William I. Thomas

A High Through-put Platform for Recombinant Antibodies to Folded Proteins

Antibodies are key reagents in biology and medicine, but commercial sources are rarely recombinant and thus do not provide a permanent and renewable resource. Here, we describe an industrialized platform to generate antigens and validated recombinant antibodies for 346 transcription factors (TFs) and 211 epigenetic antigens. We describe an optimized automated phage display and antigen expression pipeline that in aggregate produced about 3000 sequenced Fragment antigen-binding domain that had high affinity (typically EC50<20 nm), high stability (Tm∼80 °C), good expression in E. coli (∼5 mg/L), and ability to bind antigen in complex cell lysates. We evaluated a subset of Fabs generated to homologous SCAN domains for binding specificities. These Fragment antigen-binding domains were monospecific to their target SCAN antigen except in rare cases where they cross-reacted with a few highly related antigens. Remarkably, immunofluorescence experiments in six cell lines for 270 of the TF antigens, each having multiple antibodies, show that ∼70% stain predominantly in the cytosol and ∼20% stain in the nucleus which reinforces the dominant role that translocation plays in TF biology. These cloned antibody reagents are being made available to the academic community through our web site recombinant-antibodies.org to allow a more system-wide analysis of TF and chromatin biology. We believe these platforms, infrastructure, and automated approaches will facilitate the next generation of renewable antibody reagents to the human proteome in the coming decade.

Race psychology: standpoint and questionnaire, with particular reference to the immigrant and the negro

? I. Problem and method.-a) The question of mental capacity from the standpoint of race has become of particular interest for America on account of the immigration situation and the presence of the Negro. In this connection it becomes important o determine how a race rises from one level of culture to another, whether by internal stimulation and native ability, or by accepting and imitating the culture of the higher level of society; and more particularly, which races are fit to progress and which are not, and why. b) I have in mind also the study of the backwardness and forwardness of different social groups in the same community and of the same racial composition. Every community contains different levels of population regardless of race, and in the large cities the cultural intervals are perhaps as wide as those we are accustomed to think of as characteristic of race. Indeed, backwardness on account of race cannot properly be estimated apart from backwardness within the race. The following plan for viewing and collecting materials is one which I have been using in connection with some investigations among the peasants of Europe and among the Negroes, and I present it, not as a contribution to theory, but as a tool. It is

The Psychology of Race-Prejudice

IN looking for an explanation of the antipathy which one race feels toward another, we may first of all inquire whether there are any conditions arising in the course of the biological development of a species which, aside from social activities, lead to a predilection for those of ones own kind and a prejudice against organically different groups. And we do, in fact, find such conditions. The earliest movements of animal life involve, in the rejection of stimulations vitally bad, an attitude which is the analogue of prejudice. On the principle of chemiotaxis, the microorganism will approach a particle of food placed in the water and shun a particle of poison; and its movements are similarly controlled by heat, light, electricity, and other tropic forces. The development of animal life from this point upward consists in the growth of structure and organs of sense adapted to discriminate between different stimulations, to choose between the beneficial and prejudicial, and to obtain in this way a more complete control of the environment. Passing over the lower forms of animal life, we find in the human type the power of attention, memory, and comparison highly developed, so that an estimate is put on stimulations and situations correspondent with the bearing of stimulations or situations of this type on welfare in the past. The choice and rejection involved in this process are accompanied by organic changes (felt as emotions) designed to

The Gaming Instinct

ALL classes of society, and the two sexes to about the same degree, are deeply interested in all forms of contest involving skill and chance, especially where the danger or risk is great. Everybody will stop to watch a street fight, and the same persons would show an equal interest in a prize-fight or bull-fight, if certain scruples did not stand in the way of their looking on. Our socially developed sympathy and pity may recoil from witnessing a scene where physical hurt is the object of the game, but the depth of our interest in the conflict type of activity is attested by the fascination which such a game as football has for the masses, where our instinctive emotional reaction to a conflict situation is gratified to an intense degree by a scene of the conflict pattern. If we examine, in fact, our pleasures and pains, our moments of elation and depression, we find that they go back for the most part to instincts developed in the struggle for food and rivalry for mates. We can perhaps best get at the meaning of the conflict interest to the organism in terms of the significance to itself of the organisms own movements. Locomotion, of whatever type, is primarily to enable the animal to reach and grasp food, and also to escape other animals bent on finding food. The structure of the organism has been built up gradually through the survival of the most efficient structures. Corresponding with a structure mechanically adapted to successful movements, there is developed on the psychic side an interest in the conflict situation as complete and perfect as is the structure itself. The emotional states are, indeed, organic preparations for action, corresponding broadly with a tendency to advance or retreat; and a connection has even been made out between pleasurable states and the extensor muscles, and painful states and the flexor muscles. We can have no adequate idea of the time consumed and the experiments made in nature before the development of these types of structure and interest of the conflict

The Province of Social Psychology

The conception of a social mind set forth in detail by Lazarus and Steinthal in the first issue of the Zeitschrift fur Volkerpsychologie forty-four years ago, and the conception of society as an organism elaborated in the same year by Herbert Spencer in his essay on The Social Organism, have given rise to much discussion as to whether there is a social mind or a social organism in any other than a figurative sense. Some of this discussion has been fantastic and futile, and there is at present apparently a general tendency to agree that the social organism is nothing more than a useful analogy, and that there is no social mind and no social psychology apart from individual mind and individual psychology. At the same time, the development of psychology and sociology during the past twenty ears has made it plain that the individual mind cannot be understood apart from the social environment, and that a society cannot be understood apart from the operation of individual mind; and there has grown up, or there is growing up, a social psychology whose study is the individual mental processes in so far as they are conditioned by society, and the social processes in so far as they are conditioned by states of consciousness. From this standpoint social psychology may make either the individual or society the object of attention at a given moment. Ethnology, history, and the phenomena of collective life in general are its subject-matter when they are viewed from the psychological standpoint-the standpoint of attention, interest, habit, cognition, emotion, will, etc. -and the individual becomes its subject-matter when we examine the effect on his consciousness of conditions of consciousness as found in other individuals or in society at large. Otherwise stated, the province of social psychology is the examination of the interaction of individual consciousness and society, and the effect of the interaction on individual consciousness on the one hand and on society on the 1 An address delivered at the International Congress of Arts and Science, Department of Sociology, September, 1904.

The Comparative Study of Cultures

The problems of individual and group adjustment are related to a cultural situation and therefore involve studies of cultures, of social organization and education, of the capacity and opportunity of the individual for adjustment, of the failures in adaptation, and of the changes in cultural situations which require continuous readjustment. As the social sciences become concerned with the problems of human behavior especially in its relation with problems of education, contacts of races and nationalities, crime and insanity, there is a renewed interest in the comparative examination of the specific cultural systems of racial and national groups and the behavior of individuals in special cultural situations. In this paper it is assumed (1) that the diversities in behavior are the result of different interpretations of experience rather than different levels in a uniform course of cultural evolution, (2) that the theories of difference in degrees of mental endowment among races and populations have not been sustained, and (3) that emphasis should be placed on the culture area rather than on the natural environment. The reaction of personalities to the cultural situation can best be approached in terms of the definition of the situation. On the social level these definitions are represented by moral and legal codes, political policies, organizations, and institutions. Culture epochs and mass conversions are inaugurated by the propaganda of definitions of the situations.

The Prussian-Polish Situation: An Experiment in Assimilation

The principle of primary or face-to-face relations, which Professor Cooley has made so useful to all of us, is one on which a society may best preserve its life so long as it can preserve a degree of isolation. Moreover, it is a type of relationship which, with its more immediate contacts, its loves and hates, its gossip and hospitality, its costumes, vanities, and self-sacrifices, lies nearer to the primal instincts and contains consequently more sentiment and warmth than is secured through the more abstract relations of the secondary group. In Southeastern and Slavic Europe I was more than once struck by the tendency of the individual of the higher cultural group to drop back into the lower. I am told that there is no case on record of a Magyarized Rumanian, but in Transylvania I met case after case of Rumanized Magyars. I remember particularly one village where an old Magyar woman, who spoke Rumanian very badly, insisted with vehemence, almost with tears, that she was a Rumanian, while the villagers winked and laughed. The Rumanian of this region stands only just above the Gipsy. Another striking fact in this eastern and southeastern fringe of Europe is that the lower cultural groups are, at least temporarily, pushing back those of the higher cultural levels. The Pole of Posen

La definición de la situación

The author explains that communicative definition of human situations is a chief factor in their respective development. The analysis of situations in social groups, communities and family forms must account for the phaenomenon in which the definition of the situation by these social groups will construct the reality they will live in. A legendary text of sociology, social psychology and socialconstructivism.