La propuesta se detiene en analizar el eco del pensamiento utópico de Ernst Bloch presente en los ensayos de Christa Wolf “Der Schatten eines Traumes. Karoline von Günderrode -ein Entwurf” (1978) y “Nun ja! Das nächste Leben geht aber heute an. Ein Brief über die Bettine” (1979). Asimismo, se profundizará la caracterización del romanticismo de Wolf como revolucionario utópico, que implica una crítica a la Modernidad y a la civilización capitalista y que está ligado al feminismo.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Writing Anxiety: Christa Wolf’s KindheitsmusterMichael G. Levine (bio)For Diane C.Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster, published in English as Patterns of Childhood, takes very little for granted—least of all the question of beginnings. The novel literally opens with the words of another: “Das Vergangene ist nicht tot; es ist nicht einmal vergangen,” a slightly altered translation of a line from Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun: “The past is (...) never dead. It’s not even past.” 1 Lacking a proper opening and haunted by the specter of an unmastered and perhaps unmasterable past—of a “model childhood” spent in the East Prussian town of L. during the Third Reich, the text begins by questioning the very possibility of a clean break and a fresh start. This insistent question, raised in a variety of ways throughout the novel, is posed at the outset as a kind of textual stutter, as a perseverating question rehearsed from the beginning—and in lieu of simply beginning—as a series of false starts, as repeated attempts to start over, as a desperate struggle to restart a narrative paralyzed by the anticipation of difficulties still to come. “You lay aside stacks of tentatively filled pages, insert a fresh sheet in the typewriter, and start once again with Chapter 1. As in so many times during the last eighteen months, when you were forced to learn: the difficulties haven’t even begun [die Schwierigkeiten haben noch gar nicht angefangen].” 2 The temporal structure of this passage, found in the second paragraph of the novel, is worth commenting upon, for here the difficult question of how to begin seems to be folded back on itself, turned inside-out, as it were, and reposed as a question of difficulties that apparently have not yet even started. Indeed, only in a text that stammers from the start and begins by beginning over and over again could it be said both that the difficulties have already started and that they have not yet even begun.Already/not yet: such is the split temporal framework of a difficult encounter, of an encounter with difficulties that will never have been confronted as such. 3 The language of confrontation, of squaring off face-to-face, is particularly inappropriate in this context since, as we will see, the difficulties that force “you,” the writer, to begin again are not simply identifiable or avoidable obstacles in the way of writing but, rather, irreducible and irreducibly conflicted aspects of the writing itself. They are what keeps the writing from ever having a self, from ever being one with or self-consciously coming to itself. 4 [End Page 106]While it is tempting to describe Kindheitsmuster as a novel that is self-conscious in the extreme—difficult writing that writes about the difficulties of writing—one should bear in mind that it is a text that repeatedly calls into question the presumed authority and the capacity for self-knowledge of an instance derisively referred to in a passage inexplicably deleted from the English translation as “His Majesty the Ego [Seine Majestät das Ich]” [83]. In an apparent attempt to suspend the privileges usually accorded to—or, rather, autocratically arrogated to itself by—das Ich, the narrator makes a point of scrupulously avoiding the first-person pronoun when referring to herself in the text. (There is, of course, one important exception to this rule toward the end of the novel to which we will return much later.) As was already evident in the passage cited earlier, “You lay aside stacks of tentatively filled pages, insert a fresh sheet in the typewriter, and start once again with Chapter 1,” the narrator employs the second person rather than the first when speaking in the present—as though she could speak of herself at the moment only by speaking to herself. More significant still in this autobiographical novel that deals at length with the narrator’s memories of growing up in Landsberg on the Warthe (now the Polish town of Gorzmploys the second person rather than the first when speaking in the presenerson when referring to the child she used to be.What is one to make of... (shrink)

En novembre 1984, Christa Wolf ouvrait la première conférence de l'association des gynécologues psy-chosomaticiens de RDA réunis à Mag-Debourg. Dans son discours intitulé "Maladie et privation d'amour", elle s'interrogeait sur l'évolution de la médecine moderne dont les progrès en matière d'appareils médicaux éloignaient toujours davantage les praticiens de leurs patients. Par-delà son regard sur la relation entre l'âme et le corps, Christa Wolf informait aussi des attentes des femmes qui avaient pris au mot les promesses d'égalité (...) des sexes en régime "socialiste réel". Quelques années plus tôt Georges Canguilhem, résistant au scientisme triomphant, se proposait de continuer à penser la médecine comme un art qui devait s'adapter à chaque individu malade. Déplorant la disparition progressive de la clinique, il plaidait pour un dialogue continu entre le patient et le médecin Tandis que Sonia Combe s'appuie sur le discours de Christa Wolf pour appréhender l'expérience communiste à partir de l'étude de genre, revenant sur la double leçon de Christa Wolf et de Canguilhem, Antoine Spire se demande dans quelles conditions un retour de la médecine à la pratique clinique pourrait se faire et répondre à la demande des malades. (shrink)

The story of Medea has exerted a powerful influence on creative artists since the time of Euripides. It is a tale that has been told in many ways and in several genres. This article offers a discussion of Christa Wolf's 1996 novel, Medea.Stimmen (Medea. Voices), a modern retelling through the voices, and conflicting perspectives, of the major characters involved with Medea, including Jason, Agameda, Akamas, Leukon, Glauce and Medea herself.Medea's role within feminist literary reception and women's literature cannot (...) be overlooked because of the crucial archetype she represents. One task of Feminist criticism has been to expose, deconstruct and rectify prevalent male (mis) interpretations of female archetypes, such as Medea, Medusa and others, and the patriarchal distortions they introduced through 3 000 years of male literature. In the patriarchal realm, Medea represents the Witch, the black Sorceress, and the archetype of the Negative Mother. These negative interpretations or archetypes may be attributed to misogynist perceptions of Medea as the vilest of women, because she committed the most despicable of all crimes — killing her children, the patriarchy's heirs — to take revenge on Jason, the husband who abandons her in Corinth (her place of exile) to marry Glauce, King Creon of Corinth's daughter, for reasons of political expedience.As a writer with her roots in the former East-German regime, Wolf perceives the Medea story as an account of a woman with both extraordinary powers and human shortcomings, who is misunderstood by the Colchians and the Corinthians alike. Wolf explores the distorted patriarchal motives for their loathing of Medea and Medea's ultimate powerlessness to do anything more than accept her tragic destiny. In doing so, Wolf does not attempt to manipulate the Medea story to suit the one-sidedness of some more radical feminist ideologies. (shrink)

Cognitive science can help literary scholars formulate specific questions to be answered by archival research. This essay takes, as its starting point, embedded mental states (that is, mental states about mental states) and their role in generating literary subjectivity. It then follows the transformation of embedded mental states throughout several manuscripts of Christa Wolf’s autobiographical novel, Patterns of Childhood (Kindheitsmuster, 1976), available at the Berlin Academy of Arts. The author shows that later versions of Patterns of Childhood have (...) more complex embedments in the chapter describing the adolescent protagonist’s relationship with her schoolteacher. This textual development is integral to the process whereby the presumably authentic memories of the past are constructed to fit the present needs of the person who is doing the remembering. Accompanying the three case studies of the manuscript revision is a discussion of theoretical and practical implications of this “cognitive-archival” approach to literature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Phantom Mediators: Reflections on the Nature of the Violence in AlgeriaRéda Bensmaïa (bio)Translated by Hassan MelehyIn order to justify himself, each person depends on the crime of the other. There is a casuistry of blood where an intellectual, it seems to me, has no place, except to take up arms himself. When violence responds to violence in an exasperating delirium that makes the simple language of reason impossible, (...) the role of intellectuals cannot be, as we read every day, to excuse from afar one act of violence and condemn another, which has the effect both of angering the one condemned of violence to the point of rage and of encouraging the one who is not condemned to more violence. If they themselves don’t join the combatants, their role (a more obscure one, to be sure!) must be only to work in the direction of an appeasement so that reason may again have a chance.—Albert Camus, Actuelles IIIAt a secondhand bookstore in Santa Monica, I found a story by Friedrich Torberg: “Mein ist die Rache” (“Vengeance is Mine”). The author describes the sadistic practices of a concentration-camp commandant in 1943 who drives a group of Jewish prisoners to commit suicide one after the other. It is almost unbearable to read. One reader, apparently an emigré German Jew, added some bitter marginal notes after the war. On the last page this reader penciled in, “America is full of Jews who love Germany and long for it.”The night after I read this book, a question occurred to me that has stayed on my mind ever since and that I want to pass on to you: What would we all give, each one of us, each individual German, for this not to have happened? It’s a”pan-German” question. Perhaps we will know something more about ourselves if each one of us tries to answer it individually, as honestly and above all as concretely as possible. And doesn’t it lead to three other questions that are worrying us?: What was? What remains? What will be?—Christa Wolf, “Parting from Phantoms”A few weeks after reading Christa Wolf’s text, the same questions continue to haunt me. “Pan-Maghrebian” questions: what would we be willing to give, each one of us, each Algerian in any case, for what is happening now never to have occurred?What was? What remains? What will be? These are the questions that have guided me in the different steps of writing the text I offer here.In the very fine article he contributed under the heading of “The Intellectual and Society” to the Encyclopaedia Universalis, philosopher François Châtelet wrote, “If we confine ourselves to the three historical groups we have arbitrarily taken as examples—the Greek sophist, the ‘judge’ of the Russell Tribunal, and the eighteenth-century philosopher, it is clear that the would-be intellectual claims to be the teacher and the advocate of political [End Page 85] freedom, of the rights of the person, the architect of a transparent society in which the individual and the citizen coincide.“Doubtless,” added Châtelet, “one aspect or another prevails on him, according to the circumstances; but a certain structure subsists, which may allow us to define, superficially and differentially, intellectuals as a group and an agency” [my emphasis].Beginning with this definition, I would like to examine the following questions: What is the status of intellectuals in a country like Algeria? How can it be explained that they have been and still are the victims of the violence that strikes them today?Given the current situation of international politics, the example of Algeria is inevitable, because in the opinion of numerous analysts what is happening in that country is a test case, a limit case that may serve as an indicator of what the future holds for the formerly colonized countries. For many analysts, the evolution of the political situation in Algeria may also serve as an analytical operator in the large ideological movements that are shaking not only the countries of the Maghreb but also the Arab-Muslim world in its totality. And in... (shrink)

Starting from the observation that women artists who die by suicide are an object of fascination in Western culture, this article posits the existence of a ›cultural myth of the suicidal authoress‹, which it examines via an analysis of three fictional representations of historical women writers who died by suicide or were suspected of having done so: Christa Wolf’s novella Kein Ort. Nirgends, Werner Schroeter’s film Malina – which is interpreted as a portrait of Ingeborg Bachmann – and (...) Karin Struck’s Ingeborg B.: Duell mit dem Spiegelbild. Drawing on the concept of the diva as developed by Elisabeth Bronfen and Barbara Straumann, it argues that the key to the cultural appeal of the figure of the suicidal women artist lies in what is perceived to be her unusual authenticity: her life and work are perceived to be one, and her suicide is interpreted as a guarantee of her authenticity as both a person and an artist. The article also explores possible reasons for the gendered nature of this myth and asks whether literary or filmic representations of suicidal women artists do an injustice to their subjects by identifying them so persistently with their deaths. (shrink)

Jean Baudrillard has posited a theory of ‘the precession of simulacra’, arguing that it is no longer possible to tell the difference between an image and the meaning it purports to represent because technology allows the image to precede its meaning. Christa Wolf, while researching Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays (1984), traveled to Greece and discovered the ways in which language in the rational, Western model of civilization has been distorted. Both Baudrillard and Wolf are disturbed (...) by the ways in which sign systems can be manipulated and generated, and both demonstrate the effect this has in the political and cultural arenas. This analysis intends to show how Baudrillard’s theories play out in Wolf’s narrative, and how Wolf resolves the problems thus posed through the shock of the aesthetic experience, which forces communication while it defies representation. (shrink)

Der Schwerpunkt des diesjahrigen Bandes steht unter dem Titel "Medien und Medizin" und vereint die Ergebnisse einer 2009 in der Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung Munchen ausgerichteten Tagung. Hinzu kommen Originalbeitrage zu Louis Pasteur und der Neuerfindung des Lebens sowie zu der Autorin Christa Wolf. Die Essays behandeln die Bibliothek des Bundesverbandes deutscher Schriftstellerarzte e.V. sowie den Literat und Psychiater Mario Tobino. Wie immer schliessen sich zahlreiche Rezensionen aktueller Publikationen an.

In Freedom Within Reason, Susan Wolf charts a course between incompatibilism, or the notion that freedom and responsibility require causal and metaphysical independence from the impersonal forces of nature, and compatibilism, or the notion that people are free and responsible as long as their actions are governed by their desires. Wolf argues that some of the forces which are beyond our control are friends to freedom rather than enemies of it, enabling us to see the world for what (...) it is. The freedom we want is not independence from the world, but independence from the forces that prevent us from choosing how to live in the light of a sufficient appreciation of the world. (shrink)

Most people, including philosophers, tend to classify human motives as falling into one of two categories: the egoistic or the altruistic, the self-interested or the moral. According to Susan Wolf, however, much of what motivates us does not comfortably fit into this scheme. Often we act neither for our own sake nor out of duty or an impersonal concern for the world. Rather, we act out of love for objects that we rightly perceive as worthy of love--and it is (...) these actions that give meaning to our lives. Wolf makes a compelling case that, along with happiness and morality, this kind of meaningfulness constitutes a distinctive dimension of a good life. Written in a lively and engaging style, and full of provocative examples, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters is a profound and original reflection on a subject of permanent human concern. (shrink)

No consensus yet exists on how to handle incidental fnd-ings in human subjects research. Yet empirical studies document IFs in a wide range of research studies, where IFs are fndings beyond the aims of the study that are of potential health or reproductive importance to the individual research participant. This paper reports recommendations of a two-year project group funded by NIH to study how to manage IFs in genetic and genomic research, as well as imaging research. We conclude that researchers (...) have an obligation to address the possibility of discovering IFs in their protocol and communications with the IRB, and in their consent forms and communications with research participants. Researchers should establish a pathway for handling IFs and communicate that to the IRB and research participants. We recommend a pathway and categorize IFs into those that must be disclosed to research participants, those that may be disclosed, and those that should not be disclosed. (shrink)

Industrial agriculture has extensive environmental and social costs, and efforts to create alternative farming systems are widespread if not yet widely successful. This study explored how a set of grain farmers and rotational graziers in Iowa transitioned to agroecological management practices. Our focus on the resources and strategies that farmers mobilized to develop opportunities for, and overcome barriers to, transitioning to alternative practices allows us to go beyond the existing literature focused on why farmers transition. We attend to both the (...) ecological and socioeconomic context of innovation by comparing processes of technical change in two contrasting regions of Iowa. Farmers cultivated farm-level biodiversity and enterprise diversity, developed new cognitive and psychological competencies, and overcame barriers to innovation by developing external network linkages with peers, knowledge organizations, and federal policies. Our research provides insights into how biophysical, cognitive, structural and market considerations can be integrated into research efforts that aim to make sense of innovation toward sustainable agriculture. (shrink)

Bioethics has paid surprisingly little attention to the special problems faced by women and to feminist analyses of current health care issues other than ...

It is worthwhile to search for forms of coding, processing, and learning common to various cortical regions and cognitive functions. Local cortical processors may coordinate their activity by maximizing the transmission of information coherently related to the context in which it occurs, thus forming synchronized population codes. This coordination involves contextual field (CF) connections that link processors within and between cortical regions. The effects of CF connections are distinguished from those mediating receptive field (RF) input; it is shown how CFs (...) can guide both learning and processing without becoming confused with the transmission of RF information. Simulations explore the capabilities of networks built from local processors with both RF and CF connections. Physiological evidence for synchronization, CFs, and plasticity of the RF and CF connections is described. Coordination via CFs is related to perceptual grouping, the effects of context on contrast sensitivity, amblyopia, implicit influences of color in achromotopsia, object and word perception, and the discovery of distal environmental variables and their interactions through self-organization. Cortical computation could thus involve the flexible evaluation of relations between input signals by locally specialized but adaptive processors whose activity is dynamically associated and coordinated within and between regions through specialized contextual connections. Key Words: cell assemblies; cerebral cortex; context; coordination; dynamic binding; epistemology; functional specialization; learning; neural coding; neural computation; neuropsychology; object recognition; perception; reading; self-organization; synaptic plasticity; synchronization. (shrink)

In 2009, Greenpeace launched an aggressive campaign against Nestlé, accusing the organization of driving rainforest deforestation through its palm oil suppliers. The objective was to damage the brand image of Nestlé and, thereby, force the organization to make its supply chain more sustainable. Prominent cases such as these have led to the prevailing view that sustainable supply chain management is primarily reactive and propelled by external pressures. This research, in contrast, assumes that SSCM can contribute positively to the reputation of (...) an organization as a “good citizen” and, thereby, counter the impression that external stakeholder pressure is the only driver of SSCM. The study draws on Resource Dependence Theory in analyzing the three competing models of the potential stakeholder, SSCM and the corporate sustainability performance relationship. A dataset of 1,621 organizations allows the statistical comparison of these three models. Findings suggest that stakeholder pressure and SSCM both contribute to an organization’s sustainability performance. Thus, supply chain managers will perceive benefits from SSCM other than merely the reduction of risk from reputational damage through stakeholder activism. (shrink)

How can we solve the paradox of false-belief understanding: if infants pass the implicit false belief task by nonverbal behavioural responses why do they nonetheless typically fail the explicit FBT till they are 4 years old? Starting with the divide between situational and cognitive accounts of the development of false-belief understanding, we argue that we need to consider both situational and internal cognitive factors together and describe their interaction to adequately explain the development of children’s Theory of Mind ability. We (...) then argue that a further challenge is raised for existing accounts by helping behaviour versions of the FBT. We argue that the common two-stage accounts are inadequate: we need to allow for three central stages in a continuous development. Furthermore, drawing on Perner et al.’s and Perner and Leahy’s : 491–508, 2016) recent mental files account, we provide a new account of the development of these three stages of ToM ability by describing the changes of the structure and organisation of mental files including the systematic triggering role of types of situations. Thereby we aim to establish a situational mental file account as a new and adequate solution to the paradox of false-belief understanding. (shrink)

In this paper we examine the case of Tay, the Microsoft AI chatbot that was launched in March, 2016. After less than 24 hours, Microsoft shut down the experiment because the chatbot was generating tweets that were judged to be inappropriate since they included racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic language. We contend that the case of Tay illustrates a problem with the very nature of learning software that interacts directly with the public, and the developer's role and responsibility associated with it. (...) We make the case that when LS interacts directly with people or indirectly via social media, the developer has additional ethical responsibilities beyond those of standard software. There is an additional burden of care. (shrink)

Health care reform proposals threaten to exacerbate tensions physicians already face in trying to balance traditional duties to individual patients against increasing pressure to serve broader societal and institutional goals. To cope with reform, medical ethics must clarify physicians' moral obligations, change existing ethical codes, and develop an ethics of institutions.

Neuroscientific studies have shown that brain activity correlated with a decision to move can be observed before a person reports being consciously aware of having made that decision . Given that a later event cannot cause an earlier one , such results have been interpreted as evidence that decisions are made unconsciously . We argue that this interpretation depends upon an all-or-none view of consciousness, and we offer an alternative interpretation of the early decision-related brain activity based on models in (...) which conscious awareness of the decision to move develops gradually up to the level of a reporting criterion. Under this interpretation, the early brain activity reflects sub-criterion levels of awareness rather than complete absence of awareness and thus does not suggest that decisions are made unconsciously. (shrink)

The current explosion of genetic knowledge and the rapid proliferation of genetic tests has rightly provoked concern that we are approaching a future in which people will be labeled and disadvantaged based on genetic information. Indeed, some have already suffered harm, including denial of health insurance. This concern has prompted an outpouring of analysis. Yet almost all of it approaches the problem of genetic disadvantage under the rubric of “genetic discrimination.”This rubric is woefully inadequate to the task at hand. It (...) ignores years of commentary on race and gender demonstrating the limits of antidiscrimination analysis as an analytic framework and corrective tool. Too much discussion of genetic disadvantage proceeds as if scholars of race and gender had not spent decades critiquing and developing antidiscrimination theory.Indeed, there are multiple links among race, gender, and genetics. Dorothy Roberts has discussed the historical links between racism and genetics, while she and others have begun to map connections between gender and genetics. (shrink)

In this paper we address the question of when a researcher is justified in describing his or her artificial agent as demonstrating ethical decision-making. The paper is motivated by the amount of research being done that attempts to imbue artificial agents with expertise in ethical decision-making. It seems clear that computing systems make decisions, in that they make choices between different options; and there is scholarship in philosophy that addresses the distinction between ethical decision-making and general decision-making. Essentially, the qualitative (...) difference between ethical decisions and general decisions is that ethical decisions must be part of the process of developing ethical expertise within an agent. We use this distinction in examining publicity surrounding a particular experiment in which a simulated robot attempted to safeguard simulated humans from falling into a hole. We conclude that any suggestions that this simulated robot was making ethical decisions were misleading. (shrink)

The emergence of nanotechnology, and specifically nanobiotechnology, raises major oversight challenges. In the United States, government, industry, and researchers are debating what oversight approaches are most appropriate. Among the federal agencies already embroiled in discussion of oversight approaches are the Food and Drug Administration , Environmental Protection Agency , Department of Agriculture , Occupational Safety and Health Administration , and National Institutes of Health . All can learn from assessment of the successes and failures of past oversight efforts aimed at (...) emerging technologies. This article reports on work funded by the National Science Foundation aimed at learning the lessons of past oversight efforts. The article offers insights that emerge from comparing five oversight case studies that examine oversight of genetically engineered organisms in the food supply, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, chemicals in the workplace, and gene therapy. Using quantitative and qualitative analysis, the authors present a new way of evaluating oversight. (shrink)

In this first book-length examination of the Cartesian theory of visual perception, Celia Wolf-Devine explores the many philosophical implications of Descartes’ theory, concluding that he ultimately failed to provide a completely mechanistic theory of visual perception. Wolf-Devine traces the development of Descartes’ thought about visual perception against the backdrop of the transition from Aristotelianism to the new mechanistic science—the major scientific paradigm shift taking place in the seventeenth century. She considers the philosopher’s work in terms of its background (...) in Aristotelian and later scholastic thought rather than looking at it "backwards" through the later work of the British empiricists and Kant. Wolf-Devine begins with Descartes’ ideas about perception in the _Rules _and continues through the later scientific writings in which he develops his own mechanistic theory of light, color, and visual spatial perception. Throughout her discussion, she demonstrates both Descartes’ continuity with and break from the Aristotelian tradition. Wolf-Devine critically examines Cartesian theory by focusing on the problems that arise from his use of three different models to explain the behavior of light as well as on the ways in which modern science has not confirmed some of Descartes’ central hypotheses about vision. She shows that the changes Descartes made in the Aristotelian framework created a new set of problems in the philosophy of perception. While such successors to Descartes as Malebranche, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume accepted the core of his theory of vision, they struggled to clarify the ontological status of colors, to separate what is strictly speaking "given" to the sense of sight from what is the result of judgments by the mind, and to confront a "veil of perception" skepticism that would have been unthinkable within the Aristotelian framework. Wolf-Devine concludes that Descartes was not ultimately successful in providing a completely mechanistic theory of visual perception, and because of this, she suggests both that changes in the conceptual framework of Descartes are in order and that a partial return to some features of the Aristotelian tradition may be necessary. (shrink)

In his works on argumentation, Aristotle develops three main forms: apodeictical, dialectical, and rhetorical argumentation; dialectic is subdivided into several subspecies. The purpose of this paper is to discuss all of the forms described by Aristotle, to examine their differences and to point out their interrelations. This leads to an examination of the differentiating criteria and their applicability in the case of each argumentation form—and in particular to the question regarding the number of criteria that are necessary to describe each (...) form clearly and unambiguously. It is argued that Aristotle’s works on argumentation contain an implicit system of argumentation forms that is based on no more than three criteria. (shrink)

Large-scale sequencing tests, including whole-exome and whole-genome sequencing, are rapidly moving into clinical use. Sequencing is already being used clinically to identify therapeutic opportunities for cancer patients who have run out of conventional treatment options, to help diagnose children with puzzling neurodevelopmental conditions, and to clarify appropriate drug choices and dosing in individuals. To evaluate and support clinical applications of these technologies, the National Human Genome Research Institute and National Cancer Institute have funded studies on clinical and research sequencing under (...) the Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research program as well as studies on return of results. Most of these studies use sequencing in real-world clinical settings and collect data on both the application of sequencing and the impact of receiving genomic findings on study participants. They are occurring in the context of controversy over how to obtain consent for exome and genome sequencing. (shrink)

The revised Common Rule includes a new option for the conduct of secondary research with identifiable data and biospecimens: regulatory broad consent. Motivated by concerns regarding autonomy and trust in the research enterprise, regulators had initially proposed broad consent in a manner that would have rendered it the exclusive approach to secondary research with all biospecimens, regardless of identifiability. Based on public comments from both researchers and patients concerned that this approach would hinder important medical advances, however, regulators decided to (...) largely preserve the status quo approach to secondary research with biospecimens and data. The Final Rule therefore allows such research to proceed without specific informed consent in a number of circumstances, but it also offers regulatory broad consent as a new, optional pathway for secondary research with identifiable data and biospecimens. In this article, we describe the parameters of regulatory broad consent under the new rule, explain why researchers and research institutions are unlikely to utilize it, outline recommendations for regulatory broad consent issued by the Secretary's Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections, and sketch an empirical research agenda for the sorts of questions about regulatory broad consent that remain to be answered as the research community embarks on Final Rule implementation. (shrink)

Atmosphären zeichnen sich gleichermaßen durch ihre Profanität und ihre Wirkmächtigkeit aus. Wo immer man hinsieht, sind Atmosphären ein bestimmendes, vielleicht sogar das wichtigste Element im menschlichen Leben. Das Ziel des Sammelbandes besteht darin, die Bedeutung der Atmosphären im Gefühlsraum theoretisch und praktisch zu verdeutlichen und das Phänomen der Atmosphären in seinen vielfältigen Facetten, etwa in der Architektur, Kunst, Medizin, Psychiatrie, in der Pädagogik, in der Altenpflege, in Beruf und Privatleben, zu beleuchten.