“Good Mothering” or “Good Citizenship”? Conflicting Values in Choosing Whether to Donate or Store Umbilical Cord Blood

Umbilical cord blood banking is one of many biomedical innovations that confront pregnant women with new choices about what they should do to secure their own and their child’s best interests. Many mothers can now choose to donate their baby’s umbilical cord blood (UCB) to a public cord blood bank or pay to store it in a private cord blood bank. Donation to a public bank is widely regarded as an altruistic act of civic responsibility. Paying to store UCB may be regarded as a “unique opportunity” to provide “insurance” for the child’s future. This paper reports findings from a survey of Australian women that investigated the decision to either donate or store UCB. We conclude that mothers are faced with competing discourses that force them to choose between being a “good mother” and fulfilling their role as a “good citizen.” We discuss this finding with reference to the concept of value pluralism.     

Waist-to-hip ratio versus body mass index as predictors of fitness in women

The claim that men prefer women with low waist-to-hip ratios (WHR) has been vigorously disputed. We examine self-report data from 359 primiparous Polish women (with normal singleton births and healthy infants) and show that WHR correlates with at least one component of a woman’s biological fitness (her first child’s birth weight, a variable that significantly affects infant survival rates). However, a woman’s Body Mass Index (BMI) is a better predictor of her child’s neonatal weight in small-bodied women (<54 kg). The failure to find a preference for low WHR in some traditional populations may thus be a consequence of the fact that, even in western populations, body mass is a better predictor of fitness in those cases characterized by low maternal body weight. Boguslaw Pawłowski Ph.D., D.Sc., is a researcher and lecturer in biological anthropology at the University of Wrocław, Poland. His research interests focus on mechanisms of human evolution (with special attention to the evolution of subcutaneous fat tissue distribution) and human mate choice. Robin Dunbar Ph.D., FBA is British Academy Research Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Liverpool, England, and co-Director of the British Academy Centenary Research Project. His research interests focus on the evolutionary and environmental determinants of social and reproductive strategies, with particular references to humans, nonhuman primates, and ungulates.     

Legalization of Eco-balances in Germany

The development and use of, as well as scientific discussions on, eco-balances and in particular life cycle assessment has largely occurred without involving experts on environmental law. However, in the light of recent proposals to ‘legalize’ eco-balances, i.e. formally introducing them into environmental law, the legal implications of eco-balancing must be addressed in the future. The formal introduction, especially of LCA, cannot be decided independent of the general economic and environmental policy implications of material flow management, and it raises major questions of policy and constitutional law. An important question of principle is whether eco-balances should be prescribed or only a legal framework set forth for voluntary use. In view of the unfinished methodological development of LCA, any formal introduction raises the constitutional problem of conformity with the requirements of legal certainty. References to the ‘principles of good eco-balancing’ are problematic, and an introduction on an experimental basis would have to be confined to cases where the legal consequences of grossly divergent interpretations of this term are tolerable to affected firms. Where eco-balances are prescribed as a method of preparing governmental or administrative decisions, one must determine whether and to what extent they are binding on the decision-maker, and develop proper mechanisms of participation, transparency and critical review.     

Biobanking and deceased persons

Early biomedical research focused primarily on the study of specific diseases or sets of diseases within small groups of living research participants. Accordingly, the first ethical frameworks governing biomedical research addressed short-term, limited-scope research involving living research participants. Due to recent interest in longitudinal population studies and biobanking, research is increasingly long term. This shift raises several ethical and legal issues concerning the impact of a participant’s death on research. This paper offers an overview of these issues in the context of longitudinal biobanking genetic research. Our first part outlines the legal and ethical frameworks that govern the effect of the participants’ death on consent. This will be followed by an analysis of the legal and ethical frameworks that govern the secondary use of deceased participants’ data and samples and the return of deceased participants’ individual research results to biological family members. In our second part, we will review the current literature and discuss the above mentioned issues using the bioethics “principlism” theory before concluding.     

Discursive Shifts in Dutch River Management: ‘Deep’ Institutional Change or Adaptation Strategy?

This paper argues that a discursive shift is taking place in Dutch water policy, from ‘a battle against water’ to ‘living with water’ or ‘accommodating water’. Yet we ask ourselves whether this shift is just an adaptation strategy of the existing elite group of water managers, who pay lip-service to new management approaches in order to maintain their vested interests, as some authors claim, or whether it implies ‘deep’ institutional change, e.g. in terms of the emergence of new water institutions, power relations and procedures. While investigating this question, we make use of the ‘policy arrangement approach’, which pays attention to institutional and discursive aspects of policy making alike. Our conclusion is that we are currently observing institutional changes beyond ‘policy talk’, particularly in terms of new legislation and procedures. However, it is too early to speak of ‘deep’ institutional change in Dutch water management, because the former water institutions are still maintaining their power positions, despite the availability of additional resources for policy and research as well as the emergence of several new modes of governance.     

Environments of Learning: Rarámuri Children’s Plant Knowledge and Experience of Schooling,Family, and Landscapes in the Sierra Tarahumara,Mexico

This paper investigates social-environmental factors contributing to differential ethnobotanical expertise among children in Rarámuri (Tarahumara) communities in Chihuahua, Mexico, to explore processes of indigenous ecological education and epistemologies of research. One hundred and four children from two schools (one with a Ráramuri knowledge curriculum and one without) were interviewed about their knowledge of 40 useful plants. Overall, children showed less ethnobotanical expertise than expected and a great deal of variability by age, though most shared knowledge of a core set of culturally and ecologically salient plants. No significant difference was found between girls’ and boys’ knowledge. The overall use-knowledge scores were almost twice as high as naming scores (mean of 40% vs. 24.4%). This supports the conclusion that use-context is more culturally relevant, salient or easier for children to remember than names. The social–environmental factors significant in predicting levels of plant knowledge among children were whether a child attended a Rarámuri or Spanish-instruction school, and, to a lesser extent, age. However, these effects were not strong, and individual variability in expertise is best interpreted using ethnographic knowledge of each child’s family and personal history, leading to a model of ethnobotanical education that foregrounds experiential learning and personal and family interest in useful plants. Though overall plant knowledge may be lower among children today compared to previous generations, a community knowledge structure seems to be reproduced in which a few individuals in each age cohort show great proficiency, and children make the same kinds of mistakes and share specialized names for plants.     

Medical Futility and the Death of a Child

Our response to death may differ depending on the patient’s age. We may feel that death is a sad, but acceptable event in an elderly patient, yet feel that death in a very young patient is somehow unfair. This paper explores whether there is any ethical basis for our different responses. It examines in particular whether a patient’s age should be relevant to the determination that an intervention is medically futile. It also considers the responsibilities of health professionals and the rights of family members in situations where an interventions is clearly futile.     

Legal Rights in Human Bodies, Body Parts and Tissue

This paper outlines the current common law principles that protect people’s interests in their bodies, excised body parts and tissue without conferring the rights of full legal ownership. It does not include the recent statutory amendments in jurisdictions such as New South Wales and the United Kingdom. It argues that at common law, people do not own their own bodies or excised bodily material. People can authorise the removal of their bodily material and its use, either during life or after their death, for medical or scientific purposes. Researchers who acquire human bodies, body parts or tissue pursuant to such an authority have a right to possess and use them according to the authorisation they have been given, but their rights fall short of full ownership because they are limited in the way that they can use the material. The legal rights of researchers who develop intellectual property and biological products from excised human tissue can be adequately protected by existing common law principles without the need for a new legal principle that people own body parts and tissue removed from their bodies.

Best Interest of the Child: Surrogate Decision Making and the Economics of Externalities

The case of Twin B involves the decision to send a newborn to a less intensive Level 2 special care nursery (SCN) than to the Level 3 neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) that is considered optimal by the physician. The physician’s acceptance of the transfer is against the child’s best interest and is due to parental convenience. In analyzing the case, we reject the best interest standard. Our rejection is partly supported by the views of Douglas Diekema, John Hardwig, and Lannie Ross. Instead of the best interest standard, we offer and defend an approach we base on a microeconomic analysis of externalities, such as those involved with automobile emissions. This extends our previously presented general microeconomic approach to patient decision-making. It provides a clearer way to evaluate situations, like those of Twin B, in which burdens faced by family members may be used to determine the appropriate level of treatment for a decisionally incapable patient.     

The ‘requirement of total evidence’ and its role in phylogenetic systematics

The question of whether or not to partition data for the purposes of inferring phylogenetic hypotheses remains controversial. Opinions have been especially divided since Kluge's (1989, Systematic Zoology 38, 7–25) claim that data partitioning violates the requirement of total evidence (RTE). Unfortunately, advocacy for or against the RTE has not been based on accurate portrayals of the requirement. The RTE is a basic maxim for non-deductive inference, stipulating that evidence must be considered if it has relevance to an inference. Evidence is relevant if it has a positive or negative effect on a given conclusion. In the case of ℈partitioned’ phylogenetic inferences, the RTE is violated, and the basis for rational belief in any conclusion is compromised, unless it is shown that the partitions are evidentially irrelevant to one another. The goal of phylogenetic systematics is to hypothesize past causal conditions to account for observed shared similarities among two or more species. Such inferences are non-deductive, necessitating consideration of the RTE. Some phylogeneticists claim the parsimony criterion as justification for the RTE. There is no relation between the two – parsimony is a relation between a hypothesis and causal question(s). Parsimony does not dictate the content of premises prior to an inference. ℈Taxonomic congruence,’ ℈supertrees,’ and ℈conditional combination’ methods violate the RTE. Taxonomic congruence and supertree methods also fail to achieve the intended goal of phylogenetic inference, such that ℈consensus trees’ and ℈supertrees’ lack an empirical basis. ℈Conditional combination’ is problematic because hypotheses derived from partitioned data cannot be compared – a causal hypothesis inferred to account for a set of effects only has relevance to those effects, not any comparative relevance to other causal hypotheses. A similar problem arises in the comparisons of hypotheses derived from different causal theories.     

Parsimony and the Fisher–Wright debate

In the past five years, there have been a series of papers in the journal Evolution debating the relative significance of two theories of evolution, a neo-Fisherian and a neo-Wrightian theory, where the neo-Fisherians make explicit appeal to parsimony. My aim in this paper is to determine how we can make sense of such an appeal. One interpretation of parsimony takes it that a theory that contains fewer entities or processes, (however we demarcate these) is more parsimonious. On the account that I defend here, parsimony is a ‘local’ virtue. Scientists’ appeals to parsimony are not necessarily an appeal to a theory’s simplicity in the sense of it’s positing fewer mechanisms. Rather, parsimony may be proxy for greater probability or likelihood. I argue that the neo-Fisherians appeal is best understood on this interpretation. And indeed, if we interpret parsimony as either prior probability or likelihood, then we can make better sense of Coyne et al. argument that Wright’s three phase process operates relatively infrequently.     

A direct advance on advance directives

Advance directives (ADs), which are also sometimes referred to as 'living wills', are statements made by a person that indicate what treatment she should not be given in the event that she is not competent to consent or refuse at the future moment in question. As such, ADs provide a way for patients to make decisions in advance about what treatments they do not want to receive, without doctors having to find proxy decision-makers or having recourse to the doctrine of necessity. While patients can request particular treatments in an AD, only refusals are binding. This paper will examine whether ADs safeguard the autonomy and best interests of the incompetent patient, and whether legislating for the use of ADs is justified, using the specific context of the legal situation in the United Kingdom to illustrate the debate. The issue of whether the law should permit ADs is itself dependent on the issue of whether ADs are ethically justified; thus we must answer a normative question in order to answer the legislative one. It emerges that ADs suffer from two major problems, one related to autonomy and one to consent. First, ADs' emphasis on precedent autonomy effectively sentences some people who want to live to death. Second, many ADs might not meet the standard criteria for informed refusal of treatment, because they fail on the crucial criterion of sufficient information. Ultimately, it transpires that ADs are typically only appropriate for patients who temporarily lose physical or mental capacity.     

Value theory and the best interests standard

The idea of a patient's best interests raises issues in prudential value theory–the study of what makes up an individual's ultimate (nonmoral) good or well-being. While this connection may strike a philosopher as obvious, the literature on the best interests standard reveals almost no engagement of recent work in value theory. There seems to be a growing sentiment among bioethicists that their work is independent of philosophical theorizing. Is this sentiment wrong in the present case? Does value theory make a significant difference in interpreting best interests? In pursuing this question, I begin with a quick sketch of broad kinds of value theories, identifying representatives that are plausible enough to count as contenders. I then explore what each account suggests in (1) neonatal treatment decisions, and (2) decisions for patients in persistent vegetative states. I conclude that while these accounts converge somewhat in their interpretations of best interests, they also have importantly different implications.     

Globalisation and bridewealth rhetoric

This article offers a close analysis of a ‘classic’ body of ethnographic material on the rhetoric and ritual accompanying bridewealth exchange and argues both for the perspective it provides on the dynamics of cultural continuity, and for the contemporary significance of such continuity for theorising the politics of globalisation. Munn’s study on ‘spacetime’ provides a perspective on bridewealth, both as praxis of continuity and of articulation with global processes. I conclude this article by posing the question of whether subjects such as the Maring of Papua New Guinea can be said to have agency at the global level. I argue that the condition of such agency is the alienation of that agency from their specificity as subjects.     

Associational resistance for mule’s ears with sagebrush neighbors

Many examples of associational resistance have been reported, in which a plant’s neighbors reduce the rate of damage by herbivores that it experiences. Despite 30 years of interest and hundreds of examples of associational resistance, we still know very little about how plants avoid their herbivores. This lack of mechanistic understanding prevents us from predicting when or where associational resistance will be important or might affect species’ distributions. I demonstrate here that the plant neighborhoods that surrounded focal mule’s ears (Wyethia mollis) individuals affected the damage they received. In particular, distance between a focal mule’s ears individual and its nearest sagebrush neighbor (Artemisia tridentata) was a good predictor of how much leaf area the mule’s ears would lose to herbivores over 2 years. Mule’s ears close to sagebrush suffered less loss than those with more distant nearest sagebrush neighbors. Mule’s ears with near sagebrush neighbors suffered half the leaf loss as mule’s ears with sagebrush experimentally removed. This associational resistance was probably not caused by sagebrush attracting or increasing populations of predators of generalist herbivores. Sagebrush is known to emit chemicals that are feeding deterrents to generalist grasshoppers and these deterrents were probably involved here. Volatile chemicals emitted by damaged sagebrush have been found to induce resistance in neighboring plants of several species. However, I found no evidence for such eavesdropping here as mule’s ears gained associational resistance from sagebrush neighbors whether or not those sagebrush neighbors had been experimentally damaged. Understanding the mechanisms responsible for associational resistance is critical to predicting where and when it will be important.     

The prognostic significance of the adaptation potential of the cardiovascular system in 10- and 11-year-old children

Experimental physiological studies were made in 10–11-year-old boys and girls, students of a gymnasium and an education-upbringing complex. The functional parameters recorded in children momentarily included: the heart rate, systolic and diastolic arterial pressure, Roufier index, and the adaptation potential (AP) of the cardiovascular system as an integral index of the adaptivity level of human organism on the whole, measured according to special formulas, and the index of the risk of disease development. Apart from it, the height, body mass, vital lung capacity, and strength of hand grip were measured, the puberty stage and deviations in the functioning of organs and systems were revealed. The AP levels used to evaluate adults’ adaptation did not agree with 10–11-year-old children’s physical development degree, puberty stages, and health condition (belonging to different health groups). No agreement was found between the levels of these parameters and the degrees of AP of the cardiovascular system in 10–11-year-old children based on their individual values and sigmal deviations of this index. Therefore, a conclusion on the adaptation capacities of a child’s organism and the risk of disease development in it based on the AP values may be erroneous. The authors suggest an age scale of the AP levels for 10–11-year-old children.     

A second family with XLRH displays the mutation S244L in the CLCN5 gene

Mutations in the CLCN5 gene, mapped in Xp11.22, have been recently reported to be associated with X-linked nephrolithiasis, X-linked recessive hypophosphataemic rickets and Dent’s disease. We report a missense mutation in exon 6 of the CLCN5 gene. The mutation in this pedigree is S244L, the same mutation as has previously been described in an Italian family showing a similar pathology. However, in the family reported here, affected males have developed neither nephrolithiasis nor nephrocalcinosis. The question arises whether we are dealing with a milder phenotype or whether a more severe pathology will develop with ageing. Received: 19 October 1996 / Revised: 2 January 1997     

The paternal sex ratio chromosome induces chromosome loss independently of Wolbachia in the wasp Nasonia vitripennis

 The paternal sex ratio chromosome (PSR) is a paternally-inherited supernumerary chromosome found in some males of Nasonia vitripennis. PSR induces the loss of N. vitripennis’s paternal autosomes in early fertilized embryos. Previous examinations have not directly addressed the complication of PSR’s co-occurrence with Wolbachia. Wolbachia is the name assigned to a group of cytoplasmic bacteria which induce numerous reproductive alterations in their hosts. In Nasonia, Wolbachia cause cytoplasmic incompatibility (CI) which also results in paternal chromosome loss. Here we address the question of whether PSR’s function (i.e. PSR’s transmission and/or ability to induce chromosome loss) depends upon or interacts with Wolbachia. A strain of PSR males is artificially cleared of Wolbachia. Test crosses and cytological observations of this strain demonstrate that PSR’s transmission and ability to induce chromosome loss is not dependent upon Wolbachia. Comparisons suggest an absence of interactions between PSR and Wolbachia when they co-occur. Fluorescent and confocal microscopy are used to examine and compare early embryos. Observations demonstrate that microtubule interactions with chromatin do not appear to cause the initial loss of the paternal chromosomes. Cytological observations presented here also differ from previous reports of PSR- and Wolbachia-induced chromosome loss. Received: 3 May 1996 / Accepted: 24 June 1996     

The role of herbivorous water birds in aquatic systems through interactions with aquatic macrophytes,with special reference to the Bewick’s Swan – Fennel Pondweed system

The role of aquatic macrophytes in stimulating biodiversity and maintaining clear waters is currently undisputed. The management of (eutrophic) shallow waters is therefore often directed at (re-)establishing macrophyte domination. In contrast, the role of water birds has long been considered of minor importance for the functioning of fresh water ecosystems. Indeed, in terms of biomass and production, water birds constitute only a minor part of these systems. However, water birds may graze heavily on water plants under certain circumstances, and the question arises whether herbivorous water birds have an important indirect effect on shallow fresh water systems. Mainly illustrated with the interaction between Bewick’s Swans and Fennel Pondweed, we present data on the role that water plants may play in the life of water birds and how water birds may impact water plants’ fitness in terms of survival, production, dispersal and competitive ability. It appears that water plants may be crucial for water birds during periods of high-energy requirements, such as migration. Despite the plants’ costs associated with water bird grazing, the interaction between water birds and water plants varies in nature from an apparent predator–prey relationship to a mutually beneficial interaction depending on the context and the perspective. For the case of the Bewick’s Swan–Fennel Pondweed interaction, regular bird grazing is sustainable and may actually favour the plant’s dispersal. Thus, Bewick’s Swans themselves may in fact play a crucial role in establishing and maintaining the Fennel Pondweed rich staging sites between the swans’ wintering and breeding grounds, which are vital for the swans’ successful migration.