John's Life Research Articles

John Huxtable Elliott (1930–2022)

John Huxtable Elliott (1930–2022)

Obituary: John Sulston (1942-2018).

John Sulston, a pioneer in the developmental studies of the nematode C. elegans who went on to spearhead the sequencing of the genome of this organism and ultimately the human genome, died on 6th March 2018, shortly after being diagnosed with stomach cancer. Here, I reflect on John's life and work, with a particular focus on his time working on the developmental genetics and lineage of C. elegans.

Martin Delrio: Demonology and Scholarship in the Counter-Reformation

Martin Delrio: Demonology and Scholarship in the Counter-Reformation

John Collins: Highlife's Accidental Archivist

John Collins:Highlife's Accidental Archivist Catherine M. Cole "I've always been inquisitive," John Collins said in a 1993 interview.1 Innate curiosity and fate propelled John Collins onto a life path unique in the history of Ghana or, indeed, much of Africa. In 1952, at the tender age of eight, fate brought John from his British homeland to the Gold Coast colony where his father helped establish the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ghana during the final years of British rule. Yet fate also sent John home: his parents' divorce prompted an abrupt return to Britain for the remainder of John's childhood. However, it was curiosity that brought him back to independent Ghana in 1969. He came with a guitar in tow and equipped with the knowledge of how to play rock and roll—knowledge that Ghanaian musicians were keen to acquire. While John was ostensibly studying sociology and archaeology for his BA at the University of Ghana, his real passion was trading musical knowledge. He taught Ghanaian musicians how to play rock and roll, and they, in turn, taught him the distinctive chord progressions and offbeat rhythm of West African highlife music. This interweaving of performance cultures is both a defining feature of John's life and, more broadly, a defining feature of the musical practices in Ghana that have been his abiding passion.2 Perhaps this is why Collins has said of Ghana, "This place is my destiny."3 [End Page 13] During nearly half a century, John's inquisitiveness and passion led him to become a musician, music producer, archivist, journalist, teacher, activist and policy maker on behalf of musicians, and a scholar, attaining a PhD in ethnomusicology from SUNY Buffalo in 1994. John's interest in African popular music was matched by Ghanaian musicians' interest in both local and transnational cultural flows, regardless of origin. John has found Ghanaian musicians to be radically pluralistic, with voracious appetites for ideas, techniques, styles, and genres regardless of cultural derivation. "Despite the fact that the musicians and actors slept on village floors, and had little formal education, they were very cosmopolitan guys, and gave their own creative interpretations," according to John.4 Transnational cultural traffic has been central to Ghanaian popular culture dating back to the nineteenth century, at least. When the British brought soldiers from the Caribbean to fight in the Ashanti War between 1873 and 1901, calypso came along with them.5 The flow of people to and through Ghana during the twentieth century via immigration, trade, colonization, military operations, and Christian missions also brought a circulation of objects and cultural practices: sheet music; Gramophone records; silent and talking pictures; American minstrelsy; Western dances such as the fox-trot and the waltz; musical styles such as American blues and soul, as well as Latin American rumba, pachanga, and samba—all of these, when they arrived on Ghana's soil, readily took root with local artists who appropriated, integrated, and transformed what they found, while also abandoning ideas as they saw fit. Without the prolific documentation provided by John Collins, we would be hard-pressed today to even begin to understand the scope of these cultural flows. As Nate Plageman writes in this current volume, "Collins … has unveiled remarkable insights into how otherwise invisible people decolonized imported cultural resources, recovered lost histories, and outlined imagined futures." In a land with limited literacy and archives skewed by colonial biases, performance cultures potentially provide a valuable record of public discourse. The dynamism of lived artistic practice is compelling, but accessing these historical sources is challenging. Researchers of African popular culture have to approach questions of sources and methods with an appetite for innovation, appropriation, experimentation, irreverence, [End Page 14] and iconoclasm—not unlike the approach to sources and methods that popular artists themselves use. From James Brown, Otis Redding, and Aretha Franklin in the United States to Fela Kuti in Nigeria and Bob Marley and the Wailers in the Caribbean, the flow of musical genres and styles to and through Ghana has been steady and from many directions. But ironically, formal education, including scholarly knowledge production with its conventional disciplinary boundaries and geographic frames, has...

Book Review: Merchant of Words: The Life of Robert St. John, by Terry Fred Horowitz

Merchant of Words: The Life of Robert St. John. Terry Fred Horowitz. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. 444 pp. $85 hbk.Robert St. John's From the Land of Silent People, an account of the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941 as told by an Associated Press journalist who barely made it out of the country alive, ranks as one of the great books of wartime journalism.A reader who turns to Terry Fred Horowitz's biography of St. John (1902-2003), Merchant of Words, to find an equally compelling narrative about a journalist's motivations, methods, and mettle-say, along the lines of James Tobin's Ernie Pyle's War or Joseph E. Persico's Edward R. Murrow: An American Original-is likely to be disappointed.It is not that Horowitz has failed to do his legwork. The biography is based on countless hours of interviews conducted during the final years of St. John's life, after Horowitz had already spent eighteen years as a friend. And it is not from an attempt to provide context and detail; Horowitz appears to emulate John Dos Passos's fictional U.S.A. trilogy by inserting news summaries and quotations into his narrative.It is just that he does not pull it off well. Several issues are paramount to this reviewer.First, the narrative follows strict chronology. St. John's life unfolds day by day, and sometimes hour by hour, bordering on a desk calendar approach to biography. This causes the book to jump, often disjointedly, from one subject to the next without allowing sufficient attention to developing themes that might best be cultivated with some flexibility in the timeline. In a single page, for example, the author moves from St. John taking over as emcee of NBC's Believe It or Not, to his writing about the McCarran Act, his reviewing a book by William Shirer, his resignation from the Voice of Freedom Committee, and his being associated with a communist front by radio commentator Fulton Lewis. Some major issues, such as St. John's long association with pro-Jewish and pro-Israel causes, assume the readers' familiarity with narrowly focused historical situations and would have benefited from expansion and reflection.Second, the author inserts himself into the book, making himself and his wife recurring characters. Historians and journalists may debate the value of detachment and the pursuit of objectivity versus a more subjective approach, and there is much to argue in favor of a writer disclosing his or her biases upfront for a reader. But Horowitz does not use a light touch, and his voice can be jarring. He suggests disbelief, or at least a degree of skepticism, with such comments to his subject and his readers as Robert, can we talk? and (Sotto voce) I believe it. Perhaps the warning light should have flashed in the prologue, which includes multiple pages of personal letters between St. …

‘I Think I Am Becoming a New Zealander’: Letters of J.C. Beaglehole

This volume of John Beaglehole's letters is a companion volume to the 2006 biography also written by his son Tim Beaglehole. They are organised chronologically, constructing John's life as a corres...

Obituary

Obituary

In Memoriam: John P. Quinn, MD

In Memoriam: John P. Quinn, MD

The Keats brothers: the life of John and George

John and George Keats-Man of Genius and Man of Power, to use John's words-embodied sibling forms of the phenomenon we call Romanticism. George's 1818 move to the western frontier of the United States, an imaginative leap across four thousand miles onto the tabula rasa of the American dream, created in John an abysm of alienation and loneliness that would inspire the poet's most plangent and sublime poetry. Denise Gigante's account of this emigration places John's life and work in a transatlantic context that has eluded his previous biographers, while revealing the emotional turmoil at the heart of some of the most lasting verse in English. In most accounts of John's life, George plays a small role. He is often depicted as a scoundrel who left his brother destitute and dying to pursue his own fortune in America. But as Gigante shows, George ventured into a land of prairie fires, flat-bottomed riverboats, wildcats, and bears in part to save his brothers, John and Tom, from financial ruin. There was a vital bond between the brothers, evident in John's letters to his brother and sister-in-law, Georgina, in Louisville, Kentucky, which run to thousands of words and detail his thoughts about the nature of poetry, the human condition, and the soul. Gigante demonstrates that John's 1819 Odes and Hyperion fragments emerged from his profound grief following George's departure and Tom's death-and that we owe these great works of English Romanticism in part to the deep, lasting fraternal friendship that Gigante reveals in these pages.

John A Harvey

John A Harvey died on 25 June 2011, at the age of 80. He was born in New York City, but was raised in Siberia by his grandparents during the first decade of his life. John completed his BA degree in 1955, received his PhD degree from the prestigious doctoral program in Biopsychology in 1959, and began his long and celebrated career as a faculty member, all at the University of Chicago. He moved to the University of Iowa in 1968, and then to Drexel University College of Medicine in the Department of Pharmacology and Physiology in 1988, where he served as Chair from 2006–2008. John's research career is highlighted by many seminal scientific contributions related to the biochemistry of the brain and the development of behavioral pharmacology. While at Chicago, he laid the foundation for decades of investigations in neuropharmacology by seeking to explain how neurotransmitters within the central nervous system governed behavior and behavioral responses to drugs. He launched his career by establishing that monoamine neurotransmitters were organized into fiber tracts that could be identified and selectively destroyed to determine their behavioral functions. Once the brain was damaged, he showed that impaired behavioral functions could be recovered by restoring depleted neurotransmitters or stimulating denervated receptors. Using a model of increased pain sensitivity associated with serotonin depletion, he showed that the precursor 5-HTP could replenish 5-HT to reverse that behavioral deficit. This remained a model for the treatment of neurological damage for years. He championed the transformative idea that medications used to treat psychiatric disorders produced their effects by modifying behavioral functions attributed to monoaminergic pathways. Subsequently, he established that the fenfluramine and amphetamines depleted brain 5-HT to produce neurotoxic effects, initiating investigations that continue in the substance-abuse field. He was among the first to recognize a relationship between brain lesions that destroyed dopaminergic fibers and deficits in feeding and other motivated behaviors. As a lifelong student of the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, John used Pavlovian conditioning of the rabbit nictitating membrane response for the past 25 years to understand how drugs influence learning. John identified the underlying neural circuitry in the rabbit brainstem required for associative learning and then established how drugs specifically altered different components of Pavlovian conditioning. His research established unequivocally that hallucinogenic drugs enhanced learning by activating 5-HT2 receptors, and established key roles for these receptors in learning and cognition. At Drexel University, he established a NIDA program project that used Pavlovian conditioning to study the detrimental influence of prenatal exposure to cocaine on development. He also used Pavlovian conditioning to examine the effects of brain dysfunction related to autism, applying these techniques to a quest for translational biomarkers for this neurodevelopmental disorder. John published over 150 peer-reviewed articles, reviews and book chapters, and his research contributions were recognized by numerous awards. His career achievements in serotonin research were honored by the Irvine H Page Award at the 2006 international meeting of the Serotonin Club. As a member of many professional societies in pharmacology and neuroscience, he contributed a lifetime of active service to the scientific community. Elected a member of the ACNP in 1979 and a Fellow in 1991, he served actively on the Committee on the Use of Animals. He was especially proud of serving the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics as specific field editor and then editor-in-chief. He was a member of the editorial boards for more than 10 journals. John was widely known and respected for his humor, collegiality and for his intelligence, and was considered by many to be the paramount gentleman. He trained many graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, many of whom developed their own productive and influential careers in biomedical research. John was the beloved husband to Dr Rhoda Harvey, and father to sons Michael (wife Pilar), Andrew (wife Sonya), and his eldest son, David, who predeceased him. He was also a loving grandfather to Oliver and Davia who brought him the greatest joy and pride. With his passing, many who are reading this commentary on John's life and contributions lost a cherished friend and dear colleague.

John Paynter, music education and the creativity of coincidence

My purpose is to develop better understanding of John Paynter's professional life and work, and by examining his pedagogic principles, discern something of the system of beliefs that underlay his commitment to finding a place for music within a system of general education. A number of significant influences are identified that bear upon his thought and practice and which in conjunction with his vocation as a composer-teacher come to privilege a process of making that is thought to bring order and coherence not only to musical thought but by analogy to life lived creatively. Portraying John as existential-humanist, although reductive, has a two-fold purpose; it exposes and invites critique of the creative ideology John so zealously promoted and at the same time provides a basis for a wider critique, and in particular, critique of current and future ideas about music, music education and its practice. In this way, John's life and work can be viewed as a vital source of long-living value.

Catecheses Baptismales (Taufkatechesen) I-II: Griechisch-Deutsch (review)

Reviewed by: Catecheses Baptismales (Taufkatechesen) I-II: Griechisch-Deutsch Arthur B. Shippee Johannes Chrysostomus . Catecheses Baptismales (Taufkatechesen) I-II: Griechisch-Deutsch, edited and translated by Reiner Kacynski. Fontes Christiani 6.1-2Freiburg: Herder, 1992. 2 vols.520 Pp. DM 29 (pb), DM 40 (cloth) per volume. This edition of John's catecheses is essentially a repackaged, German-language version of the Sources chrétiennes editions of A. Wenger and A. Piédagnel (S.C. 50, 366). The consecutively paginated set consists of a hundred-page introduction, the Greek text with facing German translation and occasional notes, and bibliography and indices. The introduction, largely based on Wenger's, begins with a short appreciation of John's life and literary work, followed by descriptions of the catecheses and their history in modern Western scholarship. The last quarter describes the process of Christian initiation, from the enrollment of the catechumen through baptism and mystagogy, as known in Antioch. The texts and apparatus are simply borrowed from the S.C. volumes and from Montfaucon's edition of the Catechesis Altera. The Greek type is that used in the large print (10 pt.) Nestle-Aland26 N.T. The editor, professor of Liturgies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, focuses his introduction on the liturgical aspects of these sermons, such as their dates and relationships to the church year, and what they tell us about the associated rites and about catechetical practices in Antioch. This is a perfectly acceptable approach, and it has been the standard approach to these homilies. Much of the ground, however, is covered in the S.C. volumes and in P. Harkins' translation, A.C.W. 31. Frequently Kacynski simply translates Wenger (compare p. 73-74 to Wenger's p. 66, or p. 76 n. 109 to Piédagnel's p. 45 nn. 7, 9). There are updated references and other improvements, but no new area is staked out. The bibliography is symptomatic: in the mere two pages of secondary literature, Kacynski cites two articles on the disciplina arcana (of surprisingly little relevance to these catecheses), but passes over relevant works on John by R. Wilken, E. Clark, or A. Gonzalez Blanco, and relevant general works like Liebeschuetz or Petit on Antioch, or A. H. M. Jones. These works will be found quite enlightening, even of John's theology. [End Page 72] One must now add to them F. van de Paverd's St. John Chrysostom, The Homilies on the Statues: An Introduction (Rome, 1991). Here he publishes the argument, referred to by both Piédagnel and Kacynski, that Montfaucon's Catechesis Altera ought not be counted among the catecheses, but only among the Hom. de statuts, since John addressed but a limited part of this sermon to catechumens. Strictly speaking, only five of these twelve sermons are catecheses, i.e., prebaptismal addresses to catechumens, but I wonder if we must categorize so strictly. Van de Paverd also dates W. 1-8 to 391, because of the relationship between the dates he assigns to Easter and W. 8's reference to the martyrs' festival. But this is not certain. W. 1.43 refers to a venatio or kunègion, the staged animal hunt, and this probably refers directly to the one staged by Argyrius for his Syriarchate. We hear about the preparations in Libanius (Epp. 970-71) in 390. It seems unlikely that the preparations were delayed for another year, and it is very unlikely that another would have been staged for years. These conflicting indications need further integration. John Chrysostom, while a presbyter at Antioch, was responsible for some of the catechetical preaching, from which a dozen sermons from three different years are commonly counted. They are, however, less formally catechetical than Cyril of Jerusalem's sermon cycle or Theodore of Mopsuestia's pamphlets. A sermon from 387 was handed down among the Hom. de statuts, which Montfaucon called the Catechesis Altera (= M.2, CPG 4464). Montfaucon's Catechesis Prima (= M.1) was long known in Europe, but it was discovered to be the first of a series of four catecheses (= P-K. 1-4, CPG 4460-2, 4467, from 388) by A. Papadopoulos-Kerameus early this century...

John of Salisbury's Entheticus and the Classical Tradition of Satire

John of Salisbury's modern reputation depends chiefly on his prose writings. The Metalogicon and Policraticus have established the author's position as an eminent Christian humanist of the twelfth century. In fact, his name is usually discovered amidst clustered superlatives and confident affirmations of his enormous influence, especially in contexts which involve the classics. For example, Frederick Artz refers to John as "the most gifted Latin stylist of his age, and the most learned classical scholar," while to Charles Homer Haskins he was simply "the best classical scholar of the age." These statements are typical and wholly familiar to students of John's life and work. However, one literary contribution strongly imbued with the humanistic spirit remains largely unnoticed among John of Salisbury's writings. The Entheticus de Dogmate Philosophorum, a poem of 926 elegiac distichs, is John's major work in v erse.

Religious and Secular Statements

The relation between religious and scientific explanations of events and states of affairs has been the subject of much debate. For example, are the statements‘John's life was saved by surgery’‘John's life was saved in answer to prayer’in competition with each other and, if so, in what way? They do not seem to be rival causal explanations, nor are they straightforwardly contradictory. Yet each seems to cast doubt on the other, or at least to make it to some extent redundant.