The essay in this issue reflects the Ebola virus disease (EVD) by world-renowned immunologist Professor Ivo Hána. EVD first appeared in 1976 in simultaneously in Nzara, Sudan and in Yambuku, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It was detected in a village in the DRC near the Ebola River, from which the disease takes its name. and Ivo Hána.
In the presence of Deputy Minister of Education, Youth and Sports, Stanislav Štech, Rector of Charles University Tomáš Zima, Vice-President of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Vladimír Mareček, and other important guests, the implementation phase of the BIOCEV project - the Biotechnology and Biomedicine Centre of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and Charles University in Vestec was concluded on December 18, 2015. Full operation is beginning in January 2016. BIOCEV currently implements five research programmes and consists of six sets of research infrastructure and service laboratories. By 2020, as many as 450 researchers, including 200 post-graduate students, are supposed to work at the BIOCEV Centre. The Centre´s objective is to leam details about organisms at the molecular level that can be used in applied research and in the development of new therapeutic procedures. and Marina Hužvárová.
Dr. Petr Jehlička, Snr Lecturer in Environmental Geography at the Open University in Milton Keynes, United Kingdom, points out that some twenty-five years after the end of socialism, between one and two thirds of the East European middle classes still continue to grow some of the food consumed in their households - mostly not for economic reasons but primarily as their hobby. Nevertheless, social sciences in the West and a considerable part of scientific literature on home gardening in the global North continue to view this informal food production in Eastern Europe as an activity of mainly disadvantaged segments of society. He argues, moreover, that concepts generated in the Western context, where this activity is only marginal, are considered as universal knowledge, while data gathered in Eastern Europe, where household food production is dominant, are viewed as marginal and less interesting. He also describes ways in which Eastern Europe can contribute to broad international debates about this issue and various other topics in social sciences. and Jana Olivová.