Remote Copies Research Articles

The Circulation of Sciences in Europe, or Peter the Great’s ‘Greek project

In his famous speech of 1714, Peter I depicts Europe as a single organism with Greece as its heart: it is from here that “the sciences,” like blood, once flowed and along the homeward path they run, having first gained a firm foothold in Russia. The18th century perceived this comparison as a real political program: the similarity was supposed to imply that the European culture should be brought back to Greece on Russian bayonets. This rendering was born with the utopian “Greek project” of Catherine II and lasted until the end of the century. Neither confirming nor contradicting it, the 19th century prefers to see in Peter’s words pride in the successes of the Russian enlightenment which was introduced during the two decades of his reformist activity. The 20th century, burdened with the baggage of literary associations, interprets this image as commonplace for baroque rhetoric, a routine metaphor for translatio studii with little or no actual political meaning. Undoubtedly authentic, transmitted by several early witnesses, the speech became part of the ‘Petrine myth,’ but, surprisingly enough, was never the subject of critical source analysis. Thus, its historical context and intended meaning remained largely obscured. A comparative study leads to the conclusion that all its renderings originated from a common literary source. The archetypal version was that of F. Chr. Weber, while the other variants are more or less remote copies containing deliberate amendments. A closer look at the relevant paragraphs of Weber’s notes reveals the true pathos of the speech. Peter’s rhetoric, prompted by his immediate concerns, boils down to an admiration for the culture of Western Europeans. The historical context clarifies what motivates the central image of the simile — Greece as the heart of European enlightenment: shortly before the episode, the tsar was treated to a Greek speech delivered by the six-year-old son of the learned Moldavian prince Dimitrie Cantemir who was one of Peter’s principal allies.

Insulators, Not Polycomb Response Elements, Are Required for Long-Range Interactions between Polycomb Targets in Drosophila melanogaster

The genomic binding sites of Polycomb group (PcG) complexes have been found to cluster, forming Polycomb "bodies" or foci in mammalian or fly nuclei. These associations are thought to be driven by interactions between PcG complexes and result in enhanced repression. Here, we show that a Polycomb response element (PRE) with strong PcG binding and repressive activity cannot mediate trans interactions. In the case of the two best-studied interacting PcG targets in Drosophila, the Mcp and the Fab-7 regulatory elements, we find that these associations are not dependent on or caused by the Polycomb response elements they contain. Using functional assays and physical colocalization by in vivo fluorescence imaging or chromosome conformation capture (3C) methods, we show that the interactions between remote copies of Mcp or Fab-7 elements are dependent on the insulator activities present in these elements and not on their PREs. We conclude that insulator binding proteins rather than PcG complexes are likely to be the major determinants of the long-range higher-order organization of PcG targets in the nucleus.