Sacred Conceptions: Clinical Theodicies, Uncertain Science, And Technologies Of Procreation In India

This article argues that the rapid transfer of assisted conception technologies, such as in vitro fertilization, to India is not restricted merely to the modalities of offering potential biomedical resolution of infertility but includes, more crucially, how clinicians and infertile consumers assimilate the “Western technoscience” of conception. The article draws on a larger multisite ethnographic study of infertility and assisted conception in India’s five major cities and is principally based on narratives of clinicians and infertile couples and on clinic-based ethnographic observations. In this article I contend that the success or failure of assisted conception, when situated in the universe of Hindu faith, becomes a powerful critique of the “incompleteness” of the “Western” science of conception. Situating this contention in the broader context of a clinician’s faith, I assert that assisted conception—by conjoining seemingly disparate domains of the traditional and the modern, the sacred and the profane, the human and the superhuman, science and religion—produces clinical theodicies that help explain and contain the tentativeness permeating the conception technologies. The article concludes by arguing that this enchanted version of a thoroughly disenchanted worldview of biomedicine is part of a larger cultural process of indigenization of biomedicine in India.     

A proposal for re-defining the way the aetiology of schizophrenia and bipolar human psychiatric diseases is investigated

“The two big problems — the nature of development and the nature of the mind — are being subdued. I don’t know whether there will be beautiful, general theories to come out of this — something really nice like Watson and Crick’s double helix — or whether there will be an accumulation of more and more details. I’ll confess to a secret hope for the former” (Crow 2000).     

Structural insights into human GPCR protein OA1: a computational perspective

Human ocular albinism type 1 protein (OA1)—a member of the G-protein coupled receptor (GPCR) superfamily—is an integral membrane glycoprotein expressed exclusively by intracellular organelles known as melanocytes, and is responsible for the proper biogenesis of melanosomes. Mutations in the Oa1 gene are responsible for the disease ocular albinism. Despite its clinical importance, there is a lack of in-depth understanding of its structure and mechanism of activation due to the absence of a crystal structure. In the present study, homology modeling was applied to predicting OA1 structure following thorough sequence analysis and secondary structure predictions. The predicted model had the signature residues and motifs expected of GPCRs, and was used for carrying out molecular docking studies with an endogenous ligand, l-DOPA and an antagonist, dopamine; the results agreed quite well with the available experimental data. Finally, three sets of explicit molecular dynamics simulations were carried out in lipid bilayer, the results of which not only confirmed the stability of the predicted model, but also helped witness some differences in structural features such as rotamer toggle switch, helical tilts and hydrogen bonding pattern that helped distinguish between the agonist- and antagonist-bound receptor forms. In place of the typical “D/ERY”-motif-mediated “ionic lock”, a hydrogen bond mediated by the “DAY” motif was observed that could be used to distinguish the agonist and antagonist bound forms of OA1. In the absence of a crystal structure, this study helped to shed some light on the structural features of OA1, and its behavior in the presence of an agonist and an antagonist, which might be helpful in the future drug discovery process for ocular albinism.     

Laws of biological design: a reply to John Beatty

In this paper, I argue against John Beatty’s position in his paper “The Evolutionary Contingency Thesis” by counterexample. Beatty argues that there are no distinctly biological laws because the outcomes of the evolutionary processes are contingent. I argue that the heart of the Caspar–Klug theory of virus structure—that spherical virus capsids consist of 60T subunits (where T = k ² + hk + h ² and h and k are integers)—is a distinctly biological law even if the existence of spherical viruses is evolutionarily contingent.     

I/We Narratives Among African American Families Raising Children with Special Needs

This paper examines a statistics debate among African American caregivers raising children with disabilities for insights into the work of “African American mothering.” Using ethnographic, narrative and discourse analyses, we delineate the work that African American mothers do—in and beyond this conversation—to cross ideological and epistemological boundaries around race and disability. Their work entails choosing to be an “I” and, in some cases, actively resisting being seen as a “they” and/or part of a collective “we” in order to chart alternative futures for themselves and their children.     

Post-Soviet Placebos: Epistemology and Authority in Russian Treatments for Alcoholism

The dominant modalities of treatment for alcoholism in Russia are suggestion-based methods developed by narcology—the subspecialty of Russian psychiatry which deals with addiction. A particularly popular method is the use of disulfiram—an alcohol antagonist—for which narcologists commonly substitute neutral substances. Drawing on 14 months of fieldwork at narcological clinics in St. Petersburg, this article examines the epistemological and institutional conditions which facilitate this practice of “placebo therapy.” I argue that narcologists’ embrace of such treatments has been shaped by a clinical style of reasoning specific to a Soviet and post-Soviet psychiatry, itself the product of contested Soviet politics over the knowledge of the mind and brain. This style of reasoning has facilitated narcologists’ understanding of disulfiram as a behavioral, rather than a pharmacological, treatment and has disposed them to amplify patients’ responses through attention to the performative aspects of the clinical encounter and through management of the treatment’s broader reputation as an effective therapy. Moreover, such therapies have generally depended upon, and helped to reinforce, clinical encounters premised on a steeply hierarchical physician–patient relationship.     

“Theory” in Theory and Practice

A central obstacle to accepting evolution, both among students and the general public, is the idea that evolution is “just a theory,” where “theory” is understood in a pejorative sense as something conjectural or speculative. Although scientists and textbooks constantly explain that the scientific use of “theory” is quite different, the pejorative use continues to cause confusion, in part because of its deep roots in a popular, Baconian, understanding of science. A constructivist approach, whereby students are helped to examine the adequacy of their preconceptions about “theory” for themselves and to revise or replace them appropriately, is recommended.     

Universal grammar and the Baldwin effect: a hypothesis and some philosophical consequences

Grammar is now widely regarded as a substantially biological phenomenon, yet the problem of language evolution remains a matter of controversy among Linguists, Cognitive Scientists, and Evolutionary Theorists alike. In this paper, I present a new theoretical argument for one particular hypothesis—that a “Language Acquisition Device” of the sort first posited by Noam Chomsky might have evolved via the so-called “Baldwin Effect”. Close attention to the workings of that mechanism, I argue, helps to explain a previously mysterious feature of the Language Acquisition Device—the sheer variety of languages it allows the child to learn—thereby revealing a far stronger case than adherents of the hypothesis have previously supposed. A further unheralded consequence of the hypothesis is a conceptual shift in the Chomskyan understanding of language, wherein the essentially public nature of language is freshly emphasised. This has the effect of bringing the Chomskyan view into closer accord with Saussurean accounts of language, as well as with recent trends in evolutionary theory.     

“Green water” microalgae: the leading sector in world aquaculture

Freshwater fish culture is generally considered the largest sector in world aquaculture. Several of the leading species consume “green water” plankton. This plankton—mostly microalgae (phytoplankton) and also bacteria, protozoa and zooplankton—grows in man-made fertilized water impoundments. The quantity of “green water” microalgae consumed by fish and shrimp is estimated here at a quarter billion ton fresh weight a year, about three and a half times as much as the entire recognized aquaculture. This estimate is based on the quantities of the microalgae consumed and the efficiencies of their use for growth by the main species in aquaculture. The cost of producing “green water” microalgae by the aquaculturists—mostly in SE Asia—is low. The populations in “green water” are biologically managed by the cultured fish themselves. The fish with their different feeding habits help “manage” the composition of the plankton and the overall water quality as they grow. The aquaculturists further manage “green water” through simple means, including water exchange and fertilization. Cost is remunerated partially by the income from sales of the fish and partially by bio mitigation services that “green water” polyculture ponds provide the aquaculturists in treating farm and household waste. A comprehension of the scale and importance of the microalgae sector to world aquaculture should lead to more research to improve understanding of algal population dynamics, growth factors, and efficiency of food chains. The consequent improved control of the plankton’s interaction with fish and shrimp production in “green water” will undoubtedly contribute much to the expansion in production of seafood.     

Intellectual property law: a primer for scientists

“Intellectual property” (IP) is a generic legal term for patents, copyrights, and trademarks, which provide legal rights to protect ideas, the expression of ideas, and the inventors and creators of such ideas. A patent provides legal protection for a new invention, an application of a new idea, discovery, or concept that is useful. Copyright provides legal protection from copying for any creative work, as well as business and scientific publications, computer software, and compilations of information. A trademark provides rights to use symbols, particular words, logos, or other markings that indicate the source of a product or service. A further method of benefiting from an invention is simply to keep it secret, rather than to disclose it—a “trade secret.” IP impinges on almost everything scientists do. As scientists are paid to come up with ideas and aspire to patent and/or publish their work, the protection of ideas and of written works especially should be of interest and concern to all.     

Programmed cell death in bacteria

Programmed death (PDC) of individual cells is a genetically controlled biological process related to the development of multicellular organisms. It proceeds in most cases as apoptosis characterized by DNA degradation and breakdown of dying cells to apoptotic bodies, and ending by their phagocytosis by macrophages or by the surrounding tissue. Unlike apoptosis, necrosis is a genetically unregulated sudden death of a group of cells caused by a severe damage of membranes and other cell components. In bacteria, programmed cell death is mostly related to population development. This holds mainly for sporulation of bacilli where the process is best understood at the morphological, physiological and genetic level. Sporulation of bacilli begins by an asymmetric division of the nongrowing cell into two parts—the mother and the forespore compartment, whose fate is different. Whereas the smaller compartment develops into the spore, the function of the larger is twofold. It participates in the spore development mainly by forming spore coast but it also synthesizes or activates the autolytic apparatus which lyzes the sporangium cell wall at the end of the process. Some phases of the development of myxobacteria and streptomycetes also have characteristic features of programmed death. Unlike sporulation of bacilli, the autolysis of a portion of population of myxobacteria or hyphae of streptomycetes proceeds in the middle of their developmental cycle. Extensive turnover of cell membranes in growing myxobacteria results in the formation of a fatty acid mixture—theautocide—which kills a smaller or greater portion of the myxobacterial population. The dead cells are digested by extracellular enzymes released by myxobacteria and the digest is used as nutrient for completion of the developmental cycle of the remaining living population. Similar events take place also during the formation of aerial mycelium in streptomycetes. Here the autolysis of a portion of vegetative (substrate) mycelium supplies amino acids for the formation of aerial mycelium. The recently discovered programmed death of plasmid-free descendants of a plasmid-bearing population of different bacteria is based on the loss of control of toxin activity by its antidote. Both substances are encoded by plasmid DNA and the loss of the plasmid results in an “enforced suicide” of the host cell because the effective concentration of the antidote decreases more rapidly than that of the toxin. The mechanisms of this suicide can vary. In addition to the above mentioned kinds of programmed death, other events of developmentally regulated death of prokaryotes probably exist. Some bacteria contain “death genes” in their chromosome which trigger cell death at the onset of the stationary phase. The physiological function of this kind of suicide is not known. However, most nonsporulating bacteria developed a strategy of surviving at the nongrowing stage by transforming the growing cell to a more resistant dormant (cryptobiological) form.     

On Agonising: Street Charity and First Ethics

To agonise is to “undergo great mental anguish through worrying about something,” according to the New Oxford Dictionary of English. I suggest that agonising in this sense is a fundamental response to any ethical dilemma. It has a long intellectual and literary lineage. In this essay, I agonise over the dilemmas posed by street beggars, their intrusiveness and their appeal to our intuitive sense of social duty. I explore the discomfort we may feel at their presence, and the value that discomfort may have for the evolution of our ethical lives.     

Don’t Call it “Darwinism”

Evolutionary biology owes much to Charles Darwin, whose discussions of common descent and natural selection provide the foundations of the discipline. But evolutionary biology has expanded well beyond its foundations to encompass many theories and concepts unknown in the 19th century. The term “Darwinism” is, therefore, ambiguous and misleading. Compounding the problem of “Darwinism” is the hijacking of the term by creationists to portray evolution as a dangerous ideology—an “ism”—that has no place in the science classroom. When scientists and teachers use “Darwinism” as synonymous with evolutionary biology, it reinforces such a misleading portrayal and hinders efforts to present the scientific standing of evolution accurately. Accordingly, the term “Darwinism” should be abandoned as a synonym for evolutionary biology.     

Consciousness is Cheap, Even if Symbols are Expensive; Metabolism and the Brain’s Dark Energy

Use of symbols, the key to the biosemiotics field as to many others, required bigger brains which implied a promissory note for greater energy consumption; symbols are obviously expensive. A score years before the current estimate of 18–20% for the human brain’s metabolic demand on the organism, it was known that neural tissue is metabolically dear. This paper first discusses two evolutionary responses to this demand, on both of which there is some consensus. The first, assigning care of altricial infants with burgeoning brains (and in human infants the metabolic demand peaks at 65% of the total) to “allomothers” is not unique to humans. The second, using relatively small neurons as primates do, risks misfires past a certain minimal value. Moreover, in apparent paradox, there is an increasing consensus that large “Von Economo” neurons are critical for communication. This paper’s main contribution is the discussion of two further evolutionary tricks. The first is the use of self-similarity in the cortex, both in structure and process, to allow the cortex readily—and in energetic terms, parsimoniously—to shift between states in a high-dimensional space. This leads to discussion of the kind of formalism appropriate to model these shifts, a formalism which—it is tentatively suggested—may do double duty for the modeling of symbolic thought. The second trick is the superimposition on the background “white noise” of neural firing of EEG-detected waves like gamma. The paper describes a method, using the Hilbert transform, of calculating the dips in energy consumption as the brain is transitioned by gamma waves. It is hypothesized that consciousness may be a spandrel, the incidental result of a neurodynamic imperative that the brain enter a maximally sensitive (in sensory terms) “zero power” state a few times a second. If that is the case, then there are obvious benefits for health in meditation, which can be viewed as a state of consciousness extended over time by limiting afferent stimuli.     

Subtropical coral-reef associated sedimentary facies characterized by molluscs (Northern Bay of Safaga, Red Sea, Egypt)

Summary The shallow marine subtropical Northern Bay of Safaga is composed of a complex pattern of sedimentary facies that are generally rich in molluscs. Thirteen divertaken bulk-samples from various sites (reef slopes, sand between coral patches, muddy sand, mud, sandy seagrass, muddy seagrass, mangrove channel) at water depths ranging from shallow subtidal to 40m were investigated with regard to their mollusc fauna >1mm, which was separated into fragments and whole individuals. Fragments make up more than 88% of the total mollusc remains of the samples, and their proportions correspond to characteristics of the sedimentary facies. The whole individuals were differentiated into 622 taxa. The most common taxon,Rissoina cerithiiformis, represented more than 5% of the total mollusc content in the samples. The main part of the fauna consists of micromolluscs, including both small adults and juveniles. Based on the results of cluster-, correspondence-, and factor analyses the fauna was grouped into several associations, each characterizing a sedimentary facies: (1) “Rhinoclavis sordidula—Corbula erythraeensis-Pseudominolia nedyma association” characterizes mud. (2) “Microcirce sp.—Leptomyaria sp. association” characterizes muddy sand. (3)”Smaragdia spp.-Perrinia stellata—Anachis exilis—assemblage” characterizes sandy seagrass. (4) “Crenella striatissima—Rastafaria calypso—Cardiates-assemblage” characterizes muddy seagrass. (5) “Glycymeris spp.-Parvicardium sueziensis-Diala spp.-assemblage” characterizes sand between coral patches. (6) “Rissoina spp.-Triphoridae —Ostreoidea-assemblage” characterizes reef slopes. (7) “Potamides conicus—Siphonaria sp. 2—assemblage” characterizes the mangrove. The seagrass fauna is related to those of sand between coral patches and reef slopes with respect to gastropod assemblages, numbers of taxa and diversity indices, and to the muddy sand fauna on the basis of bivalve assemblages and feeding strategies of bivalves. The mangrove assemblage is related to those of sand between coral patches and the reef slope with respect to taxonomic composition and feeding strategies of bivalves, but has a strong relationship to those of the fine-grained sediments when considering diversity indices. Reef slope assemblages are closely related to that of sand between coral patches in all respects, except life habits of bivalves, which distincly separates the reef slope facies from all others.     

Art in global context: An evolutionary/functionalist perspective for the 21<Superscript>st</Superscript> century

Regarding the arts as something peopledo — as behaviors, rather than the residue or artifacts of behavior — makes possible a theoretical grounding about their nature and importance, an endeavor that current anthropology of art has largely abandoned. A reconsideration of the suspect and largely discarded terms “functionalism” and “evolutionism” is presented in light of current evolutionary thinking. It is suggested that a contemporary reformulation of these concepts, illustrated by the author's Darwinian or “adaptationist” perspective on art, supports aims and claims of current anthropology of art, and contributes new focus and direction to its endeavors.     

Recombinant Identities: Biometrics and Narrative Bioethics

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in finding stronger means of securitising identity against the various risks presented by the mobile globalised world. Biometric technology has featured quite prominently on the policy and security agenda of many countries. It is being promoted as the solution du jour for protecting and managing the uniqueness of identity in order to combat identity theft and fraud, crime and terrorism, illegal work and employment, and to efficiently govern various domains and services including asylum, immigration and social welfare. In this paper, I shall interrogate the ways in which biometrics is about the uniqueness of identity and what kind of identity biometrics is concerned with. I argue that in posing such questions at the outset, we can start delimiting the distinctive bioethical stakes of biometrics beyond the all-too-familiar concerns of privacy, data protection and the like. I take cue mostly from Cavarero’s Arendt-inspired distinction between the “what” and the “who” elements of a person, and from Ricoeur’s distinction between the “idem” and “ipse” versions of identity. By engaging with these philosophical distinctions and concepts, and with particular reference to the example of asylum policy, I seek to examine and emphasise an important ethical issue pertaining to the practice of biometric identification. This issue relates mainly to the paradigmatic shift from the biographical story (which for so long has been the means by which an asylum application is assessed) to bio-digital samples (that are now the basis for managing and controlling the identities of asylum applicants). The purging of identity from its narrative dimension lies at the core of biometric technology’s overzealous aspiration to accuracy, precision and objectivity, and raises one of the most pressing bioethical questions vis-à-vis the realm of identification.     

The Futility of Futility: Death Causation is the ��Elephant in the Room�� in Discussions about Limitation of Medical Treatment

The term “futility” has been widely used in medical ethics and clinical medicine for more than twenty years now. At first glance it appears to offer a clear-cut categorical characterisation of medical treatments at the end of life, and an apparently objective way of making decisions that are seen to be emotionally painful for those close to the patient, and ethically, and also potentially legally hazardous for clinicians. It also appears to deal with causation, because omission of a futile treatment cannot surely be a cause of death. The problem is that futility can be argued to be a “false friend”, in that it gives an appearance of representing a reliable conceptual basis, in ethics, for limitation of medical treatment—usually in the context of dying—without actually doing so. In fact, the concept of futility is a conflation of clinical judgement about outcomes of treatment and the quality or even value of life, and has really failed to contribute much to the advancement of decision-making and hence care at the end-of-life. It also has the capacity to medicalise the personal space. Deliberations about the likely outcomes of medical treatment are necessary, and medical expertise is pivotal. However, futility is argued to have a better future in partnership with a broad social action agenda about the process of dying, such as that articulated in health promoting palliative care, as a basis for better “death-ways” in the 21st century (Kellehear 2005). Medicine needs to more honest and upfront about its limits, as death is, after all, the elephant in everybody's room.     

Age-biased parasitism and density-dependent distribution of fleas (Siphonaptera) on a desert rodent

Parasites often confront conflicting demands when evaluating and distributing themselves among host individuals, in order to attain maximum reproductive success. We tested two alternative hypotheses about host preference by fleas in relation to the age of their rodent host. The first hypothesis suggests that fleas select adult over juvenile rodents because the latter represent a better nutritional resource (the “well-fed host” hypothesis), whereas the second hypothesis suggests that fleas prefer the weaker and less resistant juveniles because they are easier to colonise and exploit (“poorly fed host” hypothesis). We sampled fleas (Synosternus cleopatrae) on the gerbil (Gerbillus andersoni) in 23 different plots in the Negev desert and found an unequal distribution of fleas between adult and juvenile hosts. Furthermore, flea distribution changed as a function of flea density—from juvenile-biased flea parasitism (the “poorly fed host” hypothesis) at low densities to adult-biased flea parasitism (the “well-fed host” hypothesis) at high densities. Other factors that influenced flea preference were soil temperature and the presence of ticks. These results suggest that host selection is not an explicit alternative choice between adults and juveniles (“well-fed host” versus “poorly fed host” hypotheses), but rather a continuum where the distribution between adults and juveniles depends on host, parasite, and environmentally related factors.     

Living Precisely in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Vienna’s Institute of Experimental Biology, better known as the Vivarium, helped pioneer the quantification of experimental biology from 1903 to 1938. Among its noteable scientists were the director Hans Przibram and his brother Karl (a physicist), Paul Kammerer, Eugen Steinach, Paul Weiss, and Karl Frisch. The Vivarium’s scientists sought to derive laws describing the development of the individual organism and its relationship to the environment. Unlike other contemporary proponents of biological laws, however, these researchers created an explicitly anti-deterministic science. By “laws” they meant statistical regularities or “patterns.” They interpreted their experimental results in ways that forged a “third way” between determinism and pure spontaneity, aiming to capture the complexity of the interaction between the organism and its environment. This common feature of their research was made possible by the availability at the Vivarium of the latest in climate-control technology and of methods borrowed from statistical physics. The deeper roots of this search for a “third way” lay, I suggest, in the shared educational, social, and aesthetic experiences of the laboratory’s workers.