A Damascene Conversion:Additional Accommodation Church of St George and St Thomas

Additional Accommodation Church of St George and St Thomas - Critical Appraisal ‘A Damascene Conversion’ by Shane O’Toole in The Sunday Times December 2008.

REMA: A computer-based mapping tool for analysis of restriction sites in multiple DNA sequences

REMA is an interactive web-based program which predicts endonuclease cut sites in DNA sequences. It analyses Multiple sequences simultaneously and predicts the number and size of fragments as well as provides restriction maps. The users can select single or paired combinations of all commercially available enzymes. Additionally, REMA permits prediction of multiple sequence terminal fragment sizes and suggests suitable restriction enzymes for maximally discriminatory results. REMA is an easy to use, web based program which will have a wide application in molecular biology research. Availability: REMA is written in Perl and is freely available for non-commercial use. Detailed information on installation can be obtained from Jan Szubert (jan.szubert@gmail.com) and the web based application is accessible on the internet at the URL http://www.macaulay.ac.uk/rema. Contact: b.singh@macaulay.ac.uk. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Sex, Politics and Religion: The Transformation of the Figure of the Fairy Queen from Thomas off Ersseldoune to ‘‘Thomas Rymer’’

Our earliest version of the Thomas Rymer story is the medieval romance Thomas off Ersseldoune (c.1430). There is a four hundred year lacuna before the ballad “Thomas Rymer”, our next surviving version, is recorded in the early 1800s. In the intervening time the narrative changed very little but the dynamic of the piece, radically. The romance transformed into the highly subversive ballad, “Thomas Rymer”. Central to this transformation is the reconceptualization of the romance's heroine. Referred to simply as the “lufly lady” and caught between her husband, the fay King, and a mere mortal, Thomas, she becomes in the ballad the powerful Queen of the Fairies. The ballad is structured around a series of revelations in which the enigmatic Queen assumes the roles of Eve and Mary, and finally Christ Himself. I will explore the implications of this extraordinary ballad. Moreover, I suggest that it is Queen Elizabeth herself who, ironically, enables the heroine's transformation. “Ironically” because it appears that it was Elizabeth's own restrictions, designed to suppress heretical, seditious or radical literature, which forced Thomas off Ersseldoune (and many other romances which employed religious imagery or figures) out of the written domain and into the oral tradition. And yet, it is Elizabeth who, in creating the image of herself as a female prince, as the Faerie Queen, inspires a new literary vocabulary designed to describe female executive power, without which it would have been impossible to imagine a figure such as the ballad's Queen of the Fairies.

"From Indomania to Indophobia":Thomas De Quincey's Providential Orientalism

Thomas De Quincey’s terrifying oriental nightmares, reported to sensational acclaim in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), have become a touchstone of romantic imperialism in recent studies of the literature of the period (Leask 1991; Barrell 1992 et al). De Quincey’s collocation of “all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in all tropical regions” in the hypnagogic hallucinations that characterized what he called “the pains of opium” seems to anticipate neatly Said’s theory of orientalism, whereby the orient was supplied by the west with “a mentality, a genealogy, an atmosphere,” the attitudinal basis as he argues for the continuing march of imperialism from the late eighteenth century. Yet, as Thomas Trautmann (1997) has pointed out, orientalist scholarship based in India and led by the influential Asiatic Society of Bengal in the late eighteenth century was extremely enthusiastic about Indian classical antiquity. The early orientalist scholarship posited ethnic, linguistic, cultural and religious links between Europe and India, while recognizing the greater antiquity of Indian civilization. This favourable attitude (which Trautmann calls “Indomania”) was overtaken in the nineteenth century by disavowal of that scholarship and repugnance (which he calls “Indophobia”), influenced by utilitarian and evangelical attitudes to colonialism. De Quincey’s lifespan covers this crucial period of change. My paper examines his evangelical upbringing and interest in biblical and orientalist scholarship to suggest his anxious investment in these modes of thinking. I will suggest that the bizarre orientalist fusions of his dreams can be better understood in the context of changing attitudes to the imperialism during the period. An examination of his work provides a far more dynamic understanding of the processes of orientalism than the binary model suggested by Said. The transformation implied from imperial scholarship to governance, I will suggest, is not irrelevant to a world which continues to pull apart on various grounds of race and ethnicity, and reflects on our own role in the academy today.

Book review of Atlas of Anatomy by Patrick W. Tank and Thomas R. Gest:Book review of Atlas of Anatomy

Book review of Atlas of Anatomy by Patrick W. Tank and Thomas R. Gest

Defining the role of common variation in the genomic and biological architecture of adult human height

Using genome-wide data from 253,288 individuals, we identified 697 variants at genome-wide significance that together explained one-fifth of the heritability for adult height. By testing different numbers of variants in independent studies, we show that the most strongly associated 1/42,000, 1/43,700 and 1/49,500 SNPs explained 1/421%, 1/424% and 1/429% of phenotypic variance. Furthermore, all common variants together captured 60% of heritability. The 697 variants clustered in 423 loci were enriched for genes, pathways and tissue types known to be involved in growth and together implicated genes and pathways not highlighted in earlier efforts, such as signaling by fibroblast growth factors, WNT/I 2-catenin and chondroitin sulfate-related genes. We identified several genes and pathways not previously connected with human skeletal growth, including mTOR, osteoglycin and binding of hyaluronic acid. Our results indicate a genetic architecture for human height that is characterized by a very large but finite number (thousands) of causal variants.