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10 July 2018 Photo Supplied
Inaugural lecture focuses on understanding society
Dr Kristina Riedel, Head of the UFS Department of Linguistics and Language Practice with Prof Kobus Marais at his inaugural lecture in May.
Understanding what the terms ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ mean and where they come from is important for Prof Kobus Marais. “If one thinks about it carefully, there was a time in the history of the universe and Earth that terms like ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ did not exist. So, if they did not exist from the very beginning, they must have emerged through some process,” he said at his inaugural lecture held earlier this year.

Prof Marais is a senior lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and Language Practice at the University of the Free State (UFS). His interest is in translation studies, but he is conceptualising translation as a technical term that refers to the semiotic process   in other words, the process through which living organisms create meaningful responses to an environment. 

Semiotics entails the study of signs, and it holds that anything in the universe can act as a sign or be interpreted as one. “A tune can be a sign of resistance against political domination, such as Give me hope, Jo’anna, a song by Eddie Grant, and smoke can be a sign of fire, just as the word ‘rose’ could be a sign of a sweet-smelling flower of any colour,” Prof Marais said. 

The universe is perfused by signs, and we are constantly interpreting them, from traffic signs to buildings to agricultural practices to more abstract things like ‘the law’, ‘politics’, ‘economics’ or ‘religion’. All of these things mean something to us and were made as meaningful responses to an environment.

Inaugural lectures vital part of any university
“Inaugural lectures afford professors the opportunity to table a broader research agenda as well as the opportunity to reflect on meta-disciplinary concerns,” Prof Marais said.

He said during the lecture, he had worked out “a theory of translation that explains some aspects of where social/cultural things come from and how they come to be”. An idea that society, and or culture, are a result of translation processes, that is, “processes in which organisms (human beings in this case) respond to an environment in a meaningful way by creating social relationships and cultural phenomena”. 
“Social and cultural phenomena thus all have a meaningful (semiotic) dimension or aspect that I would like to study,” he said.

News Archive

Champagne and cancer have more in common than you might think
2013-05-08

 

Photo: Supplied
08 May 2013

No, a glass of champagne will not cure cancer....

…But they have more in common than you might think.

Researchers from the Departments of Microbial Biochemical and Food Biotechnology, Physics and the Centre for Microscopy at the University of the Free State in South Africa were recently exploring the properties of yeast cells in wine and food to find out more of how yeast was able to manufacture the gas that caused bread to rise, champagne to fizz and traditional beer to foam. And the discovery they made is a breakthrough that may have enormous implications for the treatment of diseases in humans.

The team discovered that they could slice open cells with argon gas particles, and look inside. They were surprised to find a maze of tiny passages like gas chambers that allowed each cell to ‘breathe.’ It is this tiny set of ‘lungs’ that puts the bubbles in your bubbly and the bounce in your bread.

But it was the technique that the researchers used to open up the cells that caught the attention of the scientists at the Mayo Clinic (Tumor Angiogenesis and Vascular Biology Research Centre) in the US.

Using this technology, they ultimately aim to peer inside cells taken from a cancer patient to see how treatment was progressing. In this way they would be able to assist the Mayo team to target treatments more effectively, reduce dosages in order to make treatment gentler on the patient, and have an accurate view of how the cancer was being eliminated.

“Yes, we are working with the Mayo Clinic,” said Profes Lodewyk Kock from the Microbial, Biochemical and Food Biotechnology Department at the UFS.

“This technique we developed has enormous potential for cell research, whether it is for cancer treatment or any other investigation into the working of cells. Through nanotechnology, and our own invention called Auger-architectomics, we are able to see where no-one has been able to see before.”

The team of Prof Kock including Dr Chantel Swart, Kumisho Dithebe, Prof Hendrik Swart (Physics, UFS) and Prof Pieter van Wyk (Centre for Microscopy, UFS) unlocked the ‘missing link’ that explains the existence of bubbles inside yeasts, and incidentally have created a possible technique for tracking drug and chemotherapy treatment in human cells.

Their work has been published recently in FEMS Yeast Research, the leading international journal on yeast research. In addition, their discovery has been selected for display on the cover page of all 2013 issues of this journal.

One can most certainly raise a glass of champagne to celebrate that!

There are links for video lectures on the technique used and findings on the Internet at:

1. http://vimeo.com/63643628 (Comic version for school kids)

2. http://vimeo.com/61521401 (Detailed version for fellow scientists)

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