The proteins encoded by the ras proto‐oncogenes play critical roles in normal cellular growth, differentiation and development in addition to their potential for malignant transformation. Several proteins that are involved in the control of the activity of p21ras have now been characterised. p120GAP stimulates the GTPase activity of p21ras and hence acts as a negative regulator of ras proteins. It may be controlled by tyrosine phosphorylation or association with tyrosine phosphorylated proteins. The neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF 1) gene also encodes (...) a potential GTPase activating protein which is likely to be subject to a different control mechanism. Guanosine nucleotide exchange factors for p21ras have now been identified: these may be positive regulators of ras protein function. It appears that p21ras is subject to rapid regulation by several distinct mechanisms which are likely to vary in different cell types; the ras proteins are thereby able to act as very sensitive cellular monitors of the extracellular environment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value by Julian JohnsonWilliam M. PerrineJulian Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value. Oxford University Press, 2002.In Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value, British musicologist and composer Julian Johnson defends the value of classical music in a commercialized culture fixated on the immediate gratification of popular music. At 130 pages divided into (...) six chapters, Johnson’s book is a reasonably accessible and engaging presentation of his topic. This short book contains relevant and sometimes controversial insights of interest to professional music educators. In this review I will provide a brief summary of the author’s primary arguments accompanied by critical commentary.Johnson argues that commercial forces in our society limit serious reflective discourse on music. The marketplace treats music as a commodity which derives its value from relative commercial success. In this context, classical music is relegated to one possible cultural choice among many legitimate options and is in danger of losing its distinctive features as an art form that transcends commercial concerns. Preference for particular musical products becomes an identity marker for an individual’s place within society, and criticism of a particular style of music is perceived as a personal attack. The process of turning classical music into a commodity has been aided by critics who have condemned the Western [End Page 96] canon as elitist, patriarchal, and arrogant. These critics have instead advocated a democratization of culture, placing greater emphasis on the validity of popular art forms and active participation in music-making rather than the more passive contemplation. Johnson describes this as a “pseudo-democratic” attack which encourages downward social mobility. When combined with the omnipresence of commercial culture, this approach undermines individual musical value by assuming the equal validity of all aesthetic judgments. Democracy is damaged when, refusing to discriminate between cultural products, society fails to recognize human individuality and excellence.Johnson is at his strongest when he argues for the importance of classical music fulfilling its function as art. The author argues that different types of music fulfill different functions. In contemporary society music is valued and chosen for how it is used. Music is described as “good” when it functions to provide background music for activities or when it successfully complements or enhances the listeners’ moods. Focusing solely on social use or reception, however, tends to neglect objective differences in the formal structure of music. This is the point at which Johnson begins to distinguish between classical and popular music. Popular music is composed to ensure a uniformity of affect, and deliberately avoids formal or harmonic complexity. As an aspect of popular culture, it is tied to contemporary fashion trends and rapidly becomes obsolete. Like other types of fashion, music becomes a means for expressing a current position within a larger social and cultural space. It is the music of youth; its commercial saturation of the culture blurs the boundaries between youth and adulthood. Johnson claims that the process of commercialization leads to a bland standardization. Classical music can also function as a type of popular music when it submits itself to market processes, but in doing so the music loses its distinctive features.In his discussion on popular music, Johnson presents what might be his most controversial claim: that popular music serves a pornographic function. He defines pornography as “the process by which the humane is reduced to the status of things” (p. 59) and argues that popular music takes pleasure in debasing humanity by reducing individuals to material commodities and denying the spiritual. This contention echoes Allan Bloom’s concern in The Closing of the American Mind that rock music desensitizes and debases youth by destroying imagination and deadening their capacity for passion and wonder. The strength of this language undermines Johnson’s contention in his introduction to the paperback edition that he is not trying to set up a binary opposition between art and popular music in which the classical is “better.” Moreover, if pornography is a form of dehumanization and is a legitimate concern in music, it is important to point out that such a charge is not exclusive to... (shrink)

Human‐animal chimeras—creatures composed of a mix of animal and human cells—have come to play an important role in biomedical research, and they raise ethical questions. This article focuses on one particularly difficult set of questions—those related to the moral status of human‐animal chimeras with brains that are partly or wholly composed of human cells. Given the uncertain effects of human‐animal chimera research on chimeric animals’ cognition, it would be prudent to ensure we do not overlook or underestimate their moral status. (...) However, to assess moral status, we first need to determine what kinds of capacities are morally relevant. The standard view holds that it matters, morally, if chimeric animals develop uniquely human cognitive capacities. I argue that this view is mistaken, highlighting three problems with it: that we can think of examples of uniquely human cognitive capacities that are not morally significant, that we can think of examples of morally significant cognitive capacities that are not uniquely human, and that evidence that some cognitive capacity is shared with nonhuman animals does not undermine claims that this capacity is morally significant. We need a better framework for thinking about the moral status of part‐human beings. (shrink)

Our emotional lives are full of temporal asymmetries. Salient among these is that we tend to feel differently about painful or unpleasant events depending on their temporal location: we feel anxiety or trepidation about painful events we anticipate in the future, and relief when they are over. One question, then, is whether temporally asymmetric emotions such as relief have any ramifications for the metaphysics of time. On what has become the standard way of finessing this question, the asymmetry of relief (...) is an instance of the phenomenon of future-bias, a tendency to prefer painful events to be located in the past than in the future. The main question then posed is whether this pattern of preferences can be justified in the light of different metaphysical theories of time. In this paper I argue that this whole dialectic is misconceived. While many people may have future-biased preferences and these are a legitimate object of psychological study, this should be distinguished from the more basic phenomenon of relief that an unpleasant experience is over. Acknowledging the distinctness of these phenomena has two main consequences. First, if relief is not a manifestation of a time-biased preference, it is unclear what it would be for it to be justified or unjustified. This, in turn, should lead us to reassess how the psychology of relief bears on our metaphysical commitments. As I shall suggest, the real significance of the temporally asymmetric emotions for the metaphysics of time is that they manifest, and so reflection on them serves to draw our attention to, a structural feature of our awareness of the passage of time that resists re-articulation in other terms. (shrink)

There has been a call for a potentially revolutionary change to our existing understanding of the psychological concept of personal identity. Apparently, people can psychologically represent people, including themselves, as multiple individuals at the same time. Here we ask whether the intransitive judgments found in these studies truly reflect the operation of an intransitive concept of personal identity. We manipulate several factors that arbitrate between transitivity and intransitivity and find most support for transitivity: in contrast to prior work, most participants (...) do not make intransitive judgments when there is any reason to favor one individual over another. People change which single individual they personally identify with, depending on which individual competes more strongly or weakly for identity, rather than identifying with both individuals. Even when two individuals are identical and therefore both entitled to be the same person, we find that people make more transitive judgments once they understand the practical commitments of their responses (Experiment 4), and report not being able to actually imagine two perspectives simultaneously when reasoning about the scenario (Experiment 5). In short, we suggest that while people may make intransitive judgments, these do not reflect that they psychologically represent identity in an intransitive manner. (shrink)

According to the free energy principle all living systems aim to minimise free energy in their sensory exchanges with the environment. Processes of free energy minimisation are thus ubiquitous in the biological world. Indeed it has been argued that even plants engage in free energy minimisation. Not all living things however feel alive. How then did the feeling of being alive get started? In line with the arguments of the phenomenologists, I will claim that every feeling must be felt by (...) someone. It must have mineness built into it if it is to feel a particular way. The question I take up in this paper asks how mineness might have arisen out of processes of free energy minimisation, given that many systems that keep themselves alive lack mineness. The hypothesis I develop in this paper is that the life of an organism can be seen as an inferential process. Every living system embodies a probability distribution conditioned on a model of the sensory, physiological, and morphological states that are highly probably given the life it leads and the niche it inhabits. I argue for an ecological and enactive interpretation of free energy. I show how once the life of an organism reaches a certain level of complexity mineness emerges as an intrinsic part of the process of life itself. (shrink)

For the last 40 years or so the is/ought gap, the fact/value distinction and the naturalistic fallacy have figured prominently in ethical debates. This longevity, however, has had an adverse side effect. So familiar have they become that they—and their respective rationales—have tended to become blurred. It is the purpose of this paper to explain why they should be kept distinct.

Our perceptual experiences stretch across time to present us with movement, persistence and change. How is this possible given that perceptual experiences take place in the present that has no duration? In this paper I argue that this problem is one and the same as the problem of accounting for how our experiences occurring at different times can be phenomenally unified over time so that events occurring at different times can be experienced together. Any adequate account of temporal experience must (...) also account for phenomenal unity. I look to Edmund Husserl's writings on time consciousness for such an account. (shrink)

One way to make philosophy of science more socially relevant is to attend to specific scientific practises that affect society to a great extent. One such practise is biomedical research. This paper looks at contemporary U.S. biomedical research in particular and argues that it suffers from important epistemic, moral and socioeconomic failings. It then discusses and criticises existing approaches to improve on the status quo, most prominently by Thomas Pogge (a political philosopher), Joseph Stiglitz (a Nobel-prize winning economist) and James (...) Robert Brown (a philosopher of science). Finally, it sketches an alternative proposal and argues for its superiority. The proposal has four components: changing the intellectual property regime; instituting independent clinical research; aligning innovators' and patients' interests; and enacting additional regulation. (shrink)

In Markets Without Limits and a series of related papers, Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski argue that it is morally permissible to buy and sell anything that it is morally permissible to possess and exchange outside of the market. Accordingly, we should open markets in “contested commodities” including blood, gametes, surrogacy services, and transplantable organs. This paper clarifies some important aspects of the case for market boundaries and in so doing shows why there are in fact moral limits to the (...) market. I argue that the case for restricting the scope of the market does not turn on the idea that some things are constitutively non-market goods; it turns instead on the idea that treating some things according to market norms would threaten the realization of particular kinds of human interests. (shrink)

Genomic sequencing technologies (GS) pose novel challenges not seen in older genetic technologies, making traditional standards for fully informed consent difficult or impossible to meet. This is due to factors including the complexity of the test and the broad range of results it may identify. Meaningful informed consent is even more challenging to secure in contexts involving significant time constraints and emotional distress, such as when rapid genomic testing (RGS) is performed in neonatal intensive care units. In this article, we (...) propose that informed consent matters not for its own sake, but because obtaining it furthers a range of morally important goals, such as promoting autonomy, well‐being, and trust in medicine. These goals form the basis of a new framework [PROmoting Morally Important Consent Ends (PROMICE)] for assessing the ethical appropriateness of various informed consent models. We illustrate this framework with two examples: (a) a tiered and layered consent model for obtaining consent for GS, and (b) consent for RGS in critically ill newborns. We conclude that appropriately—rather than fully—informed consent provides the correct standard for genomic medicine and research. (shrink)

This paper aims (a) to provide characterizations of realism and instrumentalism that are philosophically interesting and applicable to economics; and (b) to defend instrumentalism against realism as a methodological stance in economics. Starting point is the observation that ‘all models are false’, which, or so I argue, is difficult to square with the realist's aim of truth, even if the latter is understood as ‘partial’ or ‘approximate’. The three cheers in favour of instrumentalism are: (1) Once we have usefulness, truth (...) is redundant. (2) There is something disturbing about causal structure. (3) It's better to do what one can than to chase rainbows. (shrink)

Greely’s target article outlines six categories of ethical issues associated with human brain surrogate research. Some of these issues are familiar from other research contexts; others, less...

Luke Semrau argues that the documented harms of existing organ markets do not undermine the case for establishing regulated systems of paid kidney donation. He offers two arguments in support of this conclusion. First, Semrau argues that the harms of kidney selling are straightforwardly amenable to regulatory solution. Second, Semrau argues that even in existing black markets, sellers would likely have experienced greater harm if the option of selling a kidney were not available. This commentary challenges both of Semrau’s claims. (...) I argue that there is no reason to believe that kidney sellers benefit from the current black market trade in organs, and highlight a number of potential issues regarding the effectiveness and feasibility of Semrau’s proposed market regulations. (shrink)

Does a coherentist version of rationality issue requirements on states? Or does it issue requirements on processes? This paper evalu- ates the possibility of process-requirements. It argues that there are two possible definitions of state- and process-requirements: a satisfaction- based definition and a content-based definition. I demonstrate that the satisfaction-based definition is inappropriate. It does not allow us to uphold a clear-cut distinction between state- and process-requirements. We should therefore use a content-based definition of state- and pro- cess-requirements. However, a (...) content-based definition entails that ra- tionality does not issue process-requirements. Content-based process- requirements violate the principle that ‘rationality requires’ implies ‘can satisfy’. The conclusion of this paper therefore amounts to a radical re- jection of process-requirements of rationality. (shrink)

Presents an additional one hundred philosophical puzzles that encourage readers to seek their own conclusions about a broad spectrum of moral, social, and personal issues.

One does not need to hold that western philosophy, or some subset of it, is superior to other kinds in order to worry about whether different strands of philosophy can meaningfully engage in dialogue together. Nor do these worries necessarily entail any arrogance. We can always learn form others, but that does not mean we should not prioritise some encounters over others.

The whole purpose of the UN is to bring nations together. In an era of globalisation and short term economic goals and values, we need to go back to reflect on the purposes of UNESCO as a place for foresight, a laboratory of ideas, exploring people’s identity and helping shape this. And I also hope that we can introduce these ideas backto the mainstream European and North American traditions, which tend to dominate, so that people can see there are different (...) traditions and cultures and there’s not only one way to see the world. (shrink)

I argue that Brierley et al are wrong to claim that parents who request futile treatment are acting against the interests of their child. A better ethical ground for withholding or withdrawing life-prolonging treatment is not that it is in the interests of the patient to die, but rather on grounds of the limitation of resources and the requirements of distributive justice. Put simply, not all treatment that might be in a person's interests must ethically be provided.

In their recent paper in this journal, Zümrüt Alpinar-Şencan and colleagues review existing dignity-based objections to organ markets and outline a new form of dignity-based objection they believe has more merit: one grounded in a social account of dignity. This commentary clarifies some aspects of the social account of dignity and then shows how this revised account can be applied to other perennial issues in bioethics, including the ethics of human embryo research and the ethics of creating part-human chimeras.

Katerina Jennings and Esther Braun identify an important problem with the current approach to defining categories of competitors in sport (Jennings and Braun 2024). They make a significant contribu...

There is a curious moment in the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet. Thinking she speaks in solitude, Juliet says, “Romeo, doff thy name, / And, for thy name, which is no part of thee, / Take all myself”. Emerging from the shadows, Romeo replies, “I take thee at thy word” (Act 2, Scene 1, 92). Suddenly, Juliet’s utterance has seemingly become binding: because they have been overheard by Romeo, her words have become her word. But is Juliet truly bound (...) by her words given that she did not know they were being overheard, let alone intend for them to be binding? Using J. L. Austin’s notion of the performative, I consider the nature and status of Juliet’s utterance, its influence on the remainder of the scene, and what insight it might afford into the play as a whole. (shrink)

Is it Possible to Experiment with Thought? Ernst Mach’s Notion of Thought Experiment and its Pedagogical Context around 1900. The article tries to establish the crucial importance of the pedagogical dimension of Ernst Mach’s ideas on experimenting with thought. The focus on contemporary pedagogics demonstrates, first, that Mach’s didactic approach to physics is part of a much broader stream of pedagogical writings that transcends national and disciplinary borders and comprises a diversity of authors, e.g. Wilhelm Jerusalem, William James or Alfred (...) N. Whitehead; second, that the much‐heralded controversy between Mach and the French philosopher of science Pierre Duhem about thought experiments does not only revolve around epistemological issues but rather stems from their antagonist vision of teaching physics; and finally, third, that G. Stanley Hall’s psychogenetic theory of pedagogics bears a strong resemblance with the evolutionary naturalism of Machian epistemology and helps explaining key tenets of Mach’s conception of thought experiment. By establishing a broad convergence between the work of all these authors despite their different academic upbringing, background and nationality the article argues for a complex and historically fine‐grained vision of the relations between natural, social and human sciences going beyond dichotomies like ‘Erklären’ and ‘Verstehen’ or the ‘Two Cultures’. (shrink)