Word: organisms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Coordinating Organ...
...House Organ. A crusty, demanding journalist who works in a cloud of cigar smoke, Thompson, 66, stipulated that the magazine was not to become a house organ of the Smithsonian; he has maintained a wary distance from the Institution's staffers. Thompson was instructed that "we should be interested in the kinds of things the Smithsonian is interested in." Says he: "I added to that, 'the kinds of things the Smithsonian should be interested...
...took man centuries to comprehend that there was a miraculous mechanism in side his head and begin to in vestigate its workings. Aristotle taught his pupils that the brain was merely a radiator or cooling system for the blood; he identified the heart as the organ of thought. Pliny the Elder was one of the first to identify the brain as "the citadel of sense perception." But nei ther he nor generations of scientists who followed him had the knowledge or techniques to explore it. Investigation was also stymied by philosophical obstacles. The brain was considered the seat...
...embarked on a great voyage of discovery. In dozens of lab oratories in cities round the world, psychologists, biologists, physicists and chemists, recognizing that what goes on inside the brain cannot be divorced from what goes on outside, in increasing numbers are poking, prodding and analyzing the organ in an attempt to unlock its secrets. Man has split the atom, cracked the genetic code and, in a Promethean step unimaginable less than a quarter-century ago, leaped from his own terrestrial home to the moon. But he has yet to solve the mysteries of memory, learning and consciousness or managed...
None of those engaged in neuroscientific research underestimate the difficulty of reaching that understanding, for the brain is an organ of enormous complexity. While a sophisticated electronic computer can store and recall some 100 billion "bits" of information, for example, the capacity of the brain seems infinite. The computer can make out a payroll, compute the trajectory of a spacecraft or figure the odds against drawing a straight flush far faster than any human. But the computer is, after all, a machine, capable of doing only what its human builders tell...