Matteo Laspro et al. (2024) provide a thought-provoking review of the ethical issues surrounding Whole-Eye Transplantation (WET). In this commentary, we expand on three of the concerns they raise i...

This paper critically examines whether patients with severe brain injury, who can only communicate through assistive neuroimaging technologies, may permissibly participate in medical decisions. We examine this issue in the context of a unique case study from the Brain and Mind Institute at the University of Western Ontario. First, we describe how the standard approach to medical decision making might problematically exclude patients with communication impairments secondary to severe brain injury. Second, we present a modified approach to medical decision making. (...) We argue that this approach might warrant the inclusion of some patients with severe brain injury in low-stakes decisions, or to express preferences. Third, we present a model of supported decision making to address recalcitrant uncertainty. We conclude by suggesting that the modified approach to decision making and supported decision making might allow a patient with severe brain injury to participate in some medical decisions. Our analysis is provisional and has not yet been implemented in practice. Our discussion is intended to generate further debate on approaches to enhancing autonomy in patients with profound motor and cognitive impairments. (shrink)

In “Bioethics and the Moral Authority of Experience,” Ryan Nelson et al. (2022) argue that personal experience can simultaneously be an asset and a liability in the practice of bioethics and medici...

Home care is one of the fastest‐growing industries in the United States, providing valuable opportunities for millions of older adults and people with disabilities to live at home rather than in institutional settings. Home care workers assist clients with essential activities of daily living, but their wages and working conditions generally fail to reflect the importance of their work. Drawing on the work of Eva Feder Kittay and other care ethicists, we argue that good care involves attending to the needs (...) of another out of a concern for their well‐being. Such care should be standard in the home care system. Yet, because of the pervasive racial, gender, and economic inequalities that the home care industry perpetuates, home care workers and their clients cannot reasonably be expected to care about each other. We endorse reforms aimed at enabling home care workers and their clients to form and maintain professional relationships that cultivate care.. (shrink)

Trainees with disabilities in health-related professions are often subjected to structural ableism in medicine: the discriminatory manifestation of lowered expectations towards people with disabilities by medical professionals. In this case study, I reflect on my experiences as the first individual with significant disabilities to be offered a postdoctoral fellowship in clinical bioethics at the National Institutes of Health. I focus on the following question: What arrangements need to be in place in order for someone with my level of disability to (...) thrive as a clinical bioethicist? By telling my story, I show how the process of accommodating trainees with disabilities often requires creative problem-solving and a considerable amount of institutional resources. I also describe the team-based method that my mentors and I developed to enable me to complete rotations on the NIH’s bioethics consultation service. If more trainees with disabilities are to succeed in clinical bioethics trainee programs, the field will have to grapple with how to develop an infrastructure for providing disability related support across training programs. This article is the beginning of a dialogue about how to build such an infrastructure. (shrink)

The 2012 film The Sessions tells the story of a man with polio who loses his virginity by undergoing Surrogate Partner Therapy (SPT). In light of ensuing controversy surrounding the legal and moral status of SPT, this article uses Norman Daniels’ framework of fair equality of opportunity in health to argue that SPT is a legitimate form of treatment for sexual dysfunctions and should be evaluated alongside other such treatments. I begin by showing how sexual dysfunctions constitute deviations in normal (...) species functioning. I then show that sexual capacities are a matter of fair equality of opportunity because they affect the ability to cultivate the sexual intimacy that is crucial for forming a family and often necessary for maintaining a healthy one. Recognizing that some might object to SPT as a form of prostitution, I proceed by showing how the treatment might avoid some of the objections raised against prostitution, and conclude by affirming that societies committed to fair equality of opportunity in health should work to make SPT legal and safe. (shrink)

The two target articles in this issue draw an important connection between disability bioethics and geriatric bioethics. Dominic JC Wilkinson makes a pragmatic case for using frailty as a fa...

Is it possible that justice requires giving people with disabilities like autism sufficient opportunities to pursue a flourishing life by promoting accessibility at theme parks and other places of public accommodation? I explore this question by analyzing the ethical issues at play in a series of disability lawsuits against Disney Parks and Resorts. Drawing on the work of Martha Nussbaum and Chiara Cordelli, I argue that Disney has an obligation of justice to provide these plaintiffs with their requested disability modification. (...) I further articulate how public accommodations other than Disney should accommodate disabled customers, sometimes with government assistance. (shrink)

In the author's dual identities of Disney fanatic and philosopher of disability, he was as delighted as a five‐year‐old on their first trip to the Magic Kingdom to see the progress that Disney had made in Finding Dory by depicting what philosophers call the social model of disability. In contrast to the social model of disability, people often see the medical model, in which disability is understood as an individual problem to be remedied through medical treatment or charity. Not to (...) get too far ahead of themselves, but Dopey from Snow White is a perfect illustration of a character with a disability portrayed in terms of the medical model. Keep pondering that while people consider a darker side to the Finding Dory disability paradise, one that reveals it is only a wonderful world for those who can speak. (shrink)

Eva Feder Kittay's Learning from My Daughter: The Value and Care of Disabled Minds is poised to make a major contribution to the disability literature and is likely to spark controversy among disability scholars. The book's central contribution is the articulation of an ethics of care for meeting the “genuine needs” and “legitimate wants” of people with disabilities or chronic illnesses. We applaud Kittay, who is the mother of a woman with cerebral palsy who has multiple physical and intellectual impairments, (...) for sharing her story in such an eloquent, accessible, and personal manner. The question remains, however, as to whether Kittay's normative theory of care captures the ethical obligations that should exist between the carer and the cared‐for. In demanding that the cared‐for include the carer as a participant in all their interactions with others, Kittay conceptualizes what paid caregiving relationships should look like in a way we find misguided. (shrink)

A number of recent legal cases in the United States have considered both disability‐based exceptions to Covid‐19‐related mask mandates and disability‐based claims to stronger masking rules in states restricting the abilities of local governments to enforce mask mandates. We argue that a proper legal and ethical analysis of such cases requires understanding the distinction between disability accommodations and disability modifications. Disability accommodations are individualized adjustments that enable qualified individuals to perform jobs or achieve access on terms comparable to those experienced (...) by others. Disability modifications are programmatic changes to structures or policies that increase accessibility. We contend that in the context of mask mandates, modifications rather than accommodations are ethically desirable because modification‐oriented policies promote disability access in a way that treats all individuals fairly, avoiding the risk of promoting misinformation and uncertainty about the health benefits of masking. (shrink)

A definition of emotion common to the affective sciences is an urgent desideratum. Lack of such a definition is a constant source of numerous misunderstandings and a series of mostly fruitless debates. There is little hope that there ever will be agreement on a common definition of emotion, given the sacred traditions of the disciplines involved and the egos of the scholars working in these disciplines. Our aim here is more modest. We propose a list of elements for a working (...) definition of emotion and discuss the justification for the inclusion of elements from our respective perspectives (philosophy and psychology). This working partial definition may at least serve as a litmus test to examine theories of emotion, old and new, across disciplinary boundaries. (shrink)

We argue that explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), specifically reason-giving XAI, often constitutes the most suitable way of ensuring that someone can properly be held responsible for decisions that are based on the outputs of artificial intelligent (AI) systems. We first show that, to close moral responsibility gaps (Matthias 2004), often a human in the loop is needed who is directly responsible for particular AI-supported decisions. Second, we appeal to the epistemic condition on moral responsibility to argue that, in order to (...) be responsible for her decision, the human in the loop has to have an explanation available of the system’s recommendation. Reason explanations are especially well-suited to this end and we examine whether – and how – it might be possible to make such explanations fit with AI systems. We support our claims by focusing on a case of disagreement between human in the loop and AI system. (shrink)

An important and engaging book on a key argument in contemporary debates about free will and moral responsibility.

Introduction -- Organization, society and politics -- An Aristotelian perspective -- The politics -- The public good -- The rhetoric -- Talk and texts -- The Nichomachean ethics -- Decision making and ethics -- The Poetics -- Bolshevism to ballet in three steps -- What is "public interest"?: a case study -- Where do we go from here?

Solar radiation management (SRM) may help to reduce the negative outcomes of climate change by minimising or reversing global warming. However, many express the worry that SRM may pose a moral hazard, i.e., that information about SRM may lead to a reduction in climate change mitigation efforts. In this paper, we report a large-scale preregistered, money-incentivised, online experiment with a representative US sample (N = 2284). We compare actual behaviour (donations to climate change charities and clicks on climate change petition (...) links) as well as stated preferences (support for a carbon tax and self-reported intentions to reduce emissions) between participants who receive information about SRM with two control groups (a salience control that includes information about climate change generally and a content control that includes information about a different topic). Behavioural choices are made with an earned real-money endowment, and stated preference responses are incentivised via the Bayesian Truth Serum. We fail to find a significant impact of receiving information about SRM and, based on equivalence tests, we provide evidence in favour of the absence of a meaningfully large effect. Our results thus provide evidence for the claim that there is no detectable moral hazard with respect to SRM. [Open access]. (shrink)

There is growing interest in understanding and eliciting division of labor within groups of scientists. This paper illustrates the need for this division of labor through a historical example, and a formal model is presented to better analyze situations of this type. Analysis of this model reveals that a division of labor can be maintained in two different ways: by limiting information or by endowing the scientists with extreme beliefs. If both features are present however, cognitive diversity is maintained indefinitely, (...) and as a result agents fail to converge to the truth. Beyond the mechanisms for creating diversity suggested here, this shows that the real epistemic goal is not diversity but transient diversity. (shrink)

In _Marx at the Margins_, Kevin Anderson uncovers a variety of extensive but neglected texts by the well-known political economist which cast what we thought we knew about his work in a startlingly different light. Analyzing a variety of Marx’s writings, including journalistic work written for the _New York Tribune_, Anderson presents us with a Marx quite at odds with our conventional interpretations. Rather than providing us with an account of Marx as an exclusively class-based thinker, Anderson here offers (...) a portrait of Marx for the twenty-first century: a global theorist whose social critique was sensitive to the varieties of human social and historical development, including not just class, but nationalism, race, and ethnicity, as well. _Marx at the Margins _ultimately argues that alongside his overarching critique of capital, Marx created a theory of history that was multi-layered and not easily reduced to a single model of development or revolution. Through highly-informed readings on work ranging from Marx’s unpublished 1879–82 notebooks to his passionate writings about the antislavery cause in the United States, this volume delivers a groundbreaking and canon-changing vision of Karl Marx that is sure to provoke lively debate in Marxist scholarship and beyond. (shrink)

This chapter lays out what we take to be the main types of justice and ethical challenges concerning those adverse effects of climate change leading to climate-related Loss and Damage (L&D). We argue that it is essential to clearly differentiate between the challenges concerning mitigation and adaptation and those ethical issues exclusively relevant for L&D in order to address the ethical aspects pertaining to L&D in international climate policy. First, we show that depending on how mitigation and adaptation are distinguished (...) from L&D, the primary focus of policy measures and their ethical implications will vary. Second, we distinguish between a distributive justice framework and a compensatory justice scheme for delivering L&D measures. Third, in order to understand the differentiated remedial responsibilities concerning L&D, we categorise the measures and policy approaches available. Fourth, depending on the kind of L&D and which remedies are possible, we explain the difference between remedial and outcome responsibilities of different actors. [Open access]. (shrink)

This paper advances the conception of social entrepreneurs as caring entrepreneurs. We argue that the care ethics of social entrepreneurs, implying the pursuit of caring goals through caring processes, can be challenged when they engage in the process of scaling up their ventures. We propose that social entrepreneurs can sustain their care ethics as the essential dimension of their venture only if they are able to build a caring enterprise. Organizational care designates the set of organizing principles that facilitate the (...) embedding of care ethics at an organizational level, beyond the imprinting induced by social entrepreneurs’ personal ethics. (shrink)

[Newspaper Opinion] Before the COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying fall in oil prices, a carbon price would have been immediately painful for the countries that imposed it, but far better for everyone over the longer term. In this unprecedented moment, introducing a carbon price would be beneficial both now and for the future.

_Challenges conventional understandings of Heidegger’s account of the body._.

‘I am not yet so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas.’Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language.When asked to write for a special issue of Diogenes to be entitled ‘Anthropology: The Reluctant science?’ I was reminded of a remark made to me over dinner by my friend of more than (...) fifty years, the late Eric Wolf. It was the last time I saw him: the meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Philadelphia, in November 1998. (shrink)

This paper offers a phenomenological analysis of Heidegger’s account of “the uncanny” as it relates to the coronavirus pandemic. It explores how the pandemic has disrupted Dasein’s sense of “homelike” familiarity and how this disruption has undermined our ability to be, that is, to understand or make sense of things. By examining our experience of temporality, lived-space, and intersubjectivity, the paper illuminates different ways in which the pandemic has left us confused and anxious about our self-interpretations and future projects. The (...) paper concludes by showing how the uncanny is not simply something we feel in times of crisis; it is, for Heidegger, who we are. This means the secure feeling of familiarity that we embodied prior to the pandemic was an illusion all along, that we are not and never have been at-home in the world. (shrink)

Increasingly, epistemologists are becoming interested in social structures and their effect on epistemic enterprises, but little attention has been paid to the proper distribution of experimental results among scientists. This paper will analyze a model first suggested by two economists, which nicely captures one type of learning situation faced by scientists. The results of a computer simulation study of this model provide two interesting conclusions. First, in some contexts, a community of scientists is, as a whole, more reliable when its (...) members are less aware of their colleagues' experimental results. Second, there is a robust tradeoff between the reliability of a community and the speed with which it reaches a correct conclusion. ‡The author would like to thank Brian Skyrms, Kyle Stanford, Jeffrey Barrett, Bruce Glymour, and the participants in the Social Dynamics Seminar at University of California–Irvine for their helpful comments. Generous financial support was provided by the School of Social Science and Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at UCI. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, Baker Hall 135, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890; e-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

Existentialism claims that there is no human reality except in action: pragmatism argues that meaning and truth are given only in practice. Wittgenstein calls for attention to forms of life, Marxism calls for attention to doing, and feminism calls for attention to the body. What do these tell us about ritual acts and their connection to spirit and to truth in Christianity and other world religions? Religious rituals have a special status as virtually pure forms of belief in action. Thinking (...) Through Rituals asks how philosophical tools like existentialism and Marxism can help us to understand the thought behind actions such as tasting the Christian host, joining in ceremony and speaking sacred words. Thinking Through Rituals proposes a new philosophical understanding of rituals as mental strategies giving access to knowledge of the world, in opposition to traditional approaches which see rituals as forms of social organization and control. Covering areas including the body, pilgrimage,initiation, sacrifice and art, this is an exciting look at the relationship between doing and meaning which is implied by ritual practice, but most fully explained by philosophical theory. (shrink)

This book offers cutting edge research on the modifications and disruptions of bodily experience in the context of anxiety, depression, trauma, chronic illness, pain, and aging. It presents original contributions in applied phenomenology, biomedical ethics, and the use of medical technologies.

This essay explores the unique temporal experience in anxiety. Drawing on first-person accounts as well as examples from literature, I attempt to show how anxiety not only disrupts our physiological and cognitive timing but also disturbs the embodied rhythms of everyday social life. The primary goal, however, is to articulate the extent to which human existence itself is a temporally structured event and to identity the ways that anxiety disrupts this structure. Using Martin Heidegger’s account of human existence as a (...) point of departure, I show how the mood of anxiety has the power to alter our self-interpretations by closing down or constricting our experience of the future. I argue that a constricted future impedes our ability ‘to be’ because it closes off the range of projective meanings that we would ordinarily draw on to create or fashion our identities. (shrink)

In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger introduces a unique interpretation of death as a kind of world-collapse or breakdown of meaning that strips away our ability to understand and make sense of who we are. This is an ‘ontological death’ in the sense that we cannot be anything because the intelligible world that we draw on to fashion our identities and sustain our sense of self has lost all significance. On this account, death is not only an event that we (...) can physiologically live through; it can happen numerous times throughout the finite span of our lives. This paper draws on Arthur Frank’s (At the will of the body: reflections on illness. Houghton, Boston, 1991) narrative of critical illness to concretize the experience of ‘ontological death’ and illuminate the unique challenges it poses for health care professionals. I turn to Heidegger’s conception of ‘resoluteness’ (Entschlossenheit) to address these challenges, arguing for the need of health care professionals to help establish a discursive context whereby the critically ill can begin to meaningfully express and interpret their experience of self-loss in a way that acknowledges the structural vulnerability of their own identities and is flexible enough to let go of those that have lost their significance or viability. (shrink)

Colonial encounters in the 1850s: the European impact on India, Indonesia, and China -- Russia and Poland: the relationship of national emancipation to revolution -- Race, class, and slavery: the Civil War as a second American revolution -- Ireland: nationalism, class, and the labor movement -- From the Grundrisse to Capital: multilinear themes -- Late writings on non-western and precapitalist societies -- Conclusion -- Appendix: the vicissitudes of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe from the 1920s to today.

In this paper, I draw on Heidegger’s phenomenology of “moods” (_Stimmungen_) to interpret loneliness as a diffused and atmospheric feeling-state that often undergirds the lives of older adults, shaping the ways in which they are attuned to and make sense of the world. I focus specifically on residents in long-term care facilities to show how the social isolation and lockdown measures of the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically intensified the mood. The aim is to shed light on how profound and totalizing the (...) experience has been for residents. Making use of Heidegger’s account of the affective “collapse” or “breakdown” (_Zusammenbruch_) of meaning, I argue that when older adults are functionally locked in their rooms for months at a time and cut off from the orienting routines and rhythms of the relational world, the result is a crumbling of the fundamental meaning-structures that constitute subjectivity. The global sense of abandonment and disconnection strips away the possibility for self-understanding, and residents are often left confused and abandoned to an existence that has been drained of meaning and significance. (shrink)

Theories of scientific rationality typically pertain to belief. In this paper, the author argues that we should expand our focus to include motivations as well as belief. An economic model is used to evaluate whether science is best served by scientists motivated only by truth, only by credit, or by both truth and credit. In many, but not all, situations, scientists motivated by both truth and credit should be judged as the most rational scientists.

Increasingly, frontiers between business and philanthropy seem to be blurred. Reward-Based Crowdfunding platforms contribute to this blurring of lines since they propose funders to support both for-profit and philanthropic projects. Our empirical paper explores the case of Ulule, the leading crowdfunding platform in Europe. Our results, based on a statistical analysis of more than 3000 projects, show that crowdfunding platforms foster specific kinds of relationships relying on reciprocal giving, beyond the usual opposition between altruistic and selfish motivations. We use the (...) work of Marcel Mauss to account for this process of reciprocal giving, and we argue that Maussian theory of gift can be used more generally to describe funding activities in the context of early stage entrepreneurship. (shrink)

Work on a computer program called SMILE + IBP (SMart Index Learner Plus Issue-Based Prediction) bridges case-based reasoning and extracting information from texts. The program addresses a technologically challenging task that is also very relevant from a legal viewpoint: to extract information from textual descriptions of the facts of decided cases and apply that information to predict the outcomes of new cases. The program attempts to automatically classify textual descriptions of the facts of legal problems in terms of Factors, a (...) set of classification concepts that capture stereotypical fact patterns that effect the strength of a legal claim, here trade secret misappropriation. Using these classifications, the program can evaluate and explain predictions about a problem’s outcome given a database of previously classified cases. This paper provides an extended example illustrating both functions, prediction by IBP and text classification by SMILE, and reports empirical evaluations of each. While IBP’s results are quite strong, and SMILE’s much weaker, SMILE + IBP still has some success predicting and explaining the outcomes of case scenarios input as texts. It marks the first time to our knowledge that a program can reason automatically about legal case texts. (shrink)

This paper integrates personal narratives with the methods of phenomenology in order to draw some general conclusions about ‘what it means’ and ‘what it feels like’ to be depressed. The analysis has three parts. First, it explores the ways in which depression disrupts everyday experiences of spatial orientation and motility. This disruption makes it difficult for the person to move and perform basic functional tasks, resulting in a collapse or contraction of the life-world. Second, it illustrates how depression creates a (...) situational atmosphere of emotional indifference that reduces the person’s ability to qualitatively distinguish what matters in his or her life because nothing stands out as significant or important anymore. In this regard, depression is distinct from other feelings because it is not directed towards particular objects or situations but to the world as a whole. Finally, the paper examines how depression diminishes the possibility for ‘self-creation’ or ‘self-making’. Restricted by the illness, depression becomes something of a destiny, preventing the person from being open and free to access a range of alternative self-interpretations, identities, and possible ways of being-in-the-world. (shrink)

This essay explores the unique temporal experience in anxiety. Drawing on first-person accounts as well as examples from literature, I attempt to show how anxiety not only disrupts our physiological and cognitive timing but also disturbs the embodied rhythms of everyday social life. The primary goal, however, is to articulate the extent to which human existence itself is a temporally structured event and to identity the ways that anxiety disrupts this structure. Using Martin Heidegger’s account of human existence as a (...) point of departure, I show how the mood of anxiety has the power to alter our self-interpretations by closing down or constricting our experience of the future. I argue that a constricted future impedes our ability ‘to be’ because it closes off the range of projective meanings that we would ordinarily draw on to create or fashion our identities. (shrink)

Much of contemporary knowledge is generated by groups not single individuals. A natural question to ask is, what features make groups better or worse at generating knowledge? This paper surveys research that spans several disciplines which focuses on one aspect of epistemic communities: the way they communicate internally. This research has revealed that a wide number of different communication structures are best, but what is best in a given situation depends on particular details of the problem being confronted by the (...) group. (shrink)

This paper explores a case example of qualitative research that applied productive hermeneutics and the central concept, fusion of horizons. Interpretation of meaning is a fusing of the researchers’ and subjects’ perspectives and serves to expand understanding. The purpose is to illustrate an exemplar of qualitative research without establishing a rigid recipe of methodology. The illustration is based on in-depth observational and textual data from an applied anthropological study conducted in western Alaska with Yup’ik hunters and fishers and government agency (...) employees as they worked towards collaborative management. The metaphor of the hermeneutical circle is showcased to help the reader understand the philosophical underpinnings and the analytical processes used to realize a meaningful interpretation. A series of organizing systems for the interpretation is described, culminating in a final organizing system to communicate a fully realized understanding of collaborative management at the time. (shrink)

Provides an accessible and scholarly introduction to the core ideas of the existentialist tradition. Kevin Aho draws on a wide range of existentialist thinkers in chapters centering on the key themes of freedom, being-in-the-world, alienation, nihilism, anxiety and authenticity. He also addresses important but often overlooked issues in the canon of existentialism, with discussions devoted to the role of embodiment, the movement's contribution to ethics, politics, and environmental and comparative philosophies, as well as its influence on contemporary psychiatry and (...) psychotherapy. The enduring relevance of existentialism is shown by applying existentialist ideas to contemporary philosophical discussions of interest to a wide audience. The book covers secular thinkers such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, and Beauvoir as well as religious authors, such as Buber, Dostoevsky, Marcel, and Kierkegaard"--Back cover. (shrink)

This paper develops a problem for conciliationism that is structurally similar to the self-undermining problem but which is immune to most of the solutions offered against it. A popular objection to conciliationism is that it undermines itself. Given the current disagreement among philosophers about conciliationism, conciliationism seems to require rejecting conciliationism. Adam Elga (2010) has influentially argued that this shows that conciliationism is an incoherent method. By recommending its own rejection, conciliationism recommends multiple, incompatible responses to the same body of (...) experience. Many have offered solutions to this problem, including Elga himself. However, there is another undermining problem. When a peer disagrees about their own peerhood, conciliationism can require the rejection of the peer’s peerhood. The result is that conciliationism recommends two incompatible responses to the same body of experience in a way that parallels the original self-undermining problem. But since many, if not all, of the proposed solutions to the original undermining problem depend on distinctive characteristics of conciliationism undermining itself, they cannot apply to a peer undermining themself. I illustrate this by dividing the solutions that have been offered against the self-undermining problem into two categories: self-exempting solutions and non-exempting solutions. I then show how the proposed solutions under each type do not extend to the peer-undermining problem. If that is right, then conciliationism is faced with a more difficult undermining problem than has been so far acknowledged. (shrink)

Introduction -- Theory before theory, 1915-1960 -- French theory, 1949-1968 -- Screen theory, 1969-1996 -- Post-theory, 1996-2015 -- Summary.

Hematopoiesis is the complex developmental process through which undifferentiated, pluripotent, hematopoietic stem cells come to generate mature, functional blood cells. This process is regulated in large part by specific transcription factors that control expression of genes necessary for the developmental sequence. Leukemias represent one form of disruption of this normal developmental process, and studies over the past few years have shown that many of the genes that underlay leukemogenesis are also essential for normal hematopoiesis. In an interesting recent example, Song (...) et al.(1) demonstrate that haploinsufficiency of the AML1 gene is the genetic basis of a form of familial thrombocytopenia which predisposes the affected individuals to the development of acute myeloid leukemia. Here we summarize Song's paper and current information describing the interesting dosage effects of this gene and other members of its gene family. BioEssays 22:214–218, 2000. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)