The illicit fentanyl epidemic in the US impacts all three dimensions of sustainability: social, economic, and environmental.  Increases in CDC-reported deaths due to fentanyl poisoning from ~3,000 in 2013, up to ~73,000 in 2023 caught the US by surprise.  This increase and the large number of deaths prompts many people to speak up, including those lobbying the US Congress. 

Simultaneously, reported US Border Patrol seizures have increased so that in 2023, over 24,000 pounds of illicit fentanyl were seized.  Considering that 2 mg will kill a person, that amount is more than sufficient to kill every person in the US 18 times.

These statistics impact the US in each of the three dimensions of sustainability. These will be discussed. 

The foundations of YILDIRIM Group date back to 1963, when the late Garip Yıldırım established a modest construction materials trading company called Garip Yıldırım and Sons in Samsun, located in the northern region of Türkiye.

The Group has continuously broadened its focus through new subsidiaries since its establishment. By entrepreneurship and constant innovation, it has evolved into an industrially diversified group of companies as well as one of the fastest-growing Turkish industrial groups since 2005.

YILDIRIM Group is a family-owned business, held 100% privately by the YILDIRIM Family. Since 2018, brothers Ali Riza Yıldırım and Robert Yüksel Yıldırım are managing the company's operations, after the losses of founder Garip Yildirim and brother of the second generation Mehmet Yıldırım in 2017.

YILDIRIM's business structure ensures passionate motivation for sustainable growth as well as quick and sound decision-making capabilities. YILDIRIM Group embarked on international trade first time in 1993, importing coal directly from Russia. 15 years later, the company completed its first international acquisition in Sweden in 2008.

Following the breakthrough, YILDIRIM Group has grown to become a global force based in istanbul and Amsterdam with operations 56 countries on 5 continents, employing more than 25,000 people. Actively growing its business in 9 different industries such as metals and mining, port management, fertilizers and chemicals, energy, shipping and logistics, international trade, energy commodities, construction and real estate, financial investments.

Based on evidence in basic experiments, animal experiments, and clinical research, an antioxidant complex Twendee X® (TwX) is recognized as the most effective at protecting mitochondria without any side effects. TwX has already proved its preventive effects on dementia, chronic fatigue syndrome, sleep apnea, allergies (asthma, atopic dermatitis), systemic scleroderma, acne, diabetes, pancreatitis, cataract, infertility, male sexual functions, ulcerative colitis, cancers, and so on.

We are now approaching diseases which are difficult to treat using conventional antioxidant therapy and pharmaceutical products: (1) Reperfusion syndrome: Massive oxidative stress damage after reperfusion therapy for ischemic heart attack and brain stroke. (2) Mental and brain diseases: depression, epilepsy, schizophrenia. (3) Otorhinolaryngological diseases: vertigo, persistent postural-perceptual dizziness, tinnitus, hearing loss. In all these diseases, symptoms and oxidative stress are fundamentally correlated. Using the antioxidant effects of TwX, we aim to prevent and treat such diseases, as well as to spread the importance of antioxidant therapy.

COVID-19 pandemic showed that besides important medical aspects at play, the bioethics at the interface between state-of-the-art technology and the sick human patient is equally important. Some of the ethical issues related to the pandemic are analysed in this presentation. They are: (1) treatment priorities, (2) neglected subjects such diseases, climate changes etc…(3) vaccination and its related skepticism and disinformation as well as its availability and affordability, (4) infodemic (misinformation and disinformation) and (5) inequality, discrimination and racism. The proper conclusions are drawn for each aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Deamidation of the asparagine has been linked to oxidative stress in multiple areas of the body, such as red blood cells.

However, since 2007 when it was discovered that 4E-BP2 undergoes deamidation, there has been no credible explanation as to why deamidation of 4E-BP2 happens only in neural tissue. This is of seminal importance, because explaining what causes a post-translational modification in the brain of all mammalian species, which has been conserved for over 90 million years opens the road for curing all neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and many others.

In this work, we discovered a complete neurobiological mechanism of 4E-BP2 deamidation which explains why deamidation of 4E-BP2 happens only in neural tissue and demystifies many other aspects of deamidation. 

Three discoveries were made as part of this mechanism: (1) 4E-BP2 deamidation happens only in neurons because the 4E-BP2 protein half-life is longer than the Asparagines 99 and 102 half-lives (2) Axons are the cause of the increase of 4E-BP2 half-life in neurons and (3) proteasome-poor environment in axons is the cause of the increase of 4E-BP2 half-life. These discoveries were experimentally validated by doing 4E-BP2 western blots in five different organs: the whole brain, the optic nerve, the retinal ganglia, the sciatic nerve and the dorsal root ganglia, among which 4E-BP2 western blots on the optic nerve, the retinal ganglia and the sciatic nerve were performed for the first time ever in this work.

The experimental results demonstrated deamidation is found to be significantly higher in axons compared to cell-body enriched ganglia in both the central and the peripheral nervous systems. This shows that deamidation in the 4E-BP2 protein is linked to its presence in the axon. 

SIPS, that stands for Sustainability through Science and Technology, is firmly based on FLOGEN Sustainability Framework which has 3 criteria that must be fulfilled simultaneously to achieve sustainability: Economic Growth, Environmental Protection and Social Development. The framework has three actors that can either help or hinder sustainability: Science and Technology, Governance and Management and Education and Civil Society. These actors can be viewed as 3 pillars of a table. This paper will show that SIPS has science and technology in forefront as an actor to achieve sustainability in each of its criteria but includes also the other 2 pillars since they are equally important as the pillars of a table with three pillars.  All components of Science and Technology (both fundamental and applied) and components of Governance and Management and Education and Civil Society are shown and analyzed as integral part of SIPS content.     

SIPS, that stands for Sustainability through Science and Technology, is firmly based on FLOGEN Sustainability Framework which has 3 criteria that must be fulfilled simultaneously to achieve sustainability: Economic Growth, Environmental Protection and Social Development. The framework has three actors that can either help or hinder sustainability: Science and Technology, Governance and Management and Education and Civil Society. These actors can be viewed as 3 pillars of a table. This paper will show that SIPS has science and technology in forefront as an actor to achieve sustainability in each of its criteria but includes also the other 2 pillars since they are equally important as the pillars of a table with three pillars.  All components of Science and Technology (both fundamental and applied) and components of Governance and Management and Education and Civil Society are shown and analyzed as integral part of SIPS content.     

SIPS, that stands for Sustainability through Science and Technology, is firmly based on FLOGEN Sustainability Framework which has 3 criteria that must be fulfilled simultaneously to achieve sustainability: Economic Growth, Environmental Protection and Social Development. The framework has three actors that can either help or hinder sustainability: Science and Technology, Governance and Management and Education and Civil Society. These actors can be viewed as 3 pillars of a table. This paper will show that SIPS has science and technology in forefront as an actor to achieve sustainability in each of its criteria but includes also the other 2 pillars since they are equally important as the pillars of a table with three pillars.  All components of Science and Technology (both fundamental and applied) and components of Governance and Management and Education and Civil Society are shown and analyzed as integral part of SIPS content.         

Prospective studies of transfusion-associated hepatitis (TAH) at the Clinical Center, NIH sequentially demonstrated the following: 1) inordinately high rates of TAH in heavily transfused open-heart surgery patients, exceeding 30% prior to 1970; 2) demonstration that the high risk was directly related to the donor source wherein paid donors represented a 7-fold higher risk than volunteer donors; 3) the combined implementation of an all-volunteer donor system and introduction of first-generation donor screening for hepatitis B surface antigen resulted in a 70% reduction in TAH; 4) the discovery that most cases of TAH were unrelated to the hepatitis A or B viruses, leading to the designation non-A, non-B hepatitis (NANBH); 5) liver biopsy evidence that NANBH could lead to cirrhosis and liver-related death; 6) proof that the agent of NANBH and the cloned hepatitis C virus (HCV) were identical; 7) demonstration that the introduction of donor screening for antibody to HCV combined with less volumes of transfused blood could virtually eradicate TAH as documented from 1997-2010. Additional studies showed that that the common persistence of HCV was predominantly due the hypervariability of the agent (viral quasispecies) and an inadequate T cell immune response. It also became clear that chronic HCV infection and cirrhosis were associated with, and a major cause of, hepatocellular carcinoma. The introduction of HCV-specific direct acting antivirals in 2014 has revealed that 95%-100% of chronic HCV infection is curable with an 8-12 week course of oral therapy with virtually no significant side effects. We are thus at a point where a test-and-treat strategy could eliminate HCV infection on a global scale. That such is possible has already been demonstrated in Egypt where over 60,000,000 were tested and over 2 million cured after being found HCV-infected.   

Each of the fifty trillion cells in the adult human body require a continuous supply of O₂. Hypoxia-inducible factors (HIFs) maintain O₂ homeostasis by modulating the expression of thousands of genes in order to match O₂ supply and demand. HIFs are heterodimeric transcription factors that consist of an O₂-regulated subunit (HIF-1a, HIF-2a or HIF-3a) and a constitutively-expressed subunit (HIF-1b). The HIF-a subunits are subject to O₂-dependent modification by prolyl hydroxylase domain proteins (PHD1-3), leading to binding of the von Hippel-Lindau (VHL) protein and subsequent ubiquitination and degradation. In mice, homozygosity for a knockout allele at the Hif1a locus leads to embryonic lethality at mid-gestation with defects in cardiogenesis, erythropoiesis, and  vascularization, indicating that HIF-1a is required for development of all three components of the circulatory system. In humans, the von Hippel-Lindau syndrome is an autosomal-dominant tumor predisposition syndrome, in which affected individuals have a loss- of-function mutation in one VHL allele and the other allele is inactivated in the tumor tissue leading to cerebellar and retinal hemangioblastoma and clear cell-type renal cell carcinomas due to dysregulated HIF activity. Belzutifan, a drug that binds to HIF-2a and blocks its dimerization with HIF-1b, is a highly effective treatment for RCC and other tumors in patients with VHL syndrome. Individuals with hereditary erythrocytosis, which is characterized by excess red blood cells, pulmonary hypertension, and thrombosis, were found to have germline homozygosity for a missense mutation in VHL that reduces but does not eliminate its ability to bind to hydroxylated HIF-1 subunits. The residual VHL activity is sufficient to prevent tumor formation but insufficient to regulate HIF activity. In other patients, a mutation in PHD2 or HIF-2a that decreases hydroxylation of the latter by the former have been identified. The prolyl hydroxylases use a-ketoglutarate as a cosubstrate and drugs that compete with a-ketoglutarate for binding to the hydroxylases, such as Daprodustat, increase erythropoietin expression, thereby increasing red blood cell production in patients with anemia due to chronic kidney disease. Thus, HIF inhibitors are useful for treating cancer and HIF stabilizers are approved for the treatment anemia. 

Natural resources are being exploited three times as much as they were 50 years ago and 80% of the world's energy is still derived from fossil fuels. It has become inevitable that hundreds of millions of people will have to leave their homes in the coming decades because of  the climate catastrophe The decade in which we find ourselves will be decisive. The time has come to rethink the way we negotiate in order to integrate efficiency and speed into the plurality of exchanges. Collaboration and cooperation will have to be stepped up to an extraordinary level of efficiency in order to create new pathways towards a global climate contract. The creation of an International Unit of environmental Mediation has become an imperative necessity.

Keeping a vegetable garden in an area surrounded by wildlife – a personal perspective of sustainability Humans, from the perspective of animals, are the intruders.  Deer, bears, foxes, rabbits, moles, groundhogs, wild turkeys still roam on the four acres of my land in the Berkshires.  No sign will stop them; nothing but a fence.  Homebuilt fences do not survive the onslaught of winters; commercial ones are almost as expensive as a subscription to farm goods for the rest of our lives -- as much as we can guess.  
Let us widen the perspective and think about plants. Again we are the intruders with our monocultures of grass, with our arbitrary definition of weeds.  The late E.O. Wilson wrote a book entitled Half-Earth:  It’s too late to save our planet in its entirety, let’s at least preserve half of it. Biodiversity is something precious to be saved.  Can we do this on a small scale?  Of our four acres, we actually use one and keep the other three wild.
This and other aspects of local sustainability will be the subject of my – wild-- ruminations.

Today’s materials are predominantly defined by their properties which are independent of time and environment. In many cases, such stability is useful, as it makes the behaviour of devices based on such materials robust and predictable. But what if we had a free hand to design any materials we want, with any properties we want – what kind of materials from our dreams we would design?

One of the dreams are materials which have some characteristics of biological systems: those with self-healing capabilities, with memory functions, those which can evolve differently depending on external conditions. I will be discussing the methodologies to design such artificial living systems and the areas of their applications.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, messenger RNA became familiar to everyone. This lecture begins by exploring the three essential molecules of life - DNA, RNA, and proteins. It then delves into the history of these molecules over the past 80 years, highlighting how knowledge about them was acquired and ultimately led to the development of our current vaccines. The lecture also draws important conclusions from each case.

The evolution of the universe has generated more and more complex forms of matter through self-organization, from particles up to living and thinking matter. Mankind has created science to unravel the ways and means by which matter has become organized up to a thinking organism in particular on our planet earth. Self-organization is the process by which steps towards life and thought have emerged. Animate as well as inanimate matter, living organisms as well as materials, are formed of molecules and of the organized entities resulting from the interaction of molecules with each other. Chemistry provides the bridge and unravels the steps from the molecules of inanimate matter and the highly complex molecular architectures and systems which make up living and thinking organisms. Molecular chemistry has developed very powerful methods for constructing ever more complex molecules from atoms. Supramolecular chemistry seeks to understand and control the formation and behaviour of complex molecular assemblies. The field of chemistry is the universe of all possible structures and transformations of molecular matter, of which those actually realized in nature represent just one world among all the worlds that await to be created.  Conceptual considerations on science in general will be presented. 

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Over the last half-century, significant progress has been made in the field of medicine and healthcare. Notable achievements include significantly enhanced methods for preventing cardiovascular and other ailments, high-resolution imaging technologies that aid in early disease detection, as well as the development of effective new medications. These advancements are attributed to scientific research and development efforts carried out in academic and industrial settings. This review aims to explore the impact of two types of research – basic and applied investigation – on advancements in medical treatment. Using specific examples, it will demonstrate that major innovations within health-related industries consistently stem from important discoveries in basic biomedical sciences.

Ageing is driven by the inexorable and stochastic accumulation of damage in biomolecules vital for proper cellular function. Although this process is fundamentally haphazard and uncontrollable, senescent decline and ageing is broadly influenced by genetic and extrinsic factors. Numerous gene mutations and treatments have been shown to extend the lifespan of diverse organisms ranging from the unicellular yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae to primates. It is becoming increasingly apparent that most such interventions ultimately interface with cellular stress response mechanisms, suggesting that longevity is intimately related to the ability of the organism to effectively cope with both intrinsic and extrinsic stress. Key determinants of this capacity are the molecular mechanisms that link ageing to main stress response pathways. How each pathway contributes to modulate the ageing process is not fully elucidated. Mitochondrial impairment is a major hallmark of several age-related neurodegenerative pathologies, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Accumulation of damaged mitochondria has been observed in post-mortem brains of Alzheimer’s disease patients. Mitophagy is a selective type of autophagy mediating elimination of damaged mitochondria, and the major degradation pathway, by which cells regulate mitochondrial number in response to their metabolic state. Little is known about the role of mitophagy in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease. We find that neuronal mitophagy is impaired in animal models of Alzheimer’s disease. Indeed, mitophagy stimulation restores learning and memory capacity, in these animals. Moreover, age-dependent decline of mitophagy both inhibits removal of dysfunctional or superfluous mitochondria and impairs mitochondrial biogenesis resulting in progressive mitochondrial accretion and, consequently, deterioration of cell function. Our observations indicate that defective removal of damaged mitochondria is a pivotal event in neurodegeneration. These findings highlight mitophagy as a potential target for the development of innovative, effective therapeutic interventions towards battling human neurodegenerative disorders.

MicroRNAs are small non-coding RNAs that regulate gene expression to control important aspects of development and metabolism such as cell differentiation, apoptosis and lifespan. miR-21, miR-155, let-7 and miR-34 are microRNAs implicated in human cancer. Specifically, human let-7 and miR-34 are poorly expressed or deleted in different cancers such as breast (TNBC) and lymphoma (DLBCL), and over-expression of let-7 or miR-34 in cancer cells inhibits their growth, demonstrating a role for these miRNAs as tumor suppressors in human tissue. let-7 and miR-34 regulate the expression of important oncogenes and immune checkpoint genes implicated in multiple cancers, suggesting a mechanism for their involvement in cancer. We are focused on the role of these genes in regulating proto-oncogene expression during development and cancer, and on using mimics to these miRNAs to suppress tumorigenesis. In contrast, miR-21 and miR-155 are oncomiRs and up-regulated in many cancer types. We are also developing effective strategies to target these miRNAs as a novel anti-cancer approach. Lastly, we are examining the non-coding portions of the genome for mutations and variants that are likely to impact the cancer phenotype. We have successfully resequenced the 3’UTRome and microRNAome from cancer patients, including those with a family history of cancer to identify the next generation of cancer biomarkers and targets.

This presentation will offer an in-depth overview of Şişecam, one of the global leaders in the glass industry, showcasing its diverse areas of operation, extensive global footprint, cutting-edge production technologies, and strong commitment to sustainability. Operating across multiple sectors such as flat glass, glassware, glass packaging, glass fiber, and chemicals, Şişecam continuously innovates to meet the evolving demands of the global market. With production facilities in 14 countries and a sales network that spans over 150 markets, Şişecam has established a robust global presence, positioning itself as a key player in the international glass industry. The company's production technologies are state-of-the-art, incorporating advanced processes that not only enhance efficiency but also significantly reduce environmental impact.

A focal point of this presentation will be Şişecam's "Plant of the Future" initiative, a transformative business model which prioritizes low-carbon emission technologies, including the development of electric and hybrid furnaces, alternative combustion technologies, and carbon capture solutions. These efforts, aimed at reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions, not only reinforce Şişecam's commitment to sustainability but also highlight the importance of collective action within the glass industry to address the shared challenge of decarbonization. By encouraging collaboration and developing shared solutions, the "Plant of the Future" demonstrates how such efforts can lead the industry toward lower carbon emissions and a more sustainable operational model.