Electronic - Versus Paper - Editions of knowledge, current trust and fear: A contribution to the 40th anniversary of the journal "Cellulose Chemistry and Technology", outlined by some glance on the emergence of scientific concepts in cellulose and lignin

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Electronic - Versus Paper - Editions of knowledge, current trust and fear: A contribution to the 40th anniversary of the journal ”Cellulose Chemistry and Technology”, outlined by some glance on the emergence

of scientific concepts in cellulose and lignin chemistry

Bernard Monties

To cite this version:

Bernard Monties. Electronic - Versus Paper - Editions of knowledge, current trust and fear: A

contribution to the 40th anniversary of the journal ”Cellulose Chemistry and Technology”, outlined

by some glance on the emergence of scientific concepts in cellulose and lignin chemistry. Cellulose

Chemistry and Technology, Editura Academiei Romane, 2006, 40 (9-10), pp.685-690. �hal-02655229�

CELLULOSE CHEMISTRY AND TECHNOLOGY

Cellulose Chem. Technol., 40 (9-10), 685-690 (2006) ELECTRONIC - VERSUS PAPER – EDITIONS OF KNOWLEDGE,

CURRENT TRUST AND FEAR: A CONTRIBUTION TO THE 40

ANNIVERSARY OF THE JOURNAL “CELLULOSE CHEMISTRY AND

TECHNOLOGY”, OUTLINED BY SOME GLANCE ON THE EMERGENCE OF SCIENTIFIC CONCEPTS IN CELLULOSE AND

LIGNIN CHEMISTRY

BERNARD MONTIES

INA-Paris-Grignon, Laboratoire de Chimie Biologique, 78850, Thiverval-Grignon, France

On some occasions, celebration of an anniversary unavoidably prompts to scrutinize more closely the future, on the basis of current and past events. This is indeed the case of the 40

anniversary of Cellulose Chemistry and Technology, with respect to the conjunction of two deep-seated social phenomena, namely the strong renewal of scientific interest for the cellulosic products as clean sources of energy and polymer materials, and the rising promises on the possibilities offered by the so called ‘electronic edition’, to improve the efficiency of knowledge communication.

Under such circumstances, and considering first the past developments and events, this anniversary allows emphasizing and acknowledging the lucid and independent editorial policy of the Editors, who enforced Cellulose Chemistry and Technology – our “CCT”’ – as an indispensable international journal. As unambiguously shown by the diversity of both the national belonging of the authors, and by the extent of the professional expertises of the papers, combining academic and technological interest, this editorial policy has tenaciously responded to a scientific requirement and as such, it has strongly contributed to the development of

open and free scientific exchanges in this specific domain of cellulosic compounds.

Furthermore, the past settling and the present concern of this editorial diversity, extended in the direction of, for example, the diversity of the natural resources and of the environmental cleanness of products and technologies, also exactly respond to the existing imperious need for large and free exchanges of scientific information, necessary for a sustainable management of our contemporary human society.

Looking then to the future, one has to also emphasize that the whole suite of the 40 Cellulose Chemistry Technology volumes settles a precious collection of relevant data deserving certainly future renewed interests!

Such a statement could somewhat appear provocative as concerning ‘old papers’ and

‘old ideas’, most often reputed as ‘out of any’ of the ‘today competitive ... Science’.

This is absolutely not the case. In fact, as time fleets, the significance of some concepts, even of scientific nature, changes continuously, following the advances of recent observations and experimentations.

Thus, the related meaning of the statements

in ‘older’ papers has to be revisited,

accounting, however, for the unchanged

exactitude of the experimental observations,

Bernard Monties

686

on accepting that even the understanding of the whole texts is sometime renewed.

Obviously, this ought to be particularly the case when an original idea emerges as a new and steadily renewed concept. A clear illustration that both these facts and statements are not a kind of illusive funny idea, ‘i.e. une illusoire vue de l’esprit’, can be found if looking back into the ‘old’ papers of any scientific journal and thus of course, in … CCT. This has been the case during the emergence of the ‘molecular’ concept of cellulose and of lignin, more than one century ago. This is currently also the case for the ‘macromolecular’ organisation of lignin in diverse plant cell walls; a source of thorny contemporary controversy, this last theme will be only squished here.

As a first example, the ‘molecular’

concept of ‘cellulose’ and of its

‘homogeneous long chain’, the ‘only one page’ answer by K. Freudenberg, printed in 1977 in the 11

CCT volume, is particularly relevant, as he makes clearer an eulogistic comment by Herman Mark,

published in 1976. In fact, Mark’s statement that ‘some confusion could have been avoided if the results of Freudenberg’s experiments on the acid hydrolysis of cellulose around 1921’

had been expressed ‘with stronger emphasis’.

In addition, it could be now also suggested that the even … ‘scientific’ minds were not ready to ‘understand’, ‘combine’ or ‘com- prise’, (i.e., to etymologically ‘clearly take and bind together’), some of the original experimental ‘data’ and the new meaning of the corresponding term of ‘knowledge’, as the concept of ‘cellulose’ as large molecule, to be later on systematized by Herman Staudinger.

Resuming now to the ‘macromolecular’

concept of lignin as a second and last example, it is amazing, but certainly not surprising, to find a similar illustration in CCT, again and again, from the part of K.

Freudenberg, in 1978 volume 12, who presented some retrospective views on solved and open questions concerning lignin and ... polysaccharides! On one hand, looking again into the history of cellulose chemistry, Freudenberg wisely recalled a spectacular diatribe, i.e. “sehr hohgespielte Kontroverse”, between two well-known

experts in the field, strongly stating that, as previously emphasized here, ‘a proper study of the literature soon published could had avoided such a controversy and the related cumbersome publications’. On the other hand, looking into the future of lignin chemistry, Freudenberg then stated, with regard to its macromolecular structure organization, that ‘perhaps lignin would be not so much macromolecular as previously admitted’ on the basis of synthetic models studies,

a view also clearly expressed by H.

Staudinger.

It is however still possible to find, in some recently published ‘current opinion’ publications, papers challenging with strong emphasis this late statement of Freudenberg, starting from the contradiction of his earlier, so-called ‘assertions’ and/or

‘claims’ with references to ‘older’ 1965, 1968 and 1969 papers. Determined to avoid here any new controversy, it is enough to suggest that such an unexpected challenging could well result from the difficulty to explain ‘new’ specific concepts by using

‘old’ generic ‘words’, as later discussed here, as well as, again, from a lack of ‘a proper study of the literature’, mainly due to the difficulty of extensively exploring, in a limited period of time, an ever increasing number of more and more specialized publications in different thematic domains.

Obviously, this type of difficulty is particularly characteristic to any multidisciplinary scientific domains and related themes; it is of course particularly provoking not only the chemistry and technology of cellulose- and lignin-based products but also lignocellulosic plant cell walls.

This is therefore the main reason why the question of the ‘transmission of knowledge’

was stated here in the title, on this anniversary occasion. This question can be now more exactly expressed as focussing on the ‘current query of new possibilities of optimisation by mixed use of paper- and electronic-tools for the transmission of knowledge’, that is, with the aim of sharing, and not monopolizing knowledge, as common ‘know - what, - how and - why’.

Remembering that the complexity of this

difficult question has been debated, at least

since the invention of writing,

only one

suggestion will be here expressed as ‘Good Anniversary Wishes’, which has to be necessarily concise, namely: to have a ‘new look’ at the whole collection of the 40 volume of CCT ‘papers’ as a ‘precious deposit’, etymologically a kind of sleeping

‘treasure’, i.e. a ‘thêsauros’.

It is thus wished to look now this collection also as a potential source for a fresh documentary

‘recollection’, ‘recueil’ in French, by a conversion first as a ‘data-’ and then as a

‘knowledge-’ electronic base. Of course, these two wishes are established following some of the contemporary fascinating ‘trusts’

on the outlooks of the possible electronic editions, transmissions and exchanges of numeric documents through informatic networks.

As a ‘data-base’ source, this conversion would require a ‘simple direct’ re-edition of the entire set of publications deposited ‘on paper’, as CCT documents, from the

‘alphabetic’ printed book form into a set of

‘numeric’ electronic files, as it has already been done for some other scientific journals.

This conversion could be either ‘complete’, concerning the entire papers, or ‘limited’ to short extracts, including, for example, only the summary, standard bibliographic references and the list of the cited references.

Following the idea that everyone becomes soon experienced when simply searching selected items in such data bases, one has nevertheless to stress the essential difficulty of ‘catching’ the right data and names related to ‘new’ or ‘partially known’ concepts by means of ‘previously-well-defined-words and -key-words’, which remain necessarily unclear in this respect, once they express only ‘old’ concepts.

Specific to such type of research, this difficulty could express the major fear of such endeavour, namely appearing as trivial for the ‘established’

concepts, but certainly not for the ‘emerging’

one.

As a source of a ‘knowledge basis’, this conversion would require, in addition to the conversion of ‘numeric editions’ as

‘electronic files’ just previously discussed, a systematic and specific construction of a classification of each of the published

‘papers’ according to a hierarchical arborescence of ‘topics’, corresponding to: 1-

scientific and technical domains, 2 - speculative and scientific, ‘pure’, generic themes, and 3 - empirical and technical,

‘applied’ sub-themes, such a classification bringing thus closer, both materially and conceptually, for example, an ‘archive-box’

as a sub-theme, along with ‘set of boxes’ as themes.

Allowing a simpler systematic construction of implicit and explicit links and hyperlinks between ‘words’, ‘data’ and

‘concepts’, this type of construction is expected to favourize a more exhaustive, crossed and cyclic exploration of any collection of publications organized as networks of knowledge, again by using ‘old’

words to find ‘new’ concepts. On leaving aside the type of support – printed versus electronic –, such a network, designed to crossed cyclic exploration, is thus formally and etymologically ‘encyclopaedic’ and thus generally applicable to any system of knowledge. Focussed on lignin and plant cell walls chemistry and technology, a corresponding illustration can be found in a set of ‘documentary recollection’, named ReDoc for ‘Recueil documentaire’ in French, recently developed at INRA.

To conclude with, looking back to the

‘thesaurus’ of the 40 CCT volumes already published ‘on paper’, it is whished that both the courageous actual editorial policy and the paper edition format will be safely continued, suggesting, for the future, launching of some ‘electronic’ edition, based on full ‘papers’ or ‘limited’ to short extracts of theirs, thus better supporting the indispensable free exchanges of scientific and technical knowledge, preparing the future, extended utilization of cellulose- and lignin-based compounds as environmentally safe biological and agroindustrial products.

REFERENCES AND COMMENTS

1

K. Freudenberg, A glimpse on the early

chemistry of cellulose, Cellulose Chem. Technol.,

127 (1977); see also ‘Von Emil Fisher zur

molekulare Konstitution der Cellulose und

Stärke’ by K. Freudenberg, 1967, Chem. Ber.,

similar ‘meanders’ during the emergence of the

concept of cellulose as a ‘macromolecule’, also

later revisited by Herman Staudinger in his Nobel

lecture, www/Nobel site.

Bernard Monties

688

2

K. Freudenberg, Rückblick auf gelöste und offene Fragen der Chemie der Polysaccharide und Lignin, Cellulose Chem. Technol.,

(1977); in agreement with Freudenberg’s well predicted interest on the ‘synthesis of model lignin compounds’ as a method to explore the variability of lignin macromolecular organisation;

see also Lairez et al., Biomacromolecules, 6 , 763 (2005), and B. Monties, Cellulose Chem.

Technol.,

hypothesis on the self-organisation of the enzymatically-induced but thermodynamically- driven mechanisms, during chemical synthesis and biosynthesis.

3

Concerning the ‘lignified plant cell walls’

concept, a convincing illustration of the present need and interest on multidisciplinarity can be found in 19 papers, from ‘biomimetic composites’ to ‘polymorphic genes molecular biology’ including both ‘in vivo – situ’ and ‘in vitro’ cytology, physic and chemistry, and especially in the foreword written by A.-M.

Catesson, on a ‘thematic issue’ of the Comptes Rendus à l’Academie des Sciences (Paris), C. R.

Biologies,

the past may also provide similar illustrations in addition to some amazing views on the time taken for the emergence and clear acknowledgement of concepts such as ‘lignin’.

For example, limiting here the choice exclusively to ‘old’ papers included in these ‘Comptes Rendus’, the comparison of Reports and Communications by Payen (C. R.,

Fremy (C. R.,

R.,

is more than sufficient to follow the progressive identification of the chemical composition and heterogeneous properties of the ‘compounds now called lignins’. The two headings of C. R., by E.

Fremy ‘Chimie appliquée à l’anatomie végétale’

(C. R., 83, 1136 (1876)) and ‘Chimie appliquée à la physiologie végétale’ (C. R.,

are particularly clear with respect to the need of multidisciplinarity, as well! Obviously, similar illustrations could be found in the German, English, etc., literature, which can not be presented here. Some recent brief ‘historical outlines’ can be found in the chapters elaborated by Brunow, Dean, Hatakka and Monties for the volume ‘Biopolymers’, (vol 1: Lignin, humic substances, and coal, edited by M. Hofrichter and A. Steinbüchel, 513 p., Wiley-VCH, 2001), citing

‘older’ books and reviews.

4

As to the invention of ‘writing’ during the mythic Egyptian high antiquity, of ‘written works’ which should, according to their inventor,

‘increase the knowledge and the remembrance of Egyptians’, Plato soon emphasized, at least two times, in a Letter (VII, c°: 342) and a dialogue,

Phaidro (c°: 274), the fear of the written documents, deploring more the ‘fixed, static form of the written text’ than the fear of ‘forgetfulness, due to a too large confidence to writing, leading thus to neglect the resort of remembrance’. Even more, a third type of fear explicitly concerning the ‘mercantile operations in private education by sophists’, and thus, implicitly, ‘the merchant use and the civic bases of the rights of knowledge- property’, is intensely discussed in at least two other dialogues of Plato (Sophist: c°: 224b;

Menon: c°91 c-d).

5

With reference to the current common sense of the term ‘words’ and of its evolution versus some related concepts, it is funny to recall that, to the best of our knowledge, even the origin of the word ‘treasure’ still remains unexplained! The concept has been tentatively related, at least in the case of hypothetical classic Greek etymology, to a ‘place of deposit’ (Chantraine, Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue grecque, p. 436, Klincksieck (Paris), 1999) but, apparently, it is not currently associated with the concept of

‘value’, now occurring in the ‘documentary thesaurus’ and more likely in the merchant use

of some ‘data’ bases.

6

Concerning this ‘trust versus fear balance’, it is first assumed as ‘trusts’: 1 - any numeric document, ‘new’, original or ‘old’, converted from ‘on paper’ editions, will be then much more easily stored in more compact and durable supports; 2 - these new supports will allow, by means of informatics automated research

‘motors’, more extended, exhaustive and rapid identification and location of the searched

‘topics’, as follows: a - images as ‘whole symbols’, and b - keywords as ‘sequences of numeric characters’: letters, truncated and entire words, combinations of words…; 3 - the three ingenuous ‘Socratic’ fears just cited before

may became temporary; 4 - a last dilemma, on the possible identification of some ‘new’ concepts on the basis of ‘old’ words could be solved when, for example, converting and reorganizing ‘data-’

into ‘ knowledge-’ as documentary bases, as later discussed here.

7

Some diverse, recently published ‘current opinions’, based on the keyword ‘lignin’, now used under different meanings in various domains of molecular and polymer chemistry, biochemistry, biotechnology, biomechanics and wood- or pulp – paper- technology, could easily elucidate such cases. As, however, they sometime seem expressed in self-willed conflicting forms, as earlier,

they are not considered here any more.

8

Most of these questions result from the fact that

the ‘meaning’ of the words is progressively

adapted according to the specific advances in

each of these domains and thus it is changed in a

way unperceived by most of the non-specialists, and even more by the electronic ‘automates’

which collect the corresponding old ‘words’

either as such or as a highly elaborated, but irrelevant corresponding chain of numeric symbols and characters. An even worse situation could occur when, simultaneously, the significant word itself changes. This happened only few decades before, when mainly biochemists and botanists simply started to use the plural ‘lignins’, which is now the case of the macromolecular organisation of lignins in secondary plant cell walls (see for example, the commented references (

) and (

)). The situation can be even worst, becoming an automated nightmare, in the case of the emergence of a concept under quite different

‘names’, selected according to their generic characters. Looking back again, a wiser and more clear illustration can be provided with the concerted emergence of both the word and concept of ‘lignin’, as found in some ‘at least one century old’ French ‘papers’. The word ‘lignine’

was indexed as early as in 1819 by the botanist de Candolle (Théorie élémentaire de la botanique, p.

454 - glossologie, Deterville (Paris)) who enumerated the rough solubility and fractionation characters, much more precisely reported later in 1832 by a chemist (Physiologie végétale, § 5: De la lignine, p. 194, Bechet J. (Paris)) with reference to the 1796 study by Fourcroy and Vauquelin on the ‘spontaneous effect of concentrated sulfuric acid on plant and animal substances’ (Annales de Chimie, XXIII, p. 186 (1795)). Thinking as a physiologist, de Candolle explicitely stated in 1832, possibly without an enough ‘strong emphasis’ ... , that under the name of ‘lignine’or ‘ligneux’, chemists ‘confused two physiologically distinct compounds’; he also denominated the concept of ‘matière ligneuse’, suggesting the occurrence of botanical differences and physiological variations. This

‘heterogeneity’ was later on experimentally established by Payen and described in a suite of commented reports and memoirs (Payen, Mémoire sur la composition du tissus propre des plantes et du ligneux, C. R. Acad. Sci.,

(1838), Dumas et al., Rapport sur un mémoire de M. Payen relatif à la matière ligneuse, C. R.

Acad. Sci. , 8 , 51 (1839) and also Ann. Sci. Bot., 2

Ser., 13 , 305 (1840)) in which, according to the C-, O-, H- atomic ratio, the concept and name of ‘cellulose’ was clearly established; this was not the case of the word ‘lignine’, not used as such, even when exactly conceived from its atomic composition! Ironically, the same story could be told for the other later created ‘names’, such as ‘lignose’, ‘lignol’, ‘lignone’, ... now unused and already forgotten, similarly with

‘fibrose’ and ‘vasculose’ of E. Fremy, exactly

conceived however. Even when the significance of the corresponding concepts was relevant, still remaining scientifically sound, the semantic diversity of such names, perceived only as ‘data’, were viewed and are still felt as highly stressing, strain and time consuming, once their detection assumes automatic devices based on ‘simple’ and even ‘combined signs’ – letters, words, keywords,... included in ‘data’ bases. As later outlined here, a potential solution of this ‘fear’

could be the possible identification of these

‘names’ not according to their ‘signs’ only, but also according to their ‘sense’, to be grasped on the basis of related ‘concepts’ and thus, as expressed in the literature, according to the

‘scientific’ links to their specific properties or

‘generic characters’, up to their expression in

‘one-word-only’, according to the ‘knowledge’

indexed in the corresponding ‘data’ base.

9

As a mater of fact, each ‘sub-theme’ of this classification corresponds to the smallest set of diverse ‘papers’ perceived as sharing a sufficiently large generic sense. Materially, in a large book stand, a sub-theme may correspond to the title and heading given to one of the archive- box, where the sets of collected ‘papers’ have been logically or intuitively arranged. The definition and determination of the hierarchical position of sub-themes, themes and domains, has to be first viewed as relative to both the state of knowledge of the authors and to the place and date of base elaboration. In time, they should be changed as a function of the technical and scientific advances recorded. Roughly speaking, with respect to these unavoidable changes, the electronic edition would allow unexpected possibilities to quickly and exactly express original ideas, inventions and new concepts by

‘copy-and-paste’ re-organisation of parts of both

‘new’ and ‘old’ documents. Here involved is the other fascinating trust which remains, however, to be reconciled with the fearsome question of the

‘property’ and ‘merchant’ uses of knowledge, soon recalled.

10

This type of ‘recueil’ has been recently developed at INRA, on the basis of a collection of

‘papers’, more than 8000, concerning the lignified plant cell walls, which were classified into 4 main domains: biological chemistry (C), metabolic biology (B), physical organisation (O) and lignocellulosic products (P). Of similar size, each domain was organized according to a hierarchical list of 10 themes and 60 sub-themes, each one corresponding to an archive-box, as described in the text. Also, the headings of these 260 thematic lists, the indexed lists of references and the hand-annotated copies of the first page of the 8000 ‘papers’ were printed under

‘exchangeable’ formats, such as PDF or HTML,

Bernard Monties

690

using the commercial current software adapted to the conversion of texts and images as numeric files. These files were then assembled as electronic PDF ‘file of files’ under the acronym

‘ReDoc’, for ‘Recueil Documentaire’, in French, or documentary recollection (see above). Finally, they were organized as knowledge bases, by insertion of re-adaptable hyper-links between the data, keywords, images and thematic concepts.

Several types of ReDoc have thus been constructed by hyper-linked combinations of relatively ‘big, medium and small’ files, of around 200, 50 and 10 Mb, corresponding, respectively, to the lists of ‘annotated images of the first pages’, ‘indexed bibliographic references’ and ‘ hierarchized thematic concepts’.

Such a distributed organisation of files was set in order to more easily keep ‘up-to-date’ and/or reorganize these individual files. Characteristic of ReDoc, this construction also allows a more

‘dynamic’, evolutive possibility of collection, transfer and exchange of knowledge with such

‘electronic’ recueil, comparatively with the

‘written or printed on paper’ ones, soon considered as more ‘static’.

Each ReDoc has been arranged as a triple set of files resuming, respectively, the thematic order, the reference lists and papers extracts, an arrangement which, for example, leads to a triade of files of about 500 Mb for 1000 pages, when describing each domain, a real Enneade, in the case of the four previously cited domains (C, B, O and P) of about 2 Gb.

As expected, such constructions allow an automatized exploration, using keywords and current research motors, in only a few minutes.

Each ReDoc can be further ‘renewed’ as a conceptually new ReDoc by insertion under PDF format of files of new topics and ‘re-organized’

versions by the copy-and-paste procedure of the

selected parts. In this respect, the ‘Socratic’ fear

on the limited advantages of the transmission of

knowledge ‘written on paper ’could perhaps be

erased? At the moment, however, a still in force

constraint of the ‘properties rights’ still impedes

any public diffusion of these ReDoc; by chance

and necessity, any transmission ‘for private use

only’ is however possible, and can be done ‘on

request’. Such type of construction has thus to be

generically perceived as a model tool allowing a

more rational driving and programming the

research activities but, certainly, not the expected

corresponding discoveries and inventions, which

as obviously unknown ... remain ‘not

predictable’... , and thus imperatively require

entirely free exchanges and transmission of

knowledge.

4 O . 2 O O 6

Editor in Chief: Cr.I.

Associate Editor: V.I.

9 - I O . O C T O B E R - DECElVIBER

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