The death of Sarah Lovell and the constrained feminism of Emily Stowe.

In 1879 a coroner''s inquest was held on the body of Sarah Lovell, a young, unmarried woman who was thought to have died of an attempt at procuring an abortion. Suspicion fell on Emily Stowe, Toronto''s first woman doctor. Stowe had graduated 12 years earlier from a US medical college but had not yet been granted a licence to practise in Ontario. She admitted to having seen and spoken to Lovell but denied any involvement in an abortion. Less than a year later she obtained the long-desired licence. The author has used newspapers, journals and other archival sources to explore the nature of Stowe''s testimony and its relation to her acceptance by the profession.     

Spider Monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi yucatenensis) Cope with the Negative Consequences of Hurricanes Through Changes in Diet, Activity Budget, and Fission–Fusion Dynamics

Hurricanes can bring about dramatic changes to ecosystems and adversely affect animals that live in them. We monitored behavioral responses in wild spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi yucatanensis) in the aftermath of two hurricanes (Emily and Wilma) that moved through the Yucatan peninsula in 2005. We predicted that the monkeys would shift their diets depending on relative food availability and experience a change in the distribution of activity patterns. Because spider monkeys’ social organization is characterized by a high degree of fission–fusion dynamics, we predicted they would form smaller subgroups subsequent to the hurricanes to mitigate competition over limited food resources. We compared their responses in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Emily and across the dry seasons before and after both hurricanes, to control for seasonal changes, by examining their activity budgets, foods consumed, and subgrouping dynamics. In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Emily spider monkeys spent less time moving and more time feeding on leaves than before the hurricane and they were in smaller subgroups. In the dry season after both hurricanes the monkeys spent more time resting and less time moving than before the hurricanes, and leaves replaced fruit as their primary food resource. They fused into larger subgroups less often and had smaller subgroup sizes in the dry season after than before the hurricanes. Thus, the high degree of fission–fusion dynamics of spider monkeys was instrumental in affording the behavioral flexibility critical to cope with the negative post-hurricane consequences.     

Ultrastructure of the pars distalis of the lizard Anolis carolinensis with special reference to the identification of the gonadotropic cell

Summary Five categories of granulated cells were distinguished by their ultrastructural features, and quantitative analyses were made of the pars distalis cells in normal and castrated lizards. The gonadotropin-producing cell was identified on the basis of its uniform distribution in the gland as well as from cytological changes resulting from castration. The secretory granules of the gonadotropic cell vary in size (100–500 m) and density, and lipid bodies are commonly present. Following castration, the endoplasmic reticulum proliferates, forming many small, rough-surfaced, dilated cisternae which do not coalesce greatly as in other vertebrate species. Degranulation is accompanied by hypertrophy and hyperplasia of the mitochondria and by the appearance in the cytoplasm of conspicuous clusters of microfilaments. The designated gonadotropic cell was the only class of secretory cell showing consistent changes following three weeks of castration.In addition to the uniformly distributed gonadotrope cell, two secretory cells occur mainly in the rostral half of the gland, and two in the caudal half. Tentative identification of the cell types is discussed in the light of available information on the localization of the hormones in the pars distalis of this species.Grateful recognition is given to the Electron Microscope Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley, for use of their facilities, and to Emily Reid for her assistance with the illustrations.Member of Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Técnicas.     

Reviews

The Business of Sustainable Forestry: Strategies for an Industry in Transition, by Michael B. Jenkins and Emily T. Smith.
The Wealth of Forests: Markets, Regulation, and Sustainable Forestry, edited by Chris Tollefson     

Aztec Imperial Strategies

Aztec Imperial Strategies. Frances F. Berdan. Richard E. Blanton. Elizabeth Hill Boone. Mary G. Hodge. Michael E. Smith. and Emily Umberger. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections, 1996. 392 pp.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Book Reviewed in this Article:
Economics, Medicine and Health Care by Gavin H. Mooney
Making Choices: Ethics Issues for Health Care Professionals –Challenges of health care rationing and resource allocation, patients'rights, and providers'responsibilities Edited by Emily Friedman
High Technology Medicine: Benefits & Burdens by Bryan Jennett
The Foundations of Justice: Why The Retarded And The Rest Of Us Have Claims to Equality by Robert M. Veatch
Ethics in Nursing, 2nd Edition, by M. Benjamin & J. Curtis
Philosophical Medical Ethics by Raanan Gillon
Life Before Birth: Consensus in Medical Ethics by Kenneth Boyd     

Flexible Bodies: The Role of Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS/Crafting Science: A Sociohistory of the Quest for the Genetics of Cancer

Flexible Bodies: The Role of Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS. Emily Martin. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994 (cloth and paper), xxiii. 320 pp.
Crafting Science:. Sociohistory of the Quest for the Genetics of Cancer. Joan Fujimura. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. xii. 322 pp.     

The incidence of yeasts in cases of vaginitis and children with oral thrush in the Sudan

Summary A fresh specimen ofGloeotulasnella pinicola was allowed to discharge basidiospores on agar. Germination of the basidiospores was by production of a germination hypha, and subsequent production of asexual spores took place. These spores were produced on simple sporophores in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the method of spore production inTrichothecium roseum. The cells of the germination mycelium and sporophores were described as monokaryotic, with the assumption that these nuclei were haploid. The possible use of asexual spore type and production as taxonomic tools in the Heterobasidiomycetes is discussed, as well as a conjecture on phylogeny within the group.Contribution no. 300 from the Department of Botany, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee. The author wishes to acknowledge, with thanks, the technical assistance of MissEmily Shanks.     

Inbreeding,eugenics, and Helen Dean King (1869–1955)

Helen Dean King’s scientific work focused on inbreeding using experimental data collected from standardized laboratory rats to elucidate problems in human heredity. The meticulous care with which she carried on her inbreeding experiments assured that her results were dependable and her theoretical explanations credible. By using her nearly homozygous rats as desired commodities, she also was granted access to venues and people otherwise unavailable to her as a woman. King’s scientific career was made possible through her life experiences. She earned a doctorate from Bryn Mawr College under Thomas Hunt Morgan and spent a productive career at the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology in Philadelphia where she had access to the experimental subjects which made her career possible. In this paper I examine King’s work on inbreeding, her participation in the debates over eugenics, her position at the Wistar Institute, her status as a woman working with mostly male scientists, and her involvement with popular science.     

Courtship Behavior and Detection of Female Receptivity in the Parasitoid Wasp Urolepis rufipes

Once a Urolepis rufipes male mounted, the female beat her antennae against his mouth and clypeus. Immediately after he swept his antennae rapidly downward and extruded his mouthparts, her abdomen rose as she opened her genital orifice. Almost simultaneously he backed up for copulation and she folded her antennae against her head. Neither her abdomen rising nor her antennal folding were essential to his backing up as determined from their timing and from experiments in which her abdomen was sealed or her antennae were removed. Females did not open their genital orifice if with a sealed-mouth male; and antennae-removed females did not open even in the few cases where untreated males extruded their mouthparts. Unlike a closely related species, females mounted by sealed-mouth males did not open in response to air from containers of mating pairs.     

Women's mating strategies

What does a woman want? The traditional evolutionist's answer to Freud's famous query is that a woman's extensive investment in each of her children implies that she can maximize her fitness by restricting her sexual activity to one, or at most, a few high-quality males. Because acquiring resources for her offspring is of paramount importance, a woman will try to attract wealthy, high-status men who are willing and able to help her. She must be coy and choosy, limiting her attentions to men who are worthy of her and emphasizing her chastity so as not to threaten the paternity confidence of her mate. The lady has been getting more complicated of late, however. As Sarah Hrdy¹ predicted, we now have evidence that women, like other female primates, are also competitive, randy creatures. Women have been seen competing with their rivals using both physical aggression^2,3 and more subtle derogation of competitors.⁴ While they are still sometimes coy and chaste, women have also been described recently as sexy and sometimes promiscuous creatures, manipulating fatherhood by the timing of orgasm^5,6 and using their sexuality to garner resources from men. The real answer to Freud's query, of course, is that a woman wants it all; a man with the resources and inclination to invest, and with genes that make him attractive to other women so that her sons will inherit his success. Her strategies for attaining these somewhat conflicting aims, and her success in doing so, are shaped by her own resources and options and by conflicts of interest with men and other women.     

Foreseeing fates: a commentary on Manton (1928) ‘On the embryology of a mysid crustacean,Hemimysis lamornae’

Sidnie Manton became best known for her work on arthropod locomotion, and for proposing radical views on the evolution of arthropods that were accepted for a generation. However, her early training was as an embryologist, and the work that she carried out at the beginning of her career still stands as one of the major twentieth century contributions to the study of crustacean embryology. Here, I review her first major paper, largely completed while she was a graduate student, describing embryonic development in Hemimysis lamornae, a small shrimp-like animal found in the seas around the UK. The clarity of her writing and the quality of her figures set a standard that laid the basis for subsequent work, and although not all of her conclusions have stood the test of time, they remain a standard reference for work today. This commentary was written to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.     

The Role of her4 in Inner Ear Development and Its Relationship with Proneural Genes and Notch Signalling

The generation of sensory neurons and hair cells of the inner ear is under tight control. Different members of the Hairy and Enhancer of Split genes (HES) are expressed in the inner ear, their full array of functions still not being disclosed. We have previously shown that zebrafish her9 acts as a patterning gene to restrict otic neurogenesis to an anterior domain. Here, we disclose the role of another her gene, her4, a zebrafish ortholog of Hes5 that is expressed in the neurogenic and sensory domains of the inner ear. The expression of her4 is highly dynamic and spatiotemporally regulated. We demonstrate by loss of function experiments that in the neurogenic domain her4 expression is under the regulation of neurogenin1 (neurog1) and the Notch pathway. Moreover, her4 participates in lateral inhibition during otic neurogenesis since her4 knockdown results in overproduction of the number of neurog1 and deltaB-positive otic neurons. In contrast, during sensorigenesis her4 is initially Notch-independent and induced by atoh1b in a broad prosensory domain. At later stages her4 expression becomes Notch-dependent in the future sensory domains but loss of her4 does not result in hair cell overproduction, suggesting that there other her genes can compensate its function.     

her1 and her13.2 are jointly required for somitic border specification along the entire axis of the fish embryo

Delta-Notch and FGF signaling are involved in the control of somitogenesis in zebrafish. her genes are generally known as downstream targets of Delta-Notch signaling, but the her13.2 gene from zebrafish has recently been shown to depend on FGF signaling only. We have here studied the functional role of her13.2 in conjunction with her genes that are under Delta-Notch control. We show that joint inactivation of her1 and her13.2 leads to a complete loss of all somitic borders, including the most anterior ones. This somitic phenotype is much stronger than would be expected from the effects of the inactivation of either gene alone. A joint inactivation of her13.2 and her7, which is a paralogue of her1, does not show this enhanced effect. Thus, our results confirm inferences from in vitro studies that her1 and her13.2 form specific heterodimers, which may directly be required for regulating further target genes. These two her genes thus constitute the link between Delta-Notch pathway and FGF signaling during entire somitogenesis. We show that this interaction is conserved in the rice fish medaka, as a joint inactivation of the respective orthologues leads also to the same phenotype as in zebrafish. In addition, our results suggest that the mechanisms for anterior and posterior somite formation are not principally different, although the anterior somites often seem more refractory to genetic perturbations.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">her11</Emphasis> is involved in the somitogenesis clock in zebrafish

Somitogenesis requires an intricate process of pre-patterning, which is driven by an oscillator mechanism consisting of the Delta-Notch pathway and hairy- (h) and Enhancer of split- [E(spl)] related genes. With the aim of unravelling the complex mechanism of somite pre-patterning, we have conducted an extensive search for h/E(spl)-related genes in the third release of the Danio rerio genomic sequence. We identified 14 new h/E(spl) genes and analysed them by in situ hybridisation for their potential role in the somitogenesis process. We describe here the functional analysis of one of these genes, which we have named her11. her11 is a paralogue of her1 and, similar to her1, is arranged in a head to head fashion with another her gene, namely the previously described her5. It shares an expression in the midbrain-hindbrain boundary with her5, but is in addition cyclically expressed in patterns overlapping those of her1 and her7 and complementary to those of hey1. Furthermore it is expressed in the anterior half of the most caudally formed somites. We show that Delta-Notch pathway genes and fused somites (fss) are necessary for the control of her11 expression. However, some aspects of the her11 regulation suggest that at least one additional as yet unknown gene of the Delta-Notch cascade is required to explain its expression. Morpholino-oligonucleotide-mediated knockdown of her11 shows that it is involved in the zebrafish somitogenesis clock via an interaction with her1 and her7. We have also studied the role of hey1 by morpholino injection, but could not find a direct function for this gene, suggesting that it reflects the output of the clock rather than being a core component of the mechanism.Edited by B. Herrmann     

Recognition of Individual Males' Songs by Female Dunnocks: a Mechanism Increasing the Number of Copulatory Partners and Reproductive Success

Previous studies have shown that a female dunnock Prunella modularis increases her reproductive success on average by copulating with more than one male resident on her territory and thereby obtaining extra help in raising offspring. Here we document behavior by females that affects which males copulate with them. During her period of receptivity to copulation, a female in a territory shared by two males often left the dominant (or alpha) male, which guarded her most of the time, and approached the subordinate (or beta) male when he sang. A female's responses to individual males thus tend to increase her own reproductive success by increasing her chances for copulation with both males sharing her territory. Playbacks of tape-recorded songs in the field showed that females approached only songs of resident males, not neighbors. They can therefore discriminate individual males by their songs alone, a capability not previously established for female songbirds. Despite intensive guarding of females by males, mating success among male dunnocks depends in part on female choice.     

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.     

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'sOpen 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.     

Enhancing autonomy in paid surrogacy

The gestational surrogate – and her economic and educational vulnerability in particular – is the focus of many of the most persistent worries about paid surrogacy. Those who employ her, and those who broker and organize her services, usually have an advantage over her in resources and information. That asymmetry exposes her to the possibility of exploitation and abuse. Accordingly, some argue for banning paid surrogacy. Others defend legal permission on grounds of surrogate autonomy, but often retain concerns about the surrogate. In response to the dilemma of a ban versus bald permission, we propose a 'soft law' approach: states should require several hours of education of surrogates – education aimed at informing and enhancing surrogate autonomy.