Researcher practices on returning genetic research results.

BACKGROUND/AIMS: as genetic and genomic research proliferates, debate has ensued about returning results to participants. In addition to consideration of the benefits and harms to participants, researchers must also consider the logistical and financial feasibility of returning research results. However, little data exist of actual researcher practices. METHODS: we conducted an online survey of 446 corresponding authors of genetic/genomic studies conducted in the United States and published in 2006-2007 to assess the frequency with which they considered, offered to, or actually returned research results, what factors influenced these decisions, and the method of communicating results. RESULTS: the response rate was 24% (105/446). Fifty-four percent of respondents considered the issue of returning research results to participants, 28% offered to return individual research results, and 24% actually returned individual research results. Of those who considered the issue of returning research results during the study planning phase, the most common factors considered were whether research results were deemed clinically useful (18%) and respect for participants (13%). Researchers who had a medical degree and conducted studies on children were significantly more likely to offer to return or actually return individual results compared to those with a Ph.D. only. CONCLUSIONS: we speculate that issues associated with clinical validity and respect for participants dominated concerns of time and expense given the prominent and continuing ethical debates surrounding genetics and genomics research. The substantial number of researchers who did not consider returning research results suggests that researchers and institutional review boards need to devote more attention to a topic about which research participants are interested.

A Politics of the Unspeakable: The Differend of Israel

Israel's establishment in 1948 in former British-Mandate Palestine as a Jewish country and as a liberal democracy is commonly understood as a form of response to the Holocaust of WWII. Zionist narratives frame Israel's establishment not only as a response to the Holocaust, but also as a return to the Jewish people's original homeland after centuries of wandering in exile. Debates over Israel's policies, particularly with regard to Palestinians and to the country's non-Jewish population, often center on whether Israel's claims to Jewish singularity are at the expense of principles of liberal democracy, international law and universal human rights. In this dissertation, I argue that Israel's emphasis on Jewish singularity can be understood not as a violation of humanism's universalist frameworks, but as a symptom of the violence inherent to these frameworks and to the modern liberal rights-bearing subject on which they are based. Through an analysis of my fieldwork in Israel (2005-2008), I trace the relation between the figures of "Jew" and "Israeli" in terms of their historical genealogies and in contemporary Israeli contexts. Doing so makes legible how European modernity and its concepts of sovereignty, liberalism, the human, and subjectivity are based on a metaphysics of presence that defines the human through a displacement of difference. This displaced difference is manifest in affective expression. This dissertation shows how the figure of the Jew in relation to Israel reveals sexual difference as under erasure by the suppression of alterity in humanism's configuration of man, woman, and animal, and suggests a political subject unable to be sovereign or fully represented in language.

Where does energy R&D come from? Examining crowding out from energy R&D

Recent efforts to endogenize technological change in climate policy models demonstrate the importance of accounting for the opportunity cost of climate R&D investments. Because the social returns to R&D investments are typically higher than the social returns to other types of investment, any new climate mitigation R&D that comes at the expense of other R&D investment may dampen the overall gains from induced technological change. Unfortunately, there has been little empirical work to guide modelers as to the potential magnitude of such crowding out effects. This paper considers both the private and social opportunity costs of climate R&D. Addressing private costs, we ask whether an increase in climate R&D represents new R&D spending, or whether some (or all) of the additional climate R&D comes at the expense of other R&D. Addressing social costs, we use patent citations to compare the social value of alternative energy research to other types of R&D that may be crowded out. Beginning at the industry level, we find no evidence of crowding out across sectors-that is, increases in energy R&D do not draw R&D resources away from sectors that do not perform R&D. Given this, we proceed with a detailed look at alternative energy R&D. Linking patent data and financial data by firm, we ask whether an increase in alternative energy patents leads to a decrease in other types of patenting activity. While we find that increases in alternative energy patents do result in fewer patents of other types, the evidence suggests that this is due to profit-maximizing changes in research effort, rather than financial constraints that limit the total amount of R&D possible. Finally, we use patent citation data to compare the social value of alternative energy patents to other patents by these firms. Alternative energy patents are cited more frequently, and by a wider range of other technologies, than other patents by these firms, suggesting that their social value is higher. © 2011 Elsevier B.V.

Life-narrative and word-cued autobiographical memories in centenarians: comparisons with 80-year-old control, depressed, and dementia groups.

Centenarians provided autobiographical memories to either a request for a life narrative or a request to produce autobiographical memories to cue words. Both methods produced distributions with childhood-amnesia, reminiscence-bump, and recency components. The life-narrative method produced relatively more bump memories at the expense of recent memories. The life-narrative distributions were similar to those obtained from 80-year-old adults without clinical symptoms and from 80-year-old Alzheimer's dementia and depression patients, except that the centenarians had an additional 20-year period of relatively low recall between the bump and recency components. The centenarians produced more emotionally neutral memories than the other three groups and produced fewer and less detailed memories than the non-clinical 80-year-old sample.

To grow or not to grow: nutritional control of development during Caenorhabditis elegans L1 arrest.

It is widely appreciated that larvae of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans arrest development by forming dauer larvae in response to multiple unfavorable environmental conditions. C. elegans larvae can also reversibly arrest development earlier, during the first larval stage (L1), in response to starvation. "L1 arrest" (also known as "L1 diapause") occurs without morphological modification but is accompanied by increased stress resistance. Caloric restriction and periodic fasting can extend adult lifespan, and developmental models are critical to understanding how the animal is buffered from fluctuations in nutrient availability, impacting lifespan. L1 arrest provides an opportunity to study nutritional control of development. Given its relevance to aging, diabetes, obesity and cancer, interest in L1 arrest is increasing, and signaling pathways and gene regulatory mechanisms controlling arrest and recovery have been characterized. Insulin-like signaling is a critical regulator, and it is modified by and acts through microRNAs. DAF-18/PTEN, AMP-activated kinase and fatty acid biosynthesis are also involved. The nervous system, epidermis, and intestine contribute systemically to regulation of arrest, but cell-autonomous signaling likely contributes to regulation in the germline. A relatively small number of genes affecting starvation survival during L1 arrest are known, and many of them also affect adult lifespan, reflecting a common genetic basis ripe for exploration. mRNA expression is well characterized during arrest, recovery, and normal L1 development, providing a metazoan model for nutritional control of gene expression. In particular, post-recruitment regulation of RNA polymerase II is under nutritional control, potentially contributing to a rapid and coordinated response to feeding. The phenomenology of L1 arrest will be reviewed, as well as regulation of developmental arrest and starvation survival by various signaling pathways and gene regulatory mechanisms.

The Rational Adolescent: Strategic Information Processing during Decision Making Revealed by Eye Tracking.

Adolescence is often viewed as a time of irrational, risky decision-making - despite adolescents' competence in other cognitive domains. In this study, we examined the strategies used by adolescents (N=30) and young adults (N=47) to resolve complex, multi-outcome economic gambles. Compared to adults, adolescents were more likely to make conservative, loss-minimizing choices consistent with economic models. Eye-tracking data showed that prior to decisions, adolescents acquired more information in a more thorough manner; that is, they engaged in a more analytic processing strategy indicative of trade-offs between decision variables. In contrast, young adults' decisions were more consistent with heuristics that simplified the decision problem, at the expense of analytic precision. Collectively, these results demonstrate a counter-intuitive developmental transition in economic decision making: adolescents' decisions are more consistent with rational-choice models, while young adults more readily engage task-appropriate heuristics.

Global value Chains, rising power firms and economic and social upgrading

© Emerald Group Publishing Limited.Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce the global value chain (GVC) approach to understand the relationship between multinational enterprises (MNEs) and the changing patterns of global trade, investment and production, and its impact on economic and social upgrading. It aims to illuminate how GVCs can advance our understanding about MNEs and rising power (RP) firms and their impact on economic and social upgrading in fragmented and dispersed global production systems. Design/methodology/approach – The paper reviews theGVCliterature focusing on two conceptual elements of the GVC approach, governance and upgrading, and highlights three key recent developments in GVCs: concentration, regionalization and synergistic governance. Findings – The paper underscores the complicated role of GVCs in shaping economic and social upgrading for emerging economies, RP firms and developing country firms in general. Rising geographic and organizational concentration in GVCs leads to the uneven distribution of upgrading opportunities in favor of RP firms, and yet economic upgrading may be elusive even for the most established suppliers because of power asymmetry with global buyers. Shifting end markets and the regionalization of value chains can benefit RP firms by presenting alternative markets for upgrading. Yet, without further upgrading, such benefits may be achieved at the expense of social downgrading. Finally, the ineffectiveness of private standards to achieve social upgrading has led to calls for synergistic governance through the cooperation of private, public and social actors, both global and local. Originality/value – The paper illuminates how the GVC approach and its key concepts can contribute to the critical international business and RP firms literature by examining the latest dynamics in GVCs and their impacts on economic and social development in developing countries.