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Biomedical subjects

Peter Andras

Publications and source records attributed to Peter Andras.

13 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

Globalization in science education: an inevitable and beneficial trend.

Globalization is one aspect of the larger phenomenon of modernization, which describes societies characterized by progressive growth in the complexity of communications. Despite its inevitable problems, globalization is a generally desirable phenomenon, since it enables increased efficiency, effectiveness and capability of societies and thereby, potentially benefits most people most of the time. Scientific research was one of the first global communication systems, especially at its most advanced levels. And high quality scientific education at the post-doctoral level is also now essentially global. The next steps will be for lower level science education - at doctoral, undergraduate, and even school teaching levels - to become progressively globalized. This phenomenon is already happening in the mathematical and quantitative sciences, and will probably spread to include other kinds of science. But to be efficient requires the development of a trading medium of internationally standardized and quantitative educational credits - for instance, standard certificates, objective comparative examinations, and a hierarchical qualifications structure (which will almost certainly be based on the United States system). Globalized education also requires a common language for organizational communications, which is already in place for the quantitative and mathematical sciences, and will be increasingly the case as competence in a simplified form of international scientific English becomes more universal. As such a global science education system grows there will be increased competition and migration of teachers and students. The law of comparative advantage suggests that such mobility will encourage societies to specialize in what they do best. For example, some countries (even among wealthy nations) may provide little advanced scientific education, and import the necessary expertise from abroad - this situation seems to be developing in Germany and France, who lack any top-quality research universities. Conversely, just a few countries may provide the bulk of advanced science education teaching - as well as applied and pure research personnel - for the rest of the world: potentially China and India might supply most of world's mathematical expertise. In conclusion, there are two complementary aspects to the globalization of science education: these are standardization and specialization. We anticipate a simultaneous trend towards international convergence of basic educational structures, certificates and English usage; with increasing national differentiation of specialist educational functions.

Forecasting↗
PubMed2005

Pattern computation in neural communication systems.

Biological data suggests that activity patterns emerging in small- and large-scale neural systems may play an important role in performing the functions of the neural system, and in particular, neural computations. It is proposed in this paper that neural systems can be understood in terms of pattern computation and abstract communication systems theory. It is shown that analysing high-resolution surface EEG data, it is possible to determine abstract probabilistic rules that describe how emerging activity patterns follow earlier activity patterns. The results indicate the applicability of the proposed approach for understanding the working of complex neural systems.

Animals↗
PubMed2005

The origins of life -- the 'protein interaction world' hypothesis: protein interactions were the first form of self-reproducing life and nucleic acids evolved later as memory molecules.

The 'protein interaction world' (PIW) hypothesis of the origins of life assumes that life emerged as a self-reproducing and expanding system of protein interactions. In mainstream molecular biology, 'replication' refers to the material copying of molecules such as nucleic acids. However, PIW is conceptualized as an abstract communication system constituted by the interactions between proteins, in which 'replication' happens at the level of self-reproduction of these interactions between proteins. Densely concentrated peptide interaction systems may have reproduced and expanded as 'protocell' vesicles surrounded by lipid bi-layer membranes. Protocells led to the emergence of proto-RNA molecules of greater chemical stability which served as chemically differentiated 'memories' of peptide interaction states, thereby facilitating the reproduction and expansion of protocells. Simplification-driven expansion led to the selection of biotic amino acids and the reduction of the typical RNA alphabet to the four usual bases (A, C, G and U). Dense interactions between RNA molecules led to the emergence of the RNA interaction subsystem of the cell, and to the emergence of 'memories' of RNA interactions in the form of DNA molecules with greater chemical stability. The expansion of DNA molecule interactions led to the dense clustering and encapsulation of DNA molecules within the cell nucleus. RNA molecules therefore serve as memories of protein interactions and DNA molecules are memories of RNA interactions. We believe that the PIW hypothesis is more evolutionarily plausible than the mainstream RNA world hypothesis, and has greater explanatory power.

Evolution, Molecular↗
PubMed2005

The future of 'pure' medical science: the need for a new specialist professional research system.

Over recent decades, medical research has become mostly an 'applied' science which implicitly aims at steady progress by an accumulation of small improvements, each increment having a high probability of validity. Applied medical science is, therefore, a social system of communications for generating pre-publication peer-reviewed knowledge that is ready for implementation. However, the need for predictability makes modern medical science risk-averse and this is leading to a decline in major therapeutic breakthroughs where new treatments for new diseases are required. There is need for the evolution of a specialized professional research system of pure medial science, whose role would be to generate and critically evaluate radically novel and potentially important theories, techniques, therapies and technologies. Pure science ideas typically have a lower probability of being valid, but the possibility of much greater benefit if they turn out to be true. The domination of medical research by applied criteria means that even good ideas from pure medical science are typically ignored or summarily rejected as being too speculative. Of course, radical and potentially important ideas may currently be published, but at present there is no formal mechanism by which pure science publications may be received, critiqued, evaluated and extended to become suitable for 'application'. Pure medical science needs to evolve to constitute a typical specialized scientific system of formal communications among a professional community. The members of this putative profession would interact via close research groupings, journals, meetings, electronic and web communications--like any other science. Pure medical science units might arise as elite grouping linked to existing world-class applied medical research institutions. However, the pure medical science system would have its own separate aims, procedures for scientific evaluation, institutional organization, funding and support arrangements; and a separate higher-professional career path with distinctive selection criteria. For instance, future leaders of pure medical science institutions would need to be selected on the basis of their specialized cognitive aptitudes and their record of having generated science-transforming ideas, as well as their research management skills. Pure medical science would work most effectively and efficiently if practiced in many independent and competing institutions in several different countries. The main 'market' for pure medical science would be the applied medical scientists, who need radical strategies to solve problems which are not yielding to established methods. The stimulus to create such elite pure medical science institutions might come from the leadership of academic 'entrepreneurs' (for instance, imaginative patrons in the major funding foundations), or be triggered by a widespread public recognition of the probable exhaustion of existing applied medical science approaches to solving major therapeutic challenges.

Biomedical Research↗
PubMed2005

Modernizing UK health services: 'short-sharp-shock' reform, the NHS subsistence economy, and the spectre of health care famine.

Modernization is the trend for societies to grow functionally more complex, efficient and productive. Modernization usually occurs by increased specialization of function (e.g. division of labour, such as the proliferation of specialists in medicine), combined with increased organization in order to co-ordinate the numerous specialized functions (e.g. the increased size of hospitals and specialist teams, including the management of these large groups). There have been many attempts to modernize the National Health Service (NHS) over recent decades, but it seems that none have significantly enhanced either the efficiency or output of the health care system. The reason may be that reforms have been applied as a 'drip-drip' of central regulation, with the consequence that health care has become increasingly dominated by the political system. In contrast, a 'short-sharp-shock' of radical and rapid modernization seems to be a more successful strategy for reforming social systems - in-between waves of structural change the system is left to re-orientate towards its client group. An example was the Flexner-initiated reform of US medical education which resulted in the closure of nearly half the medical colleges, an immediate enhancement in quality and efficiency of the system and future growth based on best institutional practices. However, short-sharp-shock reforms would probably initiate an NHS 'health care famine' with acute shortages and a health care crisis, because the NHS constitutes a 'subsistence economy' without any significant surplus of health services. The UK health care system must grow to generate a surplus before it can adequately be modernized. Efficient and rapid growth in health services could most easily be generated by stimulating provision outside the NHS, using mainly staff trained abroad and needs-subsidized 'item-of-service'-type payment schemes. Once there is a surplus of critically vital health services (e.g. acute and emergency provision), then radical modernization should rapidly improve the health service by a cull of low-quality and inefficient health care providers.

Efficiency, Organizational↗
PubMed2003

A model for emergent complex order in small neural networks.

A new neural network model is introduced in this paper. The aim of the proposed Sierpinski neural networks is to provide a simple and biologically plausible neural network architecture that produces emergent complex spatio-temporal patterns through the activity of the output neurons of the network and is able to perform computational tasks. Such networks may play an important role in the analysis and understanding of complex dynamic activity observed at various levels of biological neural systems. The proposed Sierpinski neural networks are described in detail and their functioning is analyzed. We discuss about emerging neural activity patterns and their interpretations, neuro-computation with such emerging activity patterns, and also possible implications for computational neuroscience.

Animals↗
PubMed2002

Democratic deficit and communication hyper-inflation in health care systems.

There is a widespread perception of poor performance and reduced trust in relation to health care systems. The roots of this problem are interpreted in terms of the democratic deficit and communication hyper-inflation. The democratic deficit is characterized as a persistent but chronically unsatisfied demand for complete public authority over all significant societal institutions--including the health care system. However, such professional institution systems necessarily perform their functions using specialized internal languages, which are not transparent to external scrutiny. Furthermore, professional institution systems tend to eliminate all subjective and imprecise criteria, such as individual moral values. This situation encourages communication inflation, which describes the large and unpredictable divergence between the real and nominal informational content of communications. Hyper-inflation is generated by the development of morality-free information management subsystems (specifically public relations and advertising) to the extent that 'official' communications convey almost zero reliable information. Reduction of the democratic deficit and control of communication inflation depends upon successful penetration of the health care system by representative public values, including individual morality.

Attitude to Health↗