The ethics of using transgenic non-human primates to study what makes us human

An ongoing flood of comparative genomic data is identifying human lineage specific (HLS) sequences of unknown function, and there is strong interest in investigating their functional effects. Transgenic apes, our closest evolutionary relative, have the highest potential to express HLS sequences as they are expressed in Homo sapiens and likewise experience harm from such transgenic research. These harms render the conduct of this research ethically unacceptable in apes, justifying regulatory barriers between these species and all other non-human primates for transgenic research

What Research Ethics Should Learn from Genomics and Society Research: Lessons from the ELSI Congress of 2011

Research on the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of human genomics has devoted significant attention to the research ethics issues that arise from genomic science as it moves through the translational process. Given the prominence of these issues in today's debates over the state of research ethics overall, these studies are well positioned to contribute important data, contextual considerations, and policy arguments to the wider research ethics community's deliberations, and ultimately to develop a research ethics that can help guide biomedicine's future. In this essay, we illustrate this thesis through an analytic summary of the research presented at the 2011 ELSI Congress, an international meeting of genomics and society researchers. We identify three pivotal factors currently shaping genomic research, its clinical translation, and its societal implications: (1) the increasingly blurred boundary between research and treatment; (2) uncertainty — that is, the indefinite, indeterminate, and incomplete nature of much genomic information and the challenges that arise from making meaning and use of it; and (3) the role of negotiations between multiple scientific and non-scientific stakeholders in setting the priorities for and direction of biomedical research, as it is increasingly conducted “in the public square.

Measurement of the Deuteron Structure Function F₂ in the Resonance Region and Evaluation of its Moments

Inclusive electron scattering off the deuteron has been measured to extract the deuteron structure function F2 with the CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer (CLAS) at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. The measurement covers the entire resonance region from the quasielastic peak up to the invariant mass of the final-state hadronic system W similar or equal to 2.7 GeV with four-momentum transfers Q2 from 0.4 to 6 (GeV/c)2. These data are complementary to previous measurements of the proton structure function F2 and cover a similar two-dimensional region of Q2 and Bjorken variable x. Determination of the deuteron F2 over a large x interval including the quasielastic peak as a function of Q2, together with the other world data, permit a direct evaluation of the structure function moments for the first time. By fitting the Q2 evolution of these moments with an OPE-based twist expansion we have obtained a separation of the leading twist and higher twist terms. The observed Q2 behavior of the higher twist contribution suggests a partial cancelation of different higher twists entering into the expansion with opposite signs. This cancelation, found also in the proton moments, is a manifestation of the duality phenomenon in the F2 structure function

Magnetic moment of the pentaquark Θ+(1540)\Theta^+(1540) with light-cone QCD sum rules

In this article, we study the magnetic moment of the pentaquark state $\Theta^+(1540)$ as diquark-diquark-antiquark ($[ud][ud]\bar{s}$) state in the framework of the light-cone QCD sum rules approach. The numerical results indicate the magnetic moment of the pentaquark state $\Theta^+(1540)$ is about $\mu_{\Theta^+}=-(0.49\pm 0.06)\mu_N$.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure. The main contents of this article is included in hep-ph/0503007, this article will not be submitted to a journal for publicatio

Pentaquarks: review of the experimental evidence

Pentaquarks, namely baryons made by 4 quarks and one antiquark have been predicted and searched for since several decades without success. Theoretical and experimental advances in the last 2 years led to the observation of a number of pentaquark candidates. We review the experimental evidence for pentaquarks as well as their non-observations by some experiments, and discuss to which extend these sometimes contradicting informations may lead to a consistent picture.Comment: Contribution to the International Conference on 'Strangeness in Quark Matter', 15-21 Sept. 2004, Cape Tawn, South Afric

Quark-Hadron Duality in Spin Structure Functions g(1)(p) and g(1)(d)

New measurements of the spin structure functions of the proton and deuteron g(1)(p)(x,Q2) and g(1)(d)(x,Q2) in the nucleon resonance region are compared with extrapolations of target-mass-corrected next-to-leading-order (NLO) QCD fits to higher energy data. Averaged over the entire resonance region (W \u3c2 \u3eGeV), the data and QCD fits are in good agreement in both magnitude and Q2 dependence for Q2 \u3e1.7 GeV2/c2. This global duality appears to result from cancellations among the prominent local resonance regions: in particular strong σ3/2 contributions in the Δ (1232) region appear to be compensated by strong σ1/2 contributions in the resonance region centered on 1.5 GeV. These results are encouraging for the extension of NLO QCD fits to lower W and Q2 than have been used previously

A semiquantitative metric for evaluating clinical actionability of incidental or secondary findings from genome-scale sequencing

As genome-scale sequencing is increasingly applied in clinical scenarios, a wide variety of genomic findings will be discovered as secondary or incidental findings, and there is debate about how they should be handled. The clinical actionability of such findings varies, necessitating standardized frameworks for a priori decision making about their analysis

Measurement of Deeply Virtual Compton Scattering With a Polarized-Proton Target

The longitudinal target-spin asymmetry AUL for the exclusive electroproduction of high-energy photons was measured for the first time in e→p→e′pγ. The data have been accumulated at JLab with the CLAS spectrometer using 5.7 GeV electrons and a longitudinally polarized NH3 target. A significant azimuthal angular dependence was observed, resulting from the interference of the deeply virtual Compton scattering and Bethe-Heitler processes. The amplitude of the sinϕ moment is 0.252±0.042stat±0.020sys. Theoretical calculations are in good agreement with the magnitude and the kinematic dependence of the target-spin asymmetry, which is sensitive to the generalized parton distributions ˜H and H