© 2015, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.Genetic studies have identified single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with the risk of prostate cancer. It remains unclear whether such genetic variants are associated with disease aggressiveness. The NCI-SPORE Genetics Working Group retrospectively collected clinicopathologic information and genotype data for 36 SNPs which at the time had been validated to be associated with PC risk from 25,674 cases with PC. Cases were grouped according to race, Gleason score and aggressiveness. Statistical analyses were used to compare the frequency (...) of the SNPs between different disease cohorts. After adjusting for multiple testing, only PC-risk SNP rs2735839 was significantly and inversely associated with aggressive and high-grade disease in European men. Similar associations with aggressive and high-grade disease were documented in African-American subjects. The G allele of rs2735839 was associated with disease aggressiveness even at low PSA levels in both European and African-American men. Our results provide further support that a PC-risk SNP rs2735839 near the KLK3 gene on chromosome 19q13 may be associated with aggressive and high-grade PC. Future prospectively designed, case-case GWAS are needed to identify additional SNPs associated with PC aggressiveness. (shrink)

Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was a ground-breaking work of literature which still resonates in feminism and human rights movements of today.

Reading the Shape of Nature vividly recounts the turbulent early history of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard and the contrasting careers of its founder Louis Agassiz and his son Alexander. Through the story of this institution and the individuals who formed it, Mary P. Winsor explores the conflicting forces that shaped systematics in the second half of the nineteenth century. Debates over the philosophical foundations of classification, details of taxonomic research, the young institution's financial struggles, and the (...) personalities of the men most deeply involved are all brought to life. In 1859, Louis Agassiz established the Museum of Comparative Zoology to house research on the ideal types that he believed were embodied in all living forms. Agassiz's vision arose from his insistence that the order inherent in the diversity of life reflected divine creation, not organic evolution. But the mortar of the new museum had scarcely dried when Darwin's Origin was published. By Louis Agassiz's death in 1873, even his former students, including his son Alexander, had defected to the evolutionist camp. Alexander, a self-made millionaire, succeeded his father as director and introduced a significantly different agenda for the museum. To trace Louis and Alexander's arguments and the style of science they established at the museum, Winsor uses many fascinating examples that even zoologists may find unfamiliar. The locus of all this activity, the museum building itself, tells its own story through a wonderful series of archival photographs. (shrink)

How is hope to be found amid the ethical and political dilemmas of modern life? Writer and philosopher Mary Zournazi brought her questions to some of the most thoughtful intellectuals at work today. She discusses "joyful revolt" with Julia Kristeva, the idea of "the rest of the world" with Gayatri Spivak, the "art of living" with Michel Serres, the "carnival of the senses" with Michael Taussig, the relation of hope to passion and to politics with Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto (...) Laclau. A dozen stimulating minds weigh in with their visions of a better social and political order. The result is a collaboration - of writing, of thinking, and of politics - that demonstrates more clearly than any single-authored project could how ideas encountering one another can produce the vision needed for social change. (shrink)

The current widespread belief that taxonomic methods used before Darwin were essentialist is ill-founded. The essentialist method developed by followers of Plato and Aristotle required definitions to state properties that are always present. Polythetic groups do not obey that requirement, whatever may have been the ontological beliefs of the taxonomist recognizing such groups. Two distinct methods of forming higher taxa, by chaining and by examplar, were widely used in the period between Linnaeus and Darwin, and both generated polythetic groups. Philosopher (...) William Whewell congratulated pre-Darwinian taxonomists for not adhering to the rigid ideal of definition used in the mathematical sciences. What he called the method of types is here called the method of exemplars because typology has been equated with essentialism, whereas the use of a type species as the reference point or prototype for a higher category was a practice inconsistent with essentialism. The story that the essentialism of philosophers dominated the development of systematics may prove to be a myth. (shrink)

The works of Mary Wollstonecraft ranged from the early Thoughts on the Education of Daughters to The Female Reader, a selection of texts for girls, and included two novels. But her reputation is founded on A Vindication of the Rights of Woman of 1792. This treatise is the first great document of feminism—and is now accepted as a core text in western tradition. It is not widely known that the germ of Wollstonecraft's great work came out of an earlier (...) and much shorter vindication—A Vindication of the Rights of Men , written in the context of the issues raised by the French Revolution. This edition, which follows the model of other Broadview Editions in including a range of materials that help the reader to see the work in the context of its era out of which it emerged, is arranged chronologically, opening with Wollstonecraft's "other vindication." It also includes a wide range of other documents in appendices, as well as a comprehensive and authoritative introduction, chronology, and full index. (shrink)

The Buddhist Handbook - A Complete Guide to Buddhist Teaching and Practice. John Snelling. Century Hutchinson, London 1987. Pbk, 373 pp. £6.95.

Pressure is mounting to hold researchers and research institutions accountable for the protection of human subjects. When subjects or their family members believe they have been injured, they are increasingly willing to file lawsuits. Recent cases indicate that institutional review boards and their members may be pulled more and more into the legal fray.On September 17, 1999, 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger died while participating in research conducted by the University of Pennsylvania's Institute for Gene Therapy. Gelsinger was involved in a Phase (...) I clinical trial testing a new approach to treatment of ornithine transcarbamylase deficiency, a rare metabolic disorder. Although infants affected by the severe form of OTC die shortly after birth, Gelsinger suffered from a relatively mild form. It appears undisputed that the cause of Gelsinger's death was not the disorder itself, but multiple organ system failure triggered by the virus used to carry new genetic material into his system. (shrink)

For a little more than a decade, professional organizations and healthcare institutions have attempted to develop guidelines and policies to deal with seemingly intractable conflicts that arise between clinicians and patients (or their proxies) over appropriate use of aggressive life-sustaining therapies in the face of low expectations of medical benefit. This article suggests that, although such efforts at conflict resolution are commendable on many levels, inadequate attention has been given to their potential negative effects upon particular groups of patients/proxies. Based (...) on the well-documented tendency among many African Americans to prefer more aggressive end-of-life medical interventions, it is proposed that the use of institutional policy to break decision making impasse in cases for which aggressive treatment is deemed "medically inappropriate" will fall disproportionately on that group. Finally, it is suggested that the development and application of institutional conflict-resolution policies should be evaluated in the context of historical and current experiences of marginalization and disempowerment, lest such policies exacerbate that experience. (shrink)

This paper shows that species are individuals with respect to evolutionary theory in the sense that the laws of the theory deal with species as irreducible wholes rather than as sets of organisms. 'Species X' is an instantiation of a primitive term of the theory. I present a sketch of a proof that it cannot be defined within the theory as a set of organisms; the proof relies not on details of my axiomatization but rather on a generally accepted property (...) of speciation; hence the same argument should work for any axiomatization which captures this generally accepted property of speciation. (shrink)

In the Philippines, all transplant centers are mandated by the Department of Health (DOH) to have a Hospital Transplant Ethics Committee (HTEC) to ensure that donations are altruistic, voluntary and free of coercion/commercial transactions. This study was undertaken primarily to describe the organizational and functional profile of existing HTECs and identify areas for improvement. This is a descriptive cross‐sectional study. There was variation in their logistical arrangements (support from hospital, filing systems, office spaces), operations (length and frequency of meetings, number (...) of referrals) and membership (composition, qualifications, occupation, training). The approval rate for donor‐recipient pairs is high with the majority of cases made by living non‐related donors. Appropriate reasons were cited for rejection. The perception of HTECs is that they are competent and confident in their decision‐making. However, there is a need to standardize HTEC composition, provide operating procedures and additional training which can be done by the DOH. (shrink)

Durocher and colleagues argue that Norman Daniels’s notion of just health could provide a useful framework for decreasing inequities in access to assistive technology. I argue that it would provide limited help for two reasons. First, Daniels’s reliance on normal species functioning as the goal of health care and his assumptions regarding the impact of normal species functioning on reasonable life projects create substantial difficulties for application to assistive technology. Second, although Daniels’s requirements for distributive justice provide a critical starting (...) point for any discussion of health equity, these requirements appear already met within current assistive technology funding schemes. (shrink)

To the person unfamiliar with the wide variety of street art, the term “street artist” conjures a young man furtively sneaking around a decaying city block at night, spray paint in hand, defacing concrete structures, ears pricked for police sirens. The possibility of the ethical criticism of street art on such a conception seems hardly worth the time. This has to be an easy question. Street art is vandalism; vandalism is causing the intentional damage or destruction of someone else’s property; (...) causing destruction or damage is wrong. The only remaining question is which of two coarse-grained models of ethical criticism we choose. The ethicist model holds that a work of art that exhibits ethically bad properties is a work that is thereby aesthetically flawed. That is, the work is flawed as a work of art just because of its ethical flaws. Bad ethics make art worse than it otherwise would have been, although it may be aesthetically successful otherwise. The autonomist model, by contrast, holds that the ethical properties of a work of art have no bearing at all on its aesthetic success. One might suppose, therefore, that on either model, a criticism of street art would be relatively easy to undertake. In defacing public property, some street art exhibits and endorses ethically bad attitudes. On the ethicist model, such a work is thereby pro tanto aesthetically flawed because in the process of creating such works, they violate ethical norms concerning the use of public spaces; on the autonomous model, any ethical criticism of the aesthetics of street art would need to be set aside entirely in favor of criticism that focused purely on the aesthetic properties of street art. I will argue in this paper that neither the ethicist nor the autonomist model adequately captures the moral landscape of street art. Street art may indeed be criticized productively on aesthetic grounds for the destruction it does to public spaces, but the existing models of ethical criticism overlook the complex ethical landscape of street art that results from its use of public spaces. In the interplay of various forms of street art we can see the emergence of an ethical criticism of art that is accomplished by the material properties of related artwork, and consists in the creation of a dialogue over the proper use of contested public spaces. (shrink)

Hecht provides insights concerning the difficulty of empirically testing Shepard's internalization hypothesis, but his argument for an externalization hypothesis suffers from similar sins. [Hecht].

“All things are full of gods”. A Platonic conversion toward a novel form of pantheism lies behind this pronouncement. This form is seldom appreciated in Platonic studies, and perhaps in general. I shall call it “polypsychic pantheism.” Platonic polypsychic pantheism is a form of pantheism that views the universe as a living, heterogeneously ensouled, divine being. Its divinity consists in a plurality of Gods, because different sorts of Soul-Gods appear necessary to make the universe one living God. Platonic polypsychic pantheism (...) thereby distinguishes itself as an alternative to monistic forms of pantheism. Its demonstration, in the present analysis, depends particularly on the interpretation of a chain ofdevelopment in Plato’s post-Republic dialogues. (shrink)