Repairing Broken Rules: Care-Seeking Narratives for Menstrual Problems in Rural Mali

Narratives play an important role in the organization of therapeutic action in rural Mali. This article provides structural and interpretive analyses of a young, French-speaking Dogon woman's accounts of her efforts to manage her menstrual bleeding and threatened infertility. Through her personal narratives she creates social arenas to recruit support, negotiate changes in her family relationships, and enhance her standing as a member of the community. Beginning with the accounts of her fear and helplessness, the narrator integrates past events into her unfolding present and achieves a meaningful resolution of her problem. Her narratives weave together encounters with family members, friends, and healers to describe a therapeutic itinerary that acquires significance as a transformative experience, [narrative, therapeutic action, medical pluralism, menstruation, Dogon, Mali]     

Cellobiose dehydrogenase influences the production of S. microspora β-glucosidase

BglG, a Stachybotrys microspora β-glucosidase produced in the presence of glucose and cellobiose, was used individually as sole carbon source. The time course synthesis of BglG showed two aspects: (1) an exponential curve, observed in glucose Mandels medium, and (2) a cloche curve, observed in cellobiose containing cultures. A decrease was observed in bglG production at the 6th, 8th and 10th days during mycelium growth in cellobiose Mandels medium, which allowed for the assumption that the anabolism of a bglG inhibitor factor was produced with cellobiose but not with glucose. Cellobiose dehydrogenases (CDH) activity was, on another hand detected in cellobiose grown cultures but not in glucose containing ones. The aliquots, withdrawn at the time course of bglG production in the presence of cellobiose, gave rise to an inhibitory effect on bglG activity. This result was obtained with and without the heat treatment (5 min at 100°C) of the aliquots, which supported the non-proteinaceous nature of the inhibitor factor. Furthermore, sugar chromatographic analyses revealed the appearance of a secondary metabolite in the cellobiose Mandels medium and indicated that the factor behind the bglG activity cloche curve was a δ-gluconolactone. Seeing that the latter follows a strong inhibitory effect on bglG activity, it is speculated that the decrease in bglG activity during the time course of bglG synthesis in cellobiose Mandels medium is assigned to the release of δ-gluconolactone. This paper presents and validates an explanatory model for this hypothesis.     

Is Her Majesty at home?

When Queen Elizabeth is at home in Buckingham Palace, tradition has it that the Royal Standard is raised, so that all may know the fact. Although it is not crucial for most of us to know whether Her Majesty is home, it is in social insects. Endler et al. have recently shown how an ant queen signals her presence to her remote workers: she marks her eggs. This is significant because it provides insight into how queens maintain reproductive monopoly within their colonies.     

Traumatic stress disorder observed in an adult wild captive wolf (Canis lupus)

Tenino was an adult female wolf, born in the wild and placed into captivity at 1 year of age because of her participation in livestock depredation. Her method of capture, well documented, involved being darted twice by helicopter and translocated twice. This method of capture would have exposed her to the 2 factors that are important in the etiology of posttraumatic stress disorder in humans: uncontrollability and unpredictability. In a case study we conducted, Tenino displayed symptoms that were similar to those of humans with posttraumatic stress disorder. These symptoms included hypervigilance, exaggerated startles, generalized fear, avoidance, and arousal. She also displayed looking up behaviors that occured during the presence of perceived threats such as a neighboring rancher's gunshots; the keeper truck; some keeper activity; and, occasionally, aircraft. When compared to 3 other wolves, including her enclosure mate, these behaviors were exclusive to Tenino.     

Patterning of proneuronal and inter-proneuronal domains by hairy- and enhancer of split-related genes in zebrafish neuroectoderm

In teleosts and amphibians, the proneuronal domains, which give rise to primary-motor, primary-inter and Rohon-Beard (RB) neurons, are established at the beginning of neurogenesis as three longitudinal stripes along the anteroposterior axis in the dorsal ectoderm. The proneuronal domains are prefigured by the expression of basic helix-loop-helix (bHLH) proneural genes, and separated by domains (inter-proneuronal domains) that do not express the proneural genes. Little is known about how the formation of these domains is spatially regulated. We have found that the zebrafish hairy- and enhancer of split-related (Her) genes her3 and her9 are expressed in the inter-proneuronal domains, and are required for their formation. her3 and her9 expression was not regulated by Notch signaling, but rather controlled by positional cues, in which Bmp signaling is involved. Inhibition of Her3 or Her9 by antisense morpholino oligonucleotides led to ectopic expression of the proneural genes in part of the inter-proneuronal domains. Combined inhibition of Her3 and Her9 induced ubiquitous expression of proneural and neuronal genes in the neural plate, and abolished the formation of the inter-proneuronal domains. Furthermore, inhibition of Her3/Her9 and Notch signaling led to ubiquitous and homogeneous expression of proneural and neuronal genes in the neural plate, revealing that Her3/Her9 and Notch signaling have distinct roles in neurogenesis. These data indicate that her3 and her9 function as prepattern genes that link the positional dorsoventral polarity information in the posterior neuroectoderm to the spatial regulation of neurogenesis.     

The transformative power of story for healing

One of our goals in this session was, not just to talk about the healing power of narrative, but to experience it as well. Louise Profeit-LeBlanc is one of the presenters we invited specifically because of her skills as a storyteller. She has been heavily involved for several years as both an organizer and a participant in the Yukon Storytelling Festival, held every year in late May in Whitehorse. Woven into her presentation is a useful framework for differentiating various kinds of stories. As she tells us a series of stories, she takes us through a wide range of emotions from grief and loss to laughter and awe. For each of her stories, she gives us some personal contextual information that adds to the story’s meaning and helps us appreciate its significance. Her final story, in particular, is the kind of traditional story that has probably existed for a very long time. Such stories may be told with slightly different emphases, depending on the occasion, but they carry wisdom and value for every generation that hears them.     

Born too soon

In this Letter, the author walks through 'Memory Lane'. She reflects upon the birth, growth and developmental trajectory of her third child who was born too soon, in a major Hospital in London. Her aim is to share her knowledge and experiences with other parents and professionals. The author acknowledges the feelings which is so common amongst mothers of preterm babies i.e. that the baby does not belong to them. Moreover, she reflects upon her participation in caring for her daughter, how overwhelming it all was and her joy when her child left hospital and is a healthy teenager.     

The sacred groves of Western Ghats in India

Then ignoring the pleadings of the king, she wandered into the sacred grove of Kumara. Her mind bewildered by the curse of her Guru, she failed to notice this transgression into an area forbidden to women. No sooner did she enter, than she was transformed into a vine clinging to a tree at the boundary of the grove. Kalidasa in Vikramorvasiyam (c. 300 A.D.)     

A spatio-temporal model of Notch signalling in the zebrafish segmentation clock: conditions for synchronised oscillatory dynamics

In the vertebrate embryo, tissue blocks called somites are laid down in head-to-tail succession, a process known as somitogenesis. Research into somitogenesis has been both experimental and mathematical. For zebrafish, there is experimental evidence for oscillatory gene expression in cells in the presomitic mesoderm (PSM) as well as evidence that Notch signalling synchronises the oscillations in neighbouring PSM cells. A biological mechanism has previously been proposed to explain these phenomena. Here we have converted this mechanism into a mathematical model of partial differential equations in which the nuclear and cytoplasmic diffusion of protein and mRNA molecules is explicitly considered. By performing simulations, we have found ranges of values for the model parameters (such as diffusion and degradation rates) that yield oscillatory dynamics within PSM cells and that enable Notch signalling to synchronise the oscillations in two touching cells. Our model contains a Hill coefficient that measures the co-operativity between two proteins (Her1, Her7) and three genes (her1, her7, deltaC) which they inhibit. This coefficient appears to be bounded below by the requirement for oscillations in individual cells and bounded above by the requirement for synchronisation. Consistent with experimental data and a previous spatially non-explicit mathematical model, we have found that signalling can increase the average level of Her1 protein. Biological pattern formation would be impossible without a certain robustness to variety in cell shape and size; our results possess such robustness. Our spatially-explicit modelling approach, together with new imaging technologies that can measure intracellular protein diffusion rates, is likely to yield significant new insight into somitogenesis and other biological processes.     

Profiles of Pioneer Women Scientists: Katherine Esau

“Profiles of Pioneer Women Scientists: Katherine Esau” tells the story of a noted botanist, plant anatomist, and electron microscopist who was born in the Russian Ukraine (in 1898), forced to flee the Bolshevik Revolution with her family—her father a mayor of Ekaterinoslav under the Czar—to Germany, where she received a bachelor’s degree in agriculture, education she put to good use in America. Beginning in a sugarbeet field in Salinas, California, she progressed through the doctoral degree at the University of California at Davis (UC Davis) and there began her exceptional research on plant anatomy and plant viral diseases. Her textbookPlant Anatomy became known among college students as “Aunt Kitty’s Bible,” and all of her textbooks have gone into second, and some to third, editions. Transferring to the University of California at Santa Barbara (with its new Chancellor, V. I. Cheadle) only two years before retirement, she blossomed anew, producing some of her best work there and obtaining National Science Foundation support for a new electron microscope and other research funds through her 89th year. Katherine Esau started accruing awards and honors at a relatively early age (Faculty Research Lecturer at age 50, election to the National Academy of Sciences at 59) and has never stopped (the President’s Medal of Science at age 91, a UC Santa Barbara building named for her at age 93). It has been her good fortune to live to enjoy these honors. The short autobiography of her father, a truly enterprising engineer, is included here, as are the recollections of Celeste Turner Wright. Celeste, who arrived at UC Davis the same year as Katherine Esau, became an acclaimed poet, and chaired the English Department for many years. She has added a lively reminiscence of the days she and Katherine spent at UC Davis. The introduction to the book by one of Esau’s former graduate students, Ray Franklin Evert, himself a renowned plant pathologist, provides a heartfelt tribute to his greatly admired professor.     

Effects of hGRF treatment of a patient with hGRF deficiency

A 12-year old girl was admitted to our hospital for evaluation of her short stature. Her height was below -3.5 SD of the mean height for her age. She was diagnosed as having craniopharyngioma and treated surgically. Thereafter she was treated with thyroxine and hydrocortisone. One and a half years later, she revisited our hospital for treatment of short stature. Her plasma GH did not respond to insulin-induced hypoglycemia but increased after hGRF-44 administration, indicating hGRF deficiency. hGRF was therefore administered at a dosage of 100 micrograms twice a day subcutaneously for three months. Her height increased 1.6 cm during treatment, which corresponded to a height increase of 6.4 cm/year. These findings indicate that hGRF treatment stimulates height increase in patients with GRF deficiency. For complete evaluation of hGRF therapy, further studies will be required.     

Self-directed EMG training for the control of pain and spasticity in paraplegia: a case study

A 25-year-old paraplegic woman was able to gain control of her debilitating leg and bladder spasms and abdominal pain using self-directed EMG biofeedback. The case is significant in that she previously had only cursory exposure to biofeedback as an undergraduate student and received only minimal support and direction from an instructor. She proceeded through daily home practice using a borrowed EMG unit and audiotapes from Lester Fehmi's Open Focus series. Records were kept of the frequency and intensity of her pain and spasms, as well as the frequency and procedures of her home practice. She also maintained a record of specific psychosocial events in her life, which, over time, showed a strong, consistent pattern of influence on the recurrence and severity of her symptoms. The woman's physician declared her medical progress remarkable and encouraged her biofeedback work. At 2-year follow-up, she remains virtually symptom- and medication-free. Her successful biofeedback training program provides support for the value of client-directed biofeedback in selected cases.     

Louisa May Alcott: her mysterious illness

Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888), famous in her own time and immortalized in ours as a major figure of the "American Renaissance," died at the age of 55 after intermittent suffering over 20 years. Her illnesses evoked intense interest in her time and in ours. Alcott tracked her signs and symptoms (in letters and journal entries), which included headaches and vertigo, rheumatism, musculo-skeletal pain, and skin rashes; in her final years she recorded severe dyspepsia with symptoms of obstruction, and headaches compatible with severe hypertension. Her death came suddenly with a stroke. Standard biographies propose that her illnesses were due to acute mercury poisoning from inorganic mercury medication she received for a bout of typhoid in 1863, a cause she herself believed. We have reviewed Alcott's observations, as well as those of others, and have determined that acute mercury poisoning could not have caused her long-term complaints. We propose instead that Alcott suffered a multi-system disease, possibly originating from effects of mercury on the immune system. A portrait of Alcott raises the possibility that she had systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE).     

Women,resources, and dispersal in nineteenth-century Sweden

In a recent study, female dispersal in nineteenth-century Sweden has been found to correlate negatively with access to resources: women with limited access to local resources tended to migrate more frequently. In this paper I review the literature to explore whether this observed correlation was derived from a relationship in which a woman’s limited access to resources worsened her position in the marriage market and led to migration, as a strategy to improve resources and this position. Many studies within a variety of disciplines indicate that a woman’s propensity to disperse from her parish of birth variedinversely with her propensity to inherit resources. My review of the literature suggests that the less likely a woman was to inherit resources, the lower her probability of marriage, the later her expected age at marriage, and the earlier she left home, presumably to improve her resource base for marriage. This work was funded in part by the Population and Environment Dynamics Program and by the Evolution and Human Behavior Program, University of Michigan. Alice L. Clarke is a doctoral candidate in the School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her dissertation research examines the ecology of human dispersal in nineteenth-century Sweden. Her broader research interests include the ecological basis of human demography and resource use.     

Seeing Patterns: Models, Visual Evidence and Pictorial Communication in the Work of Barbara McClintock

Barbara McClintock won the Nobel Prize in 1983 for her discovery of mobile genetic elements. Her Nobel work began in 1944, and by 1950 McClintock began presenting her work on “controlling elements.” McClintock performed her studies through the use of controlled breeding experiments with known mutant stocks, and read the action of controlling elements (transposons) in visible patterns of pigment and starch distribution. She taught close colleagues to “read” the patterns in her maize kernels, “seeing” pigment and starch genes turning on and off. McClintock illustrated her talks and papers on controlling elements or transposons with photographs of the spotted and streaked maize kernels which were both her evidence and the key to her explanations. Transposon action could be read in the patterns by the initiated, but those without step by step instruction by McClintock or experience in maize often found her presentations confusing. The photographs she displayed became both McClintock's means of communication, and a barrier to successful presentation of her results. The photographs also had a second and more subtle effect. As images of patterns arrived at through growth and development of the kernel, they highlight what McClintock believed to be the developmental consequences of transposition, which in McClintock's view was her central contribution, over the mechanism of transposition, for which she was eventually recognized by others. Scientific activities are extremely visual, both at the sites of investigation and in communication through drawings, photographs, and movies. Those visual messages deserve greater scrutiny by historians of science. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Mary Elizabeth Hickox Mandels, 90, bioenergy leader

Mary E H Mandels, who spearheaded the US Army's national bioconversion studies for four decades and was an early proponent of conversion of waste biomass to readily bioconvertible sugars for the production of chemicals and transportation fuels such as ethanol, died 17 February 2008 at Natick, MA, USA. She was 90.     

黑曲霉AF-98固体发酵产纤维素酶的产酶条件研究

通过单因子及正交试验,对黑曲霉AF-98固体发酵产纤维素酶的产酶条件进行了探讨。其优化的产酶条件为:甘蔗渣3g,麸皮2g,加含尿素为0.15%的Mandels营养液25mL(加水比1:5),调初始pH5.0,28℃发酵72h。在此优化条件下,纤维素酶活力可达7.56u/g干曲。