Patterns of reproductive failure described in humans and other mammals suggest that reproductive failure may in many instances be the result of adaptations evolved to suppress reproduction under temporarily harsh conditions. By suppressing reproduction under such conditions, females are able to conserve their time and energy for reproductive opportunities in which reproduction is most likely to succeed. Such adaptations have been particularly important for female mammals, given (a) the amount of time and energy that reproduction requires, and (b) the degree (...) to which reproductive conditions can vary.The existence of conscious and unconscious mechanisms to suppress reproduction under poor conditions has several implications for obstetric/gynecologic practices. Two implications are discussed with reference to biotechnological advancements in our ability to facilitate conceptions and manage problem pregnancies: (a) potential dangers of sophisticated technologies overriding natural fertility controls; and (b) the need for greater appreciation of the association between psychosocial stress and reproductive failure in the treatment of reproductive problems. Implications for elective abortion practices are discussed as well. (shrink)

Experimental, theoretical, psychological, and economic barriers have caused physicians to rely on biomedical treatments for infertility at the exclusion of more environmentally oriented ones (e.g., psychosocial stress therapy). An evolutionary model is described for the origin of reproductive failure, suggesting why mammals evolved to be reproductively responsive to the environment and why psychosocial stress should have an especially strong impact on fertility problems. A study of the causal role of psychosocial stress in infertility is then summarized. The paper concludes with (...) implications for future directions for the treatment of infertility and related human reproductive problems. (shrink)

Ethical theories consistent with Christian moral sensibilities must assure each neighbor's dignity and recognize his or her unique needs. While utilitarian ethics and duty-based ethics may fail to some degree in these respects, virtue ethics offers perspectives that echo more faithfully the parable of the Good Samaritan.

To answer how epidemics end, one must ask two intersecting but separate questions: first, how particular waves of epidemics end, whether of yellow fever, cholera, plague; and second, how epidemic diseases become eradicated-either through scientific intervention, as with smallpox in the 1970s, or simply by disappearing for reasons that remain mysterious, as with the Second Plague Pandemic from ca. 1347. This article challenges two general notions on how epidemics end. First, individual waves of plagues in European municipalities or regional states (...) did not just fade into the sunset. By the late 16th century, their ends were celebrated with artistic displays, musical and poetic performances, ex-voto gifts, and bangs ranging from tambourines to military salutes. Second, the five-century Second Pandemic of plague-that is, the disease-did not end with declarations or scripted performances, but with another sort of bang. Instead of the usual assumption that epidemic diseases decline gradually over time, progressively inflicting lighter loads of virulence and mortality, the last significant plague outbreaks in most regions in Europe returned to heights of mortality not seen since the Black Death of 1347-1351. Finally, this article adds an obvious but rarely mentioned variable for understanding epidemic endings. Before widespread vaccination, the characteristics of these disappearances depended on the type of disease. (shrink)

COVID-19 often manifests with different outcomes in different patients, highlighting the complexity of the host-pathogen interactions involved in manifestations of the disease at the molecular and cellular levels. In this paper, we propose a set of postulates and a framework for systematically understanding complex molecular host-pathogen interaction networks. Specifically, we first propose four host-pathogen interaction (HPI) postulates as the basis for understanding molecular and cellular host-pathogen interactions and their relations to disease outcomes. These four postulates cover the evolutionary dispositions involved (...) in HPIs, the dynamic nature of HPI outcomes, roles that HPI components may occupy leading to such outcomes, and HPI checkpoints that are critical for specific disease outcomes. Based on these postulates, an HPI Postulate and Ontology (HPIPO) framework is proposed to apply interoperable ontologies to systematically model and represent various granular details and knowledge within the scope of the HPI postulates, in a way that will support AI-ready data standardization, sharing, integration, and analysis. As a demonstration, the HPI postulates and the HPIPO framework were applied to study COVID-19 with the Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO), leading to a novel approach to rational design of drug/vaccine cocktails aimed at interrupting processes occurring at critical host-coronavirus interaction checkpoints. Furthermore, the host-coronavirus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) relevant to COVID-19 were predicted and evaluated based on prior knowledge of curated PPIs and domain-domain interactions, and how such studies can be further explored with the HPI postulates and the HPIPO framework is discussed. (shrink)

Applied Christian Ethics addresses selected themes in Christian social ethics. Part one shows the roots of contributors in the realist school; part two focuses on different levels of the significance of economics for social justice; and part three deals with both existential experience and government policy in war and peace issues.

The threat of bioterrorism, the emergence of the SARS epidemic, and a recent focus on professionalism among physicians, present a timely opportunity for a review of, and renewed commitment to, physician obligations to care for patients during epidemics. The professional obligation to care for contagious patients is part of a larger "duty to treat," which historically became accepted when 1) a risk of nosocomial infection was perceived, 2) an organized professional body existed to promote the duty, and 3) the public (...) came to rely on the duty. Physicians' responses to epidemics from the Hippocratic era to the present suggests an evolving acceptance of the professional duty to treat contagious patients, reaching a long-held peak between 1847 and the1950's. There has been some professional retrenchment against this duty to treat in the last 40 years but, we argue, conditions favoring acceptance of the duty are met today. A renewed embrace of physicians' duty to treat patients during epidemics, despite conditions of personal risk, might strengthen medicine's relationship with society, improve society's capacity to prepare for threats such as bioterrorism and new epidemics, and contribute to the development of a more robust and meaningful medical professionalism. (shrink)

Matching in observational studies faces complications when units enroll in treatment on a rolling basis. While each treated unit has a specific time of entry into the study, control units each have many possible comparison, or “pseudo-treatment,” times. Valid inference must account for correlations between repeated measures for a single unit, and researchers must decide how flexibly to match across time and units. We provide three important innovations. First, we introduce a new matched design, GroupMatch with instance replacement, allowing maximum (...) flexibility in control selection. This new design searches over all possible comparison times for each treated-control pairing and is more amenable to analysis than past methods. Second, we propose a block bootstrap approach for inference in matched designs with rolling enrollment and demonstrate that it accounts properly for complex correlations across matched sets in our new design and several other contexts. Third, we develop a falsification test to detect violations of the timepoint agnosticism assumption, which is needed to permit flexible matching across time. We demonstrate the practical value of these tools via simulations and a case study of the impact of short-term injuries on batting performance in major league baseball. (shrink)

��We describe a comprehensive framework for text un- derstanding, based on the representation of context. It is designed to serve as a representation of semantics for the full range of in- terpretive and inferential needs of general natural language pro- cessing. Its most distinctive feature is its uniform representation of the various simple and independent linguistic sources that play a role in determining meaning: lexical associations, syntactic re- strictions, case-role expectations, and most importantly, contextual effects. Compositional syntactic structure from a (...) shallow parsing is represented in a neural net-based associative memory, where it then interacts through a Bayesian network with semantic associa- tions and the context or “gist” of the passage carried forward from preceding sentences. Experiments with more than 2000 sentences in different languages are included. (shrink)

In a recent Target Article Naomi Scheinerman (2023a) has offered an important and compelling call to institutionalize popular participation for heritable genome engineering through the inclusion of...

Three traditions have influenced the idea of the state in India – the Hindu Rajah, the Islamic View and the European Secular State. From biblical and theological considerations, Christians must reject the totalism and ego-centrism of modern states and work for greater accountability and decentralised decision-making.

This manuscript reviews recent evidence supporting the utility of telomeres and mitochondrial DNA copy number (mtDNAcn) in detecting the biological impacts of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and outlines mechanisms that may mediate the connection between early stress and poor physical and mental health. Critical to interrupting the health sequelae of ACEs such as abuse, neglect, and neighborhood disorder, is the discovery of biomarkers of risk and resilience. The molecular markers of chronic stress exposure, telomere length and mtDNAcn, represent critical biological (...) links between ACEs and poor health outcomes. We examine how telomeres and mtDNAcn may exacerbate health disparities and contribute to the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Finally, we explore how these molecular markers of early stress exposure may help define the role of resilience and develop effective interventions to moderate ACE health risk impact. (shrink)

The occurrence of a new strain of SARS-CoV-2 cannot be ruled out. Therefore, this study seeks to investigate the possible effects of a hypothetical imperfect anti-COVID-19 vaccine on the control of not only the first variant of SARS-CoV-2 but also the second variant of SARS-CoV-2. We further examine the rates and a, escape of quarantined infectious individuals from isolation centers. The control R c and basic reproduction numbers R 0 are computed which gives assess to obtain asymptotic stability of disease-free (...) equilibrium point globally and the existence of a unique persistent equilibrium solution. Numerical results reveal that people infected with the second strain who are vaccinated with an imperfect vaccine are under control but the prevalence of the second variant enhances the prevalence of the first variant. Thus, discovering a vaccine that is effective for the prevention of variant 2 is necessary for the control of COVID-19. Numerical results also reveal that increase in the rate at which individuals infected with the first variant escape the isolation center gives rise to the population infected with the first variant and lowers the peak of the population infected with the second variant. This is probably because individuals infected with the second variant appear to be more careful with their lives and get vaccinated more than individuals infected with the first variant. (shrink)

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 1, Page 12-14, January/February 2022.

Regulations designed to prevent global inequalities in the use of genetic resources apply to both commercial and non-commercial research. Conflating the two may have unintended consequences for collaboration between the Global North and biodiverse countries in the Global South, which may promote global injustice rather than mitigate it.

Knowledge of eukaryotic life cycles and associated genome dynamics stems largely from research on animals, plants, and a small number of “model” (i.e., easily cultivable) lineages. This skewed sampling results in an underappreciation of the variability among the many microeukaryotic lineages, which represent the bulk of eukaryotic biodiversity. The range of complex nuclear transformations that exists within lineages of microbial eukaryotes challenges the textbook understanding of genome and nuclear cycles. Here, we look in‐depth at Foraminifera, an ancient (∼600 million‐year‐old) lineage (...) widely studied as proxies in paleoceanography and environmental biomonitoring. We demonstrate that Foraminifera challenge the “rules” of life cycles developed largely from studies of plants and animals. To this end, we synthesize data on foraminiferal life cycles, focusing on extensive endoreplication within individuals (i.e., single cells), the unusual nuclear process calledZerfall, and the separation of germline and somatic function into distinct nuclei (i.e., heterokaryosis). These processes highlight complexities within lineages and expand our understanding of the dynamics of eukaryotic genomes. (shrink)