Michael A. Goldman hails the first English translation of the three-man paper that launched molecular biology.

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When I met biologist Lynn Margulis, she spoke with such authority and passion, that I immediately dubbed her “Rabbi Lynn.” She would have laughed at that. At best, she thought of religion as a useful tribal activity of anthropoids, but one that could be superstitious and antithetical to the search for truth. When she heard I was a rabbi, she teased me but it didn’t take long before she welcomed me with open arms.

Margulis, who died on November 22 at 73 of a cerebral hemorrhage, was a renegade who didn’t mince words. And she revolutionized biology more than once. Among many other things, she vociferously challenged the orthodox version of evolution called neo-Darwinism, championed by Richard Dawkins, just as much as she questioned any religious dogmatism. And she more than relished the opportunity to support students who questioned the status quo, as she did.

The orthodoxy Margulis challenged was one of the biggest bugaboos in modern culture wars: the neo-Darwinist version of evolution that says natural selection works on random mutations to drive evolution. In the extreme form, championed by Richard Dawkins, neo-Darwinism reduces all life to competition between genes, devoid of any higher meaning.

It’s a view of evolution that pretty much undermines any spiritual interpretation of life, religious or not. Margulis, despite being a deep secularist, was dead set against it. She called neo-Darwinism “a minor 20th-century sect of Anglo-Saxon biology.”

That wasn’t just because she was a fierce iconoclast. Neo-Darwinism, she claimed, can’t demonstrate how new species emerge, and it can’t explain why the fossil record shows fantastic leaps, not gradual change. “The creationists,” she said, “are right about their criticism. It’s just that they’ve got nothing to offer but intelligent design or ‘God did it.’” She was convinced she had the answer: evolution was driven by cooperation more than competition, and great leaps happened through “symbiogenesis,” the merging of genomes of different species.

When I decided I wanted to go back to school, I discovered Margulis, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, was the best person to support my research interests. Her class, “Reel Life,” included hours of watching bacteria and protists. We watched slime molds go from amoeba to giant plasmodia to hard fruiting body. We watched blastulas and gastrulas form from a fertilized egg. Margulis was just as excited about the films as if she were seeing them for the first time, and she couldn’t wait to share them with us.
Margulis was born into a passionately Zionist family and had formative experiences on kibbutz in her teens. But this was unimportant to her, and she completely rejected organized religion. She even compared her approach to science with her feelings about Jewish identity: “I remember waking up one day with an epiphanous revelation: I am not a neo-Darwinist! It recalled an earlier experience, when I realized that I wasn’t a humanistic Jew.”

For a woman who came up at a time when prejudices against women in science were strong, Margulis had something of a magical career. Born in 1938, she went to the University of Chicago at 14, married astronomer Carl Sagan at 19, and did her doctorate at Berkeley. She published her revolutionary thesis in 1967, fresh out of grad school. The thesis was confirmed more than a decade later when biologists discovered that mitochondria and chloroplasts have separate genomes from the cell’s nucleus that are similar to bacteria. She also had two children with Sagan and two more from a second marriage to chemist Thomas Margulis.

Margulis’s whole career was about seeing bigger and deeper pictures of symbiosis, the biggest being the earth itself. She was co-creator of the Gaia hypothesis — the idea that Earth is a self-regulating system shaped by life, not just a place where life resides. A primary example of this is the atmosphere we breathe, which protects us and warms us. Geologists and biologists discovered that it was created by life itself, over billions of years, something to remember as humanity changes the atmosphere. To the end of her life, Margulis dove into controversy as much as ever. In recent years, she joined with the 9/11 truthers and expressed doubt about whether HIV causes AIDS.

Margulis’s Gaia theory has had a huge cultural impact, and may do more to help us turn the tide than any other single idea. But even here, Margulis was iconoclastic, rejecting the cuddly image of Mother Earth. She famously said to one interviewer, “Gaia is a tough bitch!” Yet, she never overlooked the miracle of life. She told science journalist John Horgan, “To go from bacterium to people is less of a step than to go from a mixture of amino acids to a bacterium.”

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The whole Darwin thing can still be a tad controversial in Kentucky, a state that hosts a high-tech, Bible-centered, natural-history-style museum that asserts that the Earth is roughly 6,000 years old.

In Hart County, about an hour and 20 minutes south of Louisville, the local school superintendent is now expressing his frustration that a new state biology test is, in his opinion, treating evolution as a fact, rather than a theory. He also charges that the test is omitting the "creation story" that cites God as the originator of the universe.

The Lexington Herald-Leader's Jim Warren reported Tuesday that Superintendent Ricky D. Line raised the objections in emails and letters to the state education commissioner and education board.

"I have a very difficult time believing that we have come to a point ... that we are teaching evolution ... as a factual occurrence, while totally omitting the creation story by a God who is bigger than all of us," he wrote, according to the newspaper. "My feeling is if the Commonwealth's site-based councils, school board members, superintendents and parents were questioned ... one would find this teaching contradictory to the majority's belief systems."

He may not be too far off-base with that last bit. Supporters of teaching evolution agree that many Americans have a hard time getting their heads around what Charles Darwin called his "dangerous idea."

"Overall, the nation has a big problem," Dr. Brian Alters, a professor and author of the book "Evolution in the Classroom," said in a National Institutes of Health newsletter in 2006. "Approximately half of the U.S. population thinks evolution does (or did) not occur. While 99.9% of scientists accept evolution, 40% to 50% of college students do not accept evolution and believe it to be 'just' a theory."

Terry Holliday, the state education commissioner, said the state biology test would deal with evolution as theory, not fact. Warren noted that teachers in Kentucky may discuss theories of creation other than evolution, but are not required to do so.

The test in question is one of a number of end-of-course exams mandated in a 2009 statewide educational reform package. Line was specifically concerned about a "blueprint" for the test which delineates the subject matters that would be covered in the biology test.

Teachers in his district apparently told him they would have to spend a significant amount of time on evolution in order to adequately prepare students for the test.

The superintendent remained defiantly skeptical in the face of scientific consensus, noting that it was "interesting that the great majority of scientists felt Pluto was a planet until a short time ago, and now they have totally changed that."

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If rumors were dollars, the arcane world of particle physics would have enough cash to solve the Euro crisis. For weeks, statements circulating on physics blogs have hinted at the discovery of an elusive particle essential to our understanding of how the universe works.

Called the Higgs boson, this particle — if spotted — would all but complete the fundamental theory of particle physics, known as the Standard Model. Confirmation of the Higgs would solve the mystery of why matter has the property that physicists call mass — the resistance to being shoved around. If the Higgs does not exist, there’s a gaping hole in physicists’ explanation of nature’s deepest structure.

To search for this cosmic linchpin, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) built the biggest machine on Earth, a $10 billion circular tunnel some 17 miles long underneath the French-Swiss border called the Large Hadron Collider. Inside it, scientists smash together subatomic particles at astounding speeds. Sifting the debris offers clues as to whether the Higgs exists and what, exactly, it might look like.

On Tuesday, CERN scientists will unveil the latest results from two teams racing to spot the elusive quarry. These new results are “sufficient to make significant progress in the search for the Higgs boson, but not enough to make any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the Higgs,” read a CERN statement announcing a news conference Tuesday.

Translation: We’re inching closer, but we’re not there yet. “We are really getting to the end of hunting for this Higgs particle,” said Jacobo Konigsberg, a physicist at the University of Florida and a member of one of the two CERN teams.

Several CERN scientists said the two teams — comprising some 6,000 scientists — have enough data to strongly hint at a Higgs boson of a certain type. But the teams do not have enough data for a conclusive discovery.

As Konigsberg rushed on Monday to finish a scientific paper describing the latest results, he admitted some fatigue. “I’m a little weary of making such a big deal about this right now. Things are not going to be so black and white,” he said. “We’re entering a fuzzy area where you see some fluctuations but you can’t yet attribute them to the birth of a new particle.”

Theories developed in the 1960s and 1970s say the Higgs boson should give rise to a force field that permeates the universe and imbues other particles — such as protons and electrons — with their mass, which is not their weight, but rather their resistance to efforts to move them.

Don Lincoln, a physicist at the Energy Department’s Fermilab in Illinois and a member of one of the two CERN teams, likened the Higgs field to a pool of water. Just as a barracuda can knife swiftly through water, some subatomic particles — such as electrons — speed through the Higgs field, giving them very little mass. Other particles — akin to blubbery whales — create more drag, making them more massive.

“It’s an important particle, because it’s not just a particle, it’s also a force field that touches every other particle,” says physicist Joe Lykken of Fermilab. Lykken, a member of one of the teams searching for the Higgs, said of recent events, “The excitement is higher than anything I’ve seen in high-energy physics in the past 20 years.”

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High noon is approaching for the biggest manhunt in the history of physics. At 8 a.m. Eastern time on Tuesday morning, scientists from CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, are scheduled to give a progress report on the search for the Higgs boson — infamously known as the “God particle” — whose discovery would vindicate the modern theory of how elementary particles get mass.

The report comes amid rumors that the two competing armies of scientists sifting debris from hundreds of trillions of proton collisions in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, or L.H.C., outside Geneva, have both finally seen hints of what might turn out be the elusive particle when more data is gathered next year.

Alternatively, the experimentalists say that a year from now they should have enough data to rule out the existence of the most popular version of the Higgs boson, sending theorists back to their blackboards in search of another explanation of why particles have mass.

So the whole world will be watching.

Among them will be Lisa Randall, a Harvard particle theorist and author of the new book “Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World.” In an interview with Dennis Overbye of The Times, Dr. Randall provided this guide to the action for those of us in the bleachers.

Q. What is the Higgs and why is it important?

A. The name Higgs refers to at least four things. First of all, there is a Higgs mechanism, which is ultimately responsible for elementary particles’ masses. This is certainly one of the trickier aspects of particle physics to explain, but essentially something like a charge — not an electric charge — permeates the vacuum, the state with no particles.

These “charges” are associated with a Higgs field. As particles pass through this field they interact with the “charges,” and this interaction makes them act as if they had mass. Heavier particles do so more, and lighter particles do so less. The Higgs mechanism is essential to the masses of elementary particles.

The Higgs particle, or Higgs boson, is the vestige of the simplest proposed model of what created the Higgs field in the first place. Contrary to popular understanding, the Higgs field gives mass — not the Higgs boson. But a discovery of the Higgs boson would tell us that the Higgs mechanism is right and help us pin down the theory that underlies both the Higgs mechanism and the Standard Model.

In the simplest implementation of the Higgs mechanism, the experimental consequence is the Higgs boson. It is the particle that the experimentalists are now searching for.

Of course, Higgs is also the name of the person, Peter Higgs, who first developed the underlying theory (along with five others who will be in contention for the Nobel Prize if and when the Higgs particle is discovered.)

Q. How will we know it when we find it?

A. In the simplest implementation of the Higgs mechanism, we know precisely what the properties of the Higgs boson should be. That’s because of its connection to the Higgs mechanism, which tells us that its interactions with any particular particle are determined by that particular particle’s mass.

Knowing the interactions, we can calculate how often the Higgs boson should be produced and the ways in which it should decay. It can decay only into those particles that are light enough for energy to be conserved. Roughly speaking, the Higgs boson decays into the heaviest such particles the most often, since it interacts with them the most strongly.

What we don’t know, however, is the Higgs boson’s mass. The Higgs boson decays differently, depending on its mass, since a heavier Higgs boson can decay in ways that a light Higgs boson can’t. So when experimenters look for the Higgs boson, they look over a range of masses and employ a variety of search strategies.

Q. What do we know about it so far?

A. Experimenters have already ruled out a large range of masses. The Higgs boson, if it exists, has to be heavier than 114.4 giga-electron volts (GeV), which are the units of mass that particle physicists use. By comparison, protons, the bedrock of ordinary matter, are about 1 giga-electron volt, and an electron is only half a million electron volts.

Based on recent searches by the L.H.C., the Higgs boson is also excluded between about 140 GeV and 500 GeV. This makes the most likely region for the Higgs mass to be between about 115 and 140 GeV, which is the range Tuesday’s results should focus on, although in principle heavier Higgs boson masses are in contention too.

I don’t want to shatter hopes, but don’t count on Tuesday’s results being definitive. This is the toughest range of masses for the L.H.C., and detection is tricky for this range. I suspect they will have enough evidence not to exclude the Higgs, but too little to fully pin it down without next year’s data.

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It has been recently revealed in a research that the newest details of the stem cell therapy have proved to be really viable for use in the medical field. It was further added that these clinical trials have shown early signs of success.

It was said that the stem cells that have been acquired from human embryos that have been grown in the labs. The best is that that they are of the best quality and may be used for further clinical trial and support in the time to come. The stem cells used earlier have been of lesser quality than this and have proved to be incapable and have had to be modified to become the `clinical grade'.

The ESC's are however of the view that these stem cells come directly from the patients, and are totally un-tampered with, making them absolutely useful for regenerative research use. They don't have the faintest hints of animal products added to them, like other researchers have to for the stimulation of the growth of the cells.

It was revealed by Professor Peter Braude, the lead author of the study that "The key here is that these are clinical grade lines, they have been set up from the beginning as lines that do not contain animal products and have not got animal products coming into contact with them".

There has been the development of similar cells at the Manchester University, and it is hoped that the same shall be donated to the stem cell bank soon. Professor Braude revealed that this discovery and development has taken them a long time of research for ten years, which was full of failures and disappointments, but eventually paid off well.

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Although the history of evolutionary biology dates back to 1858, it was not until the 1970s and 1980s that a notable number of universities included it in their departmental working titles. Concerned with the descent and modification of species over time, evolutionary biology, despite its gradual development, is now widely regarded as an important branch of science. Speaking with Editor Jonathan Miles, President of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology Professor Brian Charlesworth sheds light on the development of this interdisciplinary field.

What is evolutionary biology?
Evolutionary biology is mainly concerned with the 'why' question of biology, as opposed to the 'how' question, which asks how proteins operate inside cells, and how cells communicate with each other during development to create the mechanisms of the biological machinery. Evolution, in contrast, provides an answer to the question: 'Is what we see in the modern world of living organisms the product of a long historical process that has shaped the machinery that underlies their working?'

Evolutionary biology is a diverse area as it concerns everything in biology including, for example, the history of life as revealed by the fossil record. You can also look at the functioning of the components of the whole organism, and try to interpret them in terms of the idea of adaptation and natural selection, where weeding out less efficient variants has produced machinery that works rather well. Evolutionary biology also looks within populations to try to understand the relationships between the characteristics of an organism and its biological fitness; the effect of a particular trait on the survival or the reproductive success of an organism.

What role does DNA play in evolutionary biology?
You can study the history of life by comparing living organisms among themselves and trying to reconstruct their evolutionary history – for example, from the similarities in their DNA sequences.

We currently get enormous amounts of data from DNA sequences, which means that we can examine evolution in considerable detail at the level of the DNA itself, as well as regarding the organisation of the DNA and the genome. Modern technology provides us with vast amounts of information, so this field covers virtually the whole range of biological phenomena.

However, looking at it from the perspective of 'how we can make sense of this' – in terms of what we understand about the basic mechanisms of evolutionary change – there's a strong theoretical structure that is unusual for biology. As a result of this, people make mathematical and computer models based on their understanding of what we think is going on, and try to relate this to what we actually see in the organisms. This has had a long history that goes back to the beginning of the 20th Century.

When genetics was first discovered, the rules were used to try to infer what is expected to be seen when the basic evolutionary processes of mutation and natural selection were put into models, and then relate them to the data you can get from populations. This is very successful at the moment, because of the explosion of data coming from DNA sequencing studies.

What are the research priorities in the field?
A priority area in Europe with public policy implications is the evolutionary biology of an infectious disease. This can be studied by using the sequences of the genomes of these organisms, employing clever techniques to model how rapidly these diseases are changing, and then trying to pin down what is causing disease outbreaks, such as the recent swine flu epidemic.

Another big area is evolutionary genomics, which uses modern technology to generate large amounts of data on the DNA sequence of almost any organism, so that related species can be compared and their evolutionary history can be worked out. Perhaps more importantly, the entire genomes of different individuals from a population can be sequenced, and consequently the variability between individuals can be examined. A great deal of emphasis has been placed on trying to identify variants related to various kinds of disease, and a lot of work has been done on this in humans. Genomic data can also be used to answer 'tree of life' questions, which try to look back to the beginnings of life and relate the major groups of organisms together.

There is also a lot of interest in 'evo-devo' – trying to relate the process of development that we see to evolutionary questions, for example: 'How does a wing evolve in terms of the kinds of genes that are involved in controlling the development of the wing, and can you relate those processes to the selective forces that produced it?' Obviously, we know that wings are used for flying, but sometimes it's not so obvious why something is doing what it is doing.

Overall therefore, there is a great deal of interaction between basic information that comes from molecular and cell biology, and the kinds of questions that evolutionary biologists have traditionally been studying.

What areas of evolutionary biology are mainly researched in the UK and Europe?
There's a strong emphasis in the UK and Scandinavia on behaviour ecology, which is the study of animal behaviour in their natural environment, and trying to interpret what animals do in relation to what kind of natural selection has been acting on them to make them do what they do. What is perhaps not so strong in Europe is the more genomic and molecular approach to evolution, which is better represented in North America.

Probably the weakest area of research in Europe is the study of evolution in the plant kingdom, which is important since we eat plants. This used to be quite strong in the UK, but whilst there is currently a lot of molecular biology done on plants, there is very little evolutionary biology, and that's probably true in France and Germany as well. People should perhaps be thinking about trying to encourage research into this area a bit more.

Why does evolution matter in society?
The intellectual importance of evolution and its interest for the general public cannot be overestimated. What evolution is telling us is that organisms – including humans – are the product of around 3.5 billion years of history, and we have a pretty good idea of what is driving it. This basically involves the kinds of ideas that Darwin proposed 150 years ago – modern evolutionary biology has confirmed a lot of Darwin's ideas, especially natural selection being the cause of adaptation.

We now have strong insights into how this is working: the bottom line is that we humans are nothing special; we're just one twig of a tree produced by a long history. This is important as it means that we're all part of the living world, with implications for the conservation of the natural environment – we should be aware that we have intricate relations to animals, plants and microbes.

What is the practical importance of this area of study?
Microbes can do a lot of evolving very quickly, and can consequently do a lot of damage if we stir things up too much, so disease and evolution are clearly of practical importance. Also, it's probably little known that many of the methods that have been traditionally used in animals and plant breeding to improve them from a human point of view are based on ideas and methods from evolutionary biology. In order to go forward, even with genetic manipulation based on modern technology, we have to have an understanding of the consequences of messing around with the genomes of creatures, and that involves input from evolutionary biology.

Do you see evolutionary biology as a growing research field in the UK?
There is a good deal of practical importance to what we do, and there is a need to fund both the applied aspects of the field and the basic research that underpins this, so I would like public policymakers to be made aware of that. The field is relatively small compared with the rest of biology (possibly around 10% of the funding goes to evolutionary biology and about 90% for molecular and cell biology), and consequently the community feels itself to be a little bit of a minority that is more than somewhat outnumbered by the people studying the mechanistic areas of biology (the 'how' questions, rather than the 'why' questions). However, I think we have something very important to offer.

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Energy, power, climate change, atomic explosions — what scientific concepts should any future president of the United States be familiar with? One course at Carnegie Mellon aims to address exactly that.

Markus Deserno, a professor in the department of physics, teamed up with department head Gregg Franklin to teach a course titled “Physics for Future Presidents,” in which students learn science fundamentals pertaining to global scientific issues that hold social and political importance. For example, to learn about nuclear energy, students studied the basics of atoms, chain reactions, and energy. An intelligent conversation about global warming calls for a few basics on radiation and light.

“There’s a lot of stuff out there which you can’t really have a sound opinion on if you completely lack the science,” Deserno said. “So what you instead do is just listen to the sound bites of people telling you stuff. And it’s not really that hard to have an opinion on this stuff once you know a couple of basics.”

The class, which was offered for the first time in the fall 2009 semester, is open to all students and majors. There are no prerequisites, and the professors like it this way. “I think that we just want to enable our students to become more educated citizens — it doesn’t necessarily have to be for the next future president, but any voting citizen should know a couple of these things,” Deserno said.

The course had its beginnings just over 10 years ago at University of California, Berkeley. A physics professor named Richard Muller was asked to teach a qualitative physics course that covered a very wide range of topics as effectively as possible. His vision was to create a course that taught scientific fundamentals that addressed some of the most important global issues while avoiding some technical aspects such as calculus that might confuse students. Thus, Physics for Future Presidents was born.

“Can real physics be taught without math? Yes! Math is a tool for computation, but it is not the essence of physics,” Muller explained in a 2010 newsletter for the Forum on Physics and Society. “So many people in our government have a poor grasp of science, and yet if they misjudge the science, they can make a wrong decision.” After a few years of teaching the course, Muller published the textbook Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines. Similar courses have spread to other universities, including Carnegie Mellon.

Franklin, who teaches the course with Deserno, believes the students are gaining a lot from the course. In one instance, the students viewed a three-minute video clip of a politician speaking to Congress about carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. “When [Deserno] was showing that three-minute clip, one of the students shouted out, ‘Where is she getting her numbers?’ That’s a successful class!” Franklin said.

The course has received positive reviews from students as well. “The professors have done an excellent job of finding realistic ways to clearly present the basic physical phenomena we all should understand,” Tyler Rice, a sophomore English major, said in an email. “This is important for students who are in fields which don’t require the in-depth study and rigorous mathematics of your typical physics class at CMU, but who still want to learn about the big picture.”

In the end, making judgments on the credibility of scientific decisions and statements is up to the students, and Deserno and Franklin hope the students have gained some tools to help them make good assessments based on scientific fundamentals.

“In recitation, [the students] were asking, ‘How do we find out the truth on some issue?’ ” Franklin said. “That’s the best but hardest question. But the fact that they’re asking that is good.”

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Impulsive, manipulative and lacking remorse, criminal psychopaths typically face longer and harsher sentences in the justice system. But a growing body of research shows that their aberrant behaviour may be linked to faulty wiring in the brain, challenging the assumption that psychopaths are intrinsically evil and raising questions about how they should be dealt with when they break the law.

Should criminal psychopaths - who make up 15 to 25% of the prison population, according to estimates - be held accountable to the same degree as offenders who don't have the same brain abnormalities? Are they victims of their biology?

The debate is roiling across the fields of criminology, law, philosophy and neuroscience. "I don't think there is a consensus. I think that there is a lot of confusion," said Heidi Maibom, an associate professor of philosophy at Carleton University. A study led by researchers at the University of Wisconsin and published this week in the Journal of Neuroscience is likely to add fuel to the debate.

The researchers scanned the brains of inmates from a local prison, focusing on two key areas: the almond-shaped amygdala, which helps to detect fear and mediate anxiety, and the ventro-medial prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for more complex social emotions, such as guilt, empathy and regret.

One set of data showed that the white fibres connecting these two areas of the brain were weaker in the brains of psychopaths compared to other offenders. Another set of data showed that electro-chemical signals emitted by these two areas were less coordinated in the brains of psychopaths.

"What the science suggests is this is a brain-based disorder and that the neural dysfunction may undermine the ability of these individuals to control their social behaviour and regulate their emotions," said Mike Koenigs, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the school.

While scientists can't say with certainty that these brain abnormalities are the cause of the disorder, they now at least know what area of the brain may be associated with it, he said. Psychopaths should be viewed as patients with neuro-cognitive disorders who may benefit from treatment, Koenigs said.

"We're not talking about turning them into Mother Teresa," Koenigs said. But with cognitive behavioural therapy and drug therapy, it is possible they could become "a little more responsible."Toronto criminal lawyer Graeme Hamilton adds that defence lawyers who use brain scan images in the courtroom to try to get a better outcome for their clients have to consider the possibility that prosecutors could use the same evidence to further their goals.

"If a neurological assessment shows something in the brain that would - based on the current science - suggest potential dangerousness that cannot be treated, then, of course, that could be very detrimental to your client. "It's something that could go both ways."

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To find out what distinguishes one cell type from another, cell biologists must renounce popular cell lines, argue Anthony H. Hyman and Kai Simons.

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