Meeting Review: Advances from the GPCR Retreat

In London, Ontario, the 8th Annual Joint meeting of the Great Lakes GPCR Retreat and the Club des Récepteurs à Sept Domaines Transmembranaires (now known simply as the GPCR Retreat) was held September 27–29, 2007. This meeting gathers together a core group of investigators from Michigan, Ontario, and Québec and has steadily increased its attendance in both the eastern (Europe) and western (USA, Canada) directions. The highlight this year was a sneak preview of the β₂AR crystal structure provided by Brian Kobilka, but as can be seen below, many other cutting edge talks were heard as well.     

G Protein-Coupled Receptors in and on the Cell Nucleus: A New Signaling Paradigm?

Signaling from internalizing and endosomal receptors has almost become a classic GPCR paradigm in the last several years. However, it has become clear in recent years that GPCRs also elicit signals when resident at other subcellular sites including the endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi apparatus, and the nucleus. In this review we discuss the nature, function, and trafficking of nuclear GPCR signaling complexes, as well as potential sources of endogenous and exogenous ligands. Finally, we pose a series of questions that will need to be answered in the coming years to confirm and extend this as a new paradigm for GPCR signaling.     

INTER‐ETHICS: TOWARDS AN INTERACTIVE AND INTERDEPENDENT BIOETHICS

Since its origin bioethics has been a specialized, academic discipline, focussing on moral issues, using a vast set of globalized principles and rational techniques to evaluate and guide healthcare practices. With the emergence of a plural society, the loss of faith in experts and authorities and the decline of overarching grand narratives and shared moralities, a new approach to bioethics is needed. This approach implies a shift from an external critique of practices towards embedded ethics and interactive practice improvement, and from a legal defence of rights towards fostering interdependent practices of responsibility. This article describes these transitions within bioethics in relation to the broader societal and cultural dynamics within Western societies, and traces the implications for the methodologies and changing roles of the bioethicist. The bioethicist we foresee is not just a clever expert but also a relationally sensitive person who engages stakeholders in reciprocal dialogues about their practice of responsibility and helps to integrate various sorts of knowledge (embodied, experiential, visual, and cognitive‐scientific). In order to illustrate this new approach, we present a case study. It concerns a project focusing on an innovation in elderly care, based on the participation of various stakeholders, especially older people themselves.     

EMPIRICAL ETHICS AND ITS ALLEGED META-ETHICAL FALLACIES

This paper analyses the concept of empirical ethics as well as three meta-ethical fallacies that empirical ethics is said to face: the is-ought problem, the naturalistic fallacy and violation of the fact-value distinction. Moreover, it answers the question of whether empirical ethics (necessarily) commits these three basic meta-ethical fallacies.