On ‘Mismatch’ and ‘Metabolic Ghettos:’ The Conceptualization of Global Health Differences in Research on the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease. Epigenetic approaches to human health have received growing attention in the past two decades. They allow to view the development of human organisms as plastic, i.e. as open to influences from the social and material environment such as nutrition, stress, and trauma. This has lent new credence to approaches in biomedicine that aim to draw attention to the importance (...) of development for later life health. Some scholars in the social sciences and humanities have welcomed such approaches as a departure from gene‐centric perspectives and as an opportunity for highlighting the social and political determinants of health and illness. Others have warned that they might lead to new forms of biological reductionisms and determinisms. In this article, we explore how research on developmental plasticity addresses and articulates global health disparities, specifically in the context of postcolonial India. We discuss two prominent approaches from the field of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) that build on epigenetic perspectives on health and illness and view different global rates of disease susceptibility as the result of developmental processes: first, the ‘mismatch paradigm’ by Peter Gluckman and Mark Hanson and second, the ‘metabolic ghetto’ concept by Jonathan Wells. We highlight how both approaches render historical and social factors meaningful for the development of global health disparities, but emphasize how they at the same time remain prone to determinisms and reductionisms reminiscent of a gene‐centric perspective. DOHaD actors themselves are critical of these tendencies, and in conclusion we explore novel opportunities for interdisciplinary collaborations enabled by this critical potential. (shrink)

Why do American ghettos persist? Decades after Moynihan’s report on the black family and the Kerner Commission’s investigations of urban disorders, deeply disadvantaged black communities remain a disturbing reality. Scholars and commentators today often identify some factor―such as single motherhood, joblessness, or violent street crime―as the key to solving the problem and recommend policies accordingly. But, Tommie Shelby argues, these attempts to “fix” ghettos or “help” their poor inhabitants ignore fundamental questions of justice and fail to see the urban poor (...) as moral agents responding to injustice. (shrink)

Este trabajo tiene como objetivo mostrar lo que es una sana laicidad en la sociedad actual pluralista, multicultural, democrática y diversa. En primer lugar se presentan dos tentaciones de la iglesia hoy: refugiarse en el ghetto y cerrarse al mundo dando razón a los fundamentalistas laicos que la consideran como algo privado, o salir a la cruzada a imponer sus creencias y su mensaje. Luego se analiza el proceso histórico de formación del pluralismo, de la laicidad y de la (...) libertad religiosa con énfasis en los modelos norteamericano y francés. Se concluye con una visión de lo que es la laicidad en la doctrina de la iglesia católica hoy y una propuesta de lo que debe ser el verdadero pluralismo y la sana laicidad hoy. This article has as aim show what is a healthy secularism in the current pluralist, multicultural, democratic and diverse society. First, it presents two temptations of the church today: to shelter in the ghetto and to be closed to the world giving reason to the lay fundamentalists who consider faith to be something private, or to go out to the crusade to impose Christian beliefs and message. Then there is analyzed the historical process of formation of the pluralism, of the secularism and of the religious freedom emphatically in the models North American and French. The article concludes with a vision of what is the secularism in the doctrine of the catholic church today and a proposal of what must be the real pluralism and the healthy secularism today. (shrink)

In the first part of this essay, I develop the argument that Michel Foucault's work should be read with geographical and topological ideas in mind. I argue that Foucault's archeology and genealogy are fundamentally determined by spatial, topological, geographical, and geometrical metaphors and concepts. This spatial dimension of genealogy is explicitly related to racism and the regimes that domesticate agents through the practices, institutions and ideologies of racialization. The second part offers a genealogical reading of US history and spatiality in (...) terms of its racial institutions. I suggest that if we want to read the US geographies of topographies and cartographies of racism in a Foucauldian manner, then we must focus on plantations, ghettos, and prisons as the spaces‐institutions‐geographies that consolidated the racial matrix of US polity. My goal is to acculturate Foucauldian racial genealogy to the US racial matrix, and, conversely, to read US geo‐history in terms of racializing spatialities. (shrink)

When an agent can not recognize, immediately, the implausible part of new information received, she will usually first expand her belief state by the new information, and then she may encounter some belief conflicts, and find the implausible information based on her criteria to consolidate her belief state. This process indicates a new kind of non-prioritized multiple revision, called metabolic revision. I give some axiomatic postulates for metabolic revision and propose two functional constructions for it, namely kernel (...) class='Hi'>metabolic revision and partial meet metabolic revision, with respect to which the representation theorems are proved. I also compare metabolic revision with some related works in the literature, including semi-revision, merging with integrity constraints, evaluation, and evaluative multiple revision. (shrink)

More than half of the Roma population in Slovakia lives in spaces that are segregated or separated from dominant non-Roma communities. The socio-spatial marginalization of Roma is both generated and reinforced through open and discrete social processes and measures largely orchestrated by local governments, enabled by an ineffective state; and reinforced by the general socio-economic policy framework. This article builds on extensive field research on predominantly Roma-occupied spaces (i.e., ‘settlements’) in Slovakia and focuses on the nature and function of Roma (...) segregation and separation in Slovakia from an ecological socio-political, and economic standpoint. Based on Loi’c Wacquant’s work on ethno-racial segregation and the concept of environmental justice, we discuss social and environmental discrimination as one of the constituent elements in understanding Roma socio-spatial marginalization and its functions, and employ the neologism, ‘hyper-osada’ as a tool to conceptually and analytically investigate the; new impetus and recent trajectory of Roma segregation and separation. (shrink)

Este trabajo tiene como objetivo mostrar lo que es una sana laicidad en la sociedad actual pluralista, multicultural, democrática y diversa. En primer lugar se presentan dos tentaciones de la iglesia hoy: refugiarse en el ghetto y cerrarse al mundo dando razón a los fundamentalistas laicos que la consideran como algo privado, o salir a la cruzada a imponer sus creencias y su mensaje. Luego se analiza el proceso histórico de formación del pluralismo, de la laicidad y de la (...) libertad religiosa con énfasis en los modelos norteamericano y francés. Se concluye con una visión de lo que es la laicidad en la doctrina de la iglesia católica hoy y una propuesta de lo que debe ser el verdadero pluralismo y la sana laicidad hoy. (shrink)

© Mind Association 2017By any credible theory of justice, the creation and perpetuation of the ghetto—racially segregated metropolitan areas of concentrated disadvantage to which many poor blacks are consigned—is profoundly unjust. In Dark Ghettos, Tommie Shelby develops a nonideal moral perspective centred on the injustices of the ghetto, through which he critically examines state policies directed towards ameliorating these disadvantages. He also proposes an interpretation of the conduct of some of the more alienated ghetto residents as justified (...) resistance rather than moral vice. A powerful and distinctive feature of Dark Ghettos is its focus on ghetto residents as moral agents with ethical duties of justice as well as rights that need to be respected.Dark Ghettos advances a radical critique of current policies on the basis of surprisingly conventional conceptions of ideal theory and its relation to nonideal theory. Shelby accepts a Rawlsian theory of justice, focused on... (shrink)

Este trabajo tiene como objetivo mostrar lo que es una sana laicidad en la sociedad actual pluralista, multicultural, democrática y diversa. En primer lugar se presentan dos tentaciones de la iglesia hoy: refugiarse en el ghetto y cerrarse al mundo dando razón a los fundamentalistas laicos que la consideran como algo privado, o salir a la cruzada a imponer sus creencias y su mensaje. Luego se analiza el proceso histórico de formación del pluralismo, de la laicidad y de la (...) libertad religiosa con énfasis en los modelos norteamericano y francés. Se concluye con una visión de lo que es la laicidad en la doctrina de la iglesia católica hoy y una propuesta de lo que debe ser el verdadero pluralismo y la sana laicidad hoy. This article has as aim show what is a healthy secularism in the current pluralist, multicultural, democratic and diverse society. First, it presents two temptations of the church today: to shelter in the ghetto and to be closed to the world giving reason to the lay fundamentalists who consider faith to be something private, or to go out to the crusade to impose Christian beliefs and message. Then there is analyzed the historical process of formation of the pluralism, of the secularism and of the religious freedom emphatically in the models North American and French. The article concludes with a vision of what is the secularism in the doctrine of the catholic church today and a proposal of what must be the real pluralism and the healthy secularism today. (shrink)

Many philosophers have argued that psychological time is a fundamental, inherent quality of consciousness that provides continuity and sequence to mental events—enabling memory. And, since memory is consciousness, psychological time enables the individual intentionality of consciousness. Levinas , on the other hand, argues that an individual’s past, in the most original sense, is the past of other. The irreducible alterity of one’s past sets the stage for the other who co-determines the meaning of the past. This paper is about the (...) exploration cultural memory within the context of a Caucasian doctoral student entering into an African-American community during an internship, who finds that cultural memories are remarkably more complicated than the propositional description of historic events. The paper further explores how cultural memory is not a record of “what happened” but a sociolinguistic creative meaning making process. Histories can be contested. Memory, on the other hand, never adheres to the strict true or false dichotomy. Memory is like searching for the Divine, it cannot be found, only revealed in mysterious and small details. Memory, is the intruding of the infinite, creating as an effect the idea of a finite , they are not “representations” of the past nor are they a kind of mnemonic system of subjectivism to mediate all of consciousness. (shrink)

The reprogramming of metabolism has been identified as one of the hallmarks of cancer. It is becoming more and more frequent to connect other diseases with metabolic reprogramming. This article aims to argue that metabolic reprogramming is not driven by disease but instead is the main hallmark of metabolism, based on its dynamic behavior that allows it to continuously adapt to changes in the internal and external conditions.

Whipple disease is a rare, infectious, disease first described from a single case by Whipple in 1907. As well as characterising the clinical and pathological features of the condition, Whipple made two suggestions regarding its aetiology. These were either than the disease was caused by an infectious agent, or that it was of metabolic origin. As the disease is now thought to be caused by infection with the bacterium Tropheryma whipplei, historical reviews of the history of the disease typically (...) mention only the first of these suggestions. In this paper, we therefore revisit Whipple’s other theory. We argue that a diverse and often successful research programme was developed around this mechanism of disease causation which gave rise to many useful findings on the condition. In the later parts of this article, we then turn to discuss the surprising neglect of this period of Whipple disease research in the current literature, and conclude by offering a brief reconstruction of this early history suitable for use in a technical context. (shrink)

In the flowering of Red-Green Thought over the past two decades, metabolic rift thinking is surely one of its most colorful varieties. The metabolic rift has captured the imagination of critical environmental scholars, becoming a shorthand for capitalism’s troubled relations in the web of life. This article pursues an entwined critique and reconstruction: of metabolic rift thinking and the possibilities for a post-Cartesian perspective on historical change, the world-ecology conversation. Far from dismissing metabolic rift thinking, my (...) intention is to affirm its dialectical core. At stake is not merely the mode of explanation within environmental sociology. The impasse of metabolic rift thinking is suggestive of wider problems across the environmental social sciences, now confronted by a double challenge. One of course is the widespread—and reasonable—sense of urgency to evolve modes of thought appropriate to an era of deepening biospheric instability. The second is the widely recognized—but inadequately internalized—understanding that humans are part of nature. (shrink)

This chapter aims at pointing out the correspondences between the transformative Five Percenter process of self-cultivation outlined in the Supreme Mathematics and previous interpretations articulated and transmitted in the sapiential traditions of Islam, Christianity, or Taoism.

I consider the case of the “simplest” living beings—bacteria—and examine how their embodied activity constitutes an organism/environment interaction, out of which emerges the possibility of learning from an environment. I suggest that this mutual co-emergence of organism and environment implies a panbiotic educational interaction that is at once the condition for, and achievement of, all living beings. Learning and being learned from are entangled in varied ways throughout the biosphere. Education is not an exclusively human project, it is part of (...) the ancient evolutionary process of elaborating and diversifying the relational possibilities inherent in metabolism that has brought forth our diverse and flourishing world.ed from context, “education” appears as a set of ways in which humans actively engage and take responsibility for the learning outcomes of relationships with each other. Insofar as we consider this distinction absolute rather than a performed construct to be assessed by its consequences, we blind ourselves to the educative dimension of other species as well as our many miseducative engagements with them. If learning processes are inherent and constitutive of ecological communities, education theorists should devote their pedagogical sensitivities and insights to the crucial challenge of developing educative sustainable human–nature relations. (shrink)

The definition of metabolic syndrome has been, and still is, extremely controversial. My purpose is not to give a solution to the associated debate but to argue that the controversy is at least partially due to the different ‘causal content’ of the various definitions: their theoretical validity and practical utility can be evaluated by reconstructing or making explicit the underlying causal structure. I will therefore propose to distinguish the alternative definitions according to the kinds of causal content they carry: (...) definitions grounded on associations, definitions presupposing a causal model built upon statistical associations, and definitions grounded on underlying mechanisms. I suggest that analysing definitions according to their causal content can be helpful in evaluating alternative definitions of some diseases. I want to show how the controversy over MetS suggests a distinction among three kinds of definitions based on how explicitly they characterise the syndrome in causal terms, and on the type of causality involved. I will call ‘type 1 definitions’ those definitions that are purely associative; ‘type 2 definitions’ the definitions based on statistical associations, plus generic medical and causal knowledge; and ‘type 3 definitions’ the definitions based on mechanisms. These kinds of definitions, although different, can be related to each other. A definition with more specific causal content may be useful in the evaluation of definitions characterised by a lower degree of causal specificity. Moreover, the identification of the type of causality involved is of help to constitute a good criterion for choosing among different definitions of a pathological entity. In section I introduce the controversy about MetS, in section I propose some remarks about medical definitions and their ‘causal import’, and in section I suggest that the different attitudes towards the definition of MetS are relevant to evaluate their explicative power. (shrink)

Metabolic systems are complicated and contain very large numbers of interacting reactions and many internal regulatory mechanisms. This does not prevent the genetic composition of an organism from influencing its behavior, however, nor does it preclude the possibility that some aspects of its behavior may be amenable to simple explanations.

Here, we analyze how the set of nucleotides in the cell is equilibrated and how this generates simple rules that help the cell to organize itself via maintenance of a stable non‐equilibrium state. A major mechanism operating to achieve this state is thermodynamic buffering via high activities of equilibrating enzymes such as adenylate kinase. Under stable non‐equilibrium, the ratios of free and Mg‐bound adenylates, Mg2+ and membrane potentials are interdependent and can be computed. The adenylate status is balanced with the (...) levels of reduced and oxidized pyridine nucleotides through regulated uncoupling of the pyridine nucleotide pool from ATP production in mitochondria, and through oxidation of substrates non‐coupled to NAD+ reduction in peroxisomes. The set of adenylates and pyridine nucleotides constitutes a generalized cell energy status and determines rates of major metabolic fluxes. As the result, fluxes of energy and information become organized spatially and temporally, providing conditions for self‐maintenance of metabolism. (shrink)

In the history of Western perceptions of Jews and the ‘Jewish problem’, the First World War marks a period of change which was, among other things, influenced by the course of the war on the Eastern Front. The German occupation of large parts of Russian Poland in 1915 brought the difficult conditions of Eastern European Jewry closer to public attention in the West, not only in Central Europe, but also in neutral states. For the Scandinavian writers who travelled to occupied (...) Poland in 1916 and 1917, the direct encounter with East European Jewry was a new and often disturbing experience. Their travelogues represent an illuminating and, so far, unused source for Scandinavian perceptions of Jews in Eastern Europe, focusing on the ‘ghetto’ as the physical embodiment of Eastern Jewish life. Analysing these accounts, the present article discusses the different depictions of Warsaw’s Jews thematically and identifies three interwoven perspectives of the ‘ghetto’: as a site of extreme poverty; as a foreign element in Europe; and as an archetype of Jewish life in general. (shrink)

In larger animals a considerable part of the total body mass (e.g. body water, dissolved substances, mineral and organic deposits) does not consume significant amounts of oxygen. These materials can be considered to form a metabolically inert infrastructure which mainly serves three functions: (1) structural support to the organism, (2) storage of nutrients (building material and energy stores) and (3) transport and distribution of these materials. Considering the transport and support function of the metabolically inert structures and their interconnections it (...) is likely that the infrastructure will basically show some tree-like, branching building plan. The weight of the metabolically inert infrastructure of an organism, can be given by bW/(c+W), in which W=body weight, b and c are constants. With increasing size the weight of the metabolic inert infrastructure increases disproportionably. Experimental data concerning basic metabolic rate (M) in relation to body weight (W) better fit the equation M=a W(1-bW)/(c+W), (a=constant) than the conventional power law. (shrink)

Lymphangiogenesis is an important developmental process that is critical to regulation of fluid homeostasis, immune surveillance and response as well as pathogenesis of a number of diseases, among them cancer, inflammation, and heart failure. Specification, formation, and maturation of lymphatic blood vessels involves an interplay between a series of events orchestrated by various transcription factors that determine expression of key genes involved in lymphangiogenesis. These are traditionally thought to be under control of several key growth factors including vascular growth factor‐C (...) (VEGF‐C) and fibroblast growth factors (FGFs). Recent insights into VEGF and FGF signaling point to their role in control of endothelial metabolic processes such as glycolysis and fatty acid oxidation that, in turn, play a major role in regulation of lymphangiogenesis. These advances have significantly increased our understanding of lymphatic biology and opened new therapeutic vistas. Here we review our current understanding of metabolic controls in the lymphatic vasculature. (shrink)

Many kinds of multifunctional regulatory proteins have been identified that perform distinct biochemical functions in the nucleus, the cytoplasm, or both. Here we describe the recent discovery by Hall et al. (2004)1 of a new type of multifunctional protein: a metabolic enzyme that doubles as a transcription factor. This enzyme, Arg5,6, functions as a catalytic enzyme in ornithine biosynthesis and also binds and regulates the promoters of nuclear and mitochondrial genes. It may also regulate precursor mRNA metabolism. We discuss (...) how proteins that serve as both metabolic enzymes and transcription factors might have evolved. BioEssays 27:467–471, 2005. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Computational approaches in systems biology have become a powerful tool for understanding the fundamental mechanisms of cellular metabolism and regulation. However, the interplay between the regulatory and the metabolic system is still poorly understood. In particular, there is a need for formal mathematical frameworks that allow analyzing metabolism together with dynamic enzyme resources and regulatory events. Here, we introduce a metabolic-regulatory network model that allows integrating metabolism with transcriptional regulation, macromolecule production and enzyme resources. Using this model, we (...) show that the dynamic interplay between these different cellular processes can be formalized by a hybrid automaton, combining continuous dynamics and discrete control. (shrink)

Stewart and Korol (“De-Signing Fat,” International Journal of Applied Philosophy 23.2 [2009]) contend that obesity is benign. In support of their position they have focussed on selected papers that do not take into consideration key realities. Their attempt to minimise the impact of obesity appears to centre on how difficult it can be to lose weight by diet alone (and its risks) and problems with measurements of obesity, while failing to acknowledge the specific and well-documented impact of deleterious biochemical alterations (...) arising from central obesity. Stewart and Korol also do not point out the considerable controversy with the fat but fit (metabolically healthy obesity [MHO]) concept. Whether looping from above or below, nothing changes the biochemical realities of central obesity. Above all, Stewart and Korol never once mention the benefits of obesity prevention, rather focussing on the difficulties of losing weight. Thus, respectfully, a word of caution is put forward on the views of Stewart and Korol regarding obesity. (shrink)

Neural activity varies continually from moment to moment. Such temporal variability (TV) has been highlighted as a functionally specific brain property playing a fundamental role in cognition. We sought to investigate the mechanisms involved in TV changes between two basic behavioral states, namely having the eyes open (EO) or eyes closed (EC) in vivo in humans. To these ends we acquired BOLD fMRI, ASL, and [18F]-fluoro-deoxyglucose PET in a group of healthy participants (n = 15), along with BOLD fMRI and (...) [18F]-flumazenil PET in a separate group (n = 19). Focusing on an EO- vs EC-sensitive region in the occipital cortex (identified in an independent sample), we show that TV is constrained in the EO condition compared to EC. This reduction is correlated with an increase in energy consumption and with regional GABAA receptor density. This suggests that the modulation of TV by behavioral state involves an increase in overall neural activity that is related to an increased effect from GABAergic inhibition in addition to any excitatory changes. These findings contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms underlying activity variability in the human brain and its control. (shrink)

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This essay elaborates a magical realist reading of urban dispossession and the displacement of slum dwellers in contemporary New Delhi. More generally it argues that realist descriptions of the magical and magical descriptions of the real can help us sense and engage the multiple, fractured temporalities of the postcolonial city. The essay foregrounds an impending slum demolition in postcolonial Delhi’s famous magicians’ ghetto in the heart of the city, excavating a concept of ‘moving slums’ from Salman Rushdie’s classic magical (...) realist text Midnight’s Children. The interpretive concept of ‘moving slums’ describes the precarious temporality of slum demolition and re-settlement in postcolonial Delhi, juxtaposing dominant urbanist ideologies with everyday experiences and narratives of urban change. In societies deeply marked by the historical violence of uneven development, moving slums index the haunted morphology of the postcolonial city. (shrink)

Evidence for the association of ‘soluble’ enzymes in vivo is extensive and compelling. These associations occur in all compartments of the cell of both prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Several factors present in vivo promote these associations among enzymes whose association in vitro is often too weak to detect. Several physiological advantages of the associated enzyme complexes can be identified, most (but not all) of which are the consequence of microcompartmentation of metabolites (substrate channeling). Substrate channeling of intermediates by either a ‘direct (...) transfer’ process or ‘proximity effects’ can occur. The latter mechanism does not require the special molecular features needed for the direct transfer mechanism and may, therefore, exist in more general situations in the cell. Criticisms of these views are discussed. We argue that these criticisms have been largely answered by experiment and theory in recent years. Studies on simple systems in vitro, nevertheless, contribute important insights concerning the more complex phenomena in vivo. (shrink)