My Language Autobiography and Critical Reflections

Reflections on my family history, my youth, and my professional career. Autobiography.

Editors’ Introduction The following reminiscence by Gabriele M. Zu Rhein is the seventh autobiography in a series published in the Journal of Neuropathology and Experimental Neurology. These have been solicited from senior members of the neuropathology community who have been noted leaders and contributors to neuroscience and to the American Association of Neuropathologists (AANP) and have a hi...

De Casteljau's autobiography: My time at Citroën

My first contact with Citroën had nothing in common with an entry accompanied by a brass band, so there is absolutely no reason to brag about it. My vague scientific recollection had turned into a faint blur in Algeria, and the advertisement of a job vacancy, for which I was foolhardy enough to apply for, described individuals who resembled everything else which I was not myself. When Monsieur ...

My Evolutionary Trajectory: notes towards an intellectual autobiography

The present essay is an attempt to make a global assessment of the things I have achieved up to now during my academic career. This is an excellent occasion for me to summarize and review a research trajectory that is very wide-ranging and multidisciplinary, and that therefore may seem to lack focus, but that actually has been driven by a constant interest in the self-organization of complexity...

Reflections on my daughter's DNA

I have spent the last 11 years seeking those answers on behalf of my daughter Beatrice. Our third child, Beatrice or Bea, was born in 2003 with contracted fingers (arthropgryposis) andwide eyes (hypertelorism). The attending pediatrician noted shewas a bit floppy. Yet no connections among these or other clinical findings were known to medicine. Those highly directed, system-specific physical ex...

Critical Reflections on Regulation