Nauka

In 16-18th century Poland there were few trials of blasphemy, including interferences into Church services or processions. the severe verdicts, capital punishment included, were rarely executed. The most frequently punished for an outrage against Catholic religious feelings were plebeians. No special attention was paid to the possible offences committed by noblemen and magnates. Thus, nothing happened to Erazm Otwinowski who in 1564 trampled on a monstrance torn out from a priest leading a procession. A Calvinist Marcin Kreza who also committed such an offence in 1580 went unpublished too. At the end of century Stefan Łowejko, who publicly manifested his atheism, was not even imprisoned. Although in 1785 a young magnate Henryk Niemirycz, who publicly profaned a host, was sentenced to death. He survived because he left the country. As it shows a coat of arms usually was a good protection against the administration of justice, even in denominational matters.

The article is devoted to the development of Polish sociology from the 19th century until the period of the Second Republic, when sociology became an established academic field. The first Polish sociologists studied sociology at various European universities, but later worked in different professions i.e., Supinski was an owner of a textile weaving shop, Krupinski was a priest and a teacher, while Limanowski, Świetochowski and Krzywicki worked as journalists. Their sociological interest was secondary to their professional life. What is interesting is that they first joined European sociological institutions as members of the Institut international de sociologie (The International Institute of Sociology), gave papers at international Sociological congresses and only much later spoke at Polish conferences. They published in „Annee sociologique” and „Revue international de sociologie.” At times they also taught at different European universities, for example Gumplowicz taught at the University of Grazu and Petrazycki in the St. Petersurg University. The first sociology programs were established in Poland after it regained its independence: in 1920 Leon Petrazycki was appointed chair of sociology at the University of Warsaw and Ludwik Krzywicki was appointed chair of a program called the history of socio-political systems. Sociology was treated then as an auxiliary academic field for the study of law. Sociology as an autonomous field was first created in Poznan and its main inspirer was Florian Znaniecki. Not until the second decade of the Second Republic was sociology established as a separate department at the universities in Kraków and Warsaw. At the wake of the WWII sociology was a well established academic field in Poland with its own programs of study, research intstitutes, scholarly journals and a professional association of practitioners.

The contemporary warfare seems to have great influence on the way social sciences position themselves within the socio-political contexts of today. This is being implemented in many cases by the geopolitical context of 9/11 and the fall of former centers of power (end of the Cold War). Cultural anthropology, which shared a similar dilemma in the formative period of its own history provides us today with one of the most controversial examples in this matter. The program initiated by US Army back in 2006 called Human Terrain System started a wide spread debate on ethical issues regarding doing ethnographic fieldwork in a militarized landscape. HTS became thus a field of intellectual and political polemics between certain groups of researches. The academic and political debate on HTS seems to be put in a post-colonial context as a new form of mixing of science and ideology. This paper tackles the problem of emergence of a new type of anthropological understanding of the cultural other and as well its own methods and ethical standards in a situation, where crisis seems to be a permanent state of the discipline and the world its trying to describe.

To accept science as a tool of cognition of this what is unknown, and teaching which serves popularization of knowledge in society, the scientific committees of PAS should integrate scientists within the Country and on the background of world science progress. However, scientific associations should propagate their field knowledge and join and consolidate researchers and people within the area of their interest. To realize this, the scientific committees must represent all scientific centers in our Country and all research directions and so called schools of research. Because of this, the procedure of election of the committees’ representatives has to be changed.

A gigantic amounts of data and information on molecules that constitute the very complex cell machinery have been collected, classified and stored in data banks. Although we posses enormous amount of knowledge about the properties and functions of thousands of molecular entities, we are still far from understanding how they do work in a living cell. It is clear now that these molecules (genes, proteins) are not autonomous, that there is no direct linear relation between genotype and phenotype, and that the majority of functions are carried and executed by concerted molecular activity, and that the majority of diseases are multifactorial. A basic property of the matter in a living cell (both normal and pathologic) is an interaction between variety of macromolecules, mainly proteins, genes (DNA) etc. In a process of self-organization they are able to form an active molecular biologic system – a complex, labile and dynamic network which integrity is secured by non-covalent bounds. In this essay some basic properties of network structure and the universal rules that govern them are described. Network or system biology is promising new research approach in biology and medicine.