'Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men': The moral and political scales of migration in the central Mediterranean

This paper offers recent dynamics of unauthorized migration and interception in the central Mediterranean as an example of historical anthropology of transnational region formation. It exemplifies how we can rescale classical themes in Mediterraneanist anthropology – hospitality, in this case – to illuminate transnational processes. I argue that anthropologists actually share with Human Rights advocates and European officials these ways of thinking about the scales of the moral and the political dimensions of migration, and I offer an alternative understanding of the scales of action, responsibility, and sovereignty as well as clue about how regions come to life. In the summer of 2009, the Bishop of the Sicilian town of Mazara del Vallo celebrated Holy Mass in an unprecedented way – from an altar mounted on the upper deck of an Italian Coastguard ship. The ship was anchored, together with the fishing boat tied up alongside it, off the leeward shore of the Italian island of Pantelleria, almost equidistant between the Sicilian and Tunisian shores. ^1 The position of this seaborne mass – afloat at the center of the Mediterranean – served the ritual staging of a macrocosmic transformation. Both during the mass and afterwards, the Bishop conjured up the space of Holy Communion as ‘the Mediterranean, this great Lake of Galilee.’ By casting the twenty-first century Mediterranean as the Gospel’s Lake of Galilee, the Bishop expanded the ritual act of communion and recast all its elements: the coastguard ship as St. Peter’s boat and the participating Sicilian fishers as the Apostles. When, during the seaborne mass, the bishop iterated Christ’s words to Simon and Andrew: ‘Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men,’ he cast the unauthorized migrants in danger of drowning as souls in need of salvation and, by implication, the Italian State and the European Union as Herod and the Pharisees. The ritual casting served the Bishop in justifying and applauding the fishers of his diocese’s fleet for responding to distress calls made by boats carrying clandestine migrants en route to Italian shores. The fishers’ act exemplified Mediterranean hospitality. Mazara del Vallo is the closest Sicilian town to the Tunisian shore. The town, which nowadays counts about fifty thousand inhabitants, has seen millennia of connections to the other side of the Sea, and it has played a central role in cross-Mediterranean affairs during the last sixty years: fish wars, labor migration, drugs and arms trafficking, and transnational infrastructure projects. Mazara’s role in both recent and remote histories made the town one of the Sicilian hubs of Mediterraneanism. Many economic, political, and cultural projects in town carry the word ‘Mediterranean.’ And they have all sought to secure the town’s role in the region and help its economy. The bishop initiated some of these projects and gave his blessing to many others. The seaborne Holy Mass extended the same strategy to intervene in the new transnational dynamics of unauthorized migration and interception, which were engulfing Mazara and its fleet. The Mediterranean is back. It has reemerged in the international news cycle as the sea that migrants try to cross towards European shores – where many of them die. For Europeans, these events have turned the Mediterranean into a mirror that reflects their dilemmas about the tensions between the bounds of their political union and boundless humanity. Anthropologists do not know what to do with the Mediterranean. On the one hand, its shores served as ethnographic breeding grounds for classic themes like hospitality, patronage, and networks. On the other hand, the most ambitious treatises about the elementary forms of kinship stayed away from the Mediterranean (to mention two examples, Lévi-Strauss 1969; Sahlins 2013). Instead, they followed neater examples of what Germaine Tillion called ‘republics of brothers-in-law’ (1983). In regionalist scholarship, anthropologists had once searched for the cultural unity of the Mediterranean, but then dismissed this search as a form of orientalism (Herzfeld 2005). This conclusion eliminated the sea as a candidate for understanding the processes that form transnational regions. This paper offers recent events in the central Mediterranean as an example of historical anthropology of transnational region formation. I propose viewing transnational regions as ever-changing constellations, which form and dissipate through the interaction between cross-boundary practices and official region-making projects. And I show how we can examine these dynamics from the moving vessels that lace these constellations together and stage their social relations in full view. This double attention to seaborne vessels and historical process shows how regions become palpable. By returning to the Mediterranean, we may acquire new lenses for examining transnationalism the world over. A return to the Mediterranean enables us to reframe classical themes from Mediterraneanist anthropology to illuminate processes of region formation. The theme considered here is hospitality, or, as Pitt-Rivers put it, ‘the problem of how to deal with strangers’ (1977, 94). The process is the dynamics of unauthorized migration and interception in the central Mediterranean, where a struggle emerged over the meaning of the Law of the Sea and the universal hospitality it implies. The essay contains three parts. I first revisit the role of temporal and spatial scales in classical accounts of hospitality. I then turn to the transnational working of hospitality. Here I examine how the dynamics of unauthorized migration, interception policies, and rescue at sea aligned the ways that Human Rights advocates and European officials addressed the moral and the political dimensions of the ongoing situation. I explain how the delineation of the moral and the political aspects of migration policies emerged from the dynamics of maritime migration and interdiction, and how the scales of responsibility, jurisdiction, and sovereignty depended on the ‘scalar elasticity of hospitality itself, which is always of a place but inherently transportable’ (Shryock 2012, S23) . Third, I analyze the Sacrament of the Eucharist that the Mazara Bishop performed during his pastoral visit. I focus on the alternative view of transnational hospitality that the ceremony formulated; on the jurisdictional tensions that the ceremony reveals; and on the liturgical change from the pastoral visit to the Pope’s subsequent intervention in 2013. In the conclusion, I argue that anthropologists actually share with Human Rights advocates and European officials these ways of thinking about the scales of the moral and the political. Like advocates and officials, anthropologists set their scale of reference at the paramount scale of a global ‘shared humanity’ and pan-human fraternal parity and sameness; even if some of them treat this scale politically (e.g., Ticktin 2011) and others view it morally (Fassin 2012). I then build on the transnational dynamics of hospitality to offer an alternative understanding of the scales of action, responsibility, and sovereignty, as well as a better grasp of how regions come to life. Here, the moral and the political appear not as a duo of nested scales, but rather as entwined aspects of action across scales, which includes the struggle between competing scaling projects. These projects not only affect the relationship between the moral and the political. They also shape the formation and transformation of those scale of action which lie between the local and the global – transnational regions like the Mediterranean – how palpable they seem and what they come to stand for.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.1234

Regulators of cyclin-dependent kinases are crucial for maintaining genome integrity in S phase

Maintenance of genome integrity is of critical importance to cells. To identify key regulators of genomic integrity, we screened a human cell line with a kinome small interfering RNA library. WEE1, a major regulator of mitotic entry, and CHK1 were among the genes identified. Both kinases are important negative regulators of CDK1 and -2. Strikingly, WEE1 depletion rapidly induced DNA damage in S phase in newly replicated DNA, which was accompanied by a marked increase in single-stranded DNA. This DNA damage is dependent on CDK1 and -2 as well as the replication proteins MCM2 and CDT1 but not CDC25A. Conversely, DNA damage after CHK1 inhibition is highly dependent on CDC25A. Furthermore, the inferior proliferation of CHK1-depleted cells is improved substantially by codepletion of CDC25A. We conclude that the mitotic kinase WEE1 and CHK1 jointly maintain balanced cellular control of Cdk activity during normal DNA replication, which is crucial to prevent the generation of harmful DNA lesions during replication

Development of xenopus resource centers : the national xenopus resource and the european xenopus resource center

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2011. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of John Wiley & Sons for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in genesis 50 (2012): 155–163, doi:10.1002/dvg.22013.Xenopus is an essential vertebrate model system for biomedical research that has contributed to important discoveries in many disciplines, including cell biology, molecular biology, physiology, developmental biology and neurobiology. However, unlike other model systems no central repository/stock center for Xenopus had been established until recently. Similar to mouse, zebrafish and fly communities, which have established stock centers, Xenopus researchers need to maintain and distribute rapidly growing numbers of inbred, mutant and transgenic frog strains, along with DNA and protein resources, and individual laboratories struggle to accomplish this efficiently. In the last five years two resource centers were founded to address this need: the European Xenopus Resource Center (EXRC) at the University of Portsmouth in England, and the National Xenopus Resource (NXR) at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, MA, USA. These two centers work together to provide resources and support to the Xenopus research community. The EXRC and NXR serve as stock centers and acquire, produce, maintain and distribute mutant, inbred and transgenic X. laevis and X. tropicalis lines. Independently, the EXRC is a repository for Xenopus cDNAs, fosmids and antibodies; it also provides oocytes and wild type frogs within the UK. The NXR will complement these services by providing research training and promoting intellectual interchange through hosting minicourses and workshops and offering space for researchers to perform short-term projects at the MBL. Together the EXRC and NXR will enable researchers to improve productivity by providing resources and expertise to all levels, from graduate students to experienced PIs. These two centers will also enable investigators that use other animal systems to take advantage of Xenopus’ unique experimental features to complement their studies

Mechanism of cell death resulting from DNA interstrand cross-linking in mammalian cells

DNA interstrand cross-links (ICLs) are critical cytotoxic lesions produced by cancer chemotherapeutic agents such as the nitrogen mustards and platinum drugs; however, the exact mechanism of ICL-induced cell death is unclear. Here, we show a novel mechanism of p53-independent apoptotic cell death involving prolonged cell-cycle (G2) arrest, ICL repair involving HR, transient mitosis, incomplete cytokinesis, and gross chromosomal abnormalities resulting from ICLs in mammalian cells. This characteristic ‘giant' cell death, observed by using time-lapse video microscopy, was reduced in ICL repair ERCC1- and XRCC3-deficient cells. Collectively, the results illustrate the coordination of ICL-induced cellular responses, including cell-cycle arrest, DNA damage repair, and cell death

DNA Adducts of Decarbamoyl Mitomycin C Efficiently Kill Cells without Wild-Type p53 Resulting from Proteasome-Mediated Degradation of Checkpoint Protein 1

The mitomycin derivative 10-decarbamoyl mitomycin C (DMC) more rapidly activates a p53independent cell death pathway than mitomycin C (MC). We recently documented that an increased proportion of mitosene1-β-adduct formation occurs in human cells treated with DMC in comparison to those treated with MC. Here, we compare the cellular and molecular response of human cancer cells treated with MC and DMC. We find the increase in mitosene 1-β-adduct formation correlates with a condensed nuclear morphology and increased cytotoxicity in human cancer cells with or without p53. DMC caused more DNA damage than MC in the nuclear and mitochondrial genomes. Checkpoint 1 protein (Chk1) was depleted following DMC, and the depletion of Chk1 by DMC was achieved through the ubiquitin proteasome pathway since chemical inhibition of the proteasome protected against Chk1 depletion. Gene silencing of Chk1 by siRNA increased the cytotoxicity of MC. DMC treatment caused a decrease in the level of total ubiquitinated proteins without increasing proteasome activity, suggesting that DMC mediated DNA adducts facilitate signal transduction to a pathway targeting cellular proteins for proteolysis. Thus, the mitosene-1-β stereoisomeric DNA adducts produced by the DMC signal for a p53-independent mode of cell death correlated with reduced nuclear size, persistent DNA damage, increased ubiquitin proteolysis and reduced Chk1 protein

Sensing and Processing of DNA Interstrand Crosslinks by the Mismatch Repair Pathway

DNA interstrand crosslinks (ICLs) that are repaired in non-dividing cells must be recognized independently of replication-associated DNA unwinding. Using cell-free extracts from Xenopus eggs that support neither replication nor transcription, we establish that ICLs are recognized and processed by the mismatch repair (MMR) machinery. We find that ICL repair requires MutS alpha (MSH2-MSH6) and the mismatch recognition FXE motif in MSH6, strongly suggesting that MutS alpha functions as an ICL sensor. MutS alpha recruits MutL alpha and EXO1 to ICL lesions, and the catalytic activity of both these nucleases is essential for ICL repair. As anticipated for a DNA unwinding-independent recognition process, we demonstrate that least distorting ICLs fail to be recognized and repaired by the MMR machinery. This establishes that ICL structure is a critical determinant of repair efficiency outside of DNA replication

Regulation of p73 activity by post-translational modifications

The transcription factor p73 is a member of the p53 family that can be expressed as at least 24 different isoforms with pro- or anti-apoptotic attributes. The TAp73 isoforms are expressed from an upstream promoter and are regarded as bona fide tumor suppressors; they can induce cell cycle arrest/apoptosis and protect against genomic instability. On the other hand, ΔNp73 isoforms lack the N-terminus transactivation domain; hence, cannot induce the expression of pro-apoptotic genes, but still can oligomerize with TAp73 or p53 to block their transcriptional activities. Therefore, the ratio of TAp73 isoforms to ΔNp73 isoforms is critical for the quality of the response to a genomic insult and needs to be delicately regulated at both transcriptional and post-translational level. In this review, we will summarize the current knowledge on the post-translational regulatory pathways involved to keep p73 protein under control. A comprehensive understanding of p73 post-translational modifications will be extremely useful for the development of new strategies for treating and preventing cancer

Rescue of replication failure by Fanconi anaemia proteins

Chromosomal aberrations are often associated with incomplete genome duplication, for instance at common fragile sites, or as a consequence of chemical alterations in the DNA template that block replication forks. Studies of the cancer-prone disease Fanconi anaemia (FA) have provided important insights into the resolution of replication problems. The repair of interstrand DNA crosslinks induced by chemotherapy drugs is coupled with DNA replication and controlled by FA proteins. We discuss here the recent discovery of new FA-associated proteins and the development of new tractable repair systems that have dramatically improved our understanding of crosslink repair. We focus also on how FA proteins protect against replication failure in the context of fragile sites and on the identification of reactive metabolites that account for the development of Fanconi anaemia symptoms