Preembryo Personhood: An Assessment of the President’s Council Arguments

The President’s Council on Bioethics has addressed the moral status of human preembryos in its reports on stem cell research and human therapeutic cloning. Although the Council has been criticized for being hand-picked to favor the right-to-life viewpoint concerning human preembryos, it has embraced the idea that the right-to-life position should be defended in secular terms. This is an important feature of the Council’s work, and it demonstrates a recognition of the need for genuine engagement between opposing sides in the debate over stem cell research. To promote this engagement, the Council has stated in secular terms several arguments for the personhood of human preembryos. This essay presents and critiques those arguments, and it concludes that they are unsuccessful. If the best arguments in support of the personhood of human preembryos have been presented by the Council, then there are no reasonable secular arguments in support of that view

Autoantibodies against type I IFNs in patients with life-threatening COVID-19

Interindividual clinical variability in the course of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection is vast. We report that at least 101 of 987 patients with life-threatening coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pneumonia had neutralizing immunoglobulin G (IgG) autoantibodies (auto-Abs) against interferon-w (IFN-w) (13 patients), against the 13 types of IFN-a (36), or against both (52) at the onset of critical disease; a few also had auto-Abs against the other three type I IFNs. The auto-Abs neutralize the ability of the corresponding type I IFNs to block SARS-CoV-2 infection in vitro. These auto-Abs were not found in 663 individuals with asymptomatic or mild SARS-CoV-2 infection and were present in only 4 of 1227 healthy individuals. Patients with auto-Abs were aged 25 to 87 years and 95 of the 101 were men. A B cell autoimmune phenocopy of inborn errors of type I IFN immunity accounts for life-threatening COVID-19 pneumonia in at least 2.6% of women and 12.5% of men

Management of large mediastinal masses: surgical and anesthesiological considerations

Large mediastinal masses are rare, and encompass a wide variety of diseases. Regardless of the diagnosis, all large mediastinal masses may cause compression or invasion of vital structures, resulting in respiratory insufficiency or hemodynamic decompensation. Detailed preoperative preparation is a prerequisite for favorable surgical outcomes and should include preoperative multimodality imaging, with emphasis on vascular anatomy and invasive characteristics of the tumor. A multidisciplinary team should decide whether neoadjuvant therapy can be beneficial. Furthermore, the anesthesiologist has to evaluate the risk of intraoperative mediastinal mass syndrome (MMS). With adequate preoperative team planning, a safe anesthesiological and surgical strategy can be accomplished

A quantitative X-ray diffraction inventory of the tephra and volcanic glass inputs into the Holocene marine sediment archives off Iceland: A contribution to V.A.S.T.

This paper re-evaluates how well quantitative x-ray diffraction (qXRD) can be used as an exploratory method of the weight percentage (wt%) of volcaniclastic sediment, and to identify tephra events in marine cores. In the widely used RockJock v6 software programme, qXRD tephra and glass standards include the rhyodacite White River tephra (Alaska), a rhyolitic tephra (Hekla-4) and the basaltic Saksunarvatn tephra. Experiments of adding known wt% of tephra to felsic bedrock samples indicated that additions ≥10 wt% are accurately detected, but reliable estimates of lesser amounts are masked by amorphous material produced by milling. Volcaniclastic inputs range between 20 and 50 wt%. Primary tephra events are identified as peaks in residual qXRD glass wt% from fourth-order polynomial fits. In cores where tephras have been identified by shard counts in the > 150 µm fraction, there is a positive correlation (validation) with peaks in the wt% glass estimated by qXRD. Geochemistry of tephra shards confirms the presence of several Hekla-sourced tephras in cores B997-317PC1 and -319PC2 on the northern Iceland shelf. In core B997-338 (north-west Iceland), there are two rhyolitic tephras separated by ca. 100 cm with uncorrected radiocarbon dates on articulated shells of around 13 000 yr B.P. These tephras may be correlatives of the Borrobol and Penifiler tephras found in Scotland. The number of Holocene tephra events per 1000 yr was estimated from qXRD on 16 cores and showed a bimodal distribution with an increased number of events in both the late and early Holocene.Keywords: X-ray diffraction; tephras; Iceland Holocene(Published: 26 February 2013)To access the supplementary material for this article, please see the supplementary files in the column to the right (under Readers Tools). Citation: Polar Research 2013, 32, 11130, http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/polar.v32i0.1113