THE CENTER OF VACCINE CONTROVERSY: WI-38 CELLS

Throughout history, there exists no bigger killer than disease. For centuries, families have fought against sickness and death, and ancient culture has spent thousands of years developing their own methods for healing. In the most recent years, the field of medicine has greatly expanded, allowing for cures and medicine to be greatly distributed to the general public. Millions of lives have been saved, and today society can live without fear of lurking diseases snatching away loved ones with a blink of an eye. This senior thesis focuses on the development of vaccines made from the WI-38 cell line. This cell line was developed from a 1960s aborted Swedish fetus, which marks the source of controversy. Today, this cell line is primarily used in the MMR (mumps, measles, and rubella), varicella (chickenpox), hepatitis A, and a certain rabies vaccine. However, because of the development origin of the vaccine virus, many people refuse to take these life-saving vaccines because they contain the cells of an abortion. So here lies the question – was the use of this cell line necessary, and should they be continued to be used to immunize millions of children and infants every year? With thorough research and careful analysis, the answer is yes. The WI-38 cell line was indeed a necessary foundation in the vaccines’ development. This paper explores the struggles, the disasters, and the controversies that surround the vaccines made from this cell line, and ultimately narrows down on two main facts supporting the usage of these cells: versatility and abundance, and safety. Thoroughly conducted research has proved that the WI-38 cell line to be a safe and reliable method of vaccine growth, which has only been supported by the impact that the cells have left on human history. According to researchers, the WI-38 cells has treated and prevented an estimated 198 million cases of polio, measles, mumps, rubella, varicella, rabies, and hepatitis A in the U.S alone. These cells have offered hope to desperate families, and promises security to those living today. The WI-38 cell line has been a center of controversy ever since it was established. However, when one delves deeper into the research and history behind these cells, they realize that these cells are needed in the development of life-saving vaccines. The vaccines developed from these cells have saved and ensured millions of children’s lives for the past sixty years, and will continue being a life-saving source to years to come

Think Nationally, Act Locally: Cities and the Struggle for Social Justice

Liberals and progressives typically look to the national government to make policy aimed at achieving social justice. Historically, that is not without reason. As Professor Kathleen Morris of Golden Gate University School of Law put it in a recent email exchange, social elites reached for the federal level in large part because the states and localities proved themselves to be genuinely terrifying to marginalized folks between 1860 and 1980.” Few things remain constant in the struggle for social justice, however. The liberal and progressive national focus backfired as conservative and right-wing forces built power in state legislatures, enabling them to control national outcomes through gerrymandering and voter suppression and to assert power at the local level by enlisting the police. “In the forty years between 1980 and 2020,” Kathleen adds, “the feds have grown more terrifying, which is why progressives are now turning more attention to the local level.

Woman-life-freedom. Women’s participation in the economic/ecological project of the Democratic Federation of Norther Syria-Rojava

Bajo los principios de la ecología social, el confederalismo democrático ha propiciado que las mujeres que participan en él consideren ineludible su adscripción al sistema de comunas y cooperativas a través de las cuales se está creando un modelo sustentable de producción y, hasta ahora, lo que consideran como el logro más representativo de este proceso, es decir, Jinwar, la única aldea ecológica de mujeres. A pesar de ello, el proyecto económico/ecológico de Rojava también enfrenta una serie de dificultades que ponen en peligro su subsistenciaFollowing the principles of social ecology, Democratic Confederalism has led its women participants essentially to consider their membership in the system of communes and cooperatives. On it, they see one important and sustainable production model and, so far, the most representative achievement of this process, this is, the creation of Jinwar, the only ecological village of women. Despite this, the economic/ecological project of Rojava also faces a series of difficulties that endanger its subsistenc

Disarming “Nature” as a Weapon: A Queer Ecosemiotic Reimagining of Futurity and Environmental Ethics Through Memoir

In this thesis, I posit that the need for an active, conscious, and radical queering of ecocriticism as a literary and cultural theory has arisen in light of the postmodern problematization of “nature” and the “natural,” along with the queerness of society, culture, and science. The way we understand “nature” (in life and in texts), whether of physical environments, inherent selfhood, or normalcy, begs to be appropriately informed by discourses and realities of queerness in order for both social and environmental healing to take place. I have analyzed three works of queer creative nonfiction—memoirs—to illuminate the ways in which the lives of queer people and their queer phenomenologies might lay a groundwork for positive, healthy interaction between physical environments and animal societies, including humankind’s, and I found that queer experience and discourses provide much to the study of one’s relationship with environments and “nature.” In this study, the three queer family memoirs from the twenty-first century I have analyzed are: Fun Home (2006) by Alison Bechdel, The Nature of Home (2007) by Greta Gaard, and The Argonauts (2015) by Maggie Nelson. I focused my reading on the extent to which these texts speak to the instability of prevailing systems and hierarchies we might not expect, such as family, home, love, and community. Eventually, these texts establish what signifiers “family,” “home,” “nature,” and “community” could be and mean if they were valued queerly, horizontally, and ecosystemically instead of hierarchically

Murray Bookchin, La Révolution à venir. Assemblées populaires et promesse de démocratie directe

Publié aux États-Unis en 2015, cet ouvrage est un recueil de 9 articles rédigés par Murray Bookchin entre 1990 et 2002 et présentés sans ordre chronologique. Une préface d’Ursula Le Guin, autrice majeure de science-fiction, proche de la nouvelle gauche américaine et de l’écologie (p. xii et xiii), donne le ton, en voyant dans cette publication l’aboutissement du combat anticapitalisme de son auteur, retour sur les échecs du mouvement révolutionnaire, mise en place d’un système global novateu..