Polish Greatness

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Świętosławski WOJCIECH ALOJZY, born on June 21, 1881, Kiryjówka (Ukraine), d. 29 IV 1968, Warsaw,
Polish physicochemist.

He was born on June 21, 1881 in Kiryjówka (Ukraine).In the period 1911-18, Świętosławski was an employee of a university in Moscow;1919-39 and 1946-51 professor at the Warsaw University of Technology (1928-29 its rector.), 1947-60 - University of Warsaw.In the years 1940-46 he stayed in the USA: 1940-41 he was a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, 1941-46 - Institute of Industrial Research Mellon in Pittsburgh.In the period 1947-60 he managed the Physicochemical Department of the Institute of General Chemistry in Warsaw (currently the Institute of Industrial Chemistry named after I. Mościcki), was the organizer and in 1955-60 the first director of the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.
In 1928-32 and 1934-40 he was the vice-chairman of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC); 1926-34 president, 1934-47 vice-president of the Thermochemical Commission, IUPAC Physicochemical Data Commission and the Commission of the International Physicochemical Design Office. In 1922 he became a member of the Warsaw Scientific Society, from 1923 - the Academy of Technical Sciences and the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences (1934-46 vice-president), and in 1952 - the Polish Academy of Sciences.
Świętosławski was the senator of the Republic of Poland and 1935-39 minister of religious denominations and public enlightenment (1937 allowed the introduction of a bench ghetto in colleges, accepting the so-called Aishan paragraph in the statutes of student associations). He did not belong to any political party, but he was an advocate of Józef Piłsudski. During his studies he cooperated with leftist organizations. As a member of the government, together with Deputy Prime Minister Eugeniusz. Kwiatkowski, he supported the president Ignacy Mościcki.
Polish physicochemical school
Świętosławski created a Polish physicochemical school, which issued 20 professors, promoted dozens of doctors and over 300 graduates, and also left outstanding successors in Russia. He was the author of many textbooks and monographs: Handbook on physical chemistry (1920, together with M. Centnerszwerem), Physical chemistry (volumes 1-4 1923-31), Ebuliometry (1935), Coke Formation Process and Physicochemical Properties of Coals (1942) , Ebuliometric Measurements (1945), Hard coal chemistry and coking (1953), Carbon tar (1956), Azeotropy and poliazeotropia(1957). In 1951 he was awarded the 1st degree state award for his entire scientific activity. He died on April 29, 1968 in Warsaw.
Thermochemical measurements
In his scientific work, he initially dealt with thermochemical measurements, from which he drew conclusions about the structure of organic molecules based on the algebraic relations he developed. He stated that the numerical results of analogous measurements coming from different laboratories differ significantly, so he introduced the method of conducting measurements in strictly defined conditions relative to the value obtained for the substance considered the reference.Świętosławski's proposals were adopted in 1922 by IUPAC; at his request in 1922, benzoic acid was adopted as the heat of combustion standard, 1933 changed (also at his request) to hydrogen.
Contribution to the development of ebulliometry and azeotropy
The necessity of obtaining the purest possible model substances prompted Świętosławski to improve measuring instruments, especially calorimeters.Constructed (together with Alicja Dorabialska) microcalorimeters to measure negligible amounts of heat released and (with Witold Romer) ebuliometry - instruments for precise measurement of the boiling point of pure liquids and solutions (by ebulliometry, boiling points of dilute solutions can be determined and molecular masses of chemical compounds used and used for determining the degree of purity of the liquid, solubility of the substance, in studies of azeotropes and others). Świętosławski also contributed to the development of azeotropy - he developed the systematics of two-component azeotropic systems, which in 1946-60, along with his students, expanded to multi-component systems.
Coal Department
In 1918-27, Świetosławski cooperated with military institutions on activated carbons for gas masks. In 1927 he organized the Coal Department of the Chemical Research Institute (1927-39 managed the Department), in which, together with his colleagues, he studied the ability to absorb gases by various types of hard coal and developed the theory of the coking process. After 1946, he took up the technology of processing coal tar, in large quantities obtained in Poland in hard coal coking processes; its purpose was to isolate from the tar (physicochemical methods) very pure substances that could replace the inaccessible products on the world market (previously provided by the German industry destroyed during the war), but political considerations made it impossible to implement this goal.

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Holograms – A Polish Speciality
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4. Holograms – A Polish Speciality

• hologram
  
• achievements
  
• science
  
• holography

A small Polish company has cornered the market producing devices for making hologram designs—a niche but prestigious sector.
Holograms can be found on notes, credit cards, CD cases, labels and excise stamps. But before they can be manufactured, a special machine must use a laser to carve a matrix, an intricate pattern on the surface of a glass plate covered with a photosensitive layer. Polskie Systemy Holograficzne, a Warsaw-based company, is where such high-tech apparatus is produced.

“We supply hologram manufacturers with the equipment they need to launch the production process,” explains Paweł Stępień, a partner in Polskie Systemy Holograficzne. “We’re the biggest provider of high-quality equipment for the production of holographic designs. You can say that we’ve monopolised this market sector,” he adds.

Holography is essentially a Polish discovery. Its forerunner was Mieczysław Wolfke, a brilliant physicist, a student of Albert Einstein and Warsaw University of Technology professor. In 1920, he discovered the phenomenon of holography and developed its theoretical foundations, setting the groundwork for research on the same subject carried out in the 1940s by Hungary’s Dennis Gabor, who in 1971 was awarded a Nobel Prize in recognition of his contribution to holography. Yet, it wasn’t until the laser was invented in 1960 that their ideas could get off the ground.

Paweł Stępień took an interest in holograms in the early 1990s, when he worked as an assistant professor at the Warsaw University of Technology. “I was doing research into the properties of computer-generated holograms,” he says. “First, a university friend and I worked together on Holografia Polska. In 2001, we set up our own business, and that’s how Polskie Systemy Holograficzne was born.”

The Polish company’s biggest customers are in Asian countries, where holographic packaging is in high demand. With stunning visual effects, it is easy on the eye and being difficult to counterfeit, it also serves as an anti-fake measure. Protective holograms, including the tiny ones on payment cards and excise stamps, account for the Polish company’s most strategic market sector.

“The market is small, and we can say it’s already saturated with our machines, of which we have sold 40 in total,” says Stępień. “Customers from India and China have bought our equipment in the highest numbers, around ten went to Europe, and two each to the United States and Russia.”

He says he cannot exactly boast about his customers because he signed confidentiality clauses with all of them and because big contractors providing government documents are particularly sensitive about confidentiality issues.

New production opportunities related to surfaces with unique light-reflecting properties are now opening up for Polskie Systemy Holograficzne. Such solutions could include windows covered with film with micro-lenses that direct light towards solar cells.

“In collaboration with the Electrotechnical Institute in Wroclaw we’re working on optical microstructures on the surface of electrodes in solar cells,” says Stępień. “Such surfaces intentionally made rough are capable of ‘capturing’ light to maximally utilise the solar energy and deliver the highest efficiency of the cells. We’re also developing a machine that could engineer such elements,” he said.

Holograms – A Polish Speciality

 

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Jacek Jemielity, Joanna Kowalska, Edward Darżynkiewicz and team (Poland)


Additional video:

• About the invention

Category: Research

Sector: Medical technology

Company: University of Warsaw (Poland)

Patent number: EP2167523,EP2297175


Invention: Stabilised mRNA for new therapies for cancers and genetic defects

The discovery of more stable messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) compounds by a group of Polish researchers paves the way for new therapies for cancers and inherited genetic diseases. Jacek Jemielity, Joanna Kowalska, Edward Darżynkiewicz and their team invented the so-called beta-S-ARCA and beta-B-ARCA compounds that are now finding their way into vaccines and anti-cancer medications.

Thanks to research spanning nearly four decades, the Polish scientists have injected fresh vigour into the field of protein biosynthesis for personalised medicine with their methods for stabilising mRNA.

Their more stable mRNA is not a treatment itself but offers an improved delivery system for therapies using the body's genetic communication channels (its mRNA). The patented invention enables delivery of modified mRNA that can withstand the human body's enzymes. The more stable mRNA is five times more effective and lasts three times longer within a cell than naturally occurring mRNA molecules.

Societal benefit
While survival rates for cancer have greatly improved over the past decade, treatment of the disease can take a heavy toll on patients, especially because of the side effects of chemotherapy. With projections that two out of every five people can now expect to get cancer in their lifetime, personalised medicine could be key to saving lives.

The therapeutic potential of mRNA opens up the possibility of "programming" the human immune system to produce proteins to help fight specific diseases without directly altering a patient's DNA - so far a relatively risky and difficult endeavour. The team's invention may prove to be a powerful asset as scientists unlock the full potential of human DNA. Currently, more than 1 800 disease genes have been identified and more than 2 000 genetic tests have become available, yet there are a total of 20 000 genes in the human genome.

Economic benefit
The scientists at the University of Warsaw (UW) were ahead of the curve in researching more stable forms of mRNA as a vehicle for therapeutics: their research extends back to the 1980s. After discovering promising mRNA compounds, their findings were confirmed, and the invention refined, by a team at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Centre, USA, led by Prof Robert E. Rhoads and Dr Ewa M. Grudzian-Nogalska. They filed for key European patents for mRNA technology in 2008 and established a partnership with German biopharma company BioNTech to bring their patented mRNA stabilisation method to market.

Clinical trials began in 2010, and in the following years BioNTech went on to license mRNA technology to major pharmaceutical companies, including French multinational Sanofi and Swiss multinational Roche's US-based Genentech. Joining forces with Genentech, BioNTech is testing the technology as a stand-alone treatment, as well as in combination with Roche's anti-cancer drug Tecentriq.

According to experts at Market Research Future, the global personalised medicine market is expected to reach EUR 72 billion by 2022, more than doubling in value from EUR 32 billion in 2015. North America is leading the market, followed by Europe. The main drivers are increased patient involvement in healthcare, integrated data from a wider range of sources, integration of wireless technologies with portable healthcare devices and an increase in genetic diseases.

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  Joanna Kowalska, Edward Darżynkiewicz and Jacek Jemielity (from left to right)
  
  
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  Joanna Kowalska
  
  
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  Stabilising messenger RNA
  
  
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  Jacek Jemielity
  
  
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  Jacek Jemielity, Joanna Kowalska and Edward Darżynkiewicz (from left to right)
  
  
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  Jacek Jemielity, Joanna Kowalska and Edward Darżynkiewicz (from left to right)
  
  
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  Joanna Kowalska
  

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How it works
DNA contains the thousands of genes that provide the instructions for producing the many proteins, enzymes and other molecules that make up the human body. These instructions are passed to the cells' protein factories, ribosomes, through a short-lived instructional code, mRNA. Should DNA become altered through inherited or externally caused mutations, it can send out faulty instructions. In the case of a cancer, this leads to abnormal cell grow. For other genetic diseases, it might result in over- or underproduction of specific proteins.

The mRNA developed by Jemielity and his team alters just one of the roughly 80 000 atoms in a typical mRNA molecule to make it strong enough to withstand enzymes in the body that would otherwise break it down before it could deliver "corrected" genetic instructions.

In one application of the technology, BioNTech has developed a melanoma cancer vaccine that relies on DNA sequencing of a patient's tumour and cross-comparison of this DNA with that of healthy tissue. After mutations are identified, artificially altered mRNA is injected into the patient, allowing the body's immune system to identify and destroy cancer cells with the telltale mutation markers throughout the body. The vaccine has shown promising results in phase one clinical trials.

EPO - Jacek Jemielity, Joanna Kowalska, Edward Darżynkiewicz and team (Poland)

 

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Louis Mékarski (in Polish Ludwik Mękarski) (1843, Clermont-Ferrand,[1] France – 1923) was a French engineer and inventor of Polish origin. In the 1870s he invented the so-called Mekarski system of compressed-air powered trams which was used in several cities of France and USA as alternative to horse-powered and steam-powered trams.

Patents[edit]
Louis Mékarski (with Paul Lucas-Girardville, an early aviator)[2] patented a similar system for automobiles in 1903.[3] Waste heat from an internal combustion engine generated steam, which was mixed with compressed air from an air compressor driven by the ic engine. The air/steam mixture then drove a separate piston engine which propelled the vehicle. This system pre-dated the better-known Still engine.

Mékarski also obtained a patent for spring wheels for vehicles

Louis Mékarski - Wikipedia

 

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Trams in Łódź made their first appearance on 23 December 1898. Łódź was the first city to have electric trams in what was then Congress Poland. Initially, there were two fairly short tram lines that both served the city centre area; by February 1899 their number was doubled. Two years later, the first suburban tram lines started – the Pabianice and Zgierz lines. Both of these initiatives were the result of the activities of private companies in which German manufacturers dominated.

In the years 1910-1931 suburban tram lines connected many important places around the city, creating the largest such network in Poland, which remained unchanged until the end of the 1980s. In the first half of the 1990s, some of them were closed down, but the process has since been halted, leaving Łódź the only city in the country to still have such a system of commuter trams.

Trams in Łódź - Wikipedia

 

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Vickers Tank Periscope MK.IV
Vickers Tank Periscope MK.IV
...

The Gundlach Periscope, usually known under its British designation as Vickers Tank Periscope MK.IV, was a revolutionary invention by Polish engineer Rudolf Gundlach, manufactured for Polish 7TP tanks since end of 1935 and patented in 1936 as Gundlach Peryskop obrotowy. It was the first device to allow the tank commander to have a 360-degree view from his turret with a single periscope. By rotating the periscope and allowing the tank commander to look backwards through the second eyepiece, he no longer had to change position to look behind the turret. Early tanks had small turrets and fixed seating, without an independently rotating cupola, and so the commander wasn't easily able to move himself to another rear-facing periscope.

The design was first used in the Polish 7TP light tank. Shortly before the war it was given to the British and was used in almost all tanks of WWII, including the British Crusader, Churchill, Valentine, and Cromwell and the American Sherman. After the German and Soviet attack and fall of Poland in 1939 it was copied entirely from captured 7TP and TKS Polish tanks and later by USSR (including the T-34 and T-70).

As a part of Polish-British pre-war military cooperation, the patent was sold for a penny (actually 1 Polish Zloty) to Vickers-Armstrong. It was produced as the Vickers Tank Periscope MK.IV (pictured), and built into all British tanks (Crusader, Churchill, Valentine, Cromwell). After the fall of Poland, Germany, USSR and Romania captured some equipment, allowing them to copy the invention. In USSR the Gundlach periscope was known as MK-4 (harking to the British designation, as Russian sources openly confirm that it was copied from samples acquired with British-supplied tanks) and implemented in all tanks (including the T-34 and T-70). Later technology was transferred to USA and as a periscope M6 implemented in all US tanks (M3/M5 Stuart, M4 Sherman and others). At the end of World War II this technology was adopted throughout the world and used basically unchanged for almost 50 years, until it was replaced by electronic devices.

References

• Grzegorz Łukomski and Rafał E. Stolarski, Nie tylko Enigma... Mjr Rudolf Gundlach (1892-1957) i jego wynalazek (Not Only Enigma... Major Rudolf Gundlach (1892-1957) and His Invention), Warsaw-London, 1999.
• PDF of 1938 US patent 2130006

Vickers Tank Periscope MK.IV | Revolvy

 

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International success for Polish conductor
04.09.2018 10:57
Poland's Joanna Natalia Ślusarczyk has won second prize at the Jeunesses Musicales International Conducting Competition in Bucharest, Romania.

Photo: pexels.com

The event was entered by 50 budding conductors from across the world. They were judged by an international jury chaired by leading Norwegian conductor Sigmund Thorp.

Earlier this year Ślusarczyk took the top award at the London Classical Soloists Conducting Competition. She also won third prize at the First European Union International Conducting Competition in Sofia, Bulgaria, and received an honourable mention at the BMW International Conducting Masterclass and Competition in Portugal.

Ślusarczyk is a graduate of the Music Academies in Katowice and Kraków, southern Poland. She has appeared on the conductor’s podium in the United States, Russia, Israel, Norway, Iceland, Britain, France, and Ukraine.

She is currently conductor-in-residence with the Silesian Philharmonic in Katowice

International success for Polish conductor

 

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The genius of Rudolf Stefan Weigl (1883–1957), a Lvovian microbe hunter and breeder
Article · January 2003 with 57 Reads

Waclaw Szybalski



Photo Rudolf



Stefan Weigl



Abstract
Rudolf Stefan Weigl (1883-1957) has made an enormous scientific contribution to microbiology, in general, by adapting the sucking insects, lice, to serve as laboratory animals. That permitted for the first propagation and studying of Rickettsia prowazekii, the agent of the typhus and production of the first effective vaccine against exanthematous (epidemic) typhus. Weigl has done it before and during the WWII in his Institute of Biology at the University of Jan Kazimierz (UJK), at that time in Lwów, Poland. The production of this vaccine was based on propagation of Rickettsia prowazekii, the microbial typhus agent, in the Weigl's strain of clothes lice, Pediculus vestimenti. The procedure of 1939 -1945 consisted of: (i) feeding of healthy lice with sucked blood, when kept in special cages placed on the skin of human 'feeders', (ii) infection of lice and propagation of R. prowazekii in the midgut (stomach) cells, (iii) the dissection of louse midgut, and (iv) the final preparation of the phenolized vaccine. Significance of Weigl's vaccine was enormous, both potentially and practically, at the time when it was developed just before and during WW2. However at present, the threat of typhus is almost not existent because of antibiotics and since lice could be very effectively controlled. Weigl's scientific heritage retains a great importance in the history of world medicine, especially in relation to the humanitarian, political and historical ramifications of the very Waclaw Szybalski: The genius of Rudolf Stefan Weigl (1883-1957), a Lvovian microbe hunter and and breeder -In Memoriam Waclaw Szybalski: The genius of Rudolf Stefan Weigl (1883-1957), a Lvovian microbe hunter and and breeder - In Memoriam (1 of 22) [2004-03-27 20:51:02] unique and trying period in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, including Lwów and Poland, during and after WW2.

The genius of Rudolf Stefan Weigl (1883–1957), a Lvovian microbe hunter and breeder. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/public...883-1957_a_Lvovian_microbe_hunter_and_breeder [accessed Sep 04 2018].

 

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Poles contribute to the discovery of gravitational waves
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• Albert Einstein
  
• gravitational waves
  
• black holes
  
• science
  
• physics

A team of 15 Polish scientists have made a significant contribution to the breakthrough discovery of gravitational waves. They predicted that these waves originate from the collision of two black holes, and made calculations to separate the signal from background noise.
The discovery of gravitational waves is the latest scientific evidence confirming the validity of Albert Einstein’s calculations made exactly a century ago.

He predicted the existence of gravitational waves in his theory of general relativity, but it is only now that scientists have been able to detect them. The breakthrough was made possible by improved measuring devices – gravitational waves detectors. Simulations conducted by POLGRAW, a Polish team consisting of 15 scientists form seven institutes who are coordinated by Professor Andrzej Królak, helped to identify the elusive signal. Following an analysis of detector data by Polish scientists, it was possible to separate the right impulses from background noise. Nine Polish scientists were among the authors of a paper on this subject published in the Physical Review Letters journal.

“We have been analysing data from American LIGO detectors. These are huge laser interferometers with arms ranging up to 4 kilometres in length,” Polska.pl was told by Professor Andrzej Królak from the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IM PAN).

LIGO detectors are located on the east and west coasts of the United States. A similar device called Virgo, with 3-km long arms, also works in Europe, in Italy. It is currently being modernized and will also be able to detect gravitational waves. The American LIGO detectors which captured the phenomenon have recently undergone a similar modernization process.

“These devices are so sensitive that they registered change in the length of one of the interferometer’s arms by one billionth of one billionth metre. It happened shortly after the restarting of LIGO detectors,” Prof. Królak said.

It was essential to isolate this faint signal from interference, which is very common on Earth and includes shocks caused by earthquakes, passing cars or even blowing wind. To avoid false readings, the detectors’ optical systems are seismically insulated from the surroundings and placed in a ultra-high vacuum.

What proved to be of great assistance in separating gravitational waves from the cosmic noise were calculations made by mathematicians from the POLGRAW team. Another team of Polish astrophysicists predicted that events such as mergers of black holes may occur much more often than previously suspected, and could become a source of gravitational waves that are strong enough to be detected.

“A signal detected by LIGO detectors was the largest explosion ever registered by humankind,” said POLGRAW team member, Dr Michał Bejger of the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Centre at the Polish Academy of Sciences. “It was triggered by a merger of two black holes 1.3 billion light years away from the Earth. A cataclysm bigger even than the explosion of a supernova. As much as three times the mass of the Sun was turned into energy in the form of gravitational waves, so at that single moment these merging black holes emitted more energy than the whole universe.”

Poles contribute to the discovery of gravitational waves

 

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Wlodzimierz Kutner,
Professor of Chemistry
Group of molecular films research

• M.Sc., 1971 - Department of Chemistry, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland
  
  
• Ph.D., 1975 - Department of Chemistry, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland
  
  
• D.Sc., 1995 - Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland
  
  
• Professor, 2002 - Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland, as well as 2003- Department of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, School of Science, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University, Warsaw, Poland

Professional affiliations

• Polish Chem. Soc. Member since 1975, Vice President Warsaw Div. 1989-1992.
• IUPAC Commission on Electroanal. Chem. V.5 Anal. Chem. Div. Affiliate Member 1988-1990, Assoc. Member 1990-1995, Titular Member 1995-2001, Secretary 1998-2001; Anal. Chem. Div. Committee Assoc. Member 2002-2007, Interdiv. Committee on Terminology, Nomenclature and Symbols, Titular Member 2002-2005, Assoc. Member, 2006-2007.

Research activity

• Supramolecular chemistry of inclusion polymers and molecularly imprinted polymers
• Electrochemistry, spectroscopy as well as Langmuir and Langmuir-Blodgett films of fullerenes, carbon nanotubes, and metalloporphyrins for devices of energy conversion and energy storage
• Electrodes modified with functional conducting polymer films: chemical sensors and biosensors

Editorial activity

• Associate Editor, Bioelectrochemistry, 2007 -

Education and training

• 1976-1977 - Chem. Dept., Univ. Cincinnati, Cincinnati OH, USA (Post-doctoral Fellow)
• 1979 - Inst. Inorg. Chem., J. Gutenberg Univ., Mainz, Germany (Visit. Sci.)
• 1983-1984 and 1985 - Chem. Dept., Univ. North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill NC, USA (Res. Assoc.)
• 1990-1991 - Inst. Physical Chem. Electrochem., Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Berlin, Germany (Visit. Sci.)
• 1991-1993 - Chem. Dept., Univ. Houston, Houston TX, USA (Res. Assist. Prof.)
• 1994 - Dept. Chem. Biochem., New Mexico State Univ., Las Cruces NM, USA (Visit. Spec.)
• 1994 - Dept. Electrochem. Conduct. Polymers, Leibniz Inst. Solid State Mater. Res., Dresden, Germany (Visit. Sci.)
• 1997, 1998, 1999, 2002, 2003, and 2006 - Chem. Dept., Wichita State Univ., Wichita KS, USA (Visit. Sci., Visit. Prof.)
• 2003 - Chem. Dept., Univ. Bordeaux 1, Bordeaux, France (Visit. Prof.)

Recent publications

1. Dabrowski, M., Cieplak, M., Noworyta, K, Heim, M, Adamkiewicz, W., Kuhn, A., Sharma, P. S., and Kutner, W., J. Mater. Chem. B. 2017, published online, "Surface enhancement of a molecularly imprinted polymer film using sacrificial silica beads for increasing L-arabitol chemosensor sensitivity and detectability". DOI: 10.1039/C7TB01407D.
2. Łępicka, K., Pieta, P., Shkurenko, A., Borowicz, P., Majewska, M., Rosenkranz, M., Avdoshenko, S., Popov, A., Kutner, W., J. Phys. Chem. C, 2017, published online, "Spectroelectrochemical Approaches to Mechanistic Aspects of Charge Transport in meso Nickel(II) Schiff Base Electrochromic Polymer". DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpcc.7b04700.
3. Obraztsov, I., Kutner, W., and D’Souza, F., Solar RRL, 2017, 1, 1600002, "Evolution of molecular design of porphyrin chromophore donors for photovoltaic materials of superior light-to-electricity conversion efficiency". DOI: 10.1002/solr.201600002.
4. Dabrowski, M., Cieplak, M., Sharma, P. S., Borowicz, P., Noworyta, K., Lisowski, W., D’Souza, F., Kuhn, A., and Kutner, W., Biosens. Bioelectron. 2017, 94, 155-161, "Hierarchical templating in deposition of semi-covalently imprinted inverse opal polythiophene film for femtomolar determination of human serum albumin". Redirecting.
5. Bartold, K., Pietrzyk-Le, A., Huynh T.-P., Iskierko, Z., Sosnowska, M., Noworyta, K., Lisowski, W., Sannicolo, F., Mussini, P. R., Cauteruccio, S., Licandro, E., D’Souza, F., and Kutner, W., ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 2017, 9, 3948-3958, "Programmed transfer of sequence information into molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP) for hexa(2,2’-bithien-5-yl) DNA analog formation towards single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) detection". DOI: 10.1021/acsami.6b14340.
6. Lach, P., Sharma, P. S., Golebiewska, K., Cieplak, M., D'Souza, F., and Kutner, W., Chem. Eur. J.2017, 23, 1942-1949, "Molecularly imprinted polymer chemosensor for selective determination of an N-nitroso-L-proline food toxin". DOI: 10.1002/chem.201604799.
7. Iskierko, Z., Checinska, A., Sharma, P. S., Golebiewska, K., Noworyta, K., Borowicz, P., Fronc, K., Bandi, V, D’Souza, F., and Kutner, W., J. Mater. Chem. C 2017, 5, 969-977, "Molecularly imprinted polymer based extended-gate field-effect transistor chemosensor for phenylalanine enantioselective sensing". DOI: 10.1039/c6tc03812c.
8. Voccia, D., Sosnowska M., Bettazzi, F., Roscigno, G., Condorelli, G., Fratini, E., De Franciscis, V., Chitta, R., D'Souza, F., Kutner, W., Palchetti, I., Biosens. Bioelectron. 2017, 87, 1012-1019, "Direct determination of small RNAs using a biotinylated polythiophene modified impedimetric genosensor", Redirecting.
9. Cieplak, M. and Kutner, W., Trends Biotechnol., 2016, 34, 922-941, "Artificial biosensors: how can molecular imprinting mimic biological recognition?", DOI: 10.1016/j.tibtech.2016.05.011.
10. Sannicolo, F., Mussini, P. R., Benincori, T., Martinazzo, R., Arnaboldi, S., Appoloni, G., Panigati, M., Procopio, E. Q., Marino, V. Cirilli, R., Kutner, W., Noworyta, K., Pietrzyk-Le, A., Iskierko, Z., and Bartold, K., Chem.-Eur. J. 2016, 22, 10839-10847, "Inherently chiral spider-like oligothiophenes", DOI: 10.1002/chem.201504899
11. W. Kutner

 

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A plant-derived edible vaccine against hepatitis B virus
J. KAPUSTA
,
A. MODELSKA
,
M. FIGLEROWICZ
,
T. PNIEWSKI
,
M. LETELLIER
,
O. LISOWA
,
V. YUSIBOV
,
H. KOPROWSKI
,
A. PLUCIENNICZAK
, and
A. B. LEGOCKI
Published Online:1 Oct 1999https://doi.org/10.1096/fasebj.13.13.1796

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Abstract
The infectious hepatitis B virus represents 42 nm spherical double-shelled particles. However, analysis of blood from hepatitis B virus carriers revealed the presence of smaller 22 nm particles consisting of a viral envelope surface protein. These particles are highly immunogenic and have been used in the design of hepatitis B virus vaccine produced in yeast. Upon expression in yeast, these proteins form virus-like particles that are used for parenteral immunization. Therefore, the DNA fragment encoding hepatitis B virus surface antigen was introduced into Agrobacterium tumerifacience LBA4404 and used to obtain transgenic lupin (Lupinus luteus L.) and lettuce (Lactuca sativa L.) cv. Burpee Bibb expressing envelope surface protein. Mice that were fed the transgenic lupin tissue developed significant levels of hepatitis B virus-specific antibodies. Human volunteers, fed with transgenic lettuce plants expressing hepatitis B virus surface antigen, developed specific serum-IgG response to plant produced protein.—Kapusta, J., Modelska, A., Figlerowicz, M., Pniewski, T., Letellier, M., Lisowa, O., Yusibov, V., Koprowski, H., Plucienniczak, A., Legocki, A. B. A plant-derived edible vaccine against hepatitis B virus.

https://www.fasebj.org/doi/abs/10.1096/fasebj.13.13.1796

 

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Krzysztof Penderecki and Eugeniusz Rudnik, photo: Andrzej Zborski

The Musical Milestones of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio
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Author: Culture.pl
Published: Nov 17 2017
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The temporary liberalization of life in Poland in October 1956 brought with it the establishment of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio. The event was no less than a phenomenon for this part of Europe. Ahead of Stockholm and many other centres of music which would establish electronic workshops in the 60s, Poland became an outpost of electroacoustic music.

Nine years later than Pierre Schaeffer's experimental studio in Paris, six years later than Cologne's Studio für elektronische Musik and two years after Milan's Studio di Fonologia Musicale, the Polish Radio Experimental Studio began operating in 1957. The fourth European experimentally-oriented radio unit spurred on an era of electroacoustic music in Poland. Until then, the only signs of the upcoming current were found in the film and theatre scores of Andrzej Markowski and Włodzimierz Kotoński.

For 28 years, the studio was headed by its founder, the musicologist, sound engineer, animator of musical life and later president of the Association of Polish Composers Józef Patkowski. Composer Ryszard Szeremeta managed it between 1985 and 1998, followed by Krzysztof Szlifirski between 1998 and 2004, who was also responsible for the technical concept of the studio. In March 2004, the Experimental Studio was incorporated by Channel 2 of the Polish Radio and its role is carried on by Marek Zwyrzykowski.

The Beginning: Study For One Cymbal Stroke and Microstructures
The proverbial "strike of the cymbals" which opened a new chapter in the history of music in Poland was Włodzimierz Kotoński's Etiuda na jedno uderzenie w talerz (Study for One Cymbal Stroke) from 1959. It was the first piece composed at the Experimental Studio and was the soundtrack to the surreal animated film Albo rybka...(Or the Fish) by Hanna Bielińska and Włodzimierz Haupe. The visual atmosphere is aurally mirrored by a strike of a medium sized stick on Turkish cymbals. The film score was then developed into the first autonomous Polish piece of music on tape.

Włodzimierz Kotoński, source: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne
The technological process employed for the creation of the piece connects two different composition techniques: serialism and musique concrète. The former was authored by Arnold Schönberg, who in his pieces formulated and used dodecaphony. The idea was picked up and further developed in the concept of total serialism by Anton Webern.

The Austrian composer posited a schematic organization of pitch, rhythm, dynamics, tempo, tone and articulation. An entirely new manner of composing music was put forward by Pierre Schaeffer in the mid-20th century. His pieces utilised all surrounding sounds: set and encountered matter usually considered as noise and murmur - recorded, processed, and sorted according to the assumptions of a given piece. The French artist brought concrete, palpable sound events which are recognised from the first hearing into the sphere of musical art. Magnetic tape, editing techniques, the search for new sounds and expression turned Schaeffer's "noises" into experimental music. The form was called 'concrete' by contrast to music that was first concocted in the head of a composer and then transcribed into a score.

Introducing the first performance of Schaeffer's Concert de bruits on the French National Radio on October 5th, 1948, the radio host quoted the man of the hour:

Let's open our ears, equipped with precise instruments for enlarging, speeding up, slowing down, unlike the eyes, which require a microscope. […] It turns out to be impossible to strip sounds of their dramatic nature, of their capacity to create moods and symbolic meanings. No effort can impose on them an abstract quality.

But musical tradition kept having a strong hold on the innovators. The first compositions of the Experimental Studio of the Polish Radio were published in the form of scores. Włodzimierz Kotoński's Study For One Cymbal Strokewas among the pieces brought out by the publishing house Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne.

Krzysztof Penderecki and Eugeniusz Rudnik at the Experimental Studio of the Polish Radio, April 1972, photograph from Ludwik Erhardt's book "Spotkania z Krzysztofem Pendereckim" (Meetings with Penderecki)
Filters were employed to convert the sound of the cymbals into six bands of different widths and then transposed into eleven heights. The technique was carried out in a strict manner, making use of scales. One had eleven scales and sorted the samples according to length, another had the same number of scales and was dynamic and yet another had six scales and differentiated articulations.

Traditional sound matter was torn away from its instrumental source. What was left, however, were elements of composition written on the staff in the form of a score.

Whether the innovators were planning on going through with their ideas differently is unknown. If that were the case, it would mean that they felt the need to leave space for interpretation. The plan to create new sound versions of those historical scores is coming to fruition.



Microstructures from 1963, Włodzimierz Kotoński showed a similar approach to composition. Unlike Study For One Cymbal Stroke, Microstructures was devoid of illustrative substance. The piece was built from recorded sounds of strokes on glass, wood and metal objects cut into very short centimetre long fragments containing an attack and a part of the reverb. These particles, the micro ingredients of a sound puzzle, were then mixed and randomly put together in slightly longer sections. The sequence was copied, sometimes shortened and assembled together into loops of irregular lengths.

Four to eight pieces were later matched together into one layer, thus creating a "micro structure", a type of "sound cloud" (as the composer called it), vibrating on the inside, dynamic, containing from a dozen or so to several dozen occurrences per second. Much like in the earlier Study ..., the structures were also transported into different heights. It was through tests and trials that they found their place in the over five minute long piece. Ergo, all the complicated compositional procedures underwent a largely spontaneous auditory judgement.

There are subtle technological differences between the making of Study...and Microstructures. For the former, elements of a highly accurate and rather traditional dodecaphony technique (which made use of traditional instruments) were used. The method of the latter meant avoiding any type of sorting the material, resorting to spontaneous creation instead, though analogies to writing on staves can still be made.



There was an aleotoric element to it. In the case of composition for tape this "controlled" aleotorism or chance required the pre-selection of sound structures at a certain stage of their sorting. Another possibility was to base the creative process on trial and error which promoted the search for emotions, moods and messages in the abstract sound form. Microstructures did just that.

Made of noises: Dobrowolski's Passacaglia
Andrzej Dobrowolski, author of two flagship compositions of the Experimental Studio: Muzyka na taśmę magnetofonową i obój solo (Music for Magnetic Tape and Solo Oboe) from 1965 and Muzyka na taśmę magnetofonową i fortepian solo (Music for Magnetic Tape and Solo Piano) from 1971, also composed Passacaglia which shows the extent to which traditions were still entrenched in the composition techniques of the pioneers of electroacoustic music.

Passacaglia is a musical form with a recurring melody in which the bass repeats the same harmonic pattern throughout the piece. The rest of the composition is an assembly of variations of that thematic structure. Andrzej Dobrowolski attempted to build an exact Baroque structure from bruitist materials which were different kinds of noises.

The piece derived from the score to a play by Maria Konopnicka called Szkice z przeszłości (Sketches from the Past) performed in a theatre in Białystok in 1960. Its starting point was five drum noises which were recast into a collection of forty quasi-percussive occurrences which could not longer be associated with their initial instrumental nature. The samples were given different rhythms, they were placed on an frequency axis and transposed by changing the speed of the tape for example.

Andrzej Dobrowolski's Passacaglia is subtitled "for forty out of five", a reference to the five initial drum noises from which forty sound objects were derived from.

Electronic psalm: Penderecki's Psalmus 1961
Electroacoustic music differs from traditional instrumental and vocal pieces but also espouses their creative process in its own. Krzysztof Penderecki's Psalmus 1961 is a perfect example thereof.

Krzysztof Penderecki in Dębica, 1969, photo: Wojciech Plewiński / Forum
Among the composer's best known pieces are Psalms of David for mixed choir, string instruments and percussion (1958), Strophes for soprano, voice (reciting) and ten instruments (1959) and Dimensions of Time and Silence for mixed choir of 40 voices, strings and percussion (1959-60). Some of his pieces were purely instrumental (Threnody and Anaklasis) but the vocal element, which would later become the dominating element of the oratorical works, was already strong. Psalmus 1961, the only autonomous and non-illustrative piece also had a clearly noticeable vocal element. Earlier, the Experimental Studio developed the composer's film scores and in time he created the three minute long Ekecheiria which was played at the opening of the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich.

Psalmus 1961 arose from spoken or sung vowels and consonants of different length and intensity. With a rich selection of sounds, the composer used a drafted score as a type of ideogram. Much like Kotoński's Microstructures which would appear two years later, the definitive piece resulted from spontaneous disposition of the sound material, a process of sorting of the edited, transposed, and filtered material.

Two things can be said of the work. On the one hand it is an expression of the composer's interest in the new media, on the other, it reveals his attachment to tradition. The title - Psalmus 1961 - indicated the contemporary technological context in the centuries-long tradition of psalms in music. Another idea that Penderecki relocated into instrumental music was the underlining of clusters in the score.

One of two sources: Dobrowolski's Music for Tape No 1
When it comes to the first works of Włodzimierz Kotoński, Andrzej Dobrowolski and Krzysztof Penderecki, the starting materials were homogeneous – a set of strikes of a medium sized stick on Turkish cymbals (Włodzimierz Kotoński's Study For One Cymbal Stroke), sounds of strikes on glass, wood and metal objects (Włodzimierz Kotoński's Microstructures), five percussion sounds (Andrzej Dobrowolski's Passacaglia), sung or spoken vocal sounds (Krzysztof Penderecki's Psalmus 1961).



Other compositions created in the Experimental Studio came to life on starting material of varying sources. Andrzej Dobrowolski's Music for Tape No. 1 is a good example. It had four sources: the sound of electronic generators, piano chords, sung sounds and resonating piano strings.

What was felt since the very beginnings of electroacoustic music was the need to cut back on the amount of audio material. In Music for Magnetic Tape and Oboe Solo from 1965, Andrzej Dobrowolski did exactly that. Not all the oboe sounds were made by playing it. What was also used was the beating of tabs and unconventional blowing. It was the wood and metal from which the oboe is built and the acoustic effects that brought musical value. The solo layer was the domain of the classic-sounding oboe.

Combining the oboe and tape, and the piano and tape later on (the aforementioned Music for Magnetic Tape and Solo Piano from 1971) with the use of virtuoso tenures for both pieces is but another expression of constant references to tradition - the concepts of performing in concert in this case. In Andrzej Dobrowolski's piece, the oboe can be active and explicit but also lyrical and pastoral as its nature dictates.

It's perhaps no coincidence that poly-sounds started to be introduced to the oboe technique at more or less the same time. This attempt to overcome the erstwhile perception about its possibilities was undertaken by Witold Szalonek in Four Monologues for Solo Oboe from 1966. Dobrowolski's actions were different. For Music for Magnetic tape and Solo Oboe he juxtaposed the layer of tape with the classically played oboe.

Towards radio documentary: Rudnik's Collage
From the beginning, the Experimental Studio of the Polish Radio sought to introduce composers to technology through so-called "guides". This is where the engineer Eugeniusz Rudnik and the sound director Bohdan Mazurek came into play. The former started working for the Experimental Studio in 1957, the latter in 1962 and they both began dabbing with their own compositions early on.

Eugeniusz Rudnik, still from "15 Corners of the World", photo: Ula Klimek / UNSOUND'12 / www.15corners.com
Eugeniusz Rudnik was not educated in the art of classical composition and thus saw the wide spectrum of possibilities offered by the technology of the Experimental Studio. One of his first works was Collage from 1965. The composition was based on the electric hum of the amplifier of a Telefunk lamp console. He commented on the project in a radio show,

It's the overblown music of the apparatus on which I performed all those precise, squeaky clean, sterile sounds. If you open the muffler a little wider, the console starts to whirr and tremble. There's a pulse, there's the subconscious gurgling of the blood in the arteries and veins which we don't hear on a daily basis. You have to close the human in an insulated room to make him hear himself. I recorded that soul, that pulse, that filth, that misfortune of the engineers and called it my work. I gave it a title and said: this is Eugeniusz Rudnik's composition. It can be classified to the great big branch of bruitism, the music of buzzing sounds, rotten materials, music made from non-precious sounds.

That was not the sole component of the composition. What becomes recognisable are characteristic mid-60s radio broadcasts: dance music and a statement by a blasé civil servant expressing the country's concern about the economic situation. Eugeniusz Rudnik used those elements creatively and critically towards the regime.

Schaeffer's Assemblage
Even the most avant-garde composers still yearned for the possibility to interpret music through instruments. Bogusław Schaeffer's Assemblage (joining, filling, mixing in French) brought together edited and sorted previously recorded pieces on the violin, the piano played by the artist himself. And so, instrumental sounds found a lasting place at the Experimental Studio. Assemblage is an anti-thesis of Electronic Symphony, created at the same time. What contrasts the two pieces is the role of the sound engineer. Schaeffer comments,

Bogusław Schaeffer, photo: Eugeniusz Helbert / Forum
In the Symphony, the sound material shaped by the sound engineer is not fully a reflection of the way of thinking of the microformal composer. Therefore during the act of composition and creating of the Symphony, I came up with the idea to create its anti-thesis - music created entirely by the composer, put together from elements which give only him information about how he is shaping music by himself in all the registers.

Assemblage was recorded with a special editing technique from a couple dozen of only slightly deformed, violin and piano "emotiographs." The sound is therefore authentic: this is how the composer plays, feels and understands his music (this refers in particular to the rhythmic articulatory sphere and the so-called aesthetic of instrumental sound). But to give the whole a formal consistency, in the last phase of composing, the artist used a stereo without processing the material. In opposition to the Symphony, Assemblage remains an authentic instrumental composition. This is how, through natural sounds, composer's emotions were introduced into electroacoustic music.

Almost every piece that saw the light of day in the early years of the Experimental Studio of the Polish Radio marked a new chapter in the history of technology and aesthetics. New and divergent paths which would take shape years later in different songs were being laid down.



Author: Marek Zwyrzykowski, translator Mai Jones 04/07/2014

Marek Zwyrzykowski, photo:
Wojciech Kusiński / Polskie Radio
Marek Zwyrzykowski is a journalist and musicologist who graduated from the University of Warsaw in 1977. He has been cooperating with Musical Editorial Board of the Polish Radio since 1978. Since the 2004 merger of the Experimental Studio with Channel Two Polish Radio, he heads the production of electroacoustic music production.

He is the author of musical auditions and dozens of interviews (with Krzysztof Penderecki, Wojciech Kilar, Andrzej Wajda, Jan Krenz, Antoni Wit, James MacMillan). His radio work has a focus on electroacoustic music and since 1990 he has been broadcasting the programme Hortus musicus - hortus electronicus on Channel Two Polish Radio.

He has been awarded with the Hungarian Radio award for the radio show Béla Bartók - sketch for a portrait (1981) and the Polish Radio award for a radio series on Karol Szymanowski (1982). In 2013 he received the Polish Radio Golden Microphone.

Electroacoustic Music in Poland

 

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‘Otoimplant’ – the most exciting concept developed by young Polish scientist
‘Otoimplant’ – an innovative middle ear prosthesis has been named as the most exciting idea presented by a young Polish scientist in a recent contest organised by Polish Embassy in Tokyo, Japan and the Ministry of Science and Higher Education. In recognition of the achievement, its author – DSc Magdalena Ziąbka of the Faculty of Materials Science and Ceramics – has been invited to take part in Japan’s largest science forum: Science Agora.

As part of the activities undertaken by the Polish Embassy in Tokyo under the Polish Science Year scheme, the capital of Japan is about to host the ‘Science is Freedom’ Exhibition, presenting 25 most prominent achievements of Polish science in recent years. The Grand Opening of the Exhibition was held on 13 March and was accompanied by a contest, where the invited public consisting predominantly of guests representing Japanese companies, universities and research institutes could learn about the most innovative concepts as well as successful implementations deployed by young (aged under 35) Polish scientists. The Japanese visitors watched short movies produced and sent in by the contestants. Both the format of the presentation as well as the scope of the accomplishment were left at the discretion of the young scientists, yet preference was given to science projects. The contest was met with great interest from the public, who were impressed by the high level of technological solutions as well as the innovative potential of the featured ideas. After seeing all films, the public voted for the best project.

DSc Magdalena Ziąbka will fly to Tokyo to take part in Science Agora to be held in November 2018. In addition to covering the costs of travel and accommodation, Polish Embassy in Tokyo will offer assistance with practical arrangements during her stay in the Japanese capital.

‘Otoimplant’ is a middle ear prosthesis developed from bio-stable thermoplastic polymers containing antibacterial modifying additive in the form of silver nanoparticles. The implant enables reconstruction of auditory ossicles in the middle ear cavity and effectively eliminates bacterial infections. The research team led by DSc Magdalena Ziąbka is working on the project under the ‘Lider’ Programme financed by the National Centre for Research and Development.

Watch the clip with the presentation of DSc Magdalena Ziąbka’s achievements (including the Otoimplant Project) entered for the contest.


‘Otoimplant’ – the most exciting concept developed by young Polish scientist

 

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Incredible achievement of polish sailors. Khatarsis circumnavigated Antarctica

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„We are on the finishing post in Hobart”-said the captain Mariusz Koper, who was in charge of eight-people-crew of Katharsis II. The yacht reached the capitol of Tasmania on April 5th, after 102 days and 23 hours of leaving Cape Town in RPA on December 23rd.

The Polish accomplished one of the biggest achievement in the history of world sailing circumnavigated Antarctica nonstop. In Hobart they were welcomed by representatives of polish community, honourable consul Ed Krezmer, the World Sailing Speed Record Council, and management of Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania-copromoters of prestigious regatta Sydney-Hobart, as well as numerous media.

NO ONE HAVE DONE IT BEFORE.

-Our primary challenge was to circumnavigated Antarctica nonstop on a sailing yacht. In the previous years there were several attempts of doing so, but no one succeded.

During 103 days the yacht sailed total 15 853 sea miles (29 360 km), but the loop around Antarctica itself was 10 200 sea miles long (18 920 km) and it took 72 days and 5 hours to finish it.

The crew was: Mariusz Koper –the captain and Michał Barasiński, Tomasz Grala, Ireneusz Kamiński, Robert Kibart, Piotr Kukliński, Hanna Leniec, Wojciech Małecki i Magdalena Żuchelkowska.


Incredible achievement of polish sailors. Khatarsis circumnavigated Antarctica

 

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Dr. Walter M. Golaski
Historical Marker Dedication
Dr. Walter Golaski (1913-1996)

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In 2013 the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission approved an historical marker to honor Dr. Walter Golaski, engineer and inventor who was a leading pioneer in manufacturing knitted Dacron blood-vessel replacements. A Drexel University graduate, he was also a philanthropist who devoted much time and energy to establishing closer ties between the United States and Poland through cultural and scholarly exchange. Though a Philadelphian, he was Chairman of the Board at the Kosciuszko Foundation in New York during the years 1973-1982. The dedication ceremony took place on: Saturday, May 17, 2014, near the intersection of 34th Street and Lancaster Avenue in Philadelphia, Drexel University campus.

Historical Marker Dedication Pictures by Peter Obst

Bio for Dr. Walter M. Golaski
(August 12, 1913 - September 22, 1996)
Scientist, Engineer, Polonia activist

Walter Golaski (born: 1913 in Torrington, Connecticut; died: in Overbrook, PA in 1996 at the age of 83) was an American Mechanical-Bio-Medical Engineer best known for developing Dense Knit Dacron Vascular Prostheses, which were the first practical artificial blood vessel replacements.

Early life and education

At 16, during the Great Depression, he took a job as a needle mechanic at the Torrington Company, a knitting needle manufacturer, where he soon developed new ideas for the automatic needle manufacturing industry. In 1939, Torrington transferred him to Philadelphia and promoted him to manager, and he enrolled in Drexel University's (then known as Drexel Institute of Technology) Mechanical Engineering evening school. He graduated in 1946; Drexel later honored him with many alumni awards. In 1968 he received an honorary degree from Alliance College.

Inventions

In 1940, Golaski developed a process for rebuilding hosiery machines to enable the knitting industry to make the switch from silk to nylon. In 1945 he opened the Bearing Products Company and with the profits later in 1956 bought and reorganized the Overbrook Knitting Corporation in order to convert existing machinery to produce full fashioned knitted sweaters. He was granted 10 American, 1 British and 2 Canadian patents. In 1956 he acquired the manufacturing facilities of the Charles Cooper Company and the Acme Needle Company; in 1962 he became the owner of the Royersford Needle Works.

Golaski is best known for the product he developed next, the densely knit Dacron arteries, which he sold through his company Golaski Laboratories. Until this invention, the available replacement blood vessels were stiff, woven, and not sufficiently porous. The Golaski graft offered patients longer life expectancy than any other on the market.

Golaski's business flourished after his invention, but he never forgot his ancestral heritage (he was born and raised in Connecticut but his parents immigrated to the US from Poland). He served as Chairman of the Kosciuszko Foundation. In "which [he] encouraged the exchange of students and scholars between the United States and Poland." He helped show Poland in a positive light to America in that "Americans of all ethnic backgrounds were encouraged to participate in the Foundation's programs and experience Polish culture directly."

Personal life

Golaski had a wife named Helene Dolores Golaski who died in 1968. They had a daughter named Michelle. When Helene died, he donated a painting called "Young Lady at the Fireplace" (signed 1882, Wladyslaw Czachorski) to the Kosciusko Foundation. He later married Alexandra Budna Golaski with whom he had three children, Alexandra, John Paul and Edmund.

Great Men and Women of Polish Descent

 

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Stanley Dudrick: Total Parenteral Nutrition
FEBRUARY 28, 2017

They guy who, unbeknownst to me, directed much of the many late nights I was on call for three years, comes up as number 42 of the fifty most influential doctors in history which we are going through.

Stanley Dudrick M.D. painstakingly invented and improved total parenteral nutrition (TPN) to the point it actually could be used in medicine and not cause more problems than it solved.

What do we, today, owe to the people who have gone on before to make our lives, and those of our children, safer, healthier and more enjoyable to live? We’ve already thought about many in this series: treatment of burns, discovering circulation, discovering germs, saving blue babies.

Stanley Dudrick (1935- ) – #42
From Beagles to Babies—A Living Legend
Before Dr. Dudrick’s work there were many infants and children who we had to watch literally starve to death because something was preventing their bowels from absorbing nutrition.

“Catch-22” of Infant Nutrition
In probably the earliest known example of “catch-22,” nearly any insult to a child’s intestine often killed them; because, in order to heal, the bowel needs nutrition and it can’t bring in what it needs because it’s not working. Same goes for premature births.

Truly, just years before I went to medical school (in other words not that long ago), the best hope we had was to put the tiniest of tubes into a baby’s stomach and have a pump drip the weakest of formula continually at the lowest of rates just hoping against hope that we might be able to “sneak” some nutrition into the baby without doing more damage to the gut and preventing it from healing.

We did have IV sugar water and we knew exactly how many calories it took to live and grow which was was the rub. IVs can only be so strong with glucose calories before you “burn” the veins and damage the kidneys. And IVs can only go so fast before you flood the heart and damage the kidneys. And what about fats and proteins? They’re critical to healing, how do you get them in? Even the smallest “glob” of fat can clog an artery damage a kidney or cause a stroke; and, well, proteins. We all know how sticky, clumpy, bindy and cloggy proteins are—they’ll damage the kidneys and the liver!

Early Life and Education of Stanley Dudrick

Young Dr. Stanley Dudrick, Medical student to “living legend”
Much of the late night hours in my residency was sitting with a calculator and using all the charts and calculations needed in order to design a specific “hyper-al” program for a child who couldn’t, for some reason, eat. And it was all down to the work of Dr. Dudrick.

He was born April 9th 1935 in the coal mining town of Nanticoke Pennsylvania to first generation Americans. Both his sets of grandparents emigrated from Poland and were basically indentured servants imported by the industry to mine coal. They mined for more than 40 years in addition to raising cattle and farming in order to be self-sufficient. Somehow they miraculously lived into their 80s.

His father and uncles all had to work in the mines once they were 13 until they were 21. His father and uncle studied on their own for a high-school equivalent education and both went to University of Penn. It was the depression, so his father with a family became an accountant while his uncle became a lawyer.

He was the first-born to his parents, with a large family and describes having “about 14 sets of parents” all extremely interested in his success. He graduated from high-school in 1953 while also becoming skilled in all self-sufficiency lessons of farming. He and his dad personally built a 4-room home with a hand-dug basement when he was 12.

When he was six, his “kind, salt-of-the-earth” mother contracted Rheumatic Fever in the days before penicillin and all of his relatives prepared him to be able to accept her death. He remembers the respect his family showed to the doctors telling him in reverent voices that he had to take a bath, put on his Sunday clothes and be a good boy because “the doctors are coming today.”

The doctors back then acted like the kind of men his family told them they were. The visits of the two general practitioners and the rheumatologist who made house calls made a lasting impression. “They would spend a minute or two with me and then sit administering to my mother’s needs and I was very impressed with their demeanor—great role models for me.”

He gave their concern and care the credit for his mother’s survival and it was their unmistakable compassion that settled his decision, by the age of seven, to become “one of them” and he never really wavered.

“Predestined” Medical Education

From Beagles to Babies, Dr,. Stanley Dudrick and Total Parenteral Nutrition
Dr. Dudrick was an intelligent boy and apparently superbly personable as well. A congressman visited his high-school in his senior year and was so impressed with him that he offered to appoint him to West Point Naval Academy. He did take the tests and “drills” and received acceptance.

However, as a high-school senior, he called and asked for an appointment to see the dean of the medical school at the University of Pennsylvania where he had hoped to be able to go. He wanted to merely ask if he could still go to medical school at Penn if he accepted the appointment to West Point.

Dr. John McK. Mitchell, a pediatrician, informally spoke with him then asked “what do you want from me today?” Dudrick asked his question and after a thoughtful moment was basically told yes but why would you want to spend eight years learning how to kill people first?

If you get yourself prepared for medical school, the dean told him, “If I’m still alive I’d like to see you apply here, and we’ll talk about it.”

Dudrick gave up his appointment, graduated Cum Laude in 1957 from Franklin and Marshall in Lancaster and made application to to medical school, including “Penn.” He was accepted to his second choice but hadn’t even received an interview at Penn.

He called the deans office and the secretary remembered him. She said that the dean had been so impressed with him at his previous visit that he wrote a note in his file: “If this young man ever applies to medical school here, take him.” They had discussed his application and were told that he didn’t even need an interview so they hadn’t offered him one—he had basically been accepted three years prior.

He graduated from Penn in 1961, was chief resident in Surgery at Penn until 1967, joined the faculty and worked up the ranks to full professor of surgery within five years.

Professional Career

Dr. Stanley Dudrick, Living Legend award
In 1967, baby Kelleen arrived at the Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania (CHOP) with a catastrophic congenital anomaly that prevented her from oral feeding and committed her to certain death. By then Dudrick had honed the techniques of parenteral nutrition on beagles enough to have also used it on six adults; which made him the three-and-a-half pound baby’s “only hope.”

He worked with the baby’s doctors through four-times-a-day setbacks, innovations and successes for over a month and a half to bring her weight up to almost 7 pounds. Then, as well as now, considered a complete miracle.

The number of lives of children that have been saved by his innovative technique is estimated at over 10 million, and the benefit to adults with a range of conditions is no less substantial.

His development of Total Parenteral Nutrition has been described as one of the four most significant accomplishments in the history of the development of modern surgery—along with asepsis and antisepsis, antibiotic therapy and anesthesia.

Additionally, it’s been acknowledged as one of the three most important advancements in surgery during the past century—along with open heart surgery and organ transplantation.

Later life:
Dr Dudrick is the recipient of more than 120 honors and awards and was recently named a “Living Legend” by the International Society of Small Bowel Transplantation.

Stanley Dudrick: Total Parenteral Nutrition

 

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HISTORICAL ESSAY
Poplawski, Stephen J. 1885 - 1956

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inventor of the electric blender; born in Poland on Aug. 14, 1885, he emigrated at age 9 with his parents to Racine, Wis. In 1918 he founded Stephens Tool Co. and in 1919 was hired by Arnold Electric Co. to develop an automatic malted milk mixer for use in restaurants (Racine being home of Horlick Malted Milk). In 1922 he filed a patent "for the first mixer of my design having an agitating element mounted in a base and adapted to be drivingly connected with the agitator in the cup when the cup was placed in a recess in the top of the base." During the 1920s he filed several patents for such machines and Arnold became a leader in their manufacture. In 1926 that firm was sold to Hamilton Beach Manufacturing Co. of Racine, and Poplawski joined their staff. In 1933 he began working on his own time to create a blender for home rather than commercial use, ultimately forming Stephens Electric Co., and in 1940 he patented a household mixer for family kitchens. On January 28, 1946, this machine was named the "Osterizer" when Poplawski sold his business to the John Oster Manufacturing Co. He retired in 1946 after this sale, and died in Racine on Dec. 9, 1956.

Poplawski, Stephen J. 1885 - 1956 | Wisconsin Historical Society

 

[SobieskiSavedEurope]

Canute (I), byname Canute the Great, Danish Knut, or Knud, den Store, Norwegian Knut den Mektige, (died Nov. 12, 1035), Danish king of England (1016–35), of Denmark (as Canute II; 1019–35), and of Norway (1028–35), who was a power in the politics of Europe in the 11th century, respected by both emperor and pope. Neither the place nor the date of his birth is known.

Canute was the grandson of the Polish ruler Mieszko I on his mother’s side. As a youth he accompanied his father, Sweyn I Forkbeard, king of Denmark, on his invasion of England in 1013. Canute was left in charge of the fleet at Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, and it was probably then that he met Aelfgifu, daughter of an ealdorman (chief officer) of Northumbria who had been murdered with King Aethelred II’s connivance in 1006; she bore him two sons, Sweyn and Harold. Sweyn I Forkbeard was accepted as king of England by the end of 1013 but died in February 1014, and the English invited Aethelred to return. Canute and the men of Lindsey planned a combined expedition, but Canute deserted his allies at Easter and sailed to Denmark, putting his hostages, savagely mutilated, ashore at Sandwich. In 1015 he returned and began a long struggle with Aethelred’s son Edmund IIIronside. Earl Uhtred of Northumbria submitted to Canute in 1016 and was murdered in his hall. After Aethelred died in April 1016, the English witan (council) elected Canute king at Southampton, but those councillors who were in London, with the citizens, elected Edmund. Canute won a victory at Ashingdon, Essex, on October 18, and the kingdom was then divided; but Edmund died on November 30, and Canute succeeded to the whole.

Canute’s first actions were ruthless: he gave Englishmen’s estates to his Danish followers as rewards; he engineered the death of Edmund’s brother Eadwig; and he had some prominent Englishmen killed or outlawed. Edmund’s infant sons, however, eventually reached an asylum in Hungary. Already in 1016, Canute had given the earldom of Northumbria to the Norwegian Viking Eric of Hlathir, and in 1017 he put the renowned Viking chief Thorkell the Tall over East Anglia. Yet Canute did not rule like a foreign conqueror for long: by 1018 Englishmen were holding earldoms in Wessex and Mercia. The Danish element in his entourage steadily decreased. Thorkell was outlawed in 1021, and, during the rest of the reign, of his three most influential advisers only one was a Dane. Canute paid off most of his fleet in 1018, and the Danes and the English reached an agreement at Oxford, one authority adding “according to Edgar’s law.” A draft of the treaty survives, written in the style of Archbishop Wulfstan of York, who later drew up Canute’s laws, mainly based on previous legislation. It is likely that it was Wulfstan who aroused in the young Canute an ambition to emulate the best of his English predecessors, especially King Edgar. Canute proved an effective ruler who brought internal peace and prosperity to the land. He became a strong supporter and a generous donor to the church, and his journey to Rome was inspired by religious as well as diplomatic motives. He needed English support against external dangers. King Aethelred’s sons were in Normandy, and Canute married their mother, Emma, in 1017 to prevent her brother, Duke Richard II, from espousing their cause. English forces helped to secure Canute’s position in Scandinavia in 1019, when he went to Denmark to obtain the throne on his brother’s death; in 1023, when the outlawed Thorkell was causing trouble; and again in 1026 when his regent in Denmark, Ulf Jarl, the husband of his sister Estrid, joined the king of Norway and the king of Sweden in a coalition against Denmark. Though Canute was defeated at the Battle of the Holy River, Sweden, terms were made. Scandinavian sources attribute to Canute the death of Ulf soon afterward. Canute fomented with bribes the unrest of Norwegian landowners against their king, Olaf II Haraldsson, and was able to drive him out in 1028. He put Norway in charge of Haakon, son of Eric of Hlathir, and, after Haakon’s death, of his concubine Aelfgifu and their son Sweyn. Olaf attempted to return in 1030 but fell at Stiklestad. Aelfgifu and Sweyn became unpopular and fled to Denmark in 1035 before Canute’s death.

In England, peace was broken only by Canute’s expedition to Scotland in 1027, by which he secured recognition from three of the Scottish kings. English trade profited by Canute’s control of the Baltic trade route. On his pilgrimage to Rome, timed for him to attend the coronation of the Holy Roman emperor Conrad II in 1027, he secured from the latter and other princes whom he met reductions in tolls for English traders and pilgrims. Denmark benefited from his friendly relations with the emperor, who surrendered Schleswig and territory north of the Eider River when negotiations were begun for the marriage of the emperor’s son Henry to Canute’s daughter Gunhild.

Neither Canute’s illegitimate son Harold, who ruled England until 1040, nor his legitimateson Hardecanute, who succeeded to Denmark in 1035 and to England in 1040, inherited his qualities. The English reverted to their old royal line in 1042, and Denmark passed to Sweyn II, son of Earl Ulf and Estrid.

Canute (I) | king of England, Denmark, and Norway

 

[SobieskiSavedEurope]

Polish-born playwright wins Pulitzer Prize
17.04.2018 09:30
Polish-born playwright Martyna Majok has won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her work "Cost of Living."

Photo: Free-Photos/piaxabay.com/CC0 Creative Commons

The drama was hailed by the jury as “an honest, original work that invites audiences to examine diverse perceptions of privilege and human connection through two pairs of mismatched individuals: a former trucker and his recently paralyzed ex-wife, and an arrogant young man with cerebral palsy and his new caregiver.”

“I tried to tell the story of our contacts with people and the need for such relationships,” Majok told Poland's PAP news agency about the play.

Majok migrated to the United States with her family at age five. Her plays, which include Ironbound and John, Who’s Here from Cambridge, have been staged in cities such as New York, Washington and Chicago.

She has received many prizes, among them the Charles MacArthur Award, the Lanford Wilson Award and the David Calicchio Emerging American Playwright Prize.

Polish-born playwright wins Pulitzer Prize

 

[SobieskiSavedEurope]

Bless You! Polish Film by Paulina Ziolkowska Wins at 2018 Berlinale
Written by ZF Team

Category: Awards & Prizes
Published: 24 February 2018




Paulina Ziolkowska won a special mention at the 68th Berlin Festival (competition: Generation KPlus) for her student film Bless You!

Polish animation director Paulina Ziolkowska scored a victory with her latest, 5-minute short, Bless You! (Na zdrowie!). The Youth Jury in the Competition Generation 14plus section of the 2018 Berlin Film Festival (Jascha Katjana Richer, Lilly Rinklebe, Zoe Rentmeister, Rosa Nietzsche, Robert Schlücker, Joseph Askar Schönfelder, Jonathan Auer) gave the film (shown at world premiere) a Special Mention.

Ziolkowska is also the director of the festival favorite animation short Oh! Mother [watch an excerpt here] . Her new short is described thus:

After her Warning: contagious! Germs fly around wildly in the hustle and bustle of urban life. You stand next to the wrong nose, and it happens in a flash. You can even get a dose during an innocent flirt with your potential sweetheart. And what happens if you keep on infecting yourself? - Film synopsis

The jury verdict: A very accomplished, poetic, lyrical and dense piece of art. Showing that bodies blend into the sea of humanity, individuality is not under our control – a sneeze can be a body snatcher.





Paulina Ziolkowska (b.1988, Wroclaw, Poland) started History of Art studies at Wroclaw Uniwersity. In 2008 she began Graphic Design at Academy of Art and Design in Wroclaw and in 2011animation studies at The Polish National Film School in Łódź. Bless You! is co-financed by the Polish Film institute

Bless You! Polish Film by Paulina Ziolkowska Wins at 2018 Berlinale