Homosexuality, health and humanity: Hlebotomy and biases Against gays

During the authors’ visit to hospital for a voluntary blood donation, one of them took notice of a problematic question in a survey that would determine whether one is fit to donate blood. This question was “Nakipagtalik ka na ba sa iyong kauri?” which, in English, translates to “Have you ever had sexual relations with your own kind?

Marginally Better: My Husband’s Lover And Gay Portrayal

My Husband’s Lover is a Philippine telenovela that has garnered critical and commercial success (and along the way catapulting its two stars to A-list status), mainly due to a premise that heavily mirrors Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005) but that which is unique to generally conservative Philippine society. Two high school best friends Eric Del Mundo (Dennis Trillo) and Vincent Soriano (Tom Rodriguez) also happen to be high school sweethearts, with the former leaving the latter.. Likewise, the latter’s family is the typical conservative Filipino family, so he decided to conceal his homosexuality for fear of being disowned. The two reunite years later, with Eric returning from the United States and learning that his former lover is engaged and is expecting a child with Lally Agatep (Carla Abellana). The series details the continuation of Vincent’s and Eric’s (still hidden) romance, and the former’s internal conflict, that between his true feelings and his morals. The dynamics of a love triangle peculiar to the average Filipino audience separate it from the typical Filipino romantic plotline, the portrayal of homosexuality being another Philippine TV trope that has been amply twisted so that it is “fresh.” Instead of the usual flamboyant gay best friend, the homosexuals are not only far from flamboyant, but are also the main characters of the series. Instead of being staples of beauty salons speaking in seeming code that is actually gay lingo, the homosexuals are affluent and well-spoken. The authors will buttress their textual analysis of all ten seasons of My Husband’s Lover with literature on the bakla and the global gay. With queer theory as the framework of the study, with emphasis on the theory’s element of performativity, the authors will also use several significant instances throughout the ten seasons of the series as premises to one of queer theory’s assumptions, that gender is fluid

Pilgrimage and Beyond: Going Places, Far and Away

Going Places and Far & Away are two main issues of interest in this volume, generated from the 7th Global Sacred Journeys Conference. This was the first digital or remote conference and was entitled Pilgrimage and Beyon

IJRTP Volume 10(iv) Table of Contents

Special Issue : Pilgrimage as a Multi-Faceted Diamond, containing papers from Sacred Journeys 9th Global Conference at the University of Primorska’s Department of Tourism, in Portoroz and Piran, Slovenia, from July 6-8, 202

Pilgrimage and beyond : going places, far and away

Also available at: Arrow, TU Dublin, https://arrow.tudublin.ie/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1619&context=ijrtpGoing Places and Far & Away are two main issues of interest in this volume, generated from our 7th Global Sacred Journeys Conference, but our first digital or remote conference entitled Pilgrimage and Beyond. Originally, the plan had been to convene in lovely Piran, Slovenia, hosted at the University of Primorska, from 29 June to 1 July 2020. A common saying is that the plan will never survive the battle, and so it was that Covid-19 did indeed upset the applecart. We had to resort to holding Sacred Journeys 7 via a digital platform in the same summer of 2020. Thanks to great efforts, especially those of Chadwick Co Sy Su and Ian McIntosh, we managed to create a memorable event, spread out over a couple of days. The fruit of these efforts are presented here, split in two sections, Going Places and Far and Away, since both phenomena walk along the same path, albeit in different dimensions. Although many papers on pilgrimage would typically have practical and theoretical elements, it just happened that the current papers had rather clear-cut distinctions. This does not mean, of course, that the papers fail to cover the complexity of pilgrimage, as the current selection traverses over several geographical areas, pilgrimage phenomena and concepts. The editors did not shy away from the notion of the ‘unity of contrasts’, where we allowed the academic scope to widen, for instance, to include articles on non-academic professions which use pilgrimage as a tool.peer-reviewe

Pan-cancer analysis of whole genomes

Cancer is driven by genetic change, and the advent of massively parallel sequencing has enabled systematic documentation of this variation at the whole-genome scale(1-3). Here we report the integrative analysis of 2,658 whole-cancer genomes and their matching normal tissues across 38 tumour types from the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium of the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). We describe the generation of the PCAWG resource, facilitated by international data sharing using compute clouds. On average, cancer genomes contained 4-5 driver mutations when combining coding and non-coding genomic elements; however, in around 5% of cases no drivers were identified, suggesting that cancer driver discovery is not yet complete. Chromothripsis, in which many clustered structural variants arise in a single catastrophic event, is frequently an early event in tumour evolution; in acral melanoma, for example, these events precede most somatic point mutations and affect several cancer-associated genes simultaneously. Cancers with abnormal telomere maintenance often originate from tissues with low replicative activity and show several mechanisms of preventing telomere attrition to critical levels. Common and rare germline variants affect patterns of somatic mutation, including point mutations, structural variants and somatic retrotransposition. A collection of papers from the PCAWG Consortium describes non-coding mutations that drive cancer beyond those in the TERT promoter(4); identifies new signatures of mutational processes that cause base substitutions, small insertions and deletions and structural variation(5,6); analyses timings and patterns of tumour evolution(7); describes the diverse transcriptional consequences of somatic mutation on splicing, expression levels, fusion genes and promoter activity(8,9); and evaluates a range of more-specialized features of cancer genomes(8,10-18).Peer reviewe

Sacred Journeys: Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

Pilgrimage, being an ancient practice and a global phenomenon, continues to gain a growinginterest among scholars as its scope traverses many other disciplines and perspectives.[...

The Crossroads of Plastination and Pilgrimage

At the Singapore Science Centre in 2010, I went to Body Worlds, an exhibit set up by the Institute for Plastination, founded by Gunther von Hagens. As I later learned, he pioneered plastination—the art, science, and technique of preserving entire bodies and body parts for use in medical and anatomical research, exhibition, or both. A few months after, I made the decision to donate my body after death to the Institute under arrangements similar to that of a Living Will. In my visits to two other Body World exhibits in Germany and the Netherlands, I have seen organs perfectly preserved and had thoughts occur to me that one day, I may well be an exhibit specimen instead of an exhibit attendee. By establishing a connection with existing pilgrimage literature; and using a combination of thick description and pragmatic analyses; this paper puts forward the proposition that visits to these; and other similar; exhibits constitute a pilgrimage of and to the self. The paper also discusses the ethics and practical consequences of body donation; and evaluates the arguments for and against the body donation decision from the lenses of the person making the donation; the person’s significant others; and societal influencers. The paper concludes by suggesting take-off points in discussing the connection between plastination and pilgrimage; particularly in the contexts of intercultural communication and religious studies