Prolonging Life

A physician decides not to prolong the life of a terminal patient. What are the legal consequences? Is it murder, akin to a gunman\u27s pulling the trigger? Or is the law more sensitive? Professor Fletcher proposes that a decision to interrupt life-sustaining therapy, such as that to turn off a mechanical respirator, should be classified as an omission, not an act. He arrives at this conclusion by analyzing the common sense usages of cause and permit. If the decision is an omission then the law must focus on the doctor-patient relationship to define legal consequences, allowing customary standards of the relationship to be the controlling criteria. Thus a heavy responsibility is placed on the medical profession to develop humane and sensitive standards for guiding decisions about prolonging life

Prolonging Life

A physician decides not to prolong the life of a terminal patient. What are the legal consequences? Is it murder, akin to a gunman\u27s pulling the trigger? Or is the law more sensitive? Professor Fletcher proposes that a decision to interrupt life-sustaining therapy, such as that to turn off a mechanical respirator, should be classified as an omission, not an act. He arrives at this conclusion by analyzing the common sense usages of cause and permit. If the decision is an omission then the law must focus on the doctor-patient relationship to define legal consequences, allowing customary standards of the relationship to be the controlling criteria. Thus a heavy responsibility is placed on the medical profession to develop humane and sensitive standards for guiding decisions about prolonging life

Prolonging assembly through dissociation:A self assembly paradigm in microtubules

We study a one-dimensional model of microtubule assembly/disassembly in which GTP bound to tubulins within the microtubule undergoes stochastic hydrolysis. In contrast to models that only consider a cap of GTP-bound tubulin, stochastic hydrolysis allows GTP-bound tubulin remnants to exist within the microtubule. We find that these buried GTP remnants enable an alternative mechanism of recovery from shrinkage, and enhances fluctuations of filament lengths. Under conditions for which this alternative mechanism dominates, an increasing depolymerization rate leads to a decrease in dissociation rate and thus a net increase in assembly.Comment: accepted for publication in Physical Review

Sinister Intentions and Devastating Results: Intervention and Duration of Civil Conflict

In the post-Second World War era, intra-state conflict has become an increasingly prominent feature of the international system. Accompanying the increase in civil conflicts has been interventions by third-parties seeking to influence the outcome of those civil conflicts. This has had a decisive impact on the duration of civil conflict that this work seeks to analyze in detail. Using duration of civil conflict as the dependent variable and intervention as the independent variable, this work will seek to demonstrate empirically that intervention in civil conflict has a significant impact on prolonging the duration of the conflict and can contribute to complicating efforts to reach peace settlements ending civil conflict. This work seeks to achieve this by analyzing the motives of states for intervening and how it contextualizes intervention and its impact on duration and types of third-party interventions that impact duration. It will do this through analyzing relevant scholarship regarding these topics and how they impact intervention and duration of civil conflict