Social inclusivity versus analytical acuity?:A qualitative study of UK researchers regarding the inclusion of minority racial/ethnic groups in biobanks

This paper examines how the drive to include minority ethnic groups in biomedical research raises challenging questions for the governance of some biobanks. Using findings from a qualitative study with researchers working at 10 UK biobanks that have been designed to explore common complex diseases, our study highlights the potential discordance between the twin imperatives of ‘social inclusivity’ and ‘analytical acuity’. While the researchers interviewed were keen to include minority ethnic groups in their research, they were also concerned that this could have deleterious effects on the precision of their analyses. In our discussion of these findings we show that there remains considerable debate as to the impact of including participants from minority ethnic groups on analytical acuity. Nevertheless, a principle of justice requires that potential participants from all ethnic groups should be given the opportunity to participate in and benefit from biomedical research, and UK law requires public bodies (including research councils) to demonstrate that there is no unintentional or unjustifiable ‘racial’ discrimination in their activities. Researchers' concerns about analytical acuity could result in calls for study designs that examine every ‘different’ ethnic group, which would have consequences for the governance of some biobank studies and for efforts to challenge the discredited yet resilient idea that differences between ethnic groups are innate, essential and immutable

New Labour’s citizens: activated, empowered, responsibilized, abandoned?

New Labour has paid considerable attention to citizenship. In this paper I explore the different ways in which citizens have been addressed and affected by New Labour policies, concentrating on four processes: activation, empowerment, responsibilization and abandonment. I argue that these different processes are not just the effect of looking at New Labour from different perspectives. Rather they need to be seen as linked in a political and governmental project that seeks to construct the unity of the nation and manage its internal diversity

On the origin & thermal stability of Arrokoth's and Pluto's ices

International audienceWe discuss in a thermodynamic, geologically empirical way the long-term nature of the stable majority ices that could be present in Kuiper Belt Object 2014 MU69 after its 4.6 Gyr residence in the EKB as a cold classical object. Considering the stability versus sublimation into vacuum for the suite of ices commonly found on comets, Centaurs, and KBOs at the average ~40K sunlit surface temperature of MU69 over Myr to Gyr, we find only 3 common ices that are truly refractory: HCN, CH3OH, and H2O (in order of increasing stability). NH3 and H2CO ices are marginally stable and may be removed by any positive temperature excursions in the EKB, as produced every 1e8 - 1e9 yrs by nearby supernovae and passing O/B stars. To date the NH team has reported the presence of abundant CH3OH and evidence for H2O on MU69s surface (Lisse et al. 2017, Grundy et al. 2020). NH3 has been searched for, but not found. We predict that future absorption feature detections will be due to an HCN or poly-H2CO based species. Consideration of the conditions present in the EKB region during the formation era of MU69 lead us to infer that it formed "in the dark", in an optically thick mid-plane, unable to see the nascent, variable, highly luminous Young Stellar Object-TTauri Sun, and that KBOs contain HCN and CH3OH ice phases in addition to the H2O ice phases found in their Short Period comet descendants. Finally, when we apply our ice thermal stability analysis to bodies/populations related to MU69, we find that methanol ice may be ubiquitous in the outer solar system; that if Pluto is not a fully differentiated body, then it must have gained its hypervolatile ices from proto-planetary disk sources in the first few Myr of the solar systems existence; and that hypervolatile rich, highly primordial comet C/2016 R2 was placed onto an Oort Cloud orbit on a similar timescale