Non‐homologous end‐joining (NHEJ) is the dominant means of repairing chromosomal DNA double strand breaks (DSBs), and is essential in human cells. Fifteen or more proteins can be involved in the detection, signalling, synapsis, end‐processing and ligation events required to repair a DSB, and must be assembled in the confined space around the DNA ends. We review here a number of interaction points between the core NHEJ components (Ku70, Ku80, DNA‐PKcs, XRCC4 and Ligase IV) and accessory factors such as kinases, phosphatases, (...) polymerases and structural proteins. Conserved protein‐protein interaction sites such as Ku‐binding motifs (KBMs), XLF‐like motifs (XLMs), FHA and BRCT domains illustrate that different proteins compete for the same binding sites on the core machinery, and must be spatially and temporally regulated. We discuss how post‐translational modifications such as phosphorylation, ADP‐ribosylation and ubiquitinylation may regulate sequential steps in the NHEJ pathway or control repair at different types of DNA breaks. (shrink)

This book explores major theoretical issues in the study of an individual life through its focus on Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre's quest for an "existential psychoanalysis" led him to develop what he called "true novels" in the landmark studies of Flaubert and others. In clarifying Sartre's philosophical ideas in relation to the analysis of the self, Stuart L. Charme examines the attraction/repulsion of Freudian concepts and explores parallels to Erikson's ego psychology. Certain "mythic" qualities in religious biography and autobiography are (...) seen as central to Sartre, who presents lives--including his own--as normative models. The book concludes by making a provocative link between the modern preoccupation with self-analysis in biography and autobiography and a fundamental religious need that was once fulfilled by primitive myth. (shrink)

Since his death in 1980, there has been a resurgence of scholarly interest in the life and work of Jean-Paul Sartre, as interpreters have searched for the threads that link the diverse elements of his thought. In this book, Stuart Zane Charme uses the concept of vulgarity as a key to understanding the interaction of Sartre's social background and his analysis of existential authenticity.

The purpose of the current study was to examine the reliability and validity of the RESTQ-Sport-36 for use in the collegiate student-athlete population. A total of 494 collegiate student-athletes competing in National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I, II, or III sanctioned sport completed the RESTQ-Sport-36 and Brief Profile of Mood States. Structural equation modeling procedures were used to compare first order to hierarchical model structures. Results of a confirmatory factor analysis and exploratory structural equation modeling analysis indicated that the first (...) order 12-factor structure demonstrated the best fit of all models tested. Support was not observed for the fit of any hierarchical model. Moderate to strong correlations were observed between stress and recovery subscales and mood states, thus supporting the construct validity of the abbreviated RESTQ measurement model. The current findings provide support for the measure’s use in this population and give pause as it relates to the scoring and interpretation of hierarchical factors such as Total Stress and Total Recovery. Overall, the current results indicate that the RESTQ-Sport-36 may be a useful tool for collegiate student-athlete training load and competition monitoring. (shrink)

The essays are tied together by the idea that our understanding of cognition is likely to be enhanced by consideration of mechanisms and processes at its ...

The development and utility of genetically modified crops for smallholders around the world is controversial. Critical questions include what traits and crops are to be developed; how they can be adapted to smallholders’ ecological, social and economic contexts; which dissemination channels should be used to reach smallholders; and which policy environments will enable the greatest benefits for smallholders and the rural poor. A key question is how the voices of smallholders who have experience with or desire to use GM technologies (...) enter the larger debate. Africa has the greatest number of smallholders and poor with the least exposure to GM crops. Because of the well-established use of GM crops in South Africa by commercial farmers, we formed a community of practice involving smallholders, extension, researchers, non-profits and agribusiness in KwaZulu-Natal to examine the conditions under which GM crops are used by smallholders, how smallholders interact with GM technologies and what insights smallholders and other stakeholders can provide regarding these questions. One of the advantages of the CoP approach is that it brings stakeholders together in a non-hierarchical way that encourages new ways of thinking and new partnerships. Such interaction around a specific project can enhance the voice of smallholders in a variety of ways. In our project, smallholder participants have increased their knowledge and can make better decisions about GM technologies, which had been barriers for them. Notably, they have also improved their knowledge of maize production practices, accessed new practice networks, and met new researchers and resource providers. They are now being integrated into these networks in a way that should improve their livelihoods and make the wants and needs of smallholders better known. Such knowledge and experience has improved their voice in agriculture and rural development discussions. (shrink)

When external groups accuse a business organization of unethical practices, managers of the accused organization usually offer a communicative response to attempt to protect their organization's public image. Even though many researchers readily concur that analysis of these communicative responses is important to our understanding of business and society conflict, few investigations have focused on developing a theoretical framework for analyzing these communicative strategies used by managers. In addition, research in this area has suffered from a lack of empirical investigation. (...) In this paper we address both of these weaknesses in the existing literature. First, we explicate Impression Management Theory as an appropriate framework for studying organizational communicative responses, paying particular attention to the concept of accounts. Second, we critique previous investigations of organizational accounts and discuss the major contributions of our study. Third, we propose a coding system and content analyze the accounts offered by managers from 21 organizations that were recently the targets of consumer boycotts. Finally, we report the results of our empirical investigation and discuss ethical issues related to organizational accounts. (shrink)

It is well known that the appearance of food, particularly its color, can influence flavor perception and identification. However, food studies involving the manipulation of product color face inevitable limitations, from extrinsic flavors introduced by food coloring to the cost in development time and resources in order to produce different product variants. One solution lies in modern virtual reality technology, which has become increasingly accessible, sophisticated, and widespread over the past years. In the present study, we investigated whether making a (...) coffee look milkier in a VR environment can alter its perceived flavor and liking. Thirty-two United Kingdom consumers were given four samples of black cold brew coffee at 4 and 8% sucrose concentration. They wore VR headsets throughout the study and viewed the same coffee in a virtual setting. The color of the beverage was manipulated in VR, such that participants saw either a dark brown or light brown liquid as they sipped the coffee. A full factorial design was used so that each participant tasted each sweetness x color combination, Participants reported sweetness, creaminess, and liking for each sample. Results revealed that beverage color as viewed in VR significantly influenced perceived creaminess, with the light brown coffee rated to be creamier than dark brown coffee. However, beverage color did not influence perceived sweetness or liking. The present study supports the role of VR as a means of conducting food perception studies, either to gain a better understanding of multisensory integration, or, from an industry perspective, to enable rapid product testing when it may be time-intensive or costly to produce the same range of products in the real-world. Furthermore, it opens potential future opportunities for VR to promote healthy eating behavior by manipulating the visual appearance of foods. (shrink)

Furthermore, adults with decision-making capacity, including pregnant women, can currently accept interventions with moderate net risks for themselves in other settings (e.g., open f...

We assume that acting ethically is a skill. We then use a phenomenological description of five stages of skill acquisition to argue that an ethics based on principles corresponds to a beginner’s reliance on rules and so is developmentally inferior to an ethics based on expert response that claims that, after long experience, the ethical expert learns to respond appropriately to each unique situation. The skills model thus supports an ethics of situated involvement such as that of Aristotle, John Dewey, (...) and Carol Gilligan against the detached, rationalist ethics of Kant, John Rawls, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Jürgen Habermas. (shrink)

Against the background assumptions that knowing what clinical ethics consultation represents to those with whom ethics consultants work most closely is a necessary component for being responsible in the practice of ethics consultation, and the complexities of soliciting and understanding colleague evaluations require another inherent responsibility for the methods by which ethics consultations are evaluated, in this article we report our experience soliciting, analyzing, and trying to understand retrospective evaluations of our Clinical Ethics Consultation Service. These evaluations were collected through (...) a quality assessment effort at our institution. Drawing from the qualitative elements of our survey instrument, we describe unexpected variations among the requests for ethics consultation and the retrospective reports from those colleagues making the requests. Focusing on just one aspect – the reason for request – raised several core questions about how we should evaluate those retrospective reports, what could be learned from the differences that we were now encountering, and what we could learn about the process of evaluating our practices. Working through these questions, we suggest several issues to consider in ongoing efforts to describe and evaluate clinical ethics consultation: the role of time and memory in evaluating retrospective evaluations, the importance of attending to the language of moral shift or disruption with which our colleagues describe their experiences, and how to understand the role of ethics consultation in creating ‘moral space’ for colleagues to process their moral experiences. (shrink)

Web scraping involves using computer programs for automated extraction and organization of data from the Web for the purpose of further data analysis and use. It is frequently used by commercial companies, but also has become a valuable tool in epidemiological research and public health planning. In this paper, we explore ethical issues in a project that “scrapes” public websites of U.S. county jails as part of an effort to develop a comprehensive database to enhance HIV surveillance and improve continuity (...) of care for incarcerated populations. We argue that the well-known framework of Emanuel et al. provides only partial ethical guidance for the activities we describe, which lie at a complex intersection of public health research and public health practice. We suggest some ethical considerations from the ethics of public health practice to help fill gaps in this relatively unexplored area. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 10, October 2019, Page 43-46.

Bruno and Arora (2018) present a range of important ethical issues emerging from the development of procedures for uterine transplant (UT). They approach those issues by drawing on parallels to oth...

The volume brings together a collection of original papers on some of the main tenets of Joseph Raz's legal and political philosophy: Legal positivism and the nature of law, practical reason, authority, the value of equality, incommensurability, harm, group rights, and multiculturalism. James Griffin and Yael Tamir raise questions concerning Raz's notion of group rights and its application to claims of cultural and political autonomy, while Will Kymlicka and Bernhard Peters examine Raz's theory of multicultural society. Lukas Meyer investigates (...) the applicability of the notion of harm in the intergenerational context. Other papers are devoted to fundamental theoretical tenets of Raz's work. Hillel Steiner and Andrei Marmor examine Raz's account of value pluralism and incommensurability in light of what these authors consider to be goods whose equal distribution must be valued for its own sake. Robert Alexy and Timothy Endicott discuss traditional issues of jurisprudence and legal philosphy with special attention to Raz's contribution. Rüdiger Bittner, Bruno Celano, and J. E. Penner discuss and criticize aspects of Raz's theory of practical reason. Jeremy Waldron presents a critique of Raz's interpretation of authority.This volume concludes with a chapter by Joseph Raz in which he responds to arguments in the foregoing essays. (shrink)

Despite increased attention to the question of how best to evaluate clinical ethics consultations and emphasis on external evaluation, there has been little sustained focus on how we, as clinicians, make sense of and learn from our own experiences in the midst of any one consultation. Questions of how we evaluate the request for, unfolding of, and conclusion of any specific ethics consultation are often overlooked, along with the underlying question of whether it is possible to give an accurate account (...) of clinical ethics consultants’ experience as experienced by ethics consultants. Before the challenge of submitting one’s accounts or case reports for review and evaluation from others, there is an underlying challenge of understanding and evaluating our own accounts. To highlight this crucial and deeply challenging dimension of actual clinical ethics practice, we present an account of a complex consultation, explicitly constructed to engage the reader in the unfolding experience of the consultant by emphasizing the multiple perspectives unfolding within the consultant’s experience. Written in script format, the three perspectives presented—prototypical clinically descriptive account; didactically reflective and self-evidentiary account often seen in journal presentations; highly self-critical reflective account emphasizing uncertainties inherent to clinical ethics practice—reflect different manners for responding to the ways actual clinical involvement in ethics consultation practice accentuates and refocuses the question of how to understand and evaluate our own work, as well as that of our colleagues. (shrink)

BackgroundCentral to ethically justified clinical trial design is the need for an informed consent process responsive to how potential subjects actually comprehend study participation, especially study goals, risks, and potential benefits. This will be particularly challenging when studying deep brain stimulation and whether it impedes symptom progression in Parkinson’s disease, since potential subjects will be Parkinson’s patients for whom deep brain stimulation will likely have therapeutic value in the future as their disease progresses.MethodAs part of an expanded informed consent process (...) for a pilot Phase I study of deep brain stimulation in early stage Parkinson’s disease, an ethics questionnaire composed of 13 open-ended questions was distributed to potential subjects. The questionnaire was designed to guide potential subjects in thinking about their potential participation.ResultsWhile the purpose of the study (safety and tolerability) was extensively presented during the informed consent process, in returned responses 70 percent focused on effectiveness and 91 percent included personal benefit as potential benefit from enrolling. However, 91 percent also indicated helping other Parkinson’s patients as motivation when considering whether or not to enroll.ConclusionsThis combination of responses highlights two issues to which investigators need to pay close attention in future trial designs: (1) how, and in what ways, informed consent processes reinforce potential subjects’ preconceived understandings of benefit, and (2) that potential subjects see themselves as part of a community of Parkinson’s sufferers with responsibilities extending beyond self-interest. More importantly, it invites speculation that a different paradigm for informed consent may be needed. (shrink)