Actus

You are all welcome to Michel Morange (ENS) special seminar this Friday 28/01/2011 at 15:00, entitled:
"Biology, evolution and history"

Michel Morange is a Biology professor at ENS and Pierre et Marie Curie University (Paris 6), Director of the Center Cavailles of History of Philosophy of Science at ENS.
He teaches at the CRI a "History of Science and analysis of classical papers" course.

CRI Aging Club Special session on Monday, January 24th at 18h at the CRI with Dr. André Klarsfeld, author of the book "The biology of death - Origins of mortality".

Dr. Klarsfeld will talk about "What good is it to grow old?"

Summary:
Most living organisms undergo senescence, which leads to "natural" death. I will briefly review how biologists, since the 18th century, have tried to explain this apparently universal feature of life. This will lead to the origins and development of current evolutionary theories of aging, including recent results with prokaryotes.

About his book :




About the Author (Cornell Press)
André Klarsfeld is a neurobiologist and researcher at the Institut Alfred Fessard at the CNRS in Gif-sur-Yvette. A former member of the Institut Pasteur, Frédéric Revah is also a neurobiologist and Chief Scientific Officer at Cerep, a French biotechnology firm. Lydia Brady, a long-time member of the Northern California Translators Association, is an experienced scientific and technical translator and holds a Masters Degree in Translation from the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

Aging Club
Club mediator: Tamara Milosevic
Other participants: Romain Bollart, Philippe Bouaziz, Zayna Chaker, Yann Le Cunff, Andres Felipe Diaz Delgadillo, Diana Fernandez, Jehanne Malek, Xavier Maniere, Tamara Milosevic, Ming Ni, Daniel Smiljkovski, Anamarija Stafa, Ulrich Steiner, Yifan Yang

Set goals:
The Aging Club goal is to form a network of researchers focusing on aging/longevity from different perspectives and to help disseminate the current breakthroughs in this field to the next generation of interdisciplinary scientists. The club wishes to reach a higher level of understanding from the multi-level approach to study the individual, as well as population-level differences in aging.
The club is couting on new ideas to emerge from its interactions with renowned scientists, through discussions in the club or workshops.

Astrobiology Club
Proposed club coordinator: Adrien Duchadeuil
Proposed club treasurer: Laura Da Silva
Other participants: Andres Felipe Diaz Delgadillo, Hans Bodart, Mathilde Bourbin, Zayna Chaker, Mathias Toulouze

Set goals:
- Create a basic bibliography that would give an overview of the field (articles and books)
- Have a basic understanding of all the disciplines included in Astrobiology
- Set up and perform experiments testing prebiotic environments (example: formation of liposome).
- Set up and perform experiments testing extreme life forms (example: methanotrophic extremophiles.
Vary the conditions of extremophiles to imitate life conditions on possible other "earths")
- Organize a workshop at the end of the year and invite AIV participants as well as exterior scientists

Bio Math
Coordinators: Juahn Aru, Vittorio Perduca

Set goals:
The aim of the club is not to take just a tiny bit of mathematics and a tiny bit of biology and put them together. Rather it is to see which are and which could be the meeting points between biologists and mathematicians in general. Sometimes they might benefit biology, sometimes mathematics.
To track down questions that can be posed together by a mathematician and a biologist, and that can also be answered, is one of the club's goals. To show that there is a little biologist in every mathematician and a little mathematician in every biologist, could be maybe stated as another optimistic aim. If there is time and interest, mathematical education for biologists and biology education for mathematicians might come up as additional questions.

Bio Med
Mediator: Ruben Elisée.
Treasurer: David Puyraimond.
Weekly journal club sessions: David Puyraimond and Eimad Shotar
Other members: Asma Soltani, Cécilia Lantos, Daniel Smiljkovski, Edward Kwarteng, Jérémie Cramer, Kevin Lhoste, Pamela Duboc, Philippe Bouaziz, Rima Seddiki, Romain Coriat, Romain Freund, Said Laribi, Ségolène Charaudeau, Shi Getao, Vivien Szabo, Xavier Manière

Set goals:
The club project is to allow both clinicians and scientists to improve their interdisciplinarity and creativity by increasing interactions and multidirectional learning. To reach this objective, the club plans to organize a 1-day "biomedical workshop". This workshop will provide a broad overview on the translation that was done for one specific disease. This disease will soon be determined. Around this theme, clinical and fundamental molecular talks will be organized to highlight the critical points that allowed or slown down the translation of knowledge in this field. The last session of the workshop will present the future techniques that are developped in this field.

Fabelier
Mediators and treasurer: Antoine Mazières, Samuel Huron (IRI), Kevin Lhoste
Members: Elke Schmidt, Nebraska Windfree, Xavier Duportet, Pinardel Kueteyim, Thomas Julou, J. Leger, Rafik Kheffsche, Antoine Decrulle, Geoffroy Berthelot, Antoine Frenoy, Tamara Milosevic

Set goals:
The purpose of the lab is to design the shapes of interaction, to define technical structure and to find the good methods to define the new ideas the members want to realize. As a lab, the club can create prototypes with simple tools. It's in this way the club wants to share informations in this WebLab. From NetArt to Webservices that symplify user's life, or unusable but funny things, there is a huge space for possibilities to explore, with one goal: innovation and creation.
The technical aspect is not missing, in fact it's one of the club's focus to design innovation and prototype it. Fabelier wants to share technics, code, technologies, tips and tweaks. Relations between concepts and technics is a one of bigger focus of this Lab.

Creativity Club
Mediator: Maria Loza, Felipe Golib, Tamara Milosevic
Other participants: Cristina Acasuso Rivero, Benedicte Babayan, Hans Bodart, Adrien Bouclet, Livia Camargo, Adrien Duchadeuil, Belonia Gabalda, Felipe Golib, Sabrina Hocine, Maria Loza, Tamara MIilosevic, Maeva Vignes, Paul Villoutreix

Set goals:
The club's goal is to improve the way of thinking and develop creative skills by doing group exercises on a weekly basis. All club activities are documented on the club's moodle page, for sharing purposes and later use. The club also wishes to organize a workshop to gather experts in the field of creativity in order to find out about the latest scientific advances in neurobiology of creativity, as well as new techniques to enhance creativity.

Ethics Club
Mediator: Florian Gérard-Mercier

Set goals:
The aim of the ethics club is to unite students from various backgrounds in life and social sciences around ethical issues. As life scientists, the club's members have a lot to learn from social scientists. Life scientists may sometimes lack the outsider's insight that enables to zoom out and remember the broader picture: what they do and why they do it. It is also of utmost importance to be able to explain why science is crucial for society as a whole, and social scientists are in the best position to help the life scientists in this process. On the other hand, an interaction with life scientists is of great interest for social scientists. It would enable them to understand what the scientific issues behind today's societal ones are, and build on this insight. The ethics club will foster unique interactions, and could build a tremendous momentum for ethics in the Master's degree as well as in the partner universities.

In Vitro Growing
Mediator: Ludovic Le Renard
Secretary: Rafik Kheffache
Treasurer: Clément Vulin
Other participants: Kevin Alessandri-Reggiani, Tatiana Dimitriu, Anne-Claire Fabre, Cécilia Lantos, Hawa Racine Thiam, Ariane Le Gros, Kevin Lhoste, Agnès Miermont, Jéremie Cosette, Boris Sauterey

Set goals:
The main aim of the club is to design and use an experimental setup that will enable a better understanding of shape formation of in vitro growth of structured patterns.
In Vitro Growing club is concerned about growing systems, and how they come to display patterns, forms, shapes. The club has been building its interests in an interdisciplinary exchange mainly between physicists and biologists, with the perspective to understand more the forces driving emergence of the pattern we use to see, and the In Vitro field seemed to be a good compromise (feasible) to address a question that satisfy both field of interests. The club is also willing to invite experimented researcher in the field to learn, exchange, fit the experiments, promote any kind of partnership, and to bring interest to a broader community if possible. Depending on the outcome of the fore coming sessions, the club might also choose to write a review on the field, since the field has been sparsely investigated in the two last centuries.

Lab Surfing
Club mediator: Mathilde Bourbin
Other participants: Luc Boruta, Haig Alexander Eskandarian, Ségolène Charaudeau, Dusan Misevic

Set goals:
The objective of the LabSurfing club is to help scientists efficiently share laboratory experimental devices using social networking tools. In particular, the club will build a website that will allow researchers to take advantage of each other's often underutilized resources, such as lab equipment, computer software or chemicals. Each lab would list the resources they could share in a searchable database available to all other users. Via the website, user could send a requests to "surf a lab" but the final decision of whether to share the resources will always remain with the hosting lab. The safety for all users and equipment in the system will be strengthened via a user-generated online reference system, detailing each LabSurfing experience from the perspectives of both the visitor and the hosting lab. By getting the scientists in contact with one another, LabSurfing website will provide access to valuable resources and knowledge as well as encourage novel scientific collaborations.

Med Debate
Coordinators: Pamela Duboc, Jehanne Malek, Daniel Smiljovski

Set goals:
The goal is to create a club to discuss and debate about the limits of the occidental approach to science and medical sciences. The members think that some practices are discredited in our countries for cultural, but not sufficiently validated, reasons. For example, acupuncture is very often practiced in the oriental cultures and can be effective for various conditions. However, western medical system continues to consider it as a minor medicine or even charlatanism.
It seems to the members that the West locked itself into values which it contributed to bring to the fore, such as the practice of the cartesian logic, the faith in a powerful science dissecting every mechanism that it does not understand... This frame of mind allowed for enormous progress, in particular in sciences. Nevertheless, it is limited by its habit of rejecting practices that it cannot explain, especially concerning medical practices.

Psychohistory Club
Club mediator: Anaïs Bompard
Club treasurer: Axel Seguret
Other participants: Vivien Szabo, Geoffroy Berthelot, Vicard Du, Philippe Bouaziz, Tiphaine LeMao

Set goals:
The Psychohistory club is related to the novel Foundation published by Isaac Asimov in 1951. In this book, psychohistory is a discipline based on a wide range of scientific areas to predict the evolution of human societies. It uses human sciences, biology, ecology, and virtually every field able to give information on human population to make a mathematical description. In the model itself, references to thermodynamic, statistical laws, chaos theory and systemic are numerous; it is also considered as having common bases with cybernetics. Since Foundation parution, many scientific were interested in this subject, more or less relatively to the book. The club aim to develop an approach similar to psychohistory, based on scientific backgrounds for various researches fields.

Taste Biology Club
Mediator: Hans Bodart
Treasurer: Camille Huet de Froberville
Other participants: Lívia Camargo, Adrien Duchadeuil, Yi Wang, Bénédicte Babayan, Belonia Gabalda

Set goals:
The aim of the club is to analyse the taste in many aspect by sttng interest on limited ingredient during special "cooking experiences" and produce document (article, report and reviews) with bibliographical references. Some session will be specially oriented on subject (for example: "The difference between western and eastern civilization way of cooking and the implications of those difference in the taste".)
One of the envisaged project of the club is to do in collaboration with an Hospital (Cochin for example or Necker) a study on effect of the change of the aliments and the taste of it on the recovery and behaviour of the patient. Considering that many aliments have been discovered to have benefit in recovery and that the taste can stimulate the appetite and limit the depression which can occur when staying in hospital for too long.
If the experiment goes well, the club is planning on editing a "Taste Biology" document in which the members will let a diary of the club and activities, the protocols used and the different amelioration made to it, and "discovery" on taste by researching trough articles or by the senses and brain analysis.

Student Network Club
Club mediator: Francesca Anselmi
Treasurer: Maéva Vignes
Interested students: Timothée Flutre, Darja Dubravcic, Tiffany Lieury, Quentin Perrenoud, Pinardel
Kenne, Muhamad Doris

Set goals:
1) create and analyse a survey on scientific related humans difficulties encountered during PhD,
2) browse legislation surrounded PhD,
3) create a website with lab-profiles.
The main goal of the club is to foster interactions and knowledge transmission or experience sharing between the different student generations of the FDV program. This include more precisely and mainly experience sharing on how to choose a laboratory to work in, how to deal with interdisciplinary projects and how to deal with the scientific related sociological/human difficulties encountered during the PhD program.
The Student Network will work in tight collaboration with students representatives (common meetings are already scheduled).

« La recherche transdisciplinaire à l'honneur
Un nouveau centre de recherche de 7.000 m², axé sur les dynamiques du vivant, va voir le jour à Paris, rapporte Le Quotidien du Médecin. Fruit d'un investissement initial de 28 millions d'euros apporté par la Fondation Bettencourt Schueller (FBS), le projet vise à proposer à quelque 300 étudiants un programme d'enseignement transcendant les spécialités. Cette « pédagogie innovante » est prônée par François Taddei, directeur de recherches à l'Inserm, appelé à présider l'établissement. « Il est impératif de repenser l'articulation entre la recherche et la formation, et de miser sur l'intelligence collective, le dialogue entre les disciplines », souligne-t-il.
Quotidien du Médecin [Le], 11/01/2011 via revue de presse Inserm.

Lire l'article sur le site du Quotidien du Médecin

Special seminar: "DIY practices in biology : origins, forms and ambitions"
14 Jan 2011 15:00



You are all invited to join us to hear Sara Aguiton's talk intended to locate in socio-cultural and historic contexts Do-It-Yourself practices in biology, specially in synthetic biology. We'll discuss about origins of the idea of "DIY" and the figure of amateur in general. Then, we'll try to figure communities of diyists in synthetic biology : their constitution, their organizations, their works and their ambition to change science and the world. At last, we'll collectively discuss the relevance of such DIY practices both scientifically and politically.

Sara, a science sociologist is now in her PhD at Science Po and took part in our 2009 iGEM team. Her work was re-compensated by the Best Human Practice Advancement prize.

More info about Sara Aguiton : http://www.cso.edu/cv_equipe.asp?per_id=164