This report describes the rationale, approaches, organization, and resource development leading to a large-scale deletion bin map of the hexaploid wheat genome. Accompanying reports in this issue detail results from chromosome bin-mapping of expressed sequence tags representing genes onto the seven homoeologous chromosome groups and a global analysis of the entire mapped wheat EST data set. Among the resources developed were the first extensive public wheat EST collection. Described are protocols for sequencing, sequence processing, EST nomenclature, and the assembly of (...) ESTs into contigs. These contigs plus singletons were used for selection of distinct sequence motif unigenes. Selected ESTs were rearrayed, validated by 5′ and 3′ sequencing, and amplified for probing a series of wheat aneuploid and deletion stocks. Images and data for all Southern hybridizations were deposited in databases and were used by the coordinators for each of the seven homoeologous chromosome groups to validate the mapping results. Results from this project have established the foundation for future developments in wheat genomics. (shrink)

Whole eye transplantation (WET) remains experimental. Long presumed impossible, recent scientific advances regarding WET suggest that it may become a clinical reality. However, the ethical implications of WET as an experimental therapeutic strategy remain largely unexplored. This article evaluates the ethical considerations surrounding WET as an emerging experimental treatment for vision loss. A thorough review of published literature pertaining to WET was performed; ethical issues were identified during review of the articles.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 387 and contributed an important and helpful study. This dissertation is a model of its kind. One hopes the author will continue his scholarly efforts. The Catholic University of America Washington, D.C. WILLIAM E. MAY John Henry Newman: A Biography. By IAN KER. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Pp. xii + 764. $24.95 (paper). The Achievement of John Henry Newman. By IAN KER. Notre Dame: University (...) of Notre Dame Press, 1990. Pp. x + 209. $24.95 (cloth). Ian Ker has inherited the mantle of the late Charles Stephen Dessain as the finest textual expositor of the Newman corpus, and Ker's biography should become a standard reference tool in the field. Ker ap· prenticed under Dessain in the production of the monumental (31volume ) Letters and Diaries, and his biography shows his command of the materials of that as yet unfinished project. Ker's hook joins the biographies of W. Ward (1912) and M. Trevor (1962) as significant "lives of Newman" to consider, and it addresses their earlier shortcomings : Ward's inadequate appraisal of the Anglican Newman and Trevor's unconcern for Newman's theological writings. Of Newman's intellectual contribution, Ker's treatment is similar to Dessain's John Henry Newman, an exposition of the major themes and intellectual moves, and theologically-minded inquirers need read both. Ker offers the hook as a personal life, a literary appraisal, and an intellectual study. The personal life and literary analysis are ably carried off; Ker's background in English literature and his editorial work on the letters have served him well. The intellectual study takes the form of synopses of Newman's hooks and articles, which are woven into the chronological narrative of the life. This aspect of Ker's hook is by no means "the theological achievement of JHN" (cf. Tracy's work on Lonergan); such a project still awaits Newman studies and someone of the conceptual breadth of the late Jan Walgrave to achieve it. Ker provides accurate and readable summaries of Newman's writings, and if a biography is meant to introduce the sundry aspects of a person, especially a complex thinker like Newman, then Ker's treatment of the intellectual aspect offers a fine introduction. I shall consider these three dimensions of the biography, and first the personal life. Newman considered that a person's life is best told 888 BOOK REVIEWS through that person's correspondence. Ker's biography is approached chronologically, and Newman's published letters guide the tale. Newman 's advice is particularly apropos for his own biographer, since Newman 's hooks and articles often displayed a "reserve" in which his true feelings were couched and nuanced. His letters, especially to confidants, were candid and often hard-hitting, as when he described the Curia in these words: " And who is Propaganda? one sharp man of business, who works day and night, and dispatches his work quick off, to the East and West, a high dignitary, [perhaps an Archbishop], hut after all little more than a clerk... with two or.three clerks under him " (p. 519). (Ker displays some reserve himself, omitting Newman's episcopal aside.) Ker's use of the letters is most revealing during Newman's Roman Catholic period when he encountered opposition from Archbishop Manning and W. G. Ward in England, from Archbishop Cullen in Dublin, and from Cardinal Barnaho in Rome. One senses how the laity rallied round him. Some of Newman's most pungent thoughts on ·theological freedom, on the suspicious nature of the clergy toward educated laity, on the wherewithal to make an institution a genuine university, on the role of patience and.trust in God when authorities are hearing down, are to he found in Ker's choice of letters. With so much material to mine-Newman wrote 20,000 letters-it is understandable that Ker does not include, save rarely, what Newman's opponents were thinking. Ker's account of Newman's Anglican period is equally illuminating, and indeed it is a highlight of the biography. While the Apologia has provided the main lines of the story, Ker puts flesh and hones to Newman 's struggle with his conscience. In coming to Oxford, Newman... (shrink)

Two self-paced reading experiments investigated several factors that influence the comprehension complexity of singly-embedded relative clauses (RCs) in English. Three factors were manipulated in Experiment 1, resulting in three main effects. First, object-extracted RCs were read more slowly than subject-extracted RCs, replicating previous work. Second, RCs that were embedded within the sentential complement of a noun were read more slowly than comparable RCs that were not embedded in this way. Third, and most interestingly, object-modifying RCs were read more slowly than (...) subject-modifying relative clauses. This result contradicts one of the central tenets of complexity research: that nested sentences are harder to understand than their right-branching equivalents (e.g., Miller and Chomsky 1963). It is hypothesized that this result followed from a combination of two information-flow factors: (1) background information is usually presented early in a sentence; and (2) restrictive RCs—the form of the RCs in Experiment 1—usually convey background information. Experiment 2 tested this hypothesis by comparing restrictive and non-restrictive RCs— which generally provide new information—in both subject- and objectmodifying positions. The results of the experiment were as predicted by the information-flow account: Only restrictive RCs were read more slowly when modifying objects. It is concluded that both resource and information-flow factors need to be considered in explaining RC complexity effects. (shrink)

This collection of thirteen essays, when viewed together, offers a unique perspective on the history of American philosophy. It illuminates for the first time in book form, how thirteen major American philosophical thinkers viewed a problem of special interest in the American philosophical tradition: the relationship between experience and reflection. Written by well-known authorities on the figure about which he or she writes, the essays are arranged chronologically to highlight the changes and developments in thought from Puritanism to Pragmatism to (...) Process Philosophy. While Doctrine and Experience will be of particular interest to specialists in American Philosophy, there is also much to offer anyone interested in the intellectual and cultural history of the United States. In order of appearance, the essays are: "Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening" by John E. Smith "Heart and Head: The Mind of Thomas Jefferson" by Andrew J. Reck"Emerson and the American Future" by Robert C. Pollock"Chauncey Wright and the Pragmatists" by Edward Madden"Charles S. Peirce: Action Through Thought – The Ethics of Experience" by Vincent G. Potter"Life Is in the Transitions’: Radical Empiricism and Contemporary Concerns" by John J. McDermott"John Dewey and the Metaphysics of American Democracy" by Ralph W. Sleeper"Individualization and Unification in Sartre and Dewey" by Thelma Z. Levine"Josiah Royce: Anticipator of European Existentialism and Phenomenology" by Jacqueline Ann K. Kegley"The Transcendence of Materialism and Idealism in American Thought" by John Lachs"C. I. Lewis and the Pragmatic Tradition in American Philosophy" by Sandra Rosenthal"The Social Philosophy of George Herbert Mead" by David Miller"Existence as Transaction: A Whiteheadian Study of Causality" by Elizabeth Kraus. (shrink)

The first part of this paper discusses five sets of forces that have had a major influence on world agriculture in the post-World War II period. These include (1) high rates of population growth in the developing countries; (2) a steady increase in economic integration world-wide, driven by technological breakthroughs in the communication and transportation sectors; (3) major realignments in the values of national currencies; (4) growing distortions in economic policies in both the industrialized and developing countries; and (5) growing (...) diffusion of new production technology from the industrialized to the developing countries.The second part reviews the changing role of international development assistance in support of agriculture in light of these historical forces. Such assistance successively stressed the development of extension services, food aid, institutional development of higher level education institutions, the development of research capacity, and rural development.A look to the future is the subject of the third part of the paper. This includes a discussion of the difficulties in sustaining U.S. foreign assistance, especially when that nation is letting its own economic house fall into such disarray. (shrink)

By any measure, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., led a full and remarkable life. He was tall and exceptionally attractive, especially as he aged, with piercing eyes, a shock of white hair, and prominent moustache. He was the son of a famous father, a thrice-wounded veteran of the Civil War, a Harvard-educated member of Brahmin Boston, the acquaintance of Longfellow, Lowell, and Emerson, and for a time a close friend of William James. He wrote one of the classic works of American (...) legal scholarship, The Common Law, and he served with distinction on the Supreme Court of the United States. He was actively involved in the Court's work into his nineties. In Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, G. Edward White, the acclaimed biographer of Earl Warren and one of America's most esteemed legal scholars, provides a rounded portrait of this remarkable jurist. We see Holmes's early life in Boston and at Harvard, his ambivalent relationship with his father, and his harrowing service during the Civil War. White examines Holmes's curious, childless marriage and he includes new information on Holmes's relationship with Clare Castletown. White not only provides a vivid portrait of Holmes's life, but examines in depth the inner life and thought of this preeminent legal figure. There is a full chapter devoted to The Common Law, for instance, and throughout the book, there is astute commentary on Holmes's legal writings. Indeed, White reveals that some of the themes that have dominated 20th-century American jurisprudence--including protection for free speech and the belief that "judges make the law"--originated in Holmes's work. Perhaps most important, White suggests that understanding Holmes's life is crucial to understanding his work, and he continually stresses the connections between Holmes's legal career and his personal life. For instance, his desire to distinguish himself from his father and from the "soft" literary culture of his father's generation drove him to legal scholarship of a particularly demanding kind. White's biography of Earl Warren was hailed by Anthony Lewis on the cover of The New York Times Book Review as "serious and fascinating," and The Los Angeles Times noted that "White has gone beyond the labels and given us the man." In Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, White has produced an equally serious and fascinating biography, one that again goes beyond the labels and gives us the man himself. (shrink)

The "tree of life" iconography, representing the history of life, dates from at least the latter half of the 18th century, but evolution as the mechanism providing this bifurcating history of life did not appear until the early 19th century. There was also a shift from the straight line, scala naturae view of change in nature to a more bifurcating or tree-like view. Throughout the 19th century authors presented tree-like diagrams, some regarding the Deity as the mechanism of change while (...) others argued for evolution. Straight-line or anagenetic evolution and bifurcating or cladogenetic evolution are known in biology today, but are often misrepresented in popular culture, especially with anagenesis being confounded with scala naturae. Although well known in the mid 19th century, the geologist Edward Hitchcock has been forgotten as an early, if not the first author to publish a paleontologically based "tree of life" beginning in 1840 in the first edition of his popular general geology text Elementary Geology. At least 31 editions were published and those between 1840 and 1859 had this "paleontological chart" showing two trees, one for fossil and living plants and another for animals set within a context of geological time. Although the chart did not vary in later editions, the text explaining the chart did change to reflect newer ideas in paleontology and geology. Whereas Lamarck, Chambers, Bronn, Darwin, and Haeckel saw some form of transmutation as the mechanism that created their "trees of life," Hitchcock, like his contemporaries Agassiz and Miller, who also produced "trees of life," saw a deity as the agent of change. Through each edition of his book Hitchcock denounced the newer transmutationist hypotheses of Lamarck, then Chambers, and finally Darwin in an 1860 edition that no longer presented his tree-like "paleontological chart.". (shrink)

It has been demonstrated that death certificates do not accurately record the actual cause of death in up to one-fourth of cases, as determined from subsequent autopsy findings. The purpose of this study was to explore the use of natural language autopsy data bases as an automated quality assurance mechanism. We translated the account of the major process leading to death, or the primary diagnosis, from all 45,564 narrative autopsy reports obtained at The Johns Hopkins Hospital between May 28, 1889, (...) and June 30, 1987, into the hierarchical system of Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) titles. We obtained a total of 125,772 MeSH title translations, 1,563 of them distinct (average 2.8 per case), ranging in frequency from 6,029 occurrences of LUNG to 1 occurrence apiece of 357 MeSH titles. The natural-language-to-MeSH translations showed expected trends over the past century: fewer infectious diseases; more cardiovascular and neoplastic disease among adults; and more respiratory diseases and congenital malformations in the pediatric age group. The greater availability of autopsy documents in electronic form should increase the value of this resource for quality assurance. (shrink)

We use a result due to Rolin, Speissegger, and Wilkie to show that definable sets in certain o-minimal structures admit definable parameterizations by mild maps. We then use this parameterization to prove a result on the density of rational points on curves defined by restricted Pfaffian functions.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Incoherence of Determining Death by Neurological Criteria: A Commentary on Controversies in the Determination of Death, A White Paper by the President’s Council on Bioethics*Franklin G. Miller** (bio) and Robert D. Truog (bio)Traditionally the cessation of breathing and heart beat has marked the passage from life to death. Shortly after death was determined, the body became a cold corpse, suitable for burial or cremation. Two technological changes (...) in the second half of the twentieth century prompted calls for a new, or at least expanded, definition of death: the development of intensive care medicine, especially the use of mechanical ventilators, and the advent of successful transplantation of vital organs. Patients with profound neurological damage, leaving them incapable of breathing on their own and in an irreversible coma, could be maintained for some period of time with the aid of mechanical ventilation. The situation of these patients posed two ethical questions. Is it appropriate to stop life-sustaining treatment? If so, is it acceptable to retrieve vital organs for transplantation to save the lives of others before stopping treatment?In 1968, the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death proposed that death could be determined on the basis of neurological criteria, thus providing a positive answer to these two questions (Ad Hoc Committee 1968). According to the position of this committee, patients diagnosed with the cessation of brain function are dead, despite the fact that they breathe and circulate blood with the aid of mechanical ventilation. [End Page 185] Because they are dead, it is appropriate, indeed imperative, to stop mechanical ventilation. And because they are dead, it becomes ethical to procure vital organs for transplantation before stopping what otherwise would be life-sustaining treatment. Remarkably, this innovative neurological determination of death became, with little debate or controversy, the established position in medical ethics and the law throughout the United States.The Harvard Committee articulated the diagnosis of “irreversible coma,” but merely asserted that this condition constituted death. No explanatory rationale was provided. It fell to the President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research to provide an authoritative rationale in its 1981 report, Defining Death. The second paragraph of the report set the stage as follows: “The question addressed here is not inherently difficult or complicated. Simply, it is whether the law ought to recognize new means for establishing that the death of a human being has occurred” (President’s Commission 1981, p. 3). The Commission claimed that “death is a unitary phenomenon” (p. 7) and that the determination of death by neurological criteria, in terms of the absence of all brain function, is consistent with the traditional conception of death as the cessation of vital functioning of the organism as a whole. The key issue is the integrative functioning of the human organism, which ceases to exist, according to the Commission, when the whole brain, including higher cortical areas and the brain stem, fails to function. Although “brain-dead” patients do not appear to be dead—i.e., the reality of their death is “masked” by the activity of mechanical ventilation—the patient’s body has irreversibly lost all capacity for integrative functioning. In the words of the Commission: “When artificial means of support mask this loss of integration as measured by the old methods [cessation of respiration and heart beat], brain-oriented criteria and tests provide a new window on the same phenomenon” (p. 33). The President’s Commission was instrumental in developing and establishing “The Uniform Definition of Death Act”: “An individual who has sustained either (1) irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or (2) irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem, is dead” (p. 2).Although the question posed by the President’s Commission was easy to articulate, the answer, over time, has proved complicated and controversial. The coherence and cogency of determining death by neurological criteria has been challenged. Various experts have demonstrated that “brain-dead” patients maintained on mechanical ventilation display a range of vital, integrative, functioning, which conflicts with the judgment that they are dead (Truog and... (shrink)

Most people believe in an afterlife, but is such a belief warranted? While Newman did not specifically treat the doctrine of afterlife, his Grammar of Assent furnishes a trajectory that shows that Christians can believe in this doctrine with a warranted assent, precisely because the Church is a warranted belief.

Conventional medical ethics and the law draw a bright line distinguishing the permitted practice of withdrawing life-sustaining treatment from the forbidden practice of active euthanasia by means of a lethal injection. When clinicians justifiably withdraw life-sustaining treatment, they allow patients to die but do not cause, intend, or have moral responsibility for, the patient's death. In contrast, physicians unjustifiably kill patients whenever they intentionally administer a lethal dose of medication. We argue that the differential moral assessment of these two practices (...) is based on a series of moral fictions – motivated false beliefs that erroneously characterize withdrawing life-sustaining treatment in order to bring accepted end-of-life practices in line with the prevailing moral norm that doctors must never kill patients. When these moral fictions are exposed, it becomes apparent that conventional medical ethics relating to end-of-life decisions is radically mistaken. (shrink)

What Science Offers the Humanities examines some of the deep problems facing the study of culture. It focuses on the excesses of postmodernism, but also acknowledges serious problems with postmodernism's harshest critics. In short, Edward Slingerland argues that in order for the humanities to progress, its scholars need to take seriously contributions from the natural sciences - and particular research on human cognition - which demonstrate that any separation of the mind and the body is entirely untenable. The author (...) provides suggestions for how humanists might begin to utilize these scientific discoveries without conceding that science has the last word on morality, religion, art, and literature. Calling into question such deeply entrenched dogmas as the 'blank slate' theory of nature, strong social constructivism, and the ideal of disembodied reason, What Science Offers the Humanities replaces the human-sciences divide with a more integrated approach to the study of culture. (shrink)

Cosmetic surgery is a fast-growing medical practice. In 1997 surgeons in the United States performed the four most common cosmetic procedures443,728 times, an increase of 150% over the comparable total for 1992. Estimated total expenditures for cosmetic surgery range from $1 to $2 billion. As managed care cuts into physicians' income and autonomy, cosmetic surgery, which is not covered by health insurance, offers a financially attractive medical specialty.

What is a good death? How does one live well in the face of (potentially) terminal illness? Philosophical analysis has a great deal to offer in approaching these puzzling and deep questions. Perhaps more can be gleaned of cultural and personal significance, however, from narratives of those who have been forced to face these questions in their lives and in their writings. The greatest yield, I suggest, comes from combining narrative with philosophical reflections.Commentators have frequently contrasted the way we die (...) today with deaths in the past (Callahan 1993, 2003; Hardwig 2009). Before the first half of the 20th century, people mainly died from infectious diseases, with a rapid onset and swift progression to .. (shrink)

According to many contemporary metaphysicians, we ought to theorize in terms of grounding because of its promise to explicate the idea of reality having a layered structure. However, a tension emerges when one combines the layered structure view with the view that higher-level facts are not reducible to lower-level facts. This tension emerges from two problems. The first problem arises from the fact that grounding explanations entail true universal generalizations. In order to satisfy this constraint, we will face serious pressure (...) to make sure the entities involved in the grounded facts are appropriately connected to the entities involved in the grounding facts, otherwise the generalizations associated with those grounding claims will come out false. However, ensuring the appropriate connections seemingly leaves no way for the non-reductivist to fully squeeze out reference to higher-level entities as we descend the levels of ground. This threatens the result that some higher-level facts must be taken as fundamental, which the non-reductivist cannot accept. -/- I argue that we can resolve the tension by taking the connections at issue to be essentially true. We can call this view essentialist non-reductivism. One significant upshot of the argument is that we can see not only that essentialist non-reductivism successfully resolves the tension, but that in principle no better solution could be offered. (shrink)

In this paper I wish to contrast briefly one of the later developments in philosophy, the philosophy of the concrete, with an archaic mode of thought and then to show how certain defects in each were avoided in the development of the scientific method.

Debriefing is a standard ethical requirement for human research involving the use of deception. Little systematic attention, however, has been devoted to explaining the ethical significance of debriefing and the specific ethical functions that it serves. In this article, we develop an account of debriefing as a tool of moral accountability for the prima facie wrong of deception. Specifically, we contend that debriefing should include a responsibility to promote transparency by explaining the deception and its rationale, to provide an apology (...) to subjects for infringing the principle of respect for persons, and to offer subjects an opportunity to withdraw their data. We also present recommendations concerning the discussion of deception in scientific articles reporting the results of research using deception. (shrink)

This book contains 22 essays on the ethics of research involving human subjects written over a 15-year period. Topics addressed include the ethics of clinical trials, controversial study designs, and informed consent.

The differential aging effect is shown to be valid in any physically reasonable extension of the special theory of relativity which includes a description of accelerating observers. Einstein's controversial assumption—the clock hypothesis—is avoided. Instead, it is sufficient to assume accessibility—that it is possible to travel from one inertial observer to another and then return to the first in a reasonable manner. Since Minkowski space-time displays this accessibility property, there must be an error in Sachs's quaternion development of general relativity. No (...) assumptions concerning measurements—proper time—of accelerating observers are necessary, nor are assumptions concerning special features of their motion—uniform acceleration. (shrink)