The somatic mutation theory (SMT) of cancer has been and remains the prevalent theory attempting to explain how neoplasms arise and progress. This theory proposes that cancer is a clonal, cell‐based disease, and implicitly assumes that quiescence is the default state of cells in multicellular organisms. The SMT has not been rigorously tested, and several lines of evidence raise questions that are not addressed by this theory. Herein, we propose experimental strategies that may validate the SMT. We also call attention (...) to an alternative theory of carcinogenesis, the tissue organization field theory (TOFT), which posits that cancer is a tissue‐based disease and that proliferation is the default state of all cells. Based on epistemological and experimental evidence, we argue that the TOFT compellingly explains carcinogenesis, while placing it within an evolutionarily relevant context.magnified imagemagnified imageAna Soto and Carlos Sonnenschein are at Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, MA, USA. (shrink)

The contemporary confluence of globalization and ethical pluralism is at the origin of many ethical challenges that confront business nowadays, both in practice and in theory. One of the challenges arising from the development of globalization has to do with respect for cultural diversity. It is often said that the success of economic globalization tends towards social and cultural homogeneity. To the extent that cultural diversity is usually seen as a valuable reality, that global trend seems to contradict our efforts (...) to respect ethical pluralism, both personal and cultural, within society. In this paper I argue that (a) ethical minimalism, despite its emphasis on tolerance and justice, does not take pluralism seriously into account in present-day society, and (b) ethical minimalism is not suited to balancing the homogenizing trend of globalization. Certainly ethical norms are necessary, but by no means are they sufficient in themselves to encourage either justice or tolerance; nor are they sufficient to inspire and encourage good practices and sound regulations. Instead, virtue-based ethics has the capacity of inspiring and encouraging good practices. Particularly, virtue-based ethics is able to inspire a serious dialogue about ethical and legal issues both in the public arena and within organizations. (shrink)

There are competing accounts of the birth of bioethics. Despite the differences among them, these accounts share the claim that bioethics was not born in a single disciplinary home or in a single social space, but in numerous, including hospitals, doctors' offices, research laboratories, courtrooms, medical schools, churches and synagogues, and philosophy classrooms. This essay considers the interdisciplinarity of bioethics and the contribution of new disciplines to bioethics. It also explores the implications of interdisciplinarity for bioethics education. As bioethics develops, (...) it will be helpful to identify essential elements in the education of bioethicists and to distinguish between members of other disciplines who make important contributions to bioethics and bioethicists. (shrink)

The somatic mutation theory has been the prevailing paradigm in cancer research for the last 50 years. Its premises are: (1) cancer is derived from a single somatic cell that has accumulated multiple DNA mutations, (2) the default state of cell proliferation in metazoa is quiescence, and (3) cancer is a disease of cell proliferation caused by mutations in genes that control proliferation and the cell cycle. From this compelling simplicity, an increasingly complicated picture has emerged as more than 100 (...) oncogenes and 30 tumor suppressor genes have been identified. To accommodate this complexity, additional ad hoc explanations have been postulated. After a critical review of the data gathered from this perspective, an alternative research program has been proposed. It is based on the tissue organization field theory, the premises of which are that carcinogenesis represents a problem of tissue organization, comparable to organogenesis, and that proliferation is the default state of all cells. The merits of these competing theories are evaluated herein. BioEssays 26:1097–1107, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Public decisions concerning large projects with detrimental environmental or heritage impacts involve value conflicts which stem from the diverse interests and variety of ways of evaluating the costs and benefits of such projects. They are also framed by institutionalised procedures and practices which favour certain concerns to the detriment of others. This paper aims to contribute towards a better understanding of how these procedures and practices, namely decision support tools such as the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), tend to shape public (...) decision-making processes in particular ways. It draws on a study of the public controversy surrounding the Foz Tua dam in Portugal, with a focus on the values upheld by the different parties in the controversy and their interplay in the production of justifications, specifically the actors’ positions on values and value conflicts and the restrictions posed by institutionalised public decision-making procedures on the expression and consideration of certain values. (shrink)

Nursing Sciences are at a moment of paradigmatic transition. The aim of this paper is to reflect on the new epistemological paradigms of nursing science from a critical approach. In this paper, we identified and analysed some new research lines and trends which anticipate the reorganization of nursing sciences and the paradigms emerging from nursing care: biotechnology‐centred knowledge; the interface between nursing knowledge and new information technologies; body care centred knowledge; the human body as a cyborg body; and the rediscovery (...) of an aesthetic knowledge in nursing care. (shrink)

The term ‘culture wars’ has been used to describe deep, apparently intractable, disagreements between groups for many years. In contemporary discourse, it refers to disputes regarding significant moral matters carried out in the public square and for which there appears to be no way to achieve consensus or compromise. One set of battle lines is drawn between those who hold traditional Christian commitments and those who do not. Christian bioethics is nested in a set of moral and metaphysical understandings that (...) collide with those of the dominant secular culture. The result is a gulf between a moral life and an approach to bioethics framed in the face of a transcendent God and a final judgment versus a moral life and an approach to bioethics framed as if the world were without ultimate meaning and as if death were the end of personal existence. These approaches are separated by a moral and metaphysical gulf that sustains incompatible life worlds and incompatible understandings of bioethics. Attempts to bridge the gulf with secular reason are ineffective because there is no shared conception of reason or standard of evidence. Efforts to use the state to enforce a particular set of metaphysical and moral commitments, whether secular or religious, lead to public disputes with a war-like character. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to contextualize the study of metaphors within constructivist-informed research, in the hope that this process will orient cognitive scientists to the usefulness of implementing qualitative research methodologies, especially to using the person of the researcher as the primary research instrument. First, I explore some of the differences between Johnson and Lakoff’s Contemporary Metaphor Theory (CMT) and approaches evolving from it on one hand, and the clinical approach to metaphor based on a constructivist therapy model, (...) on the other. CMT has been one of the most significant forces that helped shift cognitive science toward an embodied approach to cognition. While it has succeeded to place physical experience back where it belongs in reason and meaning, CMT has, however, also fallen into some positivist traps which lead to problems such as a dualism, a split between the knower and the known, and with that, to a distrust of introspective, first-person accounts. In the process of finding conceptual metaphors — generalizations that govern metaphorical expressions — CMT often deletes the idiosyncratic characteristics and presuppositions implicit in linguistic metaphors; it divorces them from people’s sensory experiences, the “here and now” and the intent of their communications. The constructivist approach to metaphor that I present here accepts as a priori assumptions much of what workers of CMT are out to prove. In particular, it takes the correlation of conceptual metaphors and physical experience, as well as the unity of language and thought as pragmatic givens. Emulating the constructivist therapist’s approach to metaphors, I show how it is possible to deconstruct conceptual metaphors into minute sensory distinctions, using one’s own person as the main tool, for the purpose of helping people change their experiences in desired ways, at will. I illustrate this process by numerous examples from a wide field of applications, including mathematics education and psychotherapy. (shrink)

United States service members’ personal mental health information lacks the protection afforded by Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), diverging from the legal safeguards granted to other citizens. The Public Welfare Law and the Department of Defense (DoD) reduces these protections through clauses, outlining nine conditions where service members’ information can be disclosed to their commanders, who may lack formal HIPAA or medical confidentiality training. Once a commander is notified, the information may be shared with others without the Service (...) Members consent, creating an unregulated spread of private health information. Additionally, the military environment, marked by a stigma surrounding mental health issues, compounds this vulnerability. Therefore, Service Members seeking mental health support may encounter adverse consequences upon returning to their command through the propagation of stigma, which may further foster a culture of reluctance to seek help. A fictional character within the military serves as a conduit for nonmilitary providers to understand the contextual intricacies while highlighting the ethical dilemma faced by providers adhering to Congressional law, American Psychological Association (APA) Ethics Code, and DoD standards while also serving their clients. Key ethical considerations include informed consent, disclosures, maintaining confidentiality, discussing the limits of confidentiality, avoiding harm, and conflicts between ethics and organizational demands. (shrink)

This volume explores the linguistic expression of modality in natural language from a cross-linguistic perspective. Modal expressions provide the basic tools that allow us to dissociate what we say from what is actually going on, allowing us to talk about what might happen or might have happened, as well as what is required, desirable, or permitted. Chapters in the book demonstrate that modality involves many more syntactic categories and levels of syntactic structure than traditionally assumed. The volume distinguishes between three (...) types of modality: 'low modality', which concerns modal interpretations associated with the verbal and nominal cartographies in syntax; 'middle modality', or modal interpretation associated to the syntactic cartography internal to the clause; and 'high modality', relating to the left periphery. It combines cross-linguistic discussions of the more widely-studied sources of modality with analyses of novel or unexpected sources, and shows how the meanings associated with the three types of modality are realized across a wide range of languages. (shrink)

The author examines the possibility for a rapprochement between Luc Boltanski?s sociology of critique and Bourdieu?s critical sociology of domination by analyzing three subjects within the theoretical opus of Luc Boltanski: the place given to tests in the critical agency of actors, the relation between critique and institutions, and the role the collective plays in the appropriation and distribution of critique. In Boltanski?s works the question of the sense of justice and the critical capacities of actors, that is injustice and (...) its critique, is approached with full respect for the perspectives of the social actors. In his book On Critique the French sociologist writes about domination, or more precisely, the process of domination, but he doesn?t fully answer the question wether and how the capacities of social actors for critique can be realized and elevated to the level of a full-fledged critique of domination. This is considered to be the main condition of the possibility for connecting critical sociology and sociology of critique, so the analysis of the three mentioned topics should 76 determine whether the social actors within the theoretical world of Luc Boltanski are relatively close to the stage of a critique of domination. (shrink)

The most expressive account of explanations in neuroscience is currently the causal-mechanistic model formulated by Carl Craver. According to him, explanations in neuroscience describe mechanisms, in other words, it points out how parts organize themselves and interact to engender the phenomenon. Furthermore, neuroscience is unified as scientists from different areas that compose it work together to develop mechanisms. This model was extensively discussed in the last years and several criticisms were raised towards it. Still, it remains as the soundest model (...) for explanations in neuroscience nowadays. This paper is presented as a review of this model, as well as the critiques worked out against it and finishes with a brief consideration of the problem of explanation in neuroscience. (shrink)

The novels of the Civil Rights Era are the place where voices speak the unspeakable, where the reader is showed from various angles the human character in times of conflict. The novels chosen for analysis—The Color Purple and Native Son uncover oppression and trauma, ways to cope with the ills of a society, and the forms of redemption or healing methods according to the case. The issues tackled are not just racial, they are human issues too. In every story there (...) are universal lessons for times of conflict when the power of reason should prevail. The message is to learn from history and thus prevent evil from reappearing. (shrink)

Este artículo pretende realizar un repaso por la historiografía de la noción de averroísmo latino , desde los primeros trabajos de E. Renan hasta las investigaciones más recientes. Se destaca la falta de acuerdo entre las distintas posiciones y las grandes dificultades de definición que ésta categoría ha comportado para los historiadores de la filosofía durante los dos últimos siglos.

A patent is a property granted to any new shape, configuration or arrangement of elements, of any device, tool, instrument, mechanism or other object or part thereof, that allows for a better or different operation, use or manufacture of the object that incorporates it or that provides it with some utility, advantage or technical effect that it did not have before. As a document, a patent really is a title that recognizes the right to exploit the patented invention exclusively, preventing (...) others from making, selling or using it without the consent of the owner. The fact of making a patent is motivated by the fact of promoting creativity, hindering competition in the market as only one person holds the patent, thus protecting the initial investment and fighting against plagiarism. Patents are available to the public for dissemination and general knowledge. It is generally recognized in the specialized literature that patents can be used as an indicator to calculate the results generated by research and development activities, being a very useful indicator to measure various social, economic or technological aspects. For this reason, it is of relevant interest to have tools or systems that allow us to obtain the patents developed in a specific period of time and to carry out analyses of various economic and social factors. These analyses can serve to obtain a social perspective of society’s progress in the technological field, and this is why an analysis of patents is of our interest. This paper proposes a platform specifically designed to obtain knowledge about patents as an indicator of Spanish social, economic or technological aspects. For this purpose, the platform retrieves, analyses and visualizes functionalities that represent data on the landscape of patents obtained from the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office as a particular case of study. (shrink)

El discurso primordialista sobre el origen de las identidades sociales etno-nacionales sigue latiendo en algunos enfoques históricos, antropológicos, políticos y jurídicos de las sociedades modernas, camuflado en otras formas iusnaturalistas y biologicistas de concebir los atributos culturales, étnicos, religiosos, conductuales, e incluso económicos de los pueblos. Este artículo pretende presentar, por el contrario, la construcción de las identidades nacionales desde el punto de vista modernista y analizar su papel como discurso que pretende reforzar estructuras de poder, producidas porque tienen utilidad (...) estratégica para el logro de bienes materiales o políticos, formalmente en nombre del grupo, pero de hecho solamente con objeto de dar ventaja a los líderes o las élites. Cuando llevan aparejado un carácter político, las identidades nacionales, culturales y étnicas son susceptibles de provocar conflictos violentos, la naturalización de la violencia y la deshumanización de otros grupos tienen lugar a menudo cuando de conflictos etno-nacionalistas se trata. (shrink)

Sister chromatid cohesion mediated by the ring‐shaped cohesin complex is essential for faithful chromosome segregation. A tight spatial and temporal control of cohesin release is observed in mitosis and meiosis, and a family of proteins known as shugoshins play a major role in this process. Shugoshin (Sgo) protects centromeric cohesin from dissociation in early mitosis and from cleavage by separase in meiosis I. Three exciting new reports indicate that this is accomplished by recruiting the serine/threonine protein phosphatase 2A (PP2A) to (...) centromeres.(1–3) The proposed targets of PP2A activity include cohesin and Sgo, both of which would otherwise dissociate from chromosomes upon phosphorylation by Polo kinase. Thus, a balance of kinase and phosphatase activities seems to be the key to the conserved mechanism that regulates the stepwise release of cohesin from mitotic and meiotic chromosomes. Additional evidence, however, suggests that this is only part of the story, and that Sgo has also a role independent of PP2A. BioEssays 28: 775–779, 2006. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The subject of this paper is the debate between externalism and internalism about mental content presented by Tim Crane in Chapter 4 of his book Elements of Mind. Crane’s sympathies in this debate are with internalism. The paper attempts to show that Crane’s argumentation is not refuting the Twin Earth argument and externalism, and that in its basis it does not differ much from externalism itself Crane’s version of the argument for externalism features two key premises: (1) The content of (...) a thought determines what the thought is about/what it refers to (the Content Determines Reference Principle); and (2) Twins are referring to different things when they use the word “water”. From these, in a few simple steps, Crane’s externalist infers: Therefore, their thoughts are not “in their heads”. Crane suggests denying the Content Determines Reference Principle in the light of indexical thoughts. In the first stage, Crane reduces “content” to “some aspect of content”, although he needs all aspects of content to secure identity of thoughts. However, his view then comes close to something acceptable to externalists. In the second stage, Crane makes content relative to context, but then reference still determines content. (shrink)

La figura de Medea, mujer y extranjera, es el hilo conductor que trata de ofrecer un análisis sobre la pasión de la ira desde la tradición clásica, que la rechaza como pasión destructiva, hasta la apropiación realizada por el feminismo negro norteamericano de Lorde. Ambas iras tendrán algo en común: Audre Lorde hablará de la rabia por la misoginia, homofobia y racismo sufrido y en Medea habrá ira por la misoginia y xenofobia de la época. Para ello en primer lugar (...) el artículo analiza el vocabulario relacionado con la cólera y la ira tanto en griego y en latín. A partir de ahí desarrollan dos hilos. En el primero se ofrece la lectura tradicional del mito de la Medea infanticida que es la que se encuentra en la tragedia de Séneca y que se relacionada con su tratado filosófico _Sobre la ira_. De ese modo se convierte a Medea en _exemplum e contrario_ y contraimagen del sabio estoico. En el segundo se recupera la otra tradición del mito según la cual Medea no fue la que mató a sus hijos sino los corintios. Este segundo hilo del enfoque clásico de la ira para mostrar su validez como herramienta de cambio. (shrink)

This book focuses on the role of philosophy across disciples. It gives several examples of how philosophical theories or particular concepts or lines of arguments, can be used in other (non-philosophical) disciplines, such as politics, business, psychology, art, and film studies.

The emergence and development of 'national sciences' in Latin American countries were not, until very recently, part of the agenda of historians of science because the 'traditional' history of sciences was not interested in the scientific activity of peripheral areas. The history of science is a recent discipline in Mexican historiographic studies. The methodological interest in the history of science, the creation of schools and institutes that deal with it, the establishment of particular chairs, the organization of national societies, and (...) the publication of books and periodicals are all very recent. It is important to carry out studies in the history of science that examine the development of Mexican science introducing the 'local' context, and study how this development has influenced the formation of scientific societies and the development of scientific disciplines in the country. We want to explore the introduction of genetics in Mexico as applied to agriculture between 1930 and 1960. This matter has not been investigated in Mexico and therefore this work would represent one of the first studies of this subject and one of the first studies in the general field of Mexican scientific history. (shrink)

With the expansion of artificial intelligence and advanced technologies, theworld in the 21st century is rapidly changing and imposing new living dynamics. Althoughsuch changes affect all age groups, younger generations accept them faster andreact more positively. The new cohorts - Generation Z and Alpha - live in a digital worldthat affect their lifestyle, interpersonal relations, quality of mental health, psychologicalwell-being and everyday challenges. The presence of the so called “Frankenstein effect”in some adults provoked by the fast development of artificial intelligence (...) and robotics,reflects a “humans versus machines” position, viewing artificial intelligence as athreat to humanity. However, the reality is that digital and human world are not inconflict, since many people are already using artificial intelligence tools on daily basis.It is implemented in certain aspects of medicine, education, business, law, agriculture,industry, space technology and in many other fields. With this in mind, the aspect ofmorality pops up as a very important one. A frequently asked question is: Does artificialintelligence have the capacity to make moral decisions independently? Therefore, integratingmorality into AI algorithms is one of the priorities that interdisciplinary teamsfrom engineering and computer sciences, psychology, philosophy, sociology, law, etc.are intensively working on. This paper addresses this issue by presenting findings fromrelevant research which discusses the challenges and possibilities for integrating thedimensions of morality and introducing human values into autonomous systems thatperform complex tasks. (shrink)

La idea moderna de derechos humanos y el concepto clásico de ley natural no son equivalentes. Ciertamente comparten la idea de que no toda ley es convencional. Pero más allá de esto, la noción clásica de ley natural es definida claramente en el marco de las virtudes y, consecuentemente, tiene una orientación más práctica y está atada más de cerca a la historia; la noción de derechos humanos, que han heredado las teorías modernas de los derechos naturales, conduce a la (...) subjetivación del concepto de derecho y tiende a separar al ser humano de su contexto histórico y político, donde los eventos se llevan a cabo. En ese sentido, el concepto clave asociado con los derechos humanos es aquel de “dignidad”. Dado que las dos ideas tienen diferentes puntos de partida y son diferentes en su estatuto epistemológico, no hay, estrictamente hablando, fundamento alguno para imaginar una síntesis de las dos teorías. En el plano teórico sólo podemos hablar de su complementariedad. La síntesis es algo que sólo surgirá en la práctica. (shrink)