Publications by authors named "I V Fry"

Background: Around one in ten adults take antidepressants for depression in England, and their long-term use is increasing. Some need them to prevent relapse, but 30-50% could possibly stop them without relapsing and avoid adverse effects and complications of long-term use. However, stopping is not always easy due to withdrawal symptoms and a fear of relapse of depression.

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Is science metaphysically neutral?

Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci

September 2012

This paper challenges the claim that science is metaphysically neutral upheld by contenders of the separation of peacefully co-existent science and religion and by evolutionary theists. True, naturalistic metaphysical claims can neither be refuted nor proved and are thus distinct from empirical hypotheses. However, metaphysical assumptions not only regulate the theoretical and empirical study of nature, but are increasingly supported by the growing empirical body of science.

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It is commonly accepted among origin-of-life scientists that the emergence of life was an evolutionary process involving at one stage or other the working of natural selection. Researchers disagree, however, on the nature of the chemical infrastructure that could have formed prebiotically, enabling the evolutionary process. The division of the origin-of-life research community into 'geneticists' and 'metabolists' usually revolves around the issue whether the first to arise prebiotically was a genetic polymer or a primitive metabolic system.

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Most scientists at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century chose to ignore the question of the origin of life on Earth, regarding it as too mysterious and complex to handle. Yet, in the early 1950s an experimental field devoted to the study of the problem made its first steps. The pioneering theories of several scientists in the first decades of the 20th century played a major role in this transformation, notably those of the Russian biochemist Alexander I.

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Plasmids found in six strains of Thiobacillus ferrooxidans were mapped and compared in an effort to detect the origin of replication. Four strains yielded an identical 9.8-kb plasmid, pTFI91.

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