The tropomyosins are a family of actin filament binding proteins. In multicellular animals, they exhibit extensive cell type specific isoform diversity. In this essay we discuss the genetic mechanisms by which this diversity is generated and its possible significance to cellular function.

There is growing interest in tissue procurement for cancer research through autopsy. Establishing an autopsy/tissue donation programme for breast cancer research within an academic medical centre i...

fusion theory challenges efforts to see theory as inhibiting by presenting an approach that is innovative, eclectic, and subtle in order to draw out competing and constellating ideas and opinions. This collected volume of essays examines fusion theory and demonstrates how the theory can be applied to the reading of various works of Indian English novelists.

RAID-II is a high-bandwidth, network-attached storage server designed and implemented at the University of California at Berkeley. In this paper, we measure the performance of RAID-II and evaluate various architectural decisions made during the design process. We first measure the end-to-end performance of the system to be approximately 20 MB/s for both disk array reads and writes. We then perform a bottleneck analysis by examining the performance of each individual subsystem and conclude that the disk subsystem limits performance. By adding (...) a custom interconnect board with a high-speed memory and bus system and parity engine, we are able to achieve a performance speedup of 8 to 15 over a comparative system using only off-the-shelf hardware. (shrink)

BackgroundIn the Canadian Alliance for Healthy Hearts and Minds (CAHHM) cohort, participants underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain, heart, and abdomen, that generated incidental findings (IFs). The approach to managing these unexpected results remain a complex issue. Our objectives were to describe the CAHHM policy for the management of IFs, to understand the impact of disclosing IFs to healthy research participants, and to reflect on the ethical obligations of researchers in future MRI studies.MethodsBetween 2013 and 2019, 8252 participants (...) (mean age 58 ± 9 years, 54% women) were recruited with a follow-up questionnaire administered to 909 participants (40% response rate) at 1-year. The CAHHM policy followed a restricted approach, whereby routine feedback on IFs was not provided. Only IFs of severe structural abnormalities were reported.ResultsSevere structural abnormalities occurred in 8.3% (95% confidence interval 7.7–8.9%) of participants, with the highest proportions found in the brain (4.2%) and abdomen (3.1%). The majority of participants (97%) informed of an IF reported no change in quality of life, with 3% of participants reporting that the knowledge of an IF negatively impacted their quality of life. Furthermore, 50% reported increased stress in learning about an IF, and in 95%, the discovery of an IF did not adversely impact his/her life insurance policy. Most participants (90%) would enrol in the study again and perceived the MRI scan to be beneficial, regardless of whether they were informed of IFs. While the implications of a restricted approach to IF management was perceived to be mostly positive, a degree of diagnostic misconception was present amongst participants, indicating the importance of a more thorough consent process to support participant autonomy.ConclusionThe management of IFs from research MRI scans remain a challenging issue, as participants may experience stress and a reduced quality of life when IFs are disclosed. The restricted approach to IF management in CAHHM demonstrated a fair fulfillment of the overarching ethical principles of respect for autonomy, concern for wellbeing, and justice. The approach outlined in the CAHHM policy may serve as a framework for future research studies.Clinical trial registrationhttps://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/nct02220582. (shrink)

This volume commemorates the 6th centennial of the birth of Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), a Renaissance polymath whose interests included law, politics, metaphysics, epistemology, theology, mysticism and relations between Christians and non-Christian peoples. The contributors to this volume reflect Cusanus' multiple interests; and, by doing so they commemorate three deceased luminaries of the American Cusanus Society: F. Edward Cranz, Thomas P. McTighe and Charles Trinkaus. Contributors include: Christopher M. Bellitto, H. Lawrence Bond, Elizabeth Brient, Louis Dupré, Wilhelm Dupré, Walter Andreas (...) Euler, Lawrence Hundersmarck, Thomas M. Izbicki, Dennis D. Martin, Yelena Matusevich, Bernard McGinn, Clyde Lee Miller, Thomas E. Morrissey, Brian A. Pavlac, and Morimichi Watanabe. Publications by Charles Trinkaus: - Edited by C. Trinkaus and H.A. Oberman, The pursuit of holiness in late medieval and renaissance religion, ISBN: 978 90 04 03791 5 (Out of print). (shrink)

Executives of many publicly held firms agree to compensation packages that create immense exposure to their employer’s stock. Corporate boards, aspiring to motivate executives to make value-maximizing decisions, often tie an executive’s earnings to stock price performance through stock or option awards. However, this engenders a significant ethical dilemma for many executives who are uncomfortable with sizable, firm-specific risk and desire to reduce it through hedging activities. Recent research has shown that executive hedging has become more prevalent. In essence, managers (...) are unwinding the acute economic incentive to act in the best interest of the owners. This appears to violate the spirit of the compensation contract and from a normative standpoint, is not how executives should act. In this article, we describe how some executives are acting in regard to this issue (descriptive ethics), how they should act (normative ethics) and how they can be helped to get from what they are doing, to what they should be doing (prescriptive ethics). (shrink)

Questions concerning the moral status of embryos, the validity of new technologies for human reproduction, ownership of one's own genes, gene patenting, privacy and discrimination have all been raised and debated. Although debate is healthy, it is only useful if all participants understand the fundamental biological principles underlying human life, human genes and human parenthood. Many people believe that science can play no role in determining when human life begins. I argue that this false assumption is based on a failure (...) to separate different contradictory meanings of the term ‘human life’. In actuality, science has provided great insight into when and how human life and human beings come into existence. I argue as well that, contrary to our intuitive feelings, there is no physical connection between any father and his son; shared genes represent shared information and nothing more. Nevertheless, the feeling of a physical connection between parent and child is very real and instinctive, no matter how false it may be. These new understandings have profound ramifications for the way we treat issues surrounding human reproduction, including both abortion and assisted reproductive technologies. (shrink)

Although there are compelling reasons for believing otherwise, compassion cannot provide a basis for grounding a viable theory of civil and political society. Firstly, it is often irrational or personally irresponsible to be compassionate. Secondly, relations based on compassion do not require characteristics that are essential for a viable civil and political society. Thirdly, the unpredictable consequences of compassion are such that compassion alone is not sufficient for grounding a viable civil and political society. Finally, obligating people to be compassionate (...) is antithetical to what is required for being compassionate. (shrink)

Securities lending has been a lucrative business for mutual funds and exchange-traded funds over the past decade. Unfortunately for investors, the sponsors of these funds have not been very transparent with the details of their securities lending programs, and consequently most investors in these funds are unaware of their exposure to the risks inherent in securities lending. Interestingly, most funds do not return the full profits from securities lending activities to their investors. In this paper, we examine and discuss the (...) ethical considerations related to the securities lending activities of mutual funds and ETFs and offer a series of best practices that we believe will provide better transparency of these activities to fund investors. (shrink)

In 2011, when Judith Butler delivered the lecture series that would become Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, the speech act theorist joined other critical scholars attempting to work through the dark cloud of neoliberal fatigue settling over the humanities. “Identitarian ontologies” had become only more entrenched in the age of terror, any potential alternatives seeming destined for “discursive appropriation” by the insidious vocabulary of late biopolitical capitalism. Fatigued, but not yet resigned, Notes sets out “to rethink the speech (...) act”, not to discover something else to say or some other way to say it but instead to take seriously what Butler described more than a... (shrink)

In this paper I will discuss three areas in which advances in human reproductive technology could occur, their uses and abuses, and their effects on society. First is the potential to drastically increase the success rate and availability of in vitro fertilization and embryo freezing. Second is the ability to perform biopsies on embryos prior to the onset of pregnancy. Finally, I will consider the adding or altering of genes in embryos, commonly referred to as genetic engineering.As new reproductive technologies (...) pass from experimental models into the potential for medical utilization, I believe that it will be important for lawmakers everywhere to avoid the impulse to outlaw procedures that a society believes to be unnatural at a first glance. Rather, I would hope that they can respond thoughtfully with legislation that serves two purposes — to protect the rights of couples to overcome infertility or to reduce the risk of genetic disease in their children-to-be, and more importantly, to protect children-to-be from the abuses that could result from some of the practices that I will discuss. (shrink)

African Philosophy is a collection of previously unpublished essays that address epistemological and metaphysical concerns that have emerged from the sub-Saharan regions of Africa. The primary focus of the book is on traditional African conceptions of mind, person, personal identity, truth, knowledge, understanding, objectivity, and reality. The collection also discusses traditional African conceptions of causation, destiny, and free will.

ABSTRACT While claiming to be a much-needed corrective to the dual disappointments of structuralism and post-structuralism, one is starting to get the sense that affect may have simply inverted, rather than resolved, the binary of form/feeling. Yet emerging within and against the affective turn is a re-turn to structure as the condition of possibility for affectivity. From this re-turn, which I'll term affective formalism, is culled the transdisciplinary exemplars reviewed here: Ruth Leys's The Ascent of Affect, Gary Genosko's Critical Semiotics, (...) Eugenie Brinkema's The Forms of the Affects, with a nod to Eve Sedgwick's Touching Feeling. Far from caging affect, these new books suggest a return to form, once again, with feeling. (shrink)

Method as Identity considers how social identity shapes methodological standpoints. With a refreshing hip hop sensibility, Miller and Driscoll reorient the contemporary academic study of religion toward recognition of the costs and benefits of manufacturing “critical” distance from our objects of study.

This article examines the relationship between banking access and farm household investment. The assets we examine are non-retirement financial assets, retirement financial assets, and real estate assets not owned by the farm operation. Using data from the Agricultural Resource Management Survey and the universe of commercial bank branches from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, we find that distance to commercial banks is negatively related to the degree of investment in each of these assets for farm households. We also find that (...) internet availability, as measured by the share of farms in the county with internet, is positively associated with farm households’ investment in each of these assets. Further our results show that farm households that are located in the South have the lowest bank access as measured by bank proximity and internet availability. (shrink)

BackgroundThe U.S. Food and Drug Administration traditionally has kept confidential significant amounts of information relevant to the approval or non-approval of specific drugs, devices, and biologics and about the regulatory status of such medical products in FDA’s pipeline.ObjectiveTo develop practical recommendations for FDA to improve its transparency to the public that FDA could implement by rulemaking or other regulatory processes without further congressional authorization. These recommendations would build on the work of FDA’s Transparency Task Force in 2010.MethodsIn 2016-2017, we convened (...) a team of academic faculty from Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Yale Medical School, Yale Law School, and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to develop recommendations through an iterative process of reviewing FDA’s practices, considering the legal and policy constraints on FDA in expanding transparency, and obtaining insights from independent observers of FDA.ResultsThe team developed 18 specific recommendations for improving FDA’s transparency to the public. FDA could adopt all these recommendations without further congressional action.FundingThe development of the Blueprint for Transparency at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. (shrink)

This introduction to the Journal of Business Research special issue on anti-consumption briefly defines and highlights the importance of anticonsumption research, provides an overview of the latest studies in the area, and suggests an agenda for future research on anti-consumption.

Critics of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology have advanced an adaptationists-as-right-wing-conspirators (ARC) hypothesis, suggesting that adaptationists use their research to support a right-wing political agenda. We report the first quantitative test of the ARC hypothesis based on an online survey of political and scientific attitudes among 168 US psychology Ph.D. students, 31 of whom self-identified as adaptationists and 137 others who identified with another non-adaptationist meta-theory. Results indicate that adaptationists are much less politically conservative than typical US citizens and no more (...) politically conservative than non-adaptationist graduate students. Also, contrary to the “adaptationists-as-pseudo-scientists” stereotype, adaptationists endorse more rigorous, progressive, quantitative scientific methods in the study of human behavior than non-adaptationists. (shrink)

The discovery, more than 60 years ago, of a mutant mouse with a short tail led to the birth of the new field of developmental genetics. Over the years since, numerous investigators have probed the biology of the original short‐tail mutation at the T locus, as well the naturally‐occurring t haplotypes that were uncovered as a result of their interaction with this mutation. Although the T locus ranks among the best characterized developmental loci in the mouse, it was not among (...) the first to be cloned. This situation has now been rectified with two recent reports from Herrmann, Lehrach and their colleagues. While the T locus is expressed uniquely in the embryonic tissues predicted from the mutant phenotype, the gene itself, as well as the predicted amino acid sequence of the T product, show no strong homology to any known sequence. For the moment, at least, the mystery behind the function of the T locus still awaits definitive resolution. (shrink)

Adaptive mutation is defined as a process that, during nonlethal selections, produces mutations that relieve the selective pressure whether or not other, nonselected mutations are also produced. Examples of adaptive mutation or related phenomena have been reported in bacteria and yeast but not yet outside of microorganisms. A decade of research on adaptive mutation has revealed mechanisms that may increase mutation rates under adverse conditions. This article focuses on mechanisms that produce adaptive mutations in one strain of Escherichia coli, FC40. (...) These mechanisms include recombination-induced DNA replication, the placement of genes on a conjugal plasmid, and a transient mutator state. The implications of these various phenomena for adaptive evolution in microorganisms are discussed. BioEssays 22:1067–1074, 2000. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

The Rho GTPases—Rho, Rac and Cdc42—act as molecular switches, cycling between an active GTP‐bound state and an inactive GDP‐bound state, to regulate the actin cytoskeleton. It has recently become apparent that the Rho GTPases can be activated in subcellular zones that appear semi‐stable, yet are dynamically maintained. These Rho GTPase activity zones are associated with a variety of fundamental biological processes including symmetric and asymmetric cytokinesis and cellular wound repair. Here we review the basic features of Rho GTPase activity zones, (...) suggest that these zones represent a fundamental signaling mechanism, and discuss the implications of zone properties from the perspective of both their function and how they are likely to be controlled. BioEssays 28: 983–993, 2006. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Problems in peer review, the backbone of maintaining high standards in scientific publishing, have led to wide spread discontent within the scientific community. Training in the peer review process and a simpler format to assist in decision making are possible courses to improve and expedite the process of peer review and scientific publishing. The authors discuss problems in the peer review process focusing on challenges related to major revisions and reviewer's wish list of experiments; this leads to the loss of (...) time and money. Major revisions rarely lead to significant improvements, while simultaneously delay the dissemination of knowledge. The authors propose simple solutions including training peer reviewers to improve the peer review system. (shrink)

On Sunday morning, 23 February 1997, the world awoke to a technological advance that shook the foundations of biology and philosophy. On that day, we were introduced to Dolly, a 6-month-old lamb that had been cloned directly from a single cell taken from the breast tissue of an adult donor. Perhaps more astonished by this accomplishment than any of their neighbors were the scientists who actually worked in the field of mammalian genetics and embryology. Outside the lab where the cloning (...) had actually taken place, most of us thought it could never happen. Oh, we would say that perhaps at some point in the distant future, cloning might become feasible through the use of sophisticated biotechnologies far beyond those available to us now. But what many of us really believed, deep in our hearts, was that this was one biological feat we could never master. New lifemust have its origins in an embryo formed through the merger of gametes from a mother and father. It was impossible, we thought, for a cell from an adult mammal to become reprogrammed, to start all over again, to generate another entire animal or person in the image of the one born earlier. (shrink)

In 1970, Jacque Monod, a Nobel Laureate and a founding father of molecular biology, wrote a short celebrated book entitled Chance and Necessity.

Walter Savage Landor's exasperated marginal comment on line 13 of Horace, C. 1. 4 has sent modern commentators scurrying to the poem's defence. The skirmish has been won for Horace, but at the expense perhaps of magnifying the importance of line 13: A. Y. Campbell insisted that pallida mors, far from being irrelevant, was ‘the focus of the whole poem’.

For the 17 centuries since Hippocrates called for “the most desperate remedies in desperate cases,” physicians have adhered steadfastly to two cooperative goals: to prolong life and to relieve suffering. ut during the past 50 years, mechanical interventions at the edge of life have thrown those aims into dramatic conflict. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation, mechanical ventilation, feeding tubes, and the intensive care unit have postponed physiologic death for many patients who are anencephalic, comatose, or in a persistent vegetative state or prefer death (...) to a life of suffering and pain. Demands from patients' families and cries for social justice have compelled physicians, hospital personnel, and the Supreme Court to analyze concepts long reserved for university philosophers. Although decisions are made daily to withhold and withdraw life support, society is gradually agreeing upon an ethical framework that balances hopeful science with dignified death. This article outlines that ethical framework, reviews recent legal precedents, and suggests practical guidelines for their application. (shrink)

This new translation of the first volume of Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy is a welcome and valuable addition to the new translations of Hegel's works, and now appears in paperback for the first time. Hegel's History of Philosophy has been described as perhaps one of his greatest achievements, and also as the first systematic history of philosophy since Aristotle. The translation included material from lecture notes taken by Hegel's pupils in 1923-4, 1925-6, and 1927-8. This material was (...) not available to Haldane and Simson when they made their translation nearly 100 years ago. The present volume, which supersedes that earlier one, besides being indispensable for the professional student, will also introduce those unfamiliar with Hegel to his conception of philosophy. (shrink)