Riichi Sakazaki 1920--2002

George Porter (1920-2002): kinetics research and the public understanding of science.

George Porter (Figure 1) made fundamental contributions to our understanding of fast reactions between atoms and molecules. His promotion of the public understanding of science and scientific research was of national and international importance. Much of chemistry is concerned with the study of the transition from reactants to products in a chemical reaction. The conventional and traditional me...

Writing Japan’s Orient: Shanghai through the Pen of Yokomitsu Riichi

This article is a case study of Yokomitsu Riichi’s (1898-1947) novel Shanghai (1928, 1932) and the way the novel reflects changing Japanese views of China during the period of Japanese imperial expansion. Drawing for its theoretical framework on Edward Said’s epochal Orientalism (1978), the article argues that Japan’s perception of China in the early twentieth century was shaped by the emergenc...

Homer F. Swift, 1920

François Jacob (1920–2013)

“Plus que jamais, la recherche me paraissait s’identifier à la nature humaine. En exprimer l’appétit, le désir de vivre. C’était bien le meilleur moyen trouvé par l’homme de braver le chaos de l’univers. De dominer la mort.” (More than ever, scientific research seemed to me to be intrinsic to human nature. It expressed the hunger, the desire to live. It has, in fact, been the best means found b...

Francois Jacob (1920-2013)

François Jacob studied bacteria and bacteriophages at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, France, in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1965, Jacob won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine [3] with André M. Lwoff and Jacques L. Monod for their work on the genetic control of enzyme synthesis. Jacob studied how genes [4] control and regulate metabolic enzymes in the bacterium Escherichi...