Short Career Research Articles

Ellsworth C. Dougherty: A Pioneer in the Selection of Caenorhabditis elegans as a Model Organism.

Ellsworth Dougherty (1921-1965) was a man of impressive intellectual dimensions and interests; in a relatively short career he contributed enormously as researcher and scholar to the biological knowledge base for selection of Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism in neurobiology, genetics, and molecular biology. He helped guide the choice of strains that were eventually used, and, in particular, he developed the methodology and understanding for the nutrition and axenic culture of nematodes and other organisms. Dougherty insisted upon a concise terminology for culture techniques and coined descriptive neologisms that were justified by their linguistic roots. Among other contributions, he refined the classification system for the Protista.

Nancy Dawson, Her Hornpipe and Her Posthumous Reputation

Abstract Nancy Dawson was famous for dancing the hornpipe during her short career on the London stage (1756-63). The tune to which she danced was quickly named after her and became popular as a ballad tune. After her death, “Nancy Dawson” was used as a name for race horses and boats and the tune took on a life of its own, while the dancer was forgotten. During her stage career she had been slandered in so-called Genuine Memoirs (quickly pirated as Authentic Memoirs) and attacked in satires over her liaison with the comic actor Edward Shuter. However, the tune’s popularity with sailors and a set of bawdy words made to it in the early nineteenth century led to her acquiring a reputation of being little more than a common prostitute. This paper attempts to sift fact from fiction about her life and character and considers errors and omissions in her entries in the Biography Dictionary of Actors and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Hebrew on a Desert Island:

ABSTRACT The poetic output of the American-born poet and playwright Annabelle “Chana” Farmelant consists entirely of two books of Hebrew poetry, Iyyim bodedim (Desert Islands) and Pirchei zehut (Flowers of Identity), published in Israel in the early 1960s. In this article, I offer an overview of Farmelant's oeuvre through my own English translations of her poems and in the context of American Hebrew literary history and scholarship, which has long neglected women writers. Farmelant's short career as a poet notwithstanding, her work engaged directly—and thereby offers crucial attestation of—the gender politics and U.S.-Israel literary relations that contributed to the decline of American Hebrew literature in the mid-twentieth century and to Farmelant's early departure from the field of modern Hebrew poetry.

Olivier Chesneau's Work on Low Mass Stars

During his too short career, Olivier Chesneau pioneered the study of the circumstellar environments of low mass evolved stars using very high angular resolution techniques. He applied state of the art high angular resolution techniques, such as optical interferometry and adaptive optics imaging, to the the study of a variety of objects, from AGB stars to Planetary Nebulae, via e.g. Born Again stars, RCB stars and Novae. I present here an overview of this work and most important results by focusing on the paths he followed and key encounters he made to reach these results. Olivier liked to work in teams and was very strong at linking people with complementary expertises to whom he would communicate his enthusiasm and sharp ideas. His legacy will live on through the many people he inspired.

Imitatio Christi: The Poetics of Piety in Early Modern England by Nandra Perry (review)

Reviewed by: Imitatio Christi: The Poetics of Piety in Early Modern England by Nandra Perry Rebecca Huffman Nandra Perry, Imitatio Christi: The Poetics of Piety in Early Modern England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 2014) 288 pp. Nandra Perry’s holistic approach to literary and religious imitatio from Sidney to Milton persuasively explores questions and categories of embodiment, kingship, private/public spheres, and the instability of language while also, in a most worthwhile step, seeking “to move more freely across the period, gender, generic, and confessional boundaries that often delimit treatments of early modern English piety” (11). This wide methodological lens enables Perry to draw together an ideologically diverse group of texts for case studies, all connected back to Sidney, to determine what good imitatio means in varying contexts and how it adapts over the course of this period. Perry engages questions of imitatio’s literariness alongside its religious purposes and tensions to work through its role in a variety of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century orthodoxies and heterodoxies. In the introduction, she uses Erasmus’s writings on the subject to set out a debate that will remain prominent throughout the book: what differentiates imitatio from mimicry, or worse, idolatry? In the range of ideologies in the chapters that follow, this hazard is a shared motivator in developing models of good imitatio. Beginning with Sidney’s 1580 Defense of Poesy and Thomas Roger’s translation of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, Perry suggests that Rogers develops a Protestant form of imitatio Christi that is especially connected to Sidney’s vision of imitatio’s literary qualities. Both Rogers and Sidney imagine Protestantism on a transnational scale, where Rogers in his translation of Kempis foregrounds the experience and presence of the Word. In place of Kempis’s culminating depiction of the Eucharist, Rogers offers the Word as the Protestant community’s sustenance. Rogers must also deal with the inherent fallibility of human words and human imitatio in relation to the sacred Word as well as “language’s seemingly irredeemable fleshliness” (56). In this reading, Rogers grounds good imitatio in the text and in reading, where despite its fallibilities language could connect to the sacred. While Roger’s long career and the chapter’s subsequent exploration of his later writings show how his work on imitatio played out in an increasingly factionalized English Protestantism rather than his hoped-for transnational Protestant community, Sidney’s short career is succeeded by his own Protestant martyrology; here, Sidney’s martyred body and “personal imitatio Christi is the best measure of the distance and difference separating his innovating model of poetic imitation from” modern models of Shuger or Habermas. Perry contends that Sidney’s body marks both an end and a beginning in the period studied in this volume, where the instability of words and physical bodies would eventually close down “the dream of an organic connection between language and the sacred body visible” (63). The second chapter moves into more heterodox territory as it delves into notions of Christian eloquence and tensions surrounding the instability of language with the writings and Life of Elizabeth Tanfield Cary. Here and in the [End Page 280] following chapter, Perry’s movement across conventional boundaries is especially rewarding. Perry examines the ways in which The Tragedy of Mariam and The Lady Falkland: Her Life by One of Her Daughters offer other kinds of bodies (beyond Sidney’s male, aristocratic body) for discussions of incarnational poetics. Reading Mariam’s confrontation with Herod as a Reformation confrontation between believer and magistrate shows models of female piety that align with the meekness and stoicism advocated for and by Catholic martyrs. Intervening in scholarship that draws clear parallels between Cary herself and Mariam, Perry suggests that instead Graphina, whose privatized “silent speech” offers the kind of exemplum that sustained Catholicism in England more effectively than martyrdom, is a more fitting model. From Graphina to Cary herself and subsequently to the daughter who authored her biography, “the Life explores the epistemological and expressive outer limits of this cross-confessional, post-Reformation vision of imitatio Christi” (96). The final two chapters turn to kingship and one body’s imitatio in particular: Charles I in...

Comrade Johns: Oregon's Socialist Presidential Candidate

In 1924, Frank T. Johns was nominated as the Socialist Labor Party's (SLP) candidate for president of the United States. Known as “Comrade Johns” by fellow SLP party members, Johns became interested in socialist industrial unionism as a young mail carrier and became an outspoken proponent of SLP principles. During his 1924 presidential run, Johns won only 0.1 percent of the national popular vote, but the SLP was thrilled by his sincere “dedication to his party's principles.” Johns became the party's candidate for president again in 1928, but died during a campaign speech while attempting to rescue a drowning boy from the Descutes River. “Socialism in the century's first two decades was viable political philosophy,” the authors explain, and Johns's short political career “offers documentation of the brief but important SLP moment both nationally and in Oregon.”

The Short Career of the Indian Labour Corps in France, 1917–1919

AbstractThis essay adds the story of the Indian Labour Corps (ILC) to the narratives of the various “coloured” units brought in to France to deal with the manpower crisis that had overtaken that theater of the First World War in 1916. The label “coloured” or “native labour” justified inferior care and a harsher work and disciplinary regime than that experienced by white labor. However, official reports and newspaper coverage also expose a dense play of ethnographic comparison between the different colored corps. The notion was that to “work” natives properly, the managerial regimes peculiar to them also had to be imported into the metropolis. The register of comparison was also shaped by specific political and social agendas which gave some colored units more room than others to negotiate acknowledgement of their services. One dimension of the war experience for Indian laborers was their engagement with institutional and ethnic categorizations. The other dimension was the process of being made over into military property and the workers own efforts to reframe the environments, object worlds, and orders of time within which they were positioned. By creating suggestive equivalences between themselves and other military personnel, they sought to lift themselves from the status of coolies to that of participants in a common project of war service. At the same time, they indicated that they had not put their persons at the disposal of the state in exactly the same way as thesepoy.

Wernher der Gartenaere and the Arthurian Romance: The Intertextuality of Helmbrecht’s Cap

The meaning of the Middle High German poem Helmbrecht, the sole known work of the poet Wernher der Gartenaere, is straightforward and transparent. The young Helmbrecht, son and grandson of peasants (both also named Helmbrecht), aspires to leave his lowly yet ordered and reasonably comfortable life in the country. Against the advice of his father, but with the misguided encouragement of his mother and sister, he takes up with a band of robbers, and after a short career of violence, theft and extortion he is caught, tried and condemned to mutilation by the forces of justice; finally he is seized and hanged by a group of peasants whom he has previously despoiled. He has been punished for attempting to overturn the social order.

POEZIJA SILVIJE PLAT U OKVIRIMA DRUGOG TALASA FEMINIZMA

U relativno kratkoj ali plodnoj karijeri Silvija Plat stvorila je, a po njoj osta- la i zapamćena, kompleksnu, gotovo mističnu poeziju koja je dobila notu univerzalnosti među čitaocima savremenog doba. Njene pjesme, koje su pisane strastvenim, bogatim i pomalo haotič- nim stilom, govore o smrti, usamljenosti, strasti, majčinstvu, samoobnavljanju, sebičnosti i bolu. Platova se bavila pisanjem u jednoj kulturi koja je pružala manje mogućnosti za žene pisce nego za muškarce. Žene su morale dosegnuti bar izvjestan stepen jednakosti s muškarcima da bi uopće mogle isticati sopstvenu različitost u odnosu na njih, kao nešto pozitivno. Silvija Plat je, prema mišljenju kritike, došla u fokus drugog talasa feminizma, koji je insistirao na preobražaju patrijarhalne i andocentrične socijalne hijerarhije u zajednicu ravno- pravnih individua. Ova pesnikinja je svojim poetskim stvaralaštvom predstavljala avangardu i paradigmu američkim ženama jer je nastojala da sebe kao takozvani „drugi pol“ upiše u stranice književne istorije, koja je oduvijek bila privilegija muškaraca. Kada se govori o njenom stvaralaštvu, govo- ri se zapravo o neprikosnovenosti „ženske kreativnosti“ izražene „ženskim pismom“, želji za samoobnavljanjem, odbijanjem žene da predstavlja žrtvu, objekat i neizbježni „dodatak“ patrijar- halnoj shemi. Upravo zato kad u svojoj poeziji Silvija Plat govori o položaju žene u muškom svijetu, o identitetu žene, o različitosti svog pola, o pravu na svoj jezik, o andocentričnoj osnovi književnosti, ona želi i traži promjenu.

Amal Dunqul, The Prince of Protest Poets

Once called the prince of protest poets, Amal Dunqul (1940-1983) was indeed an Egyptian poet in permanent opposition to the figures of established authority, be it political, literary or religious. His poems were therefore often banned from mainstream publications, and deprived of timely critical and scholarly recognition. Although his poetry received critical recognition and attention posthumously, much remains to be done. Dunqul’s poems were original and unique contributions to modern Arabic poetry, especially with regards to his use of historical texts. This article is a study of three of Dunqul’s hallmark poems, written in 1961, 1967 and 1972 at three different stages of his short literary career. The article focuses on poetry’s intertextual engagement with history, and the political significance of this engagement.

Huss Receives 2013 Cryosphere Young Investigator Award: Citation

Matthias Huss is an outstanding young glaciologist who completed his Ph.D. in 2009 at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland, and currently has a joint appointment there and at the University of Fribourg. During his short scientific career, Matthias has made substantial and innovative contributions to a broad range of topics in glaciology, including modeling and projection of glacier mass and runoff changes, glacier outburst floods, glacier dynamics, and climate‐glacier interactions. His work ranges from local‐scale to regional‐ and global‐scale studies. Of note, he developed a new cutting‐edge and already widely used parameterization to model glacier retreat, which fills the gap between complex ice flow models and simple scaling methods. He also computed ice thickness distribution maps of all 200,000 glaciers in the world based on principles of flow dynamics. This unique data set has many applications, of which perhaps the most significant is the estimation of the total volume of stored ice, a quantity that is critical for projections of sea level rise and water resources during the 21st century.

“A Joyous Star-Spangled-Bannerism”: Emma Juch, Opera in English Translation, and the American Cultural Landscape in the Gilded Age

AbstractSoprano Emma Juch (1860–1939), famous in the 1880s and 1890s, combined singing in concerts and festivals with a short English-language operatic career. Because Juch exemplifies a typical prima donna of the late nineteenth century, her life provides a perspective on the American cultural landscape that a focus on star performers cannot capture. Like all female singers, she had to negotiate between competing stereotypes about divas and the nineteenth-century distrust of women who led public lives. In response to these pressures, she constructed an image of a vigorous American singer who nevertheless understood her expected role in society. During the Gilded Age, opera's place in American culture was changing. Foreign-language opera became increasingly associated with wealth, the highest performance quality, and sometimes even cultural and moral uplift, whereas English-language opera suggested popular entertainment for the middle class and mediocre performance standards. The American Opera Company and Juch's own Emma Juch English Grand Opera Company attempted to fight against these assumptions and center opera in English performed by native singers as an important component of a distinctly American musical tradition. She was unsuccessful, however, and Juch's career, which began with great promise, lost momentum after her opera troupe folded and she slid into obscurity.

Norman H. Hardy: Book Illustrator and Artist

ABSTRACTNorman H. Hardy is not a well-known historical character, so an element of salvage exists in bringing his art and book illustration to a wider audience. His short career as an artist with the Sydney Mail and the 68 paintings in The Savage South Seas in 1907 open up a wider discourse concerning the links between art and photography, between visitation and recording in the field, between art and journalism, and between popular imagination and the publishing practices for illustrated travelogues. Hardy's paintings of Papua, Solomon Islands and New Hebrides reached a wide audience and provide a close-up, intimate record of Indigenous life in the islands, as well as hinting at complex encounters between Islanders and traders. The visual evidence in The Savage South Seas also contributes to debates about the motivations of early 20th-century Euro-American travellers, authors and purchasers of books on the Pacific and provides yet another citation of notions of faraway lands and people in the Pacific as perceived by distant readers and audiences.

Berliner Kunstakademie und Weimarer Freye Zeichenschule: Andreas Riems Briefe an Friedrich Justin Bertuch, 1788/89 eds. by Anneliese Klingenberg and Alexander Rosenbaum (review)

Anneliese Klingenberg and Alexander Rosenbaum, eds., Berliner Kunstakademie und Weimarer Freye Zeichenschule: Andreas Riems Briefe an Friedrich Justin Bertuch, 1788/89. Gottingen: Wallstein, 2012.160 pp.This volume focuses on the eighteen letters sent by Andreas Riem, secretary of the Berlin Academy of Arts and Mechanical Sciences, to Friedrich Justin Bertuch between September 1788 and December 1789- Despite its brevity, this collection of letters chronicles the short career Riem had as secretarias perpetuus of the Berlin Academy (it ended in 1790) while also affirming the great degree of intellectual interaction between Berlin and Weimar during this period. The letters clearly reveal that members of Weimar's cultural and intellectual elite were held in high esteem by the Berlin Academy and also show that this respectful relationship was used to revise the reputation of the academy itself. The appointment of the new curator Friedrich Anton von Heinitz in 1786 signaled a period of reform for the academy, and Riem's letters thus capture a time of intense change and innovation within this institution.The letters are fully transcribed and editorially unaltered; in this volume they appear for the first time in their entirety in print. The corpus of letters is presented with the deletions and changes that were made by Riem himself, which adds to the documentary status of this correspondence. The letters are meticulously researched, and the accompanying appendix offers a full archival commentary on the information conveyed. This scrupulous work, completed by Alexander Rosenbaum, will be of invaluable assistance to scholars working on any number of topics in this period. Overall, the editors show impressive and commendable attention to detail and provide solid documentation and supporting textual evidence for the topics discussed by Riem. For example, in the appendix they publish Bertuch's description of the famed Freye Zeichenschule in Weimar, a contribution requested by Riem on multiple occasions for publication in his Monats-Schrift at the Berlin Academy. Letters by Goethe, Kraus, Wieland, and Grand Duke Carl August (confirming his acceptance to the Berlin Academy) are also printed in their entirety in the appendix. Carl August's membership was discussed but also, rather significantly, mediated by Riem, and it stands as a notable legacy of his short career as secretary of the Berlin Academy. It is the great merit of this volume to make letters accessible to scholars that have not hitherto been published. …

Literary Attention: The Hairy Politics of Details

What can literary studies bring to our experience? The fact that many scholars, on both sides of the Atlantic, have recently felt the need to address this question is usually interpreted as a symptom of a crisis in the literary profession. Fewer students, fewer jobs, less attractiveness, less impact, less prestige: the study of seems bound to follow the path taken by the study of theology during the nineteenth century. Against this background feeling of gloom and doom, the steady flow of manifestoes in favor of literary studies often sounds overblown by wishful thinking. Literary interpretations, as performed in the classroom, are supposed to ground, shape, and expand our moral consciousness, set the foundations for an alternative to the suicidal logics of global capitalism, and/or provide an affordable gymnastics training us to become successful among the young sharks of the creative class. Such contradictory and overambitious goals have provided an understandable backlash among more realistic, cautious, or cynical colleagues. Phil Watts never indulged in theoretical or programmatic gesturing. As a teacher, as a scholar, as a member of faculty committees, as a departmental chair, he was well aware of the challenges faced by our profession. As a reader and as a thinker, he eagerly followed the debates about the constant reconfiguration of our discipline--and his interest in Jacques Ranciere and Roland Barthes bears witness to his profound engagement with literary theory, especially with respect to its connection with intellectual history and political philosophy. But, to my knowledge, he never attempted directly, openly, and frontally to intervene in the theoretical discussions about the evolution and the future of our profession. This may be due to his profound humility: there is an inherent arrogance in the theoretical mode of discourse, which went against the grain of his self-effacing persona. But I believe it is also due to a deeper form of wisdom and intelligence. Phil understood that the best way to defend the study of was to actually perform it, rather than merely to preach it. As a teacher, as a scholar, as a family man, and as a community member, he taught by example, rather than by admonition or reproach. The best thing we can do to defend, improve, and expand our practice of is to follow his example. We can do so by attempting to imitate him in his kindness, generosity, caution, and courage--and this is by far the best tribute we can bring to his memory: making his example as alive as possible in and through as many of us as possible. We can also try to understand what he did that was so lovable and inspiring--and this is what I will attempt to do here. Analyzing what Phil Watts did to and with may help us assert more powerfully the value of literary studies in our contemporary world. My thesis will be simple and straightforward: what Phil Watts's example teaches us is that today, consists in a certain exercise and practice of attention to details. Enlarging the Scope, Narrowing the Focus The first question raised by my assertion is probably attention to what? Of course, Phil Watts studied and taught literary texts: Celine, Sartre, Eluard, Camus, but also Kateb Yacine and Mohamed Dib. But his dramatically short career displays a constant and irresistible movement of expansion--from canonical metropolitan literary authors to Algerian writers, to philosophers like Ranciere, and, more and more, to cinema. If Phil Watts taught and studied French literature, then we must enlarge the scope of what we call literature in order to include in it not only Francophone texts but also forgotten films, obscure film critiques, and aesthetic and political debates, all of which might seem to have very little to do with what is usually called literature. Hence the first feature in the portrait of literary studies I am proposing under the inspiration of Phil Watts's example: literary studies can no longer be defined by certain classes of objects of inquiry (isolating a predetermined corpus), but by a certain type of attention, which can be devoted to any product of human intelligence and which I will try to define as literary attention. …

Mascots

Mascots Lenore Myka (bio) We came from many corners of the globe, though in truth they were corners found primarily in North America and the European Union, which is to say, the corners of the globe that mattered. We were employed by our governments or the big acronyms—IRC, UNESCO, USAID, ICRC, WHO—and like twins who create a language only they can understand, we discussed IFBs and RFPs, the OAU and OAS; the newest IO partnering with a local NGO. We’d come via other corners of the globe, but those corners were places that hardly mattered—Somalia and Bangladesh; Sudan and Afghanistan; all the many refugee camps scattered like bread crumbs, those purgatorial, in-between places. Hardship posts, though the more sanctimonious among us refused to call them by such a name, insisting that we’d never gone anywhere more beautiful (The mountains! The seaside!), more rich in cultural tradition and history (The pottery! The ruins!). Once, a Swede—a baby—declared that he loved Papua New Guinea. We sniggered. It had been his first post after graduate school; he’d only ever been there and here; it was too soon in his short career for him to realize that he was lying, most especially to himself. The rest of us understood that saying you loved Papua New Guinea was like saying you loved it here, in this country with its clay roads naked children ran about and shat in, its miles of tin shanties you averted your eyes from whenever you took an air-conditioned car to or from the airport. Saying you loved Papua New Guinea was like saying you loved this place where you couldn’t buy a decent loaf of bread much less a bottle of Bordeaux; where you lived and worked behind high walls and locked yourself behind bars, fastening them over the windows and doors of your home at night, and found yourself eyeing the guard at the gate, the gardener and housekeeper and cook, wondering if one of them hadn’t been responsible for the disappearance of the opal pendant you’d inherited from your grandmother or the fifty euros you’d sworn you left in your trousers last Saturday night when you’d come home from the disco drunk and reeking of other expatriates’ sweat. In the city’s main park, in the midst of an afternoon stroll from the British Embassy to the administrative offices of Médecins Sans Frontières, we’d all become accustomed to seeing the men with their tattered trousers puddled around their bare ankles, their hands as stiff and hard as the members they held, working out their frustrations in public. A national pastime, muttered Natalia. We wondered: did she mean the jerking off or the despair? For that’s what it [End Page 126] was—frustration, desperation, despair. Andres would laugh at the sight of them, wave his hand as if to join the club, but Natalia would bark at the men in a dialect the rest of us hadn’t bothered learning (We’re here two, three years tops, we rationalized. What would be the point of all that effort to learn a language we’ll never use again?). Whatever it was she said those men were quick to stop, pulling their trousers up and dashing off into the wild overgrowth that lined the sidewalks crumbling beneath our feet. Andres and Natalia were the only two locals among us. Our mascots, we called them, but behind their backs of course; we knew better than to say it to their faces. We invited them to our parties, the discotheque, the country club. We asked them questions about local culture and food, the history of ethnic tensions in the East, trying our best to appear concerned, united as we were in our humanitarian mission of making this corner of the globe a better place. Natalia had a PhD in microbiology from the National University, was a specialist in infectious diseases. She’d spent time in Washington at NIH and had been a post-doc in Marseille before returning home to, as she put it, Improve the situation on the ground. She worked too...

Roberto Arlt y el campo intelectual argentino de los años veinte y treinta

Taking as a basis Beatriz Sarlo and Carlos Altamirano's analysis of the intellectualfield (Literature and Society), inspired by Bourdieu's work on the literary field, we aregoing to study the Argentinian intellectual field of the 1920s and the 1930s as well asthe influence that Roberto Arlt had (or didn't have) in this intellectual field. Thewriter's short but prolific career —nowadays regarded as one of the greatest authors inthe first half of the century— is, as a matter of fact, marked by his stormy relationshipwith most of the intellectual field in his days. When his misused Spanish and his use oflunfardo (slung of the slums of Buenos Aires) were censured, he, the son ofimmigrants, claimed his difference and vehemently criticized the ‘recognized’ authors,those who showered praise upon them and those who despised him.

If I Had Possession over Judgment Day: Augmenting Robert Johnson

If I Had Possession over Judgment Day: Augmenting Robert Johnson

Koloman Moser: Designing modern Vienna, 1897-1907

During his short career, Koloman Moser became a towering figure in Viennese culture. His varied work in interior and graphic design, furniture, textiles, jewellery, metalwork, glass and earthenware helped usher in the modern era. This book surveys the entirety of Moser's oeuvre. It examines his work as a graphic designer and his involvement with the Vienna Secession, with special focus given to his role as an illustrator for the journal Ver Sacrum (Sacred Spring). Moser's forays into textile design and ceramic work are also introduced. book features his designs for the Vienna Secession, Thonet Brothers and the Mautner family, among others that characterise his early modern style. book also explores Moser's seminal role as a founding member of the Vienna Workshops, along with architect Josef Hoffman and patron Fritz Waerndorfer. Included are many reproductions of Moser's masterpieces, including the window of the Steinhof Chapel, his exhibition posters, postage stamps and currency and elegant samples from his design portfolio, The Source.

Serotonin in the pathophysiology and treatment of CNS disorders

Decades ago, in the 1950s, serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine, 5-Ht) was discovered in the mammalian central and peripheral nervous systems, and successively, its role as an essential neurotransmitter was revealed. advances in understanding the effect of 5-Ht have represented one of the success stories of neuropharmacology. Since its discovery, an enormous amount of experimental evidence has revealed the pivotal role of this biogenic amine in a bewildering diversity of behavioural and physiological processes. this is not surprising, considering the large distribution of 5-Ht-containing axon terminals throughout the central nervous systems (CNS), although these monoamines are synthesized by a small group of neurons within the brain stem. the serotonergic system is one of the most diffusively organized projection systems of the mammalian brain. the majority of the neurons containing 5-Ht generically called the raphe nuclei are located in the brainstem and in some regions of the reticular formation. Recent receptor discoveries have permitted the identification and classification of up to seven families of 5-Ht receptors (5-Ht1–5-Ht7) to date. all 5-Ht receptors belong to the seven transmembrane domain G-proteincoupled receptor (GPCR) superfamily, except for the 5-Ht3 receptor which is a ligand-gated channel. the 5-Ht1 receptor class is comprised of five receptor subtypes (5-Ht1a, 5-Ht1B, 5-Ht1D, 5-Ht1E and 5-Ht1F), which, in humans, share 40–63 % overall sequence identity and couple preferentially, although not exclusively, to Gi/o to inhibit caMP formation. among the multiple classes of 5-Ht receptors described in the CNS, much attention has been devoted to the 5-Ht2 receptor family since it has been shown by experimental and clinical observation to represent a possible therapeutic this special issue is in honour of Ennio Esposito, who devoted his unfortunately short but productive scientific career to serotonin research and made significant contributions to the field of neuropharmacology of monoaminergic systems in neuropsychiatric disorders. after receiving his degree in Medicine at the University of Chieti, Ennio moved to Milan to the laboratory of Neuropharmacology at the Institute of Pharmacological Research Mario Negri, under the supervision of Rosario Samanin. Successively, Ennio did his postdoc in the USa. at the Department of Psychiatry and Pharmacology at Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, in the laboratory of Dr. Benjamin S. Bunney. Back in Italy, in 1989, he joined the Consorzio Mario Negri Sud, a Biomedical and Pharmacological Research Centre at Santa Maria Imbaro, Chieti. In this new institution, a few miles from his hometown, he created and directed the laboratory of Neurophysiology for about 20 years. the aim of this special issue is to present recent developments in research areas Ennio has been particularly involved in, that is, the serotonin receptors, especially the 5-Ht2C subtype. It includes 18 papers written by several of his former students, co-workers and friends, as well as by distinguished international researchers with similar research interests.