Challenging the Status Quo

Harold Jaffe argues that we should adopt opt-out testing for HIV. There are paternalistic and utilitarian arguments for such an approach. In this commentary I draw attention to some similarities between his arguments and debates about opt-out systems of organ donation. I argue that the status quo bias provides both part of the reason that opt-out approaches work, and an explanation for why such approaches are sometimes resisted. Dominic Wilkinson is supported by an Oxford Nuffield Medical Fellowship, Eric Burnard Fellowship, and Royal Australasian College of Physicians Astra-Zeneca Medical Fellowship. The funders had no involvement in this work.     

Doing Science + Culture: How Cultural and Interdisciplinary Studies are Changing the Way We Look at Science and Medicine

Doing Science. Culture: How Cultural and Interdisciplinary Studies are Changing the Way We Look at Science and Medicine. Roddy Reid and Sharon Traweek. eds. New York/London: Routledge, 2000. viii. 339 pp.     

When Science Replaces Religion: Science as a Secular Authority Bolsters Moral Sensitivity

Scientific and religious thinking compete with each other on several levels. For example, activating one generally weakens the other. Since priming religion is known to increase moral behaviour and moral sensitivity, priming science might be expected to have the opposite effect. However, it was recently demonstrated that, on the contrary, science priming increases moral sensitivity as well. The present set of studies sought to replicate this effect and test two explanations for it. Study 1 used a sentence unscrambling task for implicitly priming the concept of science but failed to replicate its effect on moral sensitivity, presumably due to a ceiling effect. Study 2 replicated the effect with a new measure of moral sensitivity. Study 3 tested whether science-related words create this effect by activating the idea of secular authority or by activating analytic thinking. It was demonstrated that words related to secular authority, but not words related to analytic thinking, produced a similar increase in moral sensitivity. Religiosity level of the participants did not influence this basic finding. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that science as a secular institution has overtaken some of the functions of religion in modern societies.     

Scenic Spots: Chinese Tourism, the State, and Cultural Authority

Scenic Spots: Chinese Tourism, the State, and Cultural Authority . P'al Ny'iri. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005. 143 pp.     

杆状病毒杀虫剂安全性评价的历史和现状

从70年代以来学者们用各种杆状病毒做了大量的针对各类生物甚至人类的安全性试验,几乎所有试验都证明杆状病毒是安全的,但也有个别试验得到不同结论,在这些试验的论文发表后曾引起学术界两次大的争论,这些不同结果后来均被其他学者甚至作者本人用实验否定。90年代以来杆状病毒大量作为载体表达外源基因,其中有些论文报道了在哺乳动物细胞中的表达,引起对杆状病毒安全性的怀疑,本文对此进行了分析总结。本文还利用自己研制的重组杆状病毒杀虫剂的安全性试验对鲜有报道的重组杆状病毒杀虫剂安全性进行了论述。作者认为杆状病毒杀虫剂包括重组杆状病毒杀虫剂都是安全、值得推广应用的。     

On the Status of Restoration Science: Obstacles and Opportunities

Terrestrial restoration ecology is not as well developed as aquatic and wetland restoration. There are several key obstacles to progress in restoration ecology, but these obstacles may also be viewed as opportunities to exploit. One obstacle is demonstration science, or an overreliance on simplistic experiments with few treatment factors and few levels of those factors. Complex, multivariate experiments yield greater insights, especially when teamed with sophisticated methods of data analysis. A second key obstacle is myopic scholarship that has led to little synthesis and weak conceptual theory. A greater awareness of and explicit references to ecological principles will help develop the conceptual basis of restoration science. Where should restoration ecology be headed? We should consider forming partnerships with developers, landscape artists, and industry to do complex, large‐scale experiments and make restoration a more common part of everyday life.     

Cognitive Tracks of Cultural Inheritance: How Evolved Intuitive Ontology Governs Cultural Transmission

"Acquired culture" depends on social transmission and displays salient cross-cultural variability. It seems unconnected to adaptive fitness. It is, however, constrained by evolved properties of the mind. Recurrent—not necessarily universal—features of acquired culture can be explained by taking into account the early development and constraining power of intuitive ontology , a set of principled domain-specific inferential capacities. These allow us to predict recurrent trends in domains as diverse as folk-psychology, representations of natural kinds, the uses of literacy, the acquisition of scientific beliefs, and even the limiting-case of religious ontologies. In all these domains the notion of cultural transmission along domainspecific cognitive tracks governed by intuitive ontology is supported by independent psychological evidence and provides testable explanations for recurrent features in the anthropological record, [ evolution, culture, cultural universal, cognitive development, evolutionary psychology ]     

Big Science vs. Little Science: How Scientific Impact Scales with Funding

Agencies that fund scientific research must choose: is it more effective to give large grants to a few elite researchers, or small grants to many researchers? Large grants would be more effective only if scientific impact increases as an accelerating function of grant size. Here, we examine the scientific impact of individual university-based researchers in three disciplines funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). We considered four indices of scientific impact: numbers of articles published, numbers of citations to those articles, the most cited article, and the number of highly cited articles, each measured over a four-year period. We related these to the amount of NSERC funding received. Impact is positively, but only weakly, related to funding. Researchers who received additional funds from a second federal granting council, the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, were not more productive than those who received only NSERC funding. Impact was generally a decelerating function of funding. Impact per dollar was therefore lower for large grant-holders. This is inconsistent with the hypothesis that larger grants lead to larger discoveries. Further, the impact of researchers who received increases in funding did not predictably increase. We conclude that scientific impact (as reflected by publications) is only weakly limited by funding. We suggest that funding strategies that target diversity, rather than “excellence”, are likely to prove to be more productive.     

线粒体H~ -ATPase超分子结构及其催化机制的研究现状

质子泵H~ -ATPase广泛存在于线粒体,叶绿体,异养菌和光合细菌中,是生物体能量转换的核心酶,有极为重要的生理作用。近几年来,对H~ -ATPase的结构、功能和调控机制的研究进展很快,对复合体的组装有了进一步的认识。对H~ -ATPase的主要亚基已经完成序列测定及分析,对各亚基生理功能也进行了较为深入的研究。生物化学及分子生物学工作揭示:生物体内以多种方式对编码H~ -ATPase主要亚基的基因表达和该酶的活力进行调控。其中,对于线粒体H~ -ATPasc的研究显得尤为突出。本文综述了线粒体H~ -ATPase的结构、功能、和调节方面的研究现状,并进一步提出了一些值得深入探讨的问题。     

治疗性单克隆抗体药物的现状及发展趋势

治疗性单克隆抗体药物经历了三十多年的发展,已经成为生物医药的最重要组成部分之一.在疾病治疗上具有广阔的应用前景,成功用于治疗肿瘤、自身免疫性疾病、感染性疾病和移植排斥反应等多种疾病.截至2012年已有29种治疗性单克隆抗体药物通过FDA审批并上市销售.治疗性单抗的安全性和有效性很大程度上由其作用的靶点决定,上市和在研的单抗药物有些靶向相同的靶点,有些有自己独特的作用靶点,新的作用靶点也在不断出现.以治疗性单抗的作用靶点为切入点,对目前上市销售和研发中的此类药物进行了简要总结.详述了肿瘤坏死因子α、白细胞分化抗原20、表皮生长因子受体及血管内皮生长因子等4种靶点的特点及相关单克隆抗体药物的情况,并对我国单抗药物的现状进行了分析,提出未来发展对策.     

Cost Benefit Analysis of Two Policy Options for Cannabis: Status Quo and Legalisation

Aims

To date there has been limited analysis of the economic costs and benefits associated with cannabis legalisation. This study redresses this gap. A cost benefit analysis of two cannabis policy options the status quo (where cannabis use is illegal) and a legalised–regulated option was conducted.

Method

A cost benefit analysis was used to value the costs and benefits of the two policies in monetary terms. Costs and benefits of each policy option were classified into five categories (direct intervention costs, costs or cost savings to other agencies, benefits or lost benefits to the individual or the family, other impacts on third parties, and adverse or spill over events). The results are expressed as a net social benefit (NSB).

Findings

The mean NSB per annum from Monte Carlo simulations (with the 5 and 95 percentiles) for the status quo was $294.6 million AUD ($201.1 to $392.7 million) not substantially different from the $234.2 million AUD ($136.4 to $331.1 million) for the legalised–regulated model which excludes government revenue as a benefit. When government revenue is included, the NSB for legalised–regulated is higher than for status quo. Sensitivity analyses demonstrate the significant impact of educational attainment and wellbeing as drivers for the NSB result.

Conclusion

Examining the percentiles around the two policy options, there appears to be no difference between the NSB for these two policy options. Economic analyses are essential for good public policy, providing information about the extent to which one policy is substantially economically favourable over another. In cannabis policy, for these two options this does not appear to be the case.     

Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science

Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as. Science. Robert Aunger. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.242 pp.     

Global Coverage of Cetacean Line-Transect Surveys: Status Quo, Data Gaps and Future Challenges

Knowledge of abundance, trends and distribution of cetacean populations is needed to inform marine conservation efforts, ecosystem models and spatial planning. We compiled a geo-spatial database of published data on cetacean abundance from dedicated visual line-transect surveys and encoded >1100 abundance estimates for 47 species from 430 surveys conducted worldwide from 1975–2005. Our subsequent analyses revealed large spatial, temporal and taxonomic variability and gaps in survey coverage. With the exception of Antarctic waters, survey coverage was biased toward the northern hemisphere, especially US and northern European waters. Overall, <25% of the world''s ocean surface was surveyed and only 6% had been covered frequently enough (≥5 times) to allow trend estimation. Almost half the global survey effort, defined as total area (km²) covered by all survey study areas across time, was concentrated in the Eastern Tropical Pacific (ETP). Neither the number of surveys conducted nor the survey effort had increased in recent years. Across species, an average of 10% of a species'' predicted range had been covered by at least one survey, but there was considerable variation among species. With the exception of three delphinid species, <1% of all species'' ranges had been covered frequently enough for trend analysis. Sperm whales emerged from our analyses as a relatively data-rich species. This is a notoriously difficult species to survey visually, and we use this as an example to illustrate the challenges of using available data from line-transect surveys for the detection of trends or for spatial planning. We propose field and analytical methods to fill in data gaps to improve cetacean conservation efforts.     

医学生医疗职业风险教育现状及必要性分析

分析了医学生医疗职业风险教育的现状,阐述了加强医学生医疗职业风险教育的必要性,提出了通过职业道德的学习、国家政策及法律法规的学习、构建医学生医疗职业风险教育体系等建议。