Donald Henry Colless (24 August 1922–16 February 2012) was a taxonomist at the Australian National Insect Collection (ANIC) from 1960 until his retirement in 1987. He continued working in ANIC as an Honorary Fellow until his death in 2012. Don’s main scientific interests were in the taxonomy and biology of true flies, and in the theory of phylogenetic reconstruction and classification. Don was trained in entomology at the University of Sydney, and spent nearly two decades of his early career in Asia studying mosquitoes and disease transmission, first in the Army during the Second World War in New Guinea and Borneo (1942–45), then after the war in North Borneo (1947–1952) and as a lecturer in the Department of Parasitology at the University of Malaya (1952–1960) in Singapore. We list the 127 scientific papers and book chapters that Don published during his scientific career that spanned 64 years. Six of these papers were published in the prestigious international journal Nature, and he was Chief Curator of the ANIC from 1971–1977. Don had extremely broad taxonomic interests, publishing on the taxonomy of 18 families of Diptera that spanned the phylogenetic breadth of the order. He described as new to science the fly families Perissommatidae and Axiniidae, thirteen new genera and over 120 species and, with David McAlpine, authored the Diptera chapters in both editions of The Insects of Australia (Melbourne University Press, 1970 and 1991). He published a number of influential critiques of cladistic theory in the 1960's and 1970's, and advocated a phenetic approach to the discovery of taxonomic groups, and phylogenetic reconstruction.
It happens that 2019 is the commemoration date for the 130(th) and 140(th) birthday of K. Chimin Wong and Wu Lien-teh respectively, both famous modern Chinese medical historians, the authors of the book History of Chinese Medicine. Originally, they were inhabitants separated thousand miles away, the former in Eastern China, and the other in Penang, Malaysia. Both were busying in their own business works, Wong was specialized in establishing Museum of Medical History, then the first of its kind in China and the world, with splendid results. Whereas, Wu was fighting at the frontier of the overwhelming pneumonic plague in Manchuria, having successfully terminated this virulent infectious disease in a short period of about a quarter, achieving a global reputation in medical world and thus presided the International Plague Conference held in Mukden, China, attended by invited experts from 11 countries. The latter was also active in the creation of hospitals and medical schools, plague prevention and quarantine services in China. Incidentally, when one of them read the book History of Medicine written by the famous American medical historian Fielding Hudson Garrison, to find that this 700+ -page work only includes the contents for Chinese medicine next to nothing and even with wrong descriptions, both were very frustrated and wrote a letter to its author for clarification. They were even more irritated to receive a reply, complaining that the mistakes were not his own, but simply due to shortage of sources, and even that bit of content was from western sources! To wipe up these wrong "foreign descriptions" , they made up their mind to write a similar book of its own in English language, so as to fill up the gaps in this field, hence, the completion of History of Chinese Medicine in a long course of almost 16 years, formally published in 1932, and an enlarged and revised 2nd edition in 1936. This work is divided into 2 books. Book One is devoted to traditional Chines medicine written by K. Chimin Wong; the other Book Two, written by Wu Lien-teh, is devoted to modern and contemporary Chinese medical history, dealing with western medicine to China from its introduction and after experiencing tortuous course and eventually constituting an integral system on biomedicine in China. At the end of the work, there are appendices, including chronological table, geographical names, person names and subject indices. Evaluation of History of Chinese Medicine after 1949 experienced a huge difference. During the first decades, people deemed it to contain lots of mistakes and to have been influenced by national nihilism and western missionary medicine. As a result, the whole work has been roughly translated into a Chinese version, marked by "for criticism" on its cover. After the country carries out a reform and opening to outside world policy, improper appraisal for this work has been changed and is crowned with "brilliant masterpiece" which virtually fills the gaps of the lack of Chinese medical history in western language. It is known that a Chinese version for this work is ongoing and will be officially published soon.
OBJECTIVE: To find historical relics of propagation of Chengjiang acupuncture and moxibustion school of thought abroad in which Cheng Dan' an is representative.
METHODS: Interview Xing Jingqing, Zhao Zhixing, Qiu Rongqing, students of Ph.D. Su Tianyou in Malaysia, who is the third generation of students of Cheng Dan' an, and collect historical materials about practicing medicine and teaching of Ph.D. Su abroad.
RESULTS: Su Tianyou is a student of Zeng Tianzhi, a brilliant disciple of Cheng Dan' an. He practiced medicine in 1939 and established Acupuncture and Moxibustion Medical College of Hong Kong in 1940, and he went to 13 countries and districts such as Asia, America and so on for practicing medicine, running schools. He is respectfully called "father of American acupuncture and moxibustion".
CONCLUSION: Ph.D. Su propagated Chinese medicine abroad, with outstanding achievement in education of medical sciences.
The article is dedicated to the life and work of Dr. Roy Selby (1930-2002), an American neurosurgeon who founded neurosurgery in Malaysia. Dr. Selby stayed in Malaysia from July 1963 to May 1970. He opened the first neurosurgical department at the general hospital in Kuala Lumpur and established a training program under which Malaysian physicians and nurses were sent to neurosurgery centers in the United States and Canada. Some physicians came back and headed local neurosurgical units. On his return to the United States, Dr. Selby practiced neurosurgery until 1986, when he had to give it up due to the impact of progressive congestive heart failure. From 1986 to 1994, Dr. Selby taught graduate courses in the Department of Psychology at East Texas State University, Texarkana, Texas. He was a pioneer of spinal surgery and founded the Lumbar Spine Society. Dr. Selby was a world citizen neurosurgeon and advocated international standards of training in neurosurgery. From 1985 to 1994, he was chairman of the Archives Committee of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons. Dr. Selby serves as a model of a physician as a humanist.
This paper presents the existing philosophy, approach, criteria and delivery of environmental engineering education (E3) for developing countries. In general, environmental engineering is being taught in almost all major universities in developing countries, mostly under civil engineering degree programmes. There is an urgent need to address specific inputs that are particularly important for developing countries with respect to the reality of urbanisation and industrialisation. The main component of E3 in the near future will remain on basic sanitation in most developing countries, with special emphasis on the consumer-demand approach. In order to substantially overcome environmental problems in developing countries, E3 should include integrated urban water management, sustainable sanitation, appropriate technology, cleaner production, wastewater minimisation and financial framework.
In recent years, it has become evident that a generational gap has developed in the community of arbovirus research. This apparent gap is due to the dis-investment of training for the next generation of arbovirologists, which threatens to derail the rich history of virus discovery, field epidemiology, and understanding of the richness of diversity that surrounds us. On the other hand, new technologies have resulted in an explosion of virus discovery that is constantly redefining the virosphere and the evolutionary relationships between viruses. This paradox presents new challenges that may have immediate and disastrous consequences for public health when yet to be discovered arboviruses emerge. In this review we endeavor to bridge this gap by providing a historical context for the work being conducted today and provide continuity between the generations. To this end, we will provide a narrative of the thrill of scientific discovery and excitement and the challenges lying ahead.
Anopheles donaldi Reid, a member of the A. barbirostris species group, is a vector of human filariasis and probably malaria. The discovery of some old specimens of this species, collected in Kuala Lumpur town where it no longer occurs, together with evidence from the literature about past malaria in the town, suggest that donaldi may have played a part in transmitting that malaria.
14 strains of Getah virus were isolated from a variety of mosquito species collected in Sarawak between October 1968 and February 1970. Ten strains were isolated from C. tritaeniorhynchus 7 of them at K. Tijirak. Single strains were isolated from C. gelidus, C. pseudovishnui, M. bonneae/dives and Aanopheles species. 6 of the isolates were obtained in October 1968 when Japanese encephalitis, Tembusu and Sindbis viruses were also very active. The available evidence suggest that Getah virus in Sarawak is maintained in a cycle similar to that of Japanese encephalitis virus and involves C. tritaeniorhynchus, C. gelidus and domestic pigs.
Alistair Reid was an outstanding clinician, epidemiologist and scientist. At the Penang General Hospital, Malaya, his careful observation of sea snake poisoning revealed that sea snake venoms were myotoxic in man leading to generalized rhabdomyolysis, and were not neurotoxic as observed in animals. In 1961, Reid founded and became the first Honorary Director of the Penang Institute of Snake and Venom Research. Effective treatment of sea snake poisoning required specific antivenom which was produced at the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories in Melbourne from Enhydrina schistosa venom supplied by the Institute. From the low frequency of envenoming following bites, Reid concluded that snakes on the defensive when biting man seldom injected much venom. He provided clinical guidelines to assess the degree of envenoming, and the correct dose of specific antivenom to be used in the treatment of snake bite in Malaya. Reid demonstrated that the non-clotting blood of patients bitten by the pit viper, Calloselasma rhodostoma [Ancistrodon rhodostoma] was due to venom-induced defibrination. From his clinical experience of these patients, Reid suggested that a defibrinating derivative of C. rhodostoma venom might have a useful role in the treatment of deep vein thrombosis. This led to Arvin (ancrod) being used clinically from 1968. After leaving Malaya in 1964, Alistair Reid joined the staff of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, as Senior Lecturer. Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) for detecting and quantifying snake venom and venom-antibody was developed at the Liverpool Venom Research Unit: this proved useful in the diagnosis of snake bite, in epidemiological studies of envenoming patterns, and in screening of antivenom potency. In 1977, Dr H. Alistair Reid became Head of the WHO Collaborative Centre for the Control of Antivenoms based at Liverpool.
Lauritz Toft (1920-1991), also known as Lau, graduated with a MSc degree in pharmacy at the Royal Danish School of Pharmacy in 1944. During the education and parallel activities Lau had shown gifts for intuition and improvisation, together with special talents for leadership and large-scale working. In 1945 he got the idea during the organization of the East Asiatic Company Ltd. to sell the best of the products from the Danish pharmaceutical companies in India under a common trade mark: DUMEX (Danish United Medical Export). The article describes Lau's difficulties and problems in realizing this idea. The adventure peaks in the mid-1950's with about 40 pharmacists in DUMEX-departments in India as well as Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, China etc.
It is well known that the contribution of Alfred Russell Wallace (1823-1913) to the development of the "Darwinian" principle of natural selection has often been neglected. Here we focus on how the three anniversaries to celebrate the origin of the Darwin-Wallace theory in Germany in 1909, in 1959 in the divided country, as well as in 2009, have represented Charles Robert Darwin's and Alfred Russell Wallace's contributions. We have analyzed books and proceedings volumes related to these anniversaries, and the main result is that Wallace was almost always ignored, or only mentioned in passing. In 1909, Ernst Haeckel gave a talk in Jena, later published under the title The worldview of Darwin and Lamarck (Das Weltbild von Darwin und Lamarck), but not as the Darwin-Wallace concept. Haeckel mentions Wallace only once. In two important proceedings volumes from the 1959 anniversaries, Wallace was ignored. The only fair treatment of Wallace is given in another book, a collection of documents edited by Gerhard Heberer, for which the author selected nine key documents and reprinted excerpts (1959). Three of them were articles by Wallace, including the Sarawak- and Ternate-papers of 1855 and 1858, respectively. An analysis of the dominant themes during the celebrations of 2009 shows that none of the six topics had much to do with Wallace and his work. Thus, the tendency to exclude Alfred Russell Wallace is an international phenomenon, and largely attributable to the "Darwin industry".
The British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), who had to leave school aged 14 and never attended university, did extensive fieldwork, first in the Amazon River basin (1848-1852) and then in Southeast Asia (1854-1862). Based on this experience, and after reading the corresponding scientific literature, Wallace postulated that species were not created, but are modified descendants of pre-existing varieties (Sarawak Law paper, 1855). Evolution is brought about by a struggle for existence via natural selection, which results in the adaptation of those individuals in variable populations who survive and reproduce (Ternate essay, 1858). In his monograph Darwinism (1889), and in subsequent publications, Wallace extended the contents of Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) into the Neo-Darwinian theory of biological evolution, with reference to the work of August Weismann (1834-1914). Wallace also became the (co)-founder of biogeography, biodiversity research, astrobiology and evolutionary anthropology. Moreover, he envisioned what was later called the anthropocene (i.e., the age of human environmental destructiveness). However, since Wallace believed in atheistic spiritualism and mixed up scientific facts and supernatural speculations in some of his writings, he remains a controversial figure in the history of biology.
The aim of this paper is to review the literature on suicide attempts in Malaysia. PsycINFO, PubMed, and Medline databases from 1845 to 2012 and detailed manual search of local official reports from the Ministry of Health and the Malaysian Psychiatric Association and unpublished dissertations from 3 local universities providing postgraduate psychiatric training were included in the current review. A total of 38 studies on suicide attempts in Malaysia were found and reviewed. Twenty-seven (76%) of the studies on suicide attempts were descriptive studies looking at sociodemographic data, psychiatric illnesses, and methods and reasons for suicide attempts. No study has been conducted on treatment and interventions for suicide attempts and the impact of culture was rarely considered. The review showed that in order for researchers, clinicians, and public health policy makers to obtain a better understanding of suicide attempts in Malaysia, more systematic and empirically stringent methodologies and research frameworks need to be used.