M. Gibbs – författare

All animals show longlasting changes in behaviour as a result of individual experience and this adaptability is one of their most striking features. The changes may be abrupt, radical and permanent. In higher animals it seems reasonable to ascribe their ability to change behaviour to the same physiological process that underlies human behavioural change and memory. The known physiology of the brain gives no clues as to the mechanism. On the contrary, physiological research on the nervous system has relied upon the fact that the reactions of nerve cells studied were stereotyped and could be repeated frequently without modification. Only recently has the deliberate search for modifiable nerve cells begun but nothing yet discovered shows the rapidity, certainty and permanence of a behavioural change in intact animal. (Kandel and Spencer, 1968). Research on memory therefore must combine the accurate observation of animal behaviour, in very well understood situations, and a knowledge of the biology of the brain and of the kind of physiological processes likely to be involved in memory storage. If one is sure that a certain behavioural change does depend uniquely on memories gained during an experiment it is possible, by using likely inhibitors of brain physiology to test the susceptibility of memories to disruption.

All animals show longlasting changes in behaviour as a result of individual experience and this adaptability is one of their most striking features. The changes may be abrupt, radical and permanent. In higher animals it seems reasonable to ascribe their ability to change behaviour to the same physiological process that underlies human behavioural change and memory. The known physiology of the brain gives no clues as to the mechanism. On the contrary, physiological research on the nervous system has relied upon the fact that the reactions of nerve cells studied were stereotyped and could be repeated frequently without modification. Only recently has the deliberate search for modifiable nerve cells begun but nothing yet discovered shows the rapidity, certainty and permanence of a behavioural change in intact animal. (Kandel and Spencer, 1968). Research on memory therefore must combine the accurate observation of animal behaviour, in very well understood situations, and a knowledge of the biology of the brain and of the kind of physiological processes likely to be involved in memory storage. If one is sure that a certain behavioural change does depend uniquely on memories gained during an experiment it is possible, by using likely inhibitors of brain physiology to test the susceptibility of memories to disruption.

M. GIBBS and E. LATZKO In the preface to his Experiments upon Vegetables, INGEN-Housz wrote in 1779: "The discovery of Dr. PRIESTLEY that plants have a power of correcting bad air . . . shows . . . that the air, spoiled and rendered noxious to animals by their breath­ ing in it, serves to plants as a kind of nourishment. " INGEN-Housz then described his own experiments in which he established that plants absorb this "nourishment" more actively in brighter sunlight. By the turn of the eighteenth century, the "nourishment" was recognized to be CO . Photosynthetic CO2 assimilation, the 2 major subject of this encyclopedia volume, had been discovered. How plants assimilate the CO was a question several successive generations 2 of investigators were unable to answer; scientific endeavor is not a discipline in which it is easy to "put the cart before the horse". The horse, in this case, was the acquisition of radioactive isotopes of carbon, especially 14c. The cart which followed contained the Calvin cycle, formulated by CALVIN, BENSON and BASSHAM in the early 1950''s after (a) their detection of glycerate-3-P as the first stable product of CO fixation, (b) their discovery, and that by HORECKER 2 and RACKER, of the COz-fixing enzyme RuBP carboxylase, and (c) the reports by GIBBS and by ARNON of an enzyme (NADP-linked GAP dehydrogenase) capable of using the reducing power made available from sunlight (via photo­ synthetic electron transport) to reduce the glycerate-3-P to the level of sugars.