Validation of a molecular and pathological model for five-year mortality risk in patients with early stage lung adenocarcinoma

Introduction: The aim of this study was to validate a molecular expression signature [cell cycle progression (CCP) score] that identifies patients with a higher risk of cancer-related death after surgical resection of early stage (I-II) lung adenocarcinoma in a large patient cohort and evaluate the effectiveness of combining CCP score and pathological stage for predicting lung cancer mortality. Methods: Formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded surgical tumor samples from 650 patients diagnosed with stage I and II adenocarcinoma who underwent definitive surgical treatment without adjuvant chemotherapy were analyzed for 31 proliferation genes by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction. The prognostic discrimination of the expression score was assessed by Cox proportional hazards analysis using 5-year lung cancer-specific death as primary outcome. Results: The CCP score was a significant predictor of lung cancer-specific mortality above clinical covariates [hazard ratio (HR) = 1.46 per interquartile range (95% confidence interval = 1.12–1.90; p = 0.0050)]. The prognostic score, a combination of CCP score and pathological stage, was a more significant indicator of lung cancer mortality risk than pathological stage in the full cohort (HR = 2.01; p = 2.8 × 10−11) and in stage I patients (HR = 1.67; p = 0.00027). Using the 85th percentile of the prognostic score as a threshold, there was a significant difference in lung cancer survival between low-risk and high-risk patient groups (p = 3.8 × 10−7). Conclusions: This study validates the CCP score and the prognostic score as independent predictors of lung cancer death in patients with early stage lung adenocarcinoma treated with surgery alone. Patients with resected stage I lung adenocarcinoma and a high prognostic score may be candidates for adjuvant therapy to reduce cancer-related mortality

Red textures and the work of juxtaposition

Simon Gush's evocative work Red is an installation, an exhibit, a film, a website, and a provocation to think about what these different forms convey and do, and how they do so. What kinds of engagement, work and knowledge production are involved in curating, designing and creating work in different formats, each of which combines varied media and forms of expression? This article considers the design and interpretive possibilities of Red's different forms, paying particular attention to juxtaposition as a fundamental technique in designing and constructing exhibits, films and websites. The analysis examines the layerings, interactions, timings and textures involved and draws in other exhibitions to highlight the ways that Red and history museums approach their work and relations to time, history and historiography

Exhibition, difference and the logic of culture

A good deal of contemporary museum theory and practice has concerned itself with the ways in which museum environments - and the social and symbolic exchanges that take place within them - might be refashioned so as to transform museums into “differencing machines” committed to the promotion of cross-cultural understanding, especially across divisions that have been racialized. The question I want to pose here is whether this aspiration involves a series of collateral changes that, taken together, add up to a more general change in how museums operate and their situation within the cultural field. To put the point more rhetorically, does the conception of the museum as a “differencing machine” aspire to new forms of dialogism that place earlier notions of exhibition into question? I want also to review, and qualify, the concept of the “exhibitionary complex” by arguing the need to view the operations of this complex in the broader perspective of what, for the purposes of my argument here, I shall call the “logic of culture.” Before I come to either of these questions, however, I want to worry away a little at what is involved in pursuing these concerns in a context defined by a conjunction of “public cultures” and “global transformations” and the ways in which these evoke the concepts of globalization and the public sphere (or spheres) even while distancing themselves from such concepts. The consequences for how we engage with the changing role of museums can vary significantly depending on how each of these terms is interpreted and how the relations between them are viewed. And each has the potential to significantly misdirect inquiry

Seven Things to Know about Female Genital Surgeries in Africa

Starting in the early 1980s, media coverage of customary African genital surgeries for females has been problematic and overly reliant on sources from within a global activist and advocacy movement opposed to the practice, variously described as female genital mutilation, female genital cutting, or female circumcision. Here, we use the more neutral expression female genital surgery. In their passion to end the practice, anti-mutilation advocacy organizations often make claims about female genital surgeries in Africa that are inaccurate or overgeneralized or that don't apply to most cases. The aim of this article—which we offer as a public policy advisory statement from a group of concerned research scholars, physicians, and policy experts—is not to take a collective stance on the practice of genital surgeries for either females or males. Our main aim is to express our concern about the media coverage of female genital surgeries in Africa, to call for greater accuracy in cultural representations of little-known others, and to strive for evenhandedness and high standards of reason and evidence in any future public policy debates. In effect, the statement is an invitation to actually have that debate, with all sides of the story fairly represented

Modesty and modernity: photography, race, and representation on Mexico’s Costa Chica (Guerrero)

This article uses ethnographic techniques to examine photographic practices in and around San Nicolás Tolentino, Guerrero, a rural community in a historically black region of Mexico. At its core is a juxtaposed interpretation of a book of photographs entitled Tierra Negra (Black Earth), taken by a Mexican photographer in the early 1990s, and local people’s “home” photos, mostly portraits of family members displayed on the walls of sitting rooms. In 2001, I brought Tierra Negra to San Nicolás in order to elicit local people’s responses to the photographs, which turn out to be mostly of them. Through their comments on these photos, as well as discourses around their home photos, I elaborate on identity issues and local people’s formulations of progress and modernity. I situate my analysis in the historical and anthropological scholarship on race and photographic representation as I draw conclusions about the distinct yet overlapping meanings that “outsiders” and “insiders” give to blackness and the values that such blackness holds as commodity, as historical memory and as one of the roots of Mexican national identity