Gender, Body, Biomedicine: How Some Feminist Concerns Dragged Reproduction to the Center of Social Theory

This article tracks the growth of medical anthropology in the United States in the decades since the 1970s, as it has intersected the expansion of feminist activism and scholarship. I argue that feminist attention to embodied inequalities quickly focused on reproduction as a site of investigation and intervention. Medical anthropology has benefited from feminist concern with stratified reproduction, especially its interrogation of nonnormative and stigmatized fertility and childbearing. When reproduction becomes problematic, it provides a lens through which cultural norms, struggles, and transformations can be viewed. Examples drawn from prenatal diagnosis are particularly revelatory of the diverse interests and stakes we all hold in reproduction.     

Role of c-myc and other genes in interleukin 2 regulated CT6 T lymphocytes and their malignant variants

The cloned murine cytotoxic T cell line CT6 solely requires interleukin 2 (IL 2) for viability and cell cycle progression. Treatment of G arrested cultures of CT6 cells with recombinant IL 2 induces the rapid sequential expression of the nuclear proto-oncogenes c-fos, c-myc, and c-myb but does not affect the expression of several cytosolic or membrane-associated proto-oncogenes. A comparison of early genes induced by growth factor treatment of quiescent NIH/3T3 fibroblasts and CT6 cells demonstrated that only c-fos and c-myc induction is shared in the two different lineages. Factor-independent lines derived from CT6 cells show no mitogenic response to IL 2, yet binding of IL 2 with its receptor in the cells was capable of inducing the expression of c-fos and c-myc. In factor-independent cell lines, c-myc was uniformly expressed at high constitutive levels, suggesting that c-myc abrogates growth factor requirements of these cells. The levels of c-myc expression in the factor-independent lines was not due to an autocrine production of IL 2 but may be a consequence of constitutively activated IL 2 receptors.     

Complete sequence of the coding region of human elongation factor 2 (EF-2) by enzymatic amplification of cDNA from human ovarian granulosa cells

The use of two primers allowed the specific enzymatic amplification of elongation factor 2 starting with total double-stranded cDNA from human ovarian granulosa cells. The amplified DNA fragment with a length of 1765 bp was restricted and sequenced by the shot gun approach. From the sequences obtained from the amplified fragment and the cDNA insert of pHGR81 [Rapp et al. (1988) Biol. Chem. Hoppe-Seyler 369, 247-250] respectively, the DNA sequence containing the complete coding as well as the 3'-untranslated region was assembled.     

Parameter-dependent transitions and the optimal control of dynamical diseases

Many theoretical studies in biological and physical sciences consider the dynamical behavior of ann-dimensional ordinary differential equation that contains a large number of independent parameters. A frequently asked question is, are there permissible parameter sets that result in periodic or chaotic behavior? The large number of distinct parameters often limits the feasibility of trial and error calculations. The large dimension and nonlinearity of the system make application of analytic methods at best difficult and at worst effectively impossible. It is shown here that a computational search for parameter-dependent transitions of attractor topology can be effected by constrained optimization of quantitative measures of dynamical behavior (Hurwitz polynomials, Floquet coefficients, Lyapunov exponents and correlation dimension). As an example, we examine a three-dimensional nonlinear ordinary differential equation containing seven parameters that was constructed by Goldbeter and Segel to model periodic synthesis of cyclic AMP inDictyostelium. A search for bifurcations to periodic solutions is made by minimizing Hurwitz coefficients subject to parameter constraints. By comparing four optimization algorithms, the defects and advantages of the procedure are identified. It is also argued that it may be possible to use this characterization of dynamics to construct optimal responses to dynamical diseases (those disorders that result from parameter-dependent bifurcations in physiological control systems).