Suspect Subjects: Affects of Bodily Regulation

There is a growing body of academic literature that scrutinises the effects of technologies deployed to surveil the physical bodies of citizens. This paper considers the role of affect; that is, the visceral and emotive forces underpinning conscious forms of knowing that can drive one’s thoughts, feelings and movements. Drawing from research on two distinctly different groups of surveilled subjects – paroled sex offenders and elite athletes – it examines the effects of biosurveillance in their lives and how their reflections reveal unique insight into how subjectivity, citizenship, harm and deviance become constructed in intimate and public ways vis-à-vis technologies of bodily regulation. Specifically, we argue, their narratives reveal cultural conditions of biosurveillance, particularly how risk becomes embodied and internalised in subjective ways

New insights into the genetic etiology of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias

Characterization of the genetic landscape of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and related dementias (ADD) provides a unique opportunity for a better understanding of the associated pathophysiological processes. We performed a two-stage genome-wide association study totaling 111,326 clinically diagnosed/'proxy' AD cases and 677,663 controls. We found 75 risk loci, of which 42 were new at the time of analysis. Pathway enrichment analyses confirmed the involvement of amyloid/tau pathways and highlighted microglia implication. Gene prioritization in the new loci identified 31 genes that were suggestive of new genetically associated processes, including the tumor necrosis factor alpha pathway through the linear ubiquitin chain assembly complex. We also built a new genetic risk score associated with the risk of future AD/dementia or progression from mild cognitive impairment to AD/dementia. The improvement in prediction led to a 1.6- to 1.9-fold increase in AD risk from the lowest to the highest decile, in addition to effects of age and the APOE ε4 allele

A meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies identifies multiple longevity genes

Publisher's version (útgefin grein).Human longevity is heritable, but genome-wide association (GWA) studies have had limited success. Here, we perform two meta-analyses of GWA studies of a rigorous longevity phenotype definition including 11,262/3484 cases surviving at or beyond the age corresponding to the 90th/99th survival percentile, respectively, and 25,483 controls whose age at death or at last contact was at or below the age corresponding to the 60th survival percentile. Consistent with previous reports, rs429358 (apolipoprotein E (ApoE) ε4) is associated with lower odds of surviving to the 90th and 99th percentile age, while rs7412 (ApoE ε2) shows the opposite. Moreover, rs7676745, located near GPR78, associates with lower odds of surviving to the 90th percentile age. Gene-level association analysis reveals a role for tissue-specific expression of multiple genes in longevity. Finally, genetic correlation of the longevity GWA results with that of several disease-related phenotypes points to a shared genetic architecture between health and longevity.Alexander von Humboldt-StiftungPeer Reviewe

A meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies identifies multiple longevity genes

Human longevity is heritable, but genome-wide association (GWA) studies have had limited success. Here, we perform two meta-analyses of GWA studies of a rigorous longevity phenotype definition including 11,262/3484 cases surviving at or beyond the age corresponding to the 90th/99th survival percentile, respectively, and 25,483 controls whose age at death or at last contact was at or below the age corresponding to the 60th survival percentile. Consistent with previous reports, rs429358 (apolipoprotein E (ApoE) ε4) is associated with lower odds of surviving to the 90th and 99th percentile age, while rs7412 (ApoE ε2) shows the opposite. Moreover, rs7676745, located near GPR78, associates with lower odds of surviving to the 90th percentile age. Gene-level association analysis reveals a role for tissue-specific expression of multiple genes in longevity. Finally, genetic correlation of the longevity GWA results with that of several disease-related phenotypes points to a shared genetic architecture between health and longevity

Brain Politics: Gendered Difference and Traumatic Brain Injury in Sport

Media coverage of high-profile lawsuits involving professional sport leagues in North America has helped to raise awareness of the effects of traumatic brain injury (TBI). In response to the popular emphasis on men’s collision sports, this chapter examines gendered contours of concussion and TBI through a focus on how U.S.-based advocates and experts frame them in relation to women, highlighting their implications for understandings of TBI among participants in women’s sports. Specifically, it scrutinizes how efforts to capture and explain women’s experiences of TBI in popular, regulatory, and scientific narratives reveal complications between notions of sex and gender. It considers three domains of work carried out by advocates, clinicians, and researchers, elucidating the politics of sex/gender within each: (1) calls for sport-specific TBI policy and regulation; (2) explanations of sport-related TBI, and (3) scientific knowledge about TBI that informs—and is informed by—sport. The chapter concludes with a reflection on how different articulations of sex/gender operate constitutively in the shaping of concussion in women’s sport and the female athlete as a body. Building upon feminist research concerned with neuroscience and the brain, the analysis unpacks how gendered interpretations of science inform foundational understandings of the concussion crises in sport

"I felt like a lab rat": the importance of power and context in understanding biometric technologies

In “Tracking U.S. Professional Athletes,” Karkazis and Fishman (2017) identify risks associated with the expanded monitoring enabled by biometric technologies. These technologies, as the authors correctly observe, have a range of applications in sport—injury management and prevention, training and performance enhancement, and health management, to name just a few—and “offer the potential to monitor athletes’ physiology around the clock, on and off the field” (45). The ability to track, document, and share data on various aspects of athletes’ biological and physical characteristics becomes particularly problematic in practice: Not only are there significant power differentials in U.S. professional sport that often disadvantage athletes, there is also an absence of regulation aimed at protecting athletes’ data and its use. Recognizing that Karkazis and Fishman's article is a preliminary overview of the ethical concerns at hand, this commentary focuses on two areas for further consideration: (1) the need for deeper knowledge about how athletes perceive and value issues of personal autonomy, bodily integrity, and individual privacy; and (2) a more nuanced understanding of regulation than the authors present in the article. Critically engaging both areas has the potential to assist in developing regulatory approaches that support better governance by addressing data-specific issues, as well as underlying institutional dynamics that inform them. If regulation is to benefit less powerful actors—in this case, athletes—then it must do more than apply existing recommendations on data governance; it must be attentive to the specific norms and values of the sports it aims to influence

Taking a Break to Think through Gender and Regulation: Doping as a Case Study

In admitting to perjury before two grand juries during investigations into Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO) steroid ring and a related check fraud ring, Marion Jones received a six-month sentence followed by a two-year probationary period. Consequently, these very same actions spurred another set of punitive mechanisms in which Jones was stripped of the five Olympic medals she won during the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, for a so-called crime separate from perjury—that is, cheating in sport. Subject to two formal modes of punishment, Jones occupies a space of transgression that has marked her body as criminal—in fact, a felon— for overstepping the ethical boundaries of performance enhancement

Taking a Break to Think through Gender and Regulation: Doping as a Case Study

In admitting to perjury before two grand juries during investigations into Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO) steroid ring and a related check fraud ring, Marion Jones received a six-month sentence followed by a two-year probationary period. Consequently, these very same actions spurred another set of punitive mechanisms in which Jones was stripped of the five Olympic medals she won during the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, for a so-called crime separate from perjury—that is, cheating in sport. Subject to two formal modes of punishment, Jones occupies a space of transgression that has marked her body as criminal—in fact, a felon— for overstepping the ethical boundaries of performance enhancement

Reforming Global Sport: Hybridity and the Challenges of Pursuing Transparency

In light of recent controversies in global sport, this article surveys the challenges of pursuing transparency in this particular domain of governance. Although corruption in sport is attracting more scholarly attention, there remains little sociolegal research that reflects critically on corporate governance in sport and its implications. This article outlines current calls for greater transparency in global sport and considers how capitalistic underpinnings and distinct hybrid arrangements complicate the task of transparency. It concludes by reflecting on how insights from studies of regulatory capitalism can inform alternative approaches to transparency and accountability in global sport

A global movement or globalized movements? An examination of WADA and anti-doping networks

Despite the increasingly critical scholarship on anti-doping regulations, the socio-legal implications of the World Anti-Doping Agency's (WADA) authority have yet to be interrogated. Using a queer theoretical lens of analysis, this thesis examines the language appropriated by WADA representatives regarding the agency's regulatory mechanisms and their ideological underpinnings. To do so, this study adapts ethnographic methods used to study legal and globalized processes. By analyzing transcripts from the World Conference on Doping in Sport, this thesis provides a "thick description" of how policymakers depict the problem of doping, the ways in which they express how it is and should be regulated, and the ideologies articulated in relation to WADA's platform. It concludes with a discussion of how this regulatory regime, as a case study, challenges the linguistic appropriations assumed within globalization and socio-legal studies