Human biology: an ever-expanding subject

Abstract

The fourth Wisconsin Symposium on Human Biology took place in Madison, Wisconsin, May 22–25, 2006, under beautiful Spring weather (which typically precedes the less enjoyable long, hot, humid Wisconsin summer). This symposium is held once every two or three years (the previous meetingwas in 2003) and the series is shapingupas oneof the most ambitious—and interesting—of multidisciplinary symposium programmes in the United States. The breadth of this particular meeting is indicated by its subtitle: ‘‘Analysis & Synthesis, The Individual and the Environment, Robustness and Plasticity’’. An explicit goal of the organisers is to promote provocative, multidisciplinary thinking within a university setting. The University of Wisconsin, with its distinguished and long history of research on and discoveries in basic biology generally and human health, more specifically, is a highly suitable university venue for this kind of intellectual venture. Nearly 50 years ago, C.P. Snow, in a lecture at the University of Cambridge, discussed the enormous gulf in understanding and communication between the humanities and the sciences, the problem of the ‘‘two cultures’’. Today, in biology alone, there are nearly comparably large splits between the different disciplines. The symposium series is, in effect, a bet that a comprehensive university can bring together highly specialized investigators to address shared problems from complementary angles, in an effective and insightful fashion. Both the title and subtitle of the symposium inevitably prompt the question: just what precisely is ‘‘human biology’’? The short automatic answer is: ‘‘biology that is relevant to human beings’’. But this, as it transpires, is virtually all of biology plus all the cultural/social modes that impinge on this biology. In effect, the subject of ‘‘human biology’’ is virtually unbounded, unlike that of the biology of many simpler organisms, which themselves can be the focus of excellent symposia that make no reference to much of the multidimensional complexity of the biology of human beings. The program fully reflected this breadth and diversity of topic, ranging in level from the molecular to the cellular to the organismal Talks on some of the simpler organisms focussed on molecular events at the molecular scale. These ranged from viral life cycles (John Yin, University of Wisconsin), homeostasis in yeast phosphate metabolism (Erin O’Shea, Harvard), to gradients in early development of the fruit fly (Naama Barkai, The Weismann Institute). At the cellular level, there were talks on ‘‘microfluidics’’ in the governance of cell growth (David Beebe, University of Wisconsin) and the study of neural stem cells to probe basic cellular behaviour in neural growth and regeneration (Clive Svendsen, University of Wisconsin). At the most complex end of the spectrum, there were talks (to be described below) on human evolution, the nature of maternal effects on mammalian development, and the neurobiology of higher brain functions such as emotion, meditational states, and comprehension of music. Nor were technical topics neglected: important new advances in diagnosticmethods, for humans andmicrobes, respectively, were described by Charles Cantor (Sequenom, Inc.) and Ranga Sampath (ISIS Pharmaceuticals). To provide landmarks in this vast terrain, there were four plenary talks (one each day) that addressed large, central themes. All other presentations were grouped in separate subject-based sections, which ran in two concurrent streams. For the relatively rare individual whose interests are as broad as the symposium’s range of subject matter, the dilemma was choosing which session of the two streams to go to at any one time. In this report,weshall notattempt tomentionandsummarize every talkbut concentrateon those that dealt directlywithoneor more aspects of the biology of human beings; we give our apologies to those whose talks are not mentioned here, for reasons of space and focus. The symposium website (http://www.union.wisc.edu/humanbiology/) gives the full set of abstracts and links to the speakers and organizers. The keynote talk, opening the meeting, was given by Michael Meany (McGill University), whose subject was the variety of maternal effects and their long-lasting developmental sequelae in the offspring, particularly those involving maternal stress. He introduced the phenomenon of maternal environmental experience in animals with the example of Daphnia femalesexposed to theolfactory signals of predators; their offspring develop a special ‘‘helmeted’’ external armature. BioEssays Editorial Office, Cambridge, UK. Department of Oncology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI. *Correspondence to: Adam S. Wilkins, BioEssays Editorial Office, 10/ 11 Tredgold Lane, Napier Street, Cambridge CB1 1HN, UK. E-mail: awilkins@bioessays.demon.co.uk DOI 10.1002/bies.20495 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com).