Stem cells build our bodies during development, starting from a fertilized oocyte. Subsequently, they maintain and repair our organs for a lifetime. Thus, stem cells hold the promise of eternal life. While this may still be in the distant future, stem cells are rapidly changing the face of biomedical science and are finding applications in the clinic. In this article, I discuss the principles of stem cell biology and the mini-organs that can be grown from stem cells in a petri dish.

The German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina is greatly honoured by receiving the Gold Medal of the Academia Europaea. On this occasion, it might be appropriate to talk about the role of academies in science-based policy advice. The authors would like to address the question: what general aims should the academies achieve – particularly in respect to biomedicine and the life sciences?

In this article I will share some reflections on my own experience as a historian. However, I will refrain from proposing my own case as a model. I dislike preaching; moreover, I regard ego-centred preaching as a ridiculous posture. So please: note what I will say, and then follow a completely different path.

Initiated in the sixteenth century, the Copernican revolution toppled our Earth from its theological pedestal, revealing it not to be the centre of everything but a planet among several others in orbit around one of the zillions of stars of our Universe. Already proposed by some philosophers at the dawn of this major paradigm shift, the existence of exoplanets, i.e. planets in orbit around stars other than our Sun, remained suspected but unconfirmed for centuries. It is only in the last decade of the twentieth century that the first of these extrasolar worlds were found. Their seminal discoveries initiated the development of more and more ambitious projects that led eventually to the detection of thousands of exoplanets, including a few dozen potentially habitable ones, i.e. terrestrial exoplanets that could harbour large amounts of liquid water – and maybe life – on their surfaces. Upcoming astronomical facilities will soon be able to probe the atmospheric compositions of some of these extrasolar worlds, maybe performing in the process the historical detection of chemical signs of life light-years away. But while the existence of extraterrestrial life remains pure speculation for now, it has been a major theme of science fiction for more than a century. By creating countless stories of encounters between humans and alien forms of life, science-fiction authors have pursued, in a sense, the Copernican revolution, confronting us with the idea that not only could life be widespread in the Universe, but also that our species may be far from the Cosmic pinnacle in matters of intelligence and technological development.

About 6 million years ago, the Mediterranean basin was the location of one of the most extraordinary events in the recent geological history of the Earth: the Messinian Salinity Crisis. Restriction of the seawater exchange between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean led to excess evaporation and deposition on the bottom of the deep Mediterranean basins of a 1.5 km-thick salt layer. Research on this event initiated a long-term scientific controversy. COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) and Marie Skłodowska-Curie European Training Networks were identified as the most appropriate tools to address and solve the controversy using a highly cross-disciplinary approach.

In the post-imperial East Central Europe after the dissolution of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian empires, disappointment was commonplace. The imperial successor states were involved in revengeful animosities with neighbouring states, torn by their majority population’s hatred of domestic minorities, bereft of tens of millions of their co-nationals who had remained in now foreign nation-states, exposed to huge influxes of refugees, and embittered by the territorial concessions that they were forced to make. By contrast, the newly established nation-states were plagued by miserable social and economic conditions, poor infrastructures, unemployment, inflation, rigid and immobile social stratification, and corrupt and inefficient administrations. Such developments gave rise to huge and traumatic deportations and migrations of populations, which, paradoxically, simultaneously immensely increased the mobility of their imagination. Using the technique of ‘subversive mimicry’, these nationally indistinct elements established cross-national transborder communities as the zones of ‘national indifference’ within the new nation-states. Carried by the energy of their longing, these communities introduced imbalances, fissures, and divisions into the nation-state communities, which determined their belonging.

Throughout his career as a theatre director, Jerzy Grotowski encountered many different theatre cultures, which both collided with and were synthesized in his own practices. Confronted with Cold War mindsets and ideological constraints, Grotowski’s theatrical art reflects a kind of cosmopolitan spirit by embracing a common humanity. Analysing Grotowski’s biography alongside his theatrical innovations and theoretical thinking, this article aims to investigate the following three aspects of his theatrical cosmopolitanism: his encounters with different performance cultures in his theatrical concept of ‘poor theatre’, his advocacy of universal ethics in his representative theatrical production Akropolis, and his belief in world citizenship reflected in his concept of ‘art as vehicle’ from the later years of his career. As a pioneer in the contemporary experimental theatre and performance, Grotowski travelled, lived and worked all over the world, transcending the geographical and ideological divide between the Socialist and the Capitalist blocs during the Cold War. The adverse social conditions of the time did not hinder his creativity, but rather instigated his unmatched artistic talent and his cosmopolitan spirit, both of which are deeply interconnected and integrated.

The aim of this article is to analyse the TV series Black Sun/Shadows over the Balkans (Senke nad Balkanom, 2017, Dragan Bjelogrlić), understood as a reflection of the ways in which diverse imperial legacies, persisting differences and contrasting pasts shaped the (ambivalent) post-imperial traumatic history of the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1918. The burden of imperial legacy – mostly manifested in ethnic, political, cultural and economic tensions among diverse nations in the new multi-ethnic state – kept brewing under the surface and came to represent a constant threat of balkanization i.e. further fragmentation of the multicultural kingdom. In this article I claim that the same danger of balkanization – traced back to the years after the Great War – continued to haunt all successor states of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (and Yugoslavias ensuing from 1943 until 1992) eventually resulting in the break-up of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) in 1992. The irreconcilable differences and competing ambitions of different national, social and geopolitical identities define the structure, characters and their relations in the TV narrative, and are also reflected in the cityscape of Belgrade – the capital of the Kingdom and paradigmatic Balkan metropolis – in the late 1920s. The series is read against the theories of Dominique Moisi’s Geopolitics of Emotions (2010) and La géopolitique des séries/Geopolitics of TV Series (2016), and his assertion that TV series have become crucial in understanding our world in its many aspects – from domestic politics to geopolitics. The story of Belgrade between the two World Wars reveals the traumatic imperial legacy as determining the emergence of a ‘culture of fear, hope and humiliation’, tensions of balkanization and search for identity in the city suspended between an Ottoman casaba and a European metropolis. On the other side – in terms of narrative, genre, and visual style – the series itself is seen as the acculturated version of both the novel Der nasse Fisch (Volker Kutscher, 2007) and the TV series Babylon Berlin (2017), illustrating the rise of cultural imperialism in post-imperial times.

Within written history, Europe is rich in post-imperial situations. In the twentieth century the dwindling empires of this century, born during European colonial expansion after Columbus, gave rise to new post-imperial conditions with a global impact. Europe is no exception. On other continents, empires have also emerged and faded away: Latin-America with the Mayas and the Aztecs, and, notably, Asia where the Chinese Empire has disappeared and re-emerged at different historical junctures. On their way down, European empires have produced what could be labelled a post-imperial stress syndrome, very much like a PTSD, producing certain defensive ideological configurations of parochialism, xenophobia and nostalgic illusions, binding them to a past they have left, but are still chained to, mentally and ideologically. The fall or fading away of an empire is not just an event with a precise date, but a process, which, inevitably, shows cracks before it actually happens. Such frictions anticipating a future reality can only be caught by imagination. This article will concentrate on two such imaginative post-imperial prefigurations before the fact is generally recognized, both concerning the dissolution of the British Empire. It can be argued that, with Brexit, Britain is still trying to come to terms with its post-imperial reality. One such prefiguration will be seen through the eyes of the centre, J.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), the other from the periphery, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958).

Along with the rapid development and proliferation of autonomous robotic weapons, machines are beginning to replace people on battlefields. The use by the USA of Predators or Reapers and other unmanned aerial vehicles in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other places in the world clearly signals a distancing of soldiers from their targets. In this article I concentrate on fully autonomous weapons. The theses of the article are as follows: the use of autonomous weapons would be contrary to the basic and fundamental principles of international humanitarian law, such as the principles of distinction and proportionality, and thus illegal. As such, their use would threaten the wellbeing, life and health of civilians and civilian populations. Their use would undermine the whole concept of the rules of war. Still, there are scholars who are of the opinion that prohibiting the use of autonomous weapons would make no sense at all and that the development of such weapons is inevitable and will take place gradually. Their use would be an expression of the technological dimension of international security. As this article will attempt to demonstrate, the drawbacks of the use of autonomous weapons are of such magnitude that they exclude the legality of such devices.

This article, the second of two, continues an analysis of the developments which led to the Gezi Uprisings that, starting at the end of May 2013, spread to almost all of Turkey in the following months. The uprisings are seen as massive popular reactions, embracing almost all anti-Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) strata in Turkey, to the AKP’s authoritarianism, its anti-secular, anti-republican and anti-democratic discourse and policies, and its attempts to intervene in private life. The article likens the protests to a sort of firedamp explosion and argues that the explosives had been produced by the AKP government itself. The article also briefly presents the developments which have taken place since 2013 up to July 2019 and implies that the possibility of a real decline of the AKP governmental power can be seen in its problematic relation with the Kurdish masses, with the extreme right-MHP, and with the rise of the CHP, a sign of which was seen in the local elections held in March and June 2019.

It is a highly advocated view that a competition law with sanctions targeting individuals would achieve a greater deterrent impact than one that does not. Having introduced individual sanctions does not, however, guarantee that a market would have less anticompetitive conduct, because these sanctions are effective only insofar as they are severely implemented on wrongdoing individuals. UK competition law is one example of this issue because cases where individuals have been targeted and punished are significantly fewer than the authorities expected, in spite of it being more than 15 years since individual sanctions were introduced amidst high expectations. This article examines the individual sanctions of competition law in the UK and Turkey. It argues that Turkey is on the right path by departing from the way in which EU law enforces the rules of competition law, and is moving closer to UK law. However, it is argued that further steps should be cautiously considered to avoid the same issues which UK competition law is currently experiencing, as there are serious doubts that the latter has achieved the desired deterrent effect.