We report on the deliberations of an interdisciplinary group of experts in science, law, and philosophy who convened to discuss novel ethical and policy challenges in stem cell research. In this report we discuss the ethical and policy implications of safety concerns in the transition from basic laboratory research to clinical applications of cell-based therapies derived from stem cells. Although many features of this transition from lab to clinic are common to other therapies, three aspects of stem cell biology pose (...) unique challenges. First, tension regarding the use of human embryos may complicate the scientific development of safe and effective cell lines. Second, because human stem cells were not developed in the laboratory until 1998, few safety questions relating to human applications have been addressed in animal research. Third, preclinical and clinical testing of biologic agents, particularly those as inherently complex as mammalian cells, present formidable challenges, such as the need to develop suitable standardized assays and the difficulty of selecting appropriate patient populations for early phase trials. We recommend that scientists, policy makers, and the public discuss these issues responsibly, and further, that a national advisory committee to oversee human trials of cell therapies be established. **NB we did not reccommend a NAC, we think it might be appropriate**. (shrink)

If stem cell-based therapies are developed, we will likely confront a difficult problem of justice: for biological reasons alone, the new therapies might benefit only a limited range of patients. In fact, they might benefit primarily white Americans, thereby exacerbating long-standing differences in health and health care.

Anthropologists now openly acknowledge that social anthropology can no longer fulfill its traditional aim of providing holistic, objective representations of people of "exotic" cultures. After Writing Culture asks what theoretical and practical role contemporary anthropology can play in our increasingly unpredictable and complex world. With fourteen articles written by well-known anthropologists, the work explores some of the directions in which contemporary anthropology is moving, following the questions raised by the "writing culture" debates of the 1980s. Some of the chapters cover: (...) the concept of caste in Indian society, Scottish ethnography, how dreams are culturally conceptualized, representations of the family, theme parks and the anthropologist in Japan, people's place in the landscape of Northern Australia, and representing the identity of the New Zealand Maori. (shrink)

Researchers from diverse disciplines, including organismal and cellular physiology, sports science, human nutrition, evolution and ecology, have sought to understand the causes and consequences of the surprising variation in metabolic rate found among and within individual animals of the same species. Research in this area has been hampered by differences in approach, terminology and methodology, and the context in which measurements are made. Recent advances provide important opportunities to identify and address the key questions in the field. By bringing together (...) researchers from different areas of biology and biomedicine, we describe and evaluate these developments and the insights they could yield, highlighting the need for more standardisation across disciplines. We conclude with a list of important questions that can now be addressed by developing a common conceptual and methodological toolkit for studies on metabolic variation in animals. (shrink)

We present a one per cent measurement of the cosmic distance scale from the detections of the baryon acoustic oscillations in the clustering of galaxies from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. Our results come from the Data Release 11 sample, containing nearly one million galaxies and covering approximately 8500 square degrees and the redshift range 0.2 < z < 0.7. We also compare these results with those from the publicly released (...) DR9 and DR10 samples. Assuming a concordance Λ cold dark matter cosmological model, the DR11 sample covers a volume of 13 Gpc3 and is the largest region of the Universe ever surveyed at this density. We measure the correlation function and power spectrum, including density-field reconstruction of the BAO feature. The acoustic features are detected at a significance of over 7σ in both the correlation function and power spectrum. Fitting for the position of the acoustic features measures the distance relative to the sound horizon at the drag epoch, rd, which has a value of rd,fid = 149.28 Mpc in our fiducial cosmology. We find DV = at z = 0.32 and DV = at z = 0.57. At 1.0 per cent, this latter measure is the most precise distance constraint ever obtained from a galaxy survey. Separating the clustering along and transverse to the line of sight yields measurements at z = 0.57 of DA = and H =. Our measurements of the distance scale are in good agreement with previous BAO measurements and with the predictions from cosmic microwave background data for a spatially flat CDM model with a cosmological constant. © 2014 The Author Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. (shrink)

This collection, the first of its kind, brings together specially commissioned academic essays to mark fifty years since the death of John Kennedy Toole.

Machine generated contents note: PART ONE: TOWARD A SOCIOLOGY OF HISTORY -- SECTION I: THE SOCIOLOGICAL -- FOUNDATIONS OF HISTORY -- I. The Sources of Culture Change -- 2. Sociology as a Science -- 3. Sociology and the Theory of Progress -- 4. Civilization and Morals -- 5. Progress and Decay in Ancient and Modern Civilization -- 6. Art and Society -- 7. Vitality or Standardization in Culture -- 8. Cultural Polarity and Religious Schism -- 9. Prevision in Religion -- (...) Io. T. S. Eliot on the Meaning of Culture -- SECTION II: THE MOVEMENT OF WORLD HISTORY -- I. Religion and the Life of Civilization -- 2. The Warrior Peoples and the Decline -- of the Archaic Civilization -- 3. The Origins of Classical Civilization -- 4. The Patriarchal Family in History -- 5. Stages in Mankind's Religious Experience -- SECTION III: URBANISM AND THE ORGANIC -- NATURE OF CULTURE -- I. The Evolution of the Modern City -- 2. Catholicism and the Bourgeois Mind -- 3. The World Crisis and the English Tradition -- 4. Bolshevism and the Bourgeoisie -- PART TWO: CONCEPTIONS OF WORLD HISTORY -- SECTION IV: CHRISTIANITY AND THE -- MEANING OF HISTORY -- I. The Christian View of History -- 2. History and the Christian Revelation -- 3. Christianity and Contradiction in History -- 4. The Kingdom of God and History -- SECTION II: THE VISION OF THE HISTORIAN -- I. The Problem of Metahistory -- 2. St. Augustine and the City of God -- 3. Edward Gibbon and the Fall of Rome -- 4. Karl Marx and the Dialectic of History -- 5. H. G. Wells and the Outline of History -- 6. Oswald Spengler and the Life of Civilizations -- 7. Arnold Toynbee and the Study of History -- 8. Europe in Eclipse -- Afterword by John J. Mulloy: Continuity and Development -- in Christopher Dawson's Thought -- Sources -- Notes -- Index. (shrink)

Zygmunt Bauman’s sociology has often been seen as a bleak worldview; he has been called the ‘sociologist of misery’. This article argues that assigning pessimism and misery to Bauman’s work relies on a reading which does not fully consider his sociology of morality. When this is accounted for, Bauman can be seen to have a very optimistic worldview. The significance of such an observation rests on where Bauman’s optimism lies—namely in the hands of inevitably moral individuals who can acquiesce to, (...) reject or modify the demands of liquid modernity. This article argues, with reference to G.H. Mead’s concept of the ‘genius’, that this is where the potential for agency lies in Bauman’s conception of liquid modernity. This is given a political dimension by both Mead and Bauman’s advocacy of democratic forms to help realise this agency. Democracy operates as a ‘societal’ form of morality which builds upon Bauman’s ‘pre-societal’ discussion. (shrink)

The success of the Human Genome Project has prompted interest in advancing the nascent field of exposomics. The exposome, which is dynamic and variable and changes over time, consists of all the internal and external exposures an individual has over a lifetime beginning with the prenatal period and early childhood. Efforts are underway to decipher the human epigenome by identifying the effects of all deleterious environmental exposures according to duration of exposure and time period. In this article, we argue that (...) the deciphering of the human exposome should be accompanied by sustained efforts to address the ethical, social and legal implications (ELSI) of exposomics. This will require financial investments from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the European Union and other public and private funding agencies, analogous to support provided by NIH to address ELSI issues in genomics. (shrink)

This paper explores the notion of reciprocity in the context of active pulmonary and laryngeal tuberculosis treatment and related control policies and practices. We seek to do three things: First, we sketch the background to contemporary global TB care and suggest that poverty is a key feature when considering the treatment of TB patients. We use two examples from TB care to explore the role of reciprocity: isolation and the use of novel TB drugs. Second, we explore alternative means of (...) justifying the use of reciprocity through appeal to different moral and political theoretical traditions. We suggest that each theory can be used to provide reasons to take reciprocity seriously as an independent moral concept, despite any other differences. Third, we explore general meanings and uses of the concept of reciprocity, with the primary intention of demonstrating that it cannot be simply reduced to other more frequently invoked moral concepts such as beneficence or justice. We argue that reciprocity can function as a mid-level principle in public health, and generally, captures a core social obligation arising once an individual or group is burdened as a result of acting for the benefit of others. We conclude that while more needs to be explored in relation to the theoretical justification and application of reciprocity, sufficient arguments can be made for it to be taken more seriously as a key principle within public health ethics and bioethics more generally. (shrink)

The emphasis in this approach to philosophy of history is on the system philosophers. The emphasis itself follows from the theme of the book, which is that man's vision of historical reality is ultimately reducible to religious or secular notions of progress, or to cyclical recurrence of some kind. All other outlooks on history are taken to be merely variations on these two basic themes. As a result, the modern existentialist, phenomenological and analytic approaches to history are all lumped together (...) in one short chapter at the end of the book. The linguistic approach goes unmentioned altogether. There is a special chapter on Theology of History and the Augustinian Spirit. The philosophers examined are Augustine, Vico, Kant, Turgot, Saint-Simon, Marx, Nietzsche, Danilevsky, Spengler, Sorokin, Hegel, Dilthey, Croce, Toynbee, Teilhard de Chardin, Maritain, Dawson, and Marrou. The bibliographical references are valuable. Unfortunately, the author accepts uncritically interpretations which have been vigorously challenged in the last thirty years, most notably in the cases of Hegel, Marx, and Dilthey.--H. B. (shrink)

To localize wheat ESTs on chromosomes, 882 homoeologous group 6-specific ESTs were identified by physically mapping 7965 singletons from 37 cDNA libraries on 146 chromosome, arm, and sub-arm aneuploid and deletion stocks. The 882 ESTs were physically mapped to 25 regions flanked by 23 deletion breakpoints. Of the 5154 restriction fragments detected by 882 ESTs, 2043 were localized to group 6 chromosomes and 806 were mapped on other chromosome groups. The number of loci mapped was greatest on chromosome 6B and (...) least on 6D. The 264 ESTs that detected orthologous loci on all three homoeologs using one restriction enzyme were used to construct a consensus physical map. The physical distribution of ESTs was uneven on chromosomes with a tendency toward higher densities in the distal halves of chromosome arms. About 43% of the wheat group 6 ESTs identified rice homologs upon comparisons of genome sequences. Fifty-eight percent of these ESTs were present on rice chromosome 2 and the remaining were on other rice chromosomes. Even within the group 6 bins, rice chromosomal blocks identified by 1-6 wheat ESTs were homologous to up to 11 rice chromosomes. These rice-block contigs were used to resolve the order of wheat ESTs within each bin. (shrink)

Many have argued against the claim that Plato posited the mathematical objects that are the subjects of Metaphysics M and N. This paper shifts the burden of proof onto these objectors to show that Plato did not posit these entities. It does so by making two claims: first, that Plato should posit the mathematical Intermediates because Forms and physical objects are ill suited in comparison to Intermediates to serve as the objects of mathematics; second, that their utility, combined with Aristotle’s (...) commentary on Plato’s posit of Intermediates, provides good reason to conclude that Plato did posit them. (shrink)