known to ignite, rather than extinguish, the ambition to learn and discover. Stephen Hawking, cosmologist and occupant of Newton’s Lucasian Chair of Mathematics in Cambridge, embodies this truth. Consider also Solomon Lefschetz (1884-1972), the much-admired American topologist, who, destined to be an engineer until both his hands were severed in a laboratory accident, turned instead to mathematics. He was fitted with pros thetic claws, always sheathed in black gloves. A student was charged with thrusting a stick of chalk into one claw at the beginning of the working day and taking out the stub at its conclusion.

Prison and the madhouse are scarcely the most congenial environments for the advancement of learning. Yet science has flowered after a fashion in internment and prisoner-of-war camps, and even captives in solitary confinement have added new chapters to human knowledge. Jean Victor Poncelet (1788-1867), a French mathematician, was perhaps the most celebrated of these indomitable spirits. An officer in the Corps of Military Engineers in the Napoleonic campaigns, he was captured by the Russians after a skirmish during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 and incarcerated in a camp at Saratov on the Volga river. There he remained for nearly two years. To divert himself he turned his mind to his youthful interest, mathematics, and especially geometry. Having, in the absence of books, reconstructed the elements of the subject from the beginning, he set out on a programme of research on projections of conic forms. This set the course for his most important later work, which he pursued after his release, while continuing to serve as a military engineer—a specialist in fortifications. Late in his life he published his definitive work, Applications d’analyse et de la g éometric, the first volume of which bore the title, Cahiers de Saratov.