Vol 87, No 6 (2017)

The second half of the 20th century was marked by discoveries of the structure and function of nucleic acids, proteins, and carbohydrates, which make up the basis for the vital activity of organisms. Even though the decisive contribution to the study of these compounds was made by investigations using the methods of spectral and X-ray structural analysis, as well as nuclear magnetic resonance, we should admit that the methods of chemical modification also largely influenced the progress in understanding the functional mechanisms of biological macromolecules. The priority in their development, primarily in formulating objectives and prospects for the targeted delivery of functional chemical compounds to molecules of proteins and nucleic acids, largely belongs to Russian scientists. The fundamentals of the pioneering works of Academician D.G. Knorre’s scientific school in the field of specific modification of biological macromolecules and ways of using this approach in molecular biology and biomedicine are considered.

The task is posed to study the One Belt One Road initiative, proposed by China in 2013 and based on original Chinese documents; materials of various conferences held in China and abroad; and works by Chinese, Russian, and Western scholars. This project is primarily economic and is targeted at accelerating China’s socioeconomic development under new challenges in the global arena. These challenges include the reduction of export possibilities in the traditional markets of the United States, the European Union, and East Asia as a result of decreased global economic growth rates and the attempt of the United States to weaken China’s political and economic positions by creating two new structures—the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. A paper on this topic was presented by A.V. Ostrovskii at a session of the RAS Presidium in April 2017.

The results of modeling the information space for promising research in domestic linguistics are presented. Interdisciplinarity and polyparadigmality in recent domestic linguistic studies are analyzed. A corpus of the extended abstracts of initiative projects supported by the Russian Foundations for the Humanities is used as a case study. The basic method is semantic graph modeling, implemented in the Semograph information system, the operational units being sets of keywords reflected in the extended abstracts of the supported projects, grouped in term fields.

Russia’s mineral resources are a unique wealth, given to us by nature and discovered and preserved by generations of our ancestors. In the 20th century, two addends of this wealth, oil and gas, gained special importance. They are nonrenewable, and their reserves are decreasing. Over the last two decades, the highest state bodies have kept saying that the raw-materials export model of the Russian economy has exhausted itself and we should transfer to innovation-oriented development. How can we do this in practice using our natural advantages? This and other problems are discussed by S.S. Popov, a Sector Head of the journal Vestnik Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk (Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences), in his conversation with Academician A.N. Dmitrievskii, one of the leaders of Russian oil and gas science and Director for Research of the RAS Oil and Gas Research Institute (RAS OGRI), who will celebrate his 80th birthday in 2017.

The connection between the Russian Tsar Peter the Great and the German philosopher G.W. Leibniz is discussed with a focus on their common plan to develop science in Russia and to create for this purpose the Academy of Sciences, which, embracing all knowledge areas and being in this context of special importance for the state, should be under direct protection of the supreme power. Considering the initial project, its implementation, and subsequent stages of the Academy’s development, the author shows how the place of philosophy in the structure of the Academy of Sciences changed, emphasizes the direct and indirect influence of academic scientific activity on the development of domestic professional philosophy in the 18th and 19th centuries, and analyzes the changes that led to the detachment of philosophy into an academic specialization and the creation of a relevant research institute. A brief background of the RAS Institute of Philosophy is provided, and research possibilities of academic philosophy as opposed to those of university philosophy are considered.

The surrounding world changes slowly, and this is hardly noticeable over a short period. However, over the 4.5 billion years of existence of our planet, it has changed cardinally; Homo sapiens and the noosphere appeared. The English biologist R. Dawkins called this evolution the greatest show on earth. However, the nature of changes is still a great secret and causes debates among scientists of different fields. The author is sure that one of the causes of the existing situation is total rejection or narrow understanding of evolution in nonliving matter by science. There are abiogenic systems on earth, primarily, aquatic, that are capable of continuous and nonlinear evolution. Such dissipative systems develop far from equilibrium. They are irreversible and can accumulate energy or reduce entropy; they receive substance and energy from the external environment and have internal mechanisms of a geologically long evolution with the formation of more complex compounds. Evolution in nonliving matter is close to the evolution of living systems by many of its mechanisms and parameters.

The fate of the first publications by A.L. Chizhevsky that considered the influence of space weather on the dynamics of sociohistorical processes and on human collective behavior is discussed briefly. The scientist’s statistical data that indicate a correlation between certain characteristics of social processes and cosmophysical indices are noted to have been confirmed by independent Russian and foreign authors, and the hypothesis of the impact of solar activity on sociohistorical processes and the biosphere has passed the test of the latest biophysical and neurophysiological studies.

An attempt is made to define a way of solving the problem of incoordination between the main needs of scientific and technological development, on the one hand, and the deficit of the new scientific infrastructure aimed to respond to the current social, economic, and cultural changes, on the other. The author suggests turning to the concept of trading zones, proposed by the physicist and science historian P. Galison, using it in a special context of interaction between scientific and extrascientific social subjects. This will concretize the concept of scientific communication, ultimately making it possible to design scientific and technosocial ways of filling in the above lacunae, particularly by developing and expanding the methods of researching, modeling, and designing trading zones.

This article is dedicated to intellectual property management, a problem topical for the scientific community. The main approaches to ensuring intellectual rights to developments created in universities of various regions are considered. Special emphasis is placed on commercializing the results of intellectual activity; the experience of individual European and Israeli universities and state policies in this area are analyzed. Attention is drawn to the feasibility of using in Russia successful experience that has proved effective in scientifically advanced countries.