Mendel--both ignored and forgotten

Innate Immunity: Ignored for decades, but not forgotten

The innate immune system must recognize and rapidly respond to microbial pathogens, providing a first line of host defense. This is accomplished through an array of pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) that reside in specific subcellular compartments and can bind pathogen-associated molecular patterns. PRRs also recognize self-molecules that are released after cell damage or death, known as dan...

Ignored Architecture, Ignored Architect

Let's face it: Having to deal with a software architect can be, well, also funny – but not necessarily constructive. Any influential person is highly visible and evokes emotional reactions. Personality clashes can lead to mutual ignorance, and team members might deliberately choose to ignore the architect at least occasionally. Sometimes the architecture itself gives good reasons to ignore it. ...

Darwin, Mendel, and Galton.

THIS paper was never meant to be a centenary address, in fact until I started to prepare it I did not realize that the original Darwin-Wallace communication to the Linnean Society was read in I858. An interest in human genetics led me to seek more knowledge of the lives of the three men who seemed to me to have been the founders of our present understanding of heredity. Darwin's evidence in fav...

Mendel might get dizzy.

Building on Mendel

Twelve months after the first successes of an ambitious project to commemorate Mendel in the abbey where he carried out his work, efforts are now turning to the gardens, perhaps some of the most intellectually fruitful patches of ground in the world. Restoration work in the abbey, in the beautiful Czech city of Brno, reveals a building in which little has changed since Mendel’s time where it is...