Alexandru C. Stan

Comparative Neuro-oncology: From Man to Insect

Nervous-system tumours are read here not as a tax on neural sophistication but as failure modes of a single developmental switch — the gate between self-renewal and terminal fate, enforced by the retinoblastoma protein and its pathway. Descending a gradient of neural organisation...

The Seen World Beyond The Stargate

The standalone companion to Vision: From Photon to Mind, this essay picks up the visual signal at the threshold where the retina ends and the brain begins — the lamina cribrosa, the "Stargate" — and follows the central visual pathway station by station: the optic nerve and chiasm...

Comparative Neuro-oncology: From Man to Insect

Nervous-system tumours are read here not as a tax on neural sophistication but as failure modes of a single developmental switch — the gate between self-renewal and terminal fate, enforced by the retinoblastoma protein and its pathway. Descending a gradient of neural organisation...

Vision: From Photon to Mind

A reference walk through vision in three parts, tracing one continuous argument from the absorption of a single photon to the perception it enables. Part I sets out the human eye at reference grade: optical anatomy and dioptrics, the ten-layer retina, receptor physiology and phot...

The Removal of Rails

The great dystopian dread can arrive with no biology in it at all — a stadium, a boardroom, and a crowd taught to love its own diminishment are enough. So what, precisely, does synthetic biology add? This essay's answer inverts the usual reading: synthetic biology invents no new...

Synesthesia: Mechanisms, Mappings, and the Geometry of the Senses

Synesthesia — the automatic, involuntary coupling in which one stimulus (an inducer) triggers an additional percept (a concurrent) in a second pathway — is examined across neuroscience, genetics, linguistics, information theory, and the philosophy of mind. One thesis runs through...