STANISLAS NORIA     唐戽水車     e-SEMINAR

Les Causeries du Jeudi
A Stanislas Noria seminar

Science is a social activity. It cannot be singled out from other human activities, although it has its own rationality. The Causeries du Jeudi (Thursday's chats) bring together scientists, laymen, artists, lawyers, poets, philosophers, who feel concerned by problems raised by biological knowledge (and in general human knowledge) for discussions on the chief concepts that make Biology as we now know it.

This seminar runs under the collective name Stanislas Noria (唐戽  水車 ). In the mid-1980s, when whole genome sequencing programs were implemented, Artificial Intelligence research (popularized by Douglas Hofstadter in his Gödel, Escher, Bach, published in 1979) was in full swing. We chose in 1989 the name Stanislas Noria, the acronym for Total Nucleic Acid Sequencing (STAN in French) New Orientation of Research in Artificial Intelligence (NORIA in French), to illustrate our participation in this effort in the domain of biology.

The origin of the seminar is a sequel of the participation of Antoine Danchin in the Centre Royaumont pour une Science de l'Homme. The seminar met on wednesday afternoon at the Institut de Biologie Physico-Chimique, IBPC, history in French) from 1971 to 1976. During these seminars, in the tradition of the seminars at the IBPC before the second world war, we decided to make predictions based on rational analysis of the situation of the world in 1974. We ended up with four predictions, three of which have been fully borne out 40 years later.

1. Because of the uncontrolled demographic explosion (China had not yet implemented its one child policy, quite the opposite), the consumption of energy based on coal and oil will result in global warming, with considerable changes in weather in many parts of the world
2. Because of rejection of ancestral customs, a contagious disease (in particular sex-borne) will become a pandemic
3. Because accidents are the rule, not the exception, there will be a nuclear accident with world-wide consequences
4. Because of the streamlining of genetic resources there will be a general loss of an important crop, with devastating consequences for food supply.

1-3 were massively substantiated, with: considerable weather change (1); AIDS caused by HIV, and today the COVID-19 pandemic, and the monkeypox epidemic of 2022 shows that man has still not understood anything and is unable to anticipate (2); and several nuclear accidents (Three Miles Island, Tchernobyl and Fukushima Daichi).
4 is not yet fully developed. However we have indications that this will happen: elms all but disappeared in Europe; many types of fish are no longer available on many open markets (typically: eels, red tuna, cod, etc), flat oysters are now very rare, some types of fruit are no longer available (Passe-Crassane pear, for example) and the most worrying at this time is banana, because it is a staple food in many parts of the world.

All this indicates that rational analysis is really worth developing, to counteract the catastrophic role of fake news propagated by anonymous social networks and by the generally uneducated public. However, it is important to understand that no practice is with no risk. In practice, because accidents are the rule, not the exception, we must prepare for accidents and their consequences. When developing a new technology, from the outset, accidents should be taken into consideration, allowing the promoters of the technology to know what they will do when an accident happens.

Because language becomes critical when one departs strictly from the most esoteric science, our discussions use several tongues. Started in French in the early nineties, they are now held mostly in English (sometimes in Cantonese!, when held in Hong Kong), but some discussions still go on in French. It should be remembered here that, in contrast to Anglo-American cultures, Latin civilisations (especially in Italy and Portugal, but in France also) do not split between Science, Arts and Literature (see CP Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution). It is therefore natural that any ongoing reflection of the very basis of Science (which is deeply rooted in language, and therefore in semantics, see Keith Chen for a fairly extreme but documented view) is pursued not only in English, but in other languages as well. It should be remembered that the 2000 Nobel Prize winner in Literature Gao Xingjian 高行健, writes not only in Chinese, but also in French... Whereas radical empiricism fits well with English (facts first, demonstration later), the basis of what makes Science (a kind of rational thinking build on hypotheses and deductions) is hypothesis-driven, and in this endeavour languages such as French, Greek or Italian (and in its own special way, German) may appear to be much more appropriate. The case of Chinese is very original there, and has to be entirely re-constructed, from the holistic point of view which is its own native feature. This is one of the endeavours of the Causeries.

These causeries are a revival of the discussions of the Centre Royaumont pour une Science de l'Homme, initiated in the early seventies mostly by Jacques Monod (1910-1976). This Centre unfortunately disappeared after Monod's untimely death. This took place at the time of the destruction, in most Western countries where it still existed, of an education system based on Humanities. For this reason it became incongruous, if not plainly obscene, to speak of philosophy (or poetry) inside a "hard-science" laboratory. However, in the early nineties, there was a first hint that young scientists became interested again in the reasons underlying their own endeavours. This is what prompted the organisation of a weekly meeting in the Regulation of Gene Expression Unit at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, where people interested in the nature of Science would come and discuss general issues. This was at a time when a programme with Chinese Universities, as well as the University of Bologna in Italy, were experimenting an unconventional exploration of anthropological studies of the West by Non-Westerners. This programmed stemmed from a conference organized in november 1983 by Anne Retel-Laurentin, that gave rise to a wealth of studies with fairly undefined conceptual background. For two years, the discussion was centered on a presentation of the Presocratic Philosophers, starting with the observation that the quotation of Democritus which made the title of the famous book of Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity, was apocryphous, and entirely foreign to the Greek spirit. Subsequently, the major theme of the Causeries was the concept of function. The discussion was initiated by Yves Brette, a former manager of the Bull Company, who spoke about the nature of the functions of human artefacts. From then on the discussion focused on many topics, ranging from Aristotelian philosophy, Cassirer, Leibniz, to concrete issues in functional genomics, and genome annotation. At the onset of the founding of the HKU-Pasteur Centre the discussion was moved to Hong Kong, where it began with a discussion about the nature of Science and knowledge in Europe and in Eastern countries.

During years 2001-2002 and until march 2003, the causeries were held at the Department of Mathematics of the University of Hong Kong, as Working Seminar - Conceptualized Biology: first steps to define what life is (2^nd Series - 2002-2003). They started again at the Institut Pasteur in october 2003. In Paris, this working seminar was temporarily interrupted. Several ongoing efforts were nevertheless developing in parallel: the conference Le Logique et le Biologique held at the University Paris I on april 22^nd 2005 is an illustration (summarized in our presentation). Since 2006 the discussions have resumed a more regular course, with conferences, seminars and discussions in Paris and in Hong Kong. A central focus at the time is Symplectic (Synthetic) Biology. This work was followed up by the creation of an open access journal, Symplectic Biology. This journal failed to develop in a context where Open Access publication has suddenly become extremely lucrative (authors pay for being published, in a move not different from advertisement), so that hundreds, then thousands of new predatory journals have been created, and keep being created (as of march 2013).

Hence this E-seminar is the only ongoing outcome of our effort to promote Symplectic Biology. After each discussion a summary is written, sent by E-mail to former participants as well as to persons interested in the discussion, all over the world, who wish to participate.

Why subscribe

The "causeries" are meant to be an open forum, but not a chat room or a general unregulated forum where anybody can attend. In fact, it is expected that there is some participation of everybody in the discussion - more like mediaeval disputatii - and we assume that there is some progress made in the definition of "prospective" notions (to take the word of John Myhill), coming out from our common work. For this reason, we must be sure that people connected are really interested, and that they have a constructive approach to the discussion. This is why we ask everybody to register, and we discuss whether we accept any newcomer in the discussion group. It is also admitted that not all summaries, contents etc will be in English: multilingual discussions are encouraged... It must also be understood that, because some may be interested for a while, then no longer interested, we shall from time to time ask whether participants are still interested and unregister those who do not answer positively.

Note that a public (copyright) summary of the causeries is regularly published in the form articles in peer-reviewed journals, where the contribution of the Stanislas Noria network is acknowledged. These summaries began with the text of the comments on the Presocratic philosophers discussed in the early nineties (in French), as well as a summary of the discussion on the scientific method (in English, and hopefully, in Chinese when the text will be available).

Ethics

Science has to be placed in a moral context. It cannot escape ethical choices.

The novel aspect of Biology, which is described under the name "Synthetic Biology", but which we prefer to name "Symplectic Biology" has scientific important consequences, but as a social practice it needs to answer ethical questions. The main ideas behind this approach, reconstruction, abstraction, and engineering does not pose major ethical questions (under the helm of ethics of creation of knowledge, a typical human activity) until it leads to applications, that may be the subject of venal exchanges, or of unethical use (such as warfare or terrorism).

See hearing at the XXXII^nd Meeting of the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies (EGE)

Science and China

Qu'est-ce qui rend Auguste Comte si étrange et si "chinois"
What makes Auguste Comte so strange and so "Chinese"?

Role of spoken language in knowledge

Publications with Stanislas Noria

A Danchin, PM Binder, S Noria
Antifragility and tinkering in biology (and in business): Flexibility provides an efficient epigenetic way to manage risk
Genes (2011), 2: 998-1016; doi:10.3390/genes2040998

	S Noria, A Danchin
	Just so genome stories: what does my neighbor tell me
	Proceedings of the Uehara Memorial Foundation Symposium: Genome Science: towards a new paradigm? H Yoshikawa, N Ogasawara, N Satoh, eds. Elsevier Science BV (2002) International congress series 1246: 3-13

A Danchin, G Fang, S Noria
The extant core bacterial proteome is an archive of the origin of life
Proteomics (2007) 7: 875-889  

S Noria
Challenge n°1: Is the synteny around the pyrH gene in bacterial genomes significant?
Symplectic Biology (2010) 1: c390t9c12uxx.1

A Danchin, A Sekowska, S Noria
Chapter 5. Functional requirements in the program and the cell chassis for next-generation synthetic biology pp. 81-108
In: Synthetic Biology: Parts, Devices and Applications (2018) Christina Smolke (Editor)
Sang Yup Lee (Series Editor), Jens Nielsen (Series Editor), Gregory Stephanopoulos (Series Editor), Wiley
doi:10.1002/9783527688104.ch5      ISBN: 978-3-527-68808-1