ANTOINE DANCHIN 唐善 • 安東
Alcmaeon of Croton
Site modifications and updates
23 October 2024
The history page of the birth of
molecular biology (1940-1953) is updated.
1 October 2024
Besides reorganisation of many pages, a page devoted to the English
version of a preface to
Schrödinger's What is Life is created. This is the
English original of the preface for the Chinese version of the book:
《什么是生命?》（2023年）中文版序 by 唐善 安东（Danchin
Antoine）
19 January 2024
Multiple dead links have been removed or changed into active ones. The
"history" pages have been updated with several new links to relevant
works. A new page summarizing the history
of biology during years 1920-1939 has been translated
into French.
1 January 2024
Creation of a new page for
science and health-related news in 2024 and correction of many minor
bugs in previous pages.
8 November 2023
Pages devoted to the origin of genome programs are translated into
Spanish.
29 October 2023
A lecture read at the 100th
anniversary of the birth René Thom at the Institut des Hautes
Études Scientifiques in Bures-sur-Yvette has been added to the site.
14 September 2023
Multiple links to the original text of treaties of historical
importance are added in the "history"
and "histoire" pages for example Jan
Swammerdam's Histoire
générale des Insectes. Ou l'on expose la manière lente et presque
insensible de l'accroissement de leurs membres, et ou l'on
découvre evidemment l'Erreur ou l'on tombe d'ordinaire au sujet de
leur prétendue transformation, in French as this was the
rule at the time.
4 April 2023
Several new links to the original text of treaties of historical
importance are added in the "history"
and "histoire" pages. For example
link
to the original staining of the organisms now known as bacteria by
Friedrich Wilhelm von Gleichen is now available directly from
the pages.
13 February 2023
The pages of this site will be progressively modified to reduce their
carbon print. This page has a category A EcoIndex. We will ensure that
all pages have an EcoIndex from A to C.
29 December 2022
Update of links, cosmetic improvements over pages and recent bibliography
update.
19 December 2022
Several dozen references to patents citing our papers added
in the bibliography. Many are also used in Wikipedia pages (note
that this is unstable and anonymous, however). A reference to a
preliminary report on the origin of SARS-CoV-2 by the Senate of the
USA is provided in our daily
updates. When the link will disappear the original paper will be
provided here.
26 November 2022
Several links added to the original source of works, such as the Physiologie
végétale of Candolle or the contribution of Geoffroy Saint
Hilaire à l'évolution
des formes animales en fonction de l'environnement.
23 November 2022
| Update of the History / Histoire section with link to Stéphane Leduc's La Biologie Synthétique now archived here. Removal of dead links and cosmetic changes. |  |
17 October 2022
The Web is always moving, and many links become obsolete. Dead links
are now being repaired or replaced on many pages, especially in the
entire subsection of the site "causeries".
8 October 2022
A text on the organic/inorganic
difference is added to the site. Antoine Destutt de Tracy
creates the concept
of idéologie. Various corrections on multiple pages.
22 August 2022
New page summarizing the
true secret of life, namely energy-dissipating discrimination.
18 July 2022
Updating of multiple works that predate those of Pasteur.
13 February 2022
Multiple link updates.
1 January 2022
The page devoted to uncommon news
about science and epidemics enters a new year. The page
for 2021 is now standing alone. 在2022年，本网站将引入新的中文条目。
3 December 2021
Multiple updates, in particular of the resume in Chinese.
多次更新，特别是中文简历的更新。
30 May 2021
We begin to update information about science in the Middle Ages, a
time which was much more important and considerably less obscurantist
than the image provided since the time of the self-congratulating «
Enlightment ». The first entry is reference to the work of Meletius
the Monk, who was an important precursor of William
Harvey and probably a missing link between Antiquity and
scholars such as Avicenna.
8 May 2021
The development of COVID-19 has required many changes in these pages,
in particular the splitting up of year 2020 into several sections for
regular information on the pandemic. Pages that are highly similar in
French and in English are now using an attribute that allows them to
be read as a function of the country of the reader (using link
rel="alternate"). Some changes have been made in history pages as well
as in the Presocratics
pages, as suggested by readers or after getting access to new
information sources.
17 August 2020
The majority of pages of the site have been revamped to try to make
them more visible for keyword research, in particular linked to
emerging diseases.
19 July 2020
A second wave of COVID-19 epidemic has begun at many places while the
first wave is expanding
fast, in particular in India and not under control in the USA.
18 May 2020
The COVID-19 epidemic has reached its peak, but a second wave may be
starting. The unfolding of the epidemic is still monitored
on a regular basis.
8 February 2020
The 2019-nCoV epidemic is updated on a daily basis, with more frequent
updates as required by its evolution. As a consequence of its
development the company AMAbiotics SAS will change its name to
Stellate Therapeutics. 2023: The company
ceased its activity in September 2023.
17 January 2020
Various updates about epidemics (Wuhan's coronavirus and H5N8 flu).
Modification of the note on Brown's
motion with direct link to his work.
1 january 2020
A disease similar to SARS
begins to develop in Wuhan, China. We will follow
up its development.
28 December 2019
Introduction of François-Vincent
Raspail in our history section, for his role
in stating that cells come from cells (omnis cellula e cellula).
However, while I found two articles by Raspail in the Annales
des Sciences Naturelles in 1825, I did not find the
explicit popular statement, despite the fact that Raspail used a
comparison with soap bubbles to state that in contrast to those which
do not generate bubbles, cells were making cells.
8 December 2019
Slight modifications of the .css style. Pages with old style are
replaced by novel ones, such as the CASB
or EFBIC
pages. The bibliography
is updated as is the lectures pages for lectures
in English (update of lectures delivered in Hong Kong in november) or
conférences
en Français.
11 October 2019
Pages are progressively cleaned up. We have now included a
page on the role of classification in constructing consistent
classes of living organisms.
5 August 2019
Many broken links are removed or modified if we could find an
equivalent. The lack of memory of the WWW is worrying because it leads
to 1984 « Doublethink » and the rewriting of history by the Ministry
of Truth. As in Big Brother's totalitarian world: « Who controls
the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the
past ».
4 August 2019
Minor changes in several pages, update of bibliographies, and
reference to the work of George Bentham is included
in our history pages: 1800-1849
and 1850-1874.
12 May 2019
At the suggestion of a knowledgeable reader, the entries about Joblot's
work are corrected in the history section, with addition of a link to
his Descriptions
et usages de plusieurs nouveaux microscopes, published in 1718,
with important first reflections about spontaneous generation.
2 May 2019
Addition of a new page on « motivated research » in French : recherche
motivée
30 April 2019
The index pages and summary
of
AD's work is now referring to Landauer's principle.
25 February 2019
A new page of
bibliography is added.
27 October 2018
Small corrections and updates of the lectures section.
28 August 2018
Some of the translation into French of sections of the history of
biology have been corrected.
23 August 2018
Several new definitions have been introduced in the glossary
(also in the 
glossaire) and broken or obsolete
links have been corrected or removed.
8 August 2018
The role of Wilhelm Busch
who use erysipela to treat cancer is introduced in our brief history
of biology.
8 May 2018
The Internet is extremely unstable as many links rapidly die off. We
had to delete links to the Xinhua agency during the SARS episode and
later on. In the same way the popular magazine Nature keeps changing
the way it allows access to its articles, systematically breaking
links. This is unfortunate as this precludes correct referencing of
historical events. A new page, in French, advocates for the study of humanities.
27 April 2018
A new page, focusing on the beginnings
of Synthetic Biology (US-EU task force in 2006) is created.
12 April 2018
We extend our code modifications to accomodate CSS flexboxes instead
of tables. This is considerably time-consuming and will be
progressively built up, especially as we enter new pages.
8 April 2018
We begin to modify all pages code to make them keyboard accessible.
This required slightly changing the overall format, including colour
contrast. Remaining typos are corrected at the same time, as much as
possible.
5 April 2018
A new
page in French (Formes
vivantes) is added to the site. It develops a reflection on
living forms, with important consequences for the theory of evolution
by natural selection.
4 April 2018
The underscore in page titles will progressively be replaced by a
dash. This begins with pages origine-fr and origine-en changed into origine-fr
and origine-en respectively.
Missing links are repaired or deleted across pages.
14
January 2018
The css style sheet of the site has been slightly modified to improve
readability while remaining consistent with the vast amount of
information made available to the interested reader.
2 January 2018
Improved links to the original site of the HKU-Pasteur Research Centre
Ltd. Tests for animation of some images.
22 November 2017
Small corrections of typos in several pages (many still remain).
Introduction of a text in French about the development
of genome studies at the Institut Pasteur.
24 April 2017
The general layout of the pages has been streamlined and it will
progressively be changed in all individual pages. However, the overall
constraints of WWW pages is for the time being based on the English
language and we will retain french (and some other languages) in a
significant part of the site, which does not fit with widespread
recommendations. For example here the index page (Accueil) is in
French, while standards recommend that it is labelled "HOME".
16 April 2017
Most images were compressed to speed up loading of the site. The code
of most pages was partially cleaned up to comply to recommendations of
the W3C as much as possible, considering that some pages are archives,
which were written at a time when standards were very different from
present ones
13 April 2017
Change of the name of the home page present at the archives site of
the HKU-Pasteur Research Centre Ltd from Home_HKU_P_RCL.html to
Home-HKUPRCL.html and update of all pages calling for this page.
11 April 2017
Input of a new page (in French) with the introduction of a report
of the GDR1029 "Informatique et Génomes" from the CNRS. This
page replaces an obsolete link pointing to the report, now
unavailable.
10 April 2017
The names of folders and pages at this site will progressively replace
underscores by dashes.
5 January 2017
Deletion of broken links. Unfortunately most of those associated to
news provided by media are no longer available and cannot be recovered
in any form.
