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Notably, if your payment is made after Jan. 5, your paper may not be included in the conference proceedings.

Keynote Speeches

Saturday, Jan 26th 2013

10:30 am, Room GAMMA

Everything Should Be Made as Simple as Possible, but not Simpler

Prof. Peter J. Morton, Chinese Culture University

13:10 pm, Room GAMMA  

Discovery, Development and Delivery of Biologicals for Cancer Therapy

Prof. Crispin R. Dass, Victoria University

Everything Should Be Made as Simple as Possible, but not Simpler

Peter J. Morton

Center for Language Teaching and Learning,

And Department of Economics

Chinese Culture University                                                                                        

ABSTRACT:

Many metrics have been developed to track the increasing complexity of the language used throughout primary and secondary education. In advertising, public safety and military communication, these formulas help guide writers towards an appropriate balance between the subject matter they want to transmit and the audience they wish to reach. This paper extends that analysis to the university level, in order to estimate the costs and benefits of language complexity among academic authors in the social sciences and business. People in academics generally must compete to make fine distinctions and communicate complex ideas. We find evidence that more experienced authors are able to simplify the language they use, and that the more prestigious academic journals seem to encourage simpler language. But when we look for a direct association between complexity measures and rates of citation by other scholars, the evidence is much weaker and seldom statistically significant. We conclude that the pressure for simplicity of expression is mainly imposed editorially by journals rather than by the preferences of end readers in their selection of material for citation. A possible explanation is proposed. The findings are especially relevant to younger academics whose writing style is still malleable, and to non-native English speakers who may have greater-than-average difficulty reading and writing complex passages. If English is to serve as a shared language for scholars during the coming years, it will be desirable to eliminate those features of English that serve to block communication rather than facilitate it.

Discovery, Development and Delivery of Biologicals for Cancer Therapy

Crispin R. Dass

School of Biomedical and Health Sciences,

Victoria University, Australia 

Cancer is a group of diseases characterised by an uncontrolled growth of cells in the body.  These lesions, if not treated, grow until they become life-threatening or fatal.  Traditionally, surgery has been the main form of tumour control, though this is not performed where the growth is deep-seated in the body or located at a site where surgery could itself be life-threatening.  Alternatives to, or assisting surgery, are chemotherapy and radiotherapy.  However, these two traditional forms of cancer therapy, whilst curative in some cases, are usually suboptimal due to harmful effects to the healthy parts of the body.  To address this, there is a global push to find compounds that are effective against neoplastic cells, but less harmful against normal healthy cells of the body.  Pigment epithelium-derived factor (PEDF) is one molecule that we are looking at which has antiangiogenic, direct anticancer and cell differentiation properties.  Dz13 is another which has significant anticancer activity specifically via activation of caspase-2.  Currently, we are also looking at ‘green’ biopolymer, chitosan, for its effects on cancer and tissue regeneration.   

Biography    

Crispin R. Dass has 18 years of cell and molecular biology research experience, mainly focusing on oncological R&D.  His research is on systems at various levels – in silico, in vitro, in vivo, ADME/Tox, clinical, and also with biomedical education.  He has worked on projects for Johnson & Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline, Amgen, and Novartis.  His extensive experience is documented in his 135 papers to date, with a h-index of 30, and ~2700 citations, and publications in Nature Medicine, Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Biomaterials, Nucleic Acids Research, Cancer, and Journal of Controlled Release. He is currently on the editorial board of 4 journals in his field, and has been invited to chair sessions and to give plenary lectures at national and international conferences.  Based currently in St Albans (Melbourne, Australia), he has research links with Thailand, Fiji, USA, China, South Korea, Japan, Iran and India.