Defending the First Premise: Why Prenatal Life Is Not the Exception

This thesis frames the abortion debate by dividing the pro-life position into two premises: that the government must protect human beings’ right to life, and that an unborn human organism is a human being. It briefly describes the proposition that the unborn are moral persons. It then proceeds to examine philosophical, legal, and practical objections to the first premise, concluding that if the unborn are established as human beings, the government must uphold their right to life. While this thesis is intended to argue in favor of restricting elective abortion, it does not put forth an opinion on what should be considered an elective abortion or how restrictions should be enforced. Abortion’s moral status is not subjective; the government can and should legislate it. An unborn human being has the right to live in dependence on its mother, and abortion is not justified by the right to bodily autonomy or self-defense. The Roe v. Wade opinion provided weak support for a constitutional right to abortion. The Court has recognized its insufficient reasoning, and the case is no longer controlling law. Prohibiting abortion does not confer an affirmative duty to aid beyond the bounds of what is appropriate in law. While abortion is treated as a cultural panacea, its societal benefits are vastly overstated. Any positive impact of abortion cannot overcome the government’s duty to protect human rights. Like slavery, abortion is an unsalvageable institution that must end

Gene mutation and biochemical characterization of recombinant mutant FtrB: A novel cupredoxin

Brucella is a Gram-negative zoonotic pathogen that is commonly passed from livestock to humans. The resulting condition, Brucellosis, is hard to diagnose, hard to treat, and chronic. Brucella is able to overcome the toxic environment of the host cell by utilizing various transport systems that steal essential nutrients, such as iron, from the host. The FtrABCD system of Brucella is an example of one of these transport systems involved in Fe2+ uptake and contributes to the high virulence of this bacteria. Periplasmic FtrB is hypothesized to be novel cupredoxin due to its common ancestry with known cupredoxins with a conserved Type-1 Cu binding site. However, FtrB does not conserve two His and a Cys Type-1 Cu coordinating residues seen in other cupredoxins. Previous homology modeling of wild-type Brucella FtrB shows Asp, Met, and His residues forming a putative Cu binding pocket. To test the proposed metal binding of these residues, single-site substitution mutants of FtrB (D55A, M81A, and H121A) were created. Isothermal Titration Calorimetry (ITC) results indicated greater binding affinity in the mutants than the wild-type protein. Circular Dichronic (CD) spectroscopy suggested significant structural differences for both mutants with H121A having more pronounced structural changes. The purpose of this study was to confirm the binding residues identified in the homology model bound Cu and mutations of these sites would eliminate Cu binding. Characterization assays performed on these mutants indicate structural and binding differences when compared to the wild-type

A neurotoxic regimen of methamphetamine exacerbates the febrile and neuroinflammatory response to a subsequent peripheral immune stimulus

Methamphetamine (MA) use is associated with activation of microglia and, at high doses, can induce neurotoxicity. Given the changes in the neuroinflammatory environment associated with MA, we investigated whether MA administration would interfere with the thermoregulatory and neuroinflammatory response to a subsequent peripheral immune stimulus. C57BL6/J mice were given four i.p. injections of either 5 mg/kg MA or saline at two hour intervals. Twenty-four hours following the first MA injection, mice were given 100 μg/kg LPS or saline i.p. and blood and brains were collected. Here we report that mice exposed to MA developed higher fevers in response to LPS than did those given LPS alone. MA also exacerbated the LPS-induced increase in central cytokine mRNA. MA alone increased microglial Iba1 expression and expression was further increased when mice were exposed to both MA and LPS, suggesting that MA not only activated microglia but also influenced their response to a peripheral immune stimulus. Taken together, these data show that MA administration exacerbates the normal central immune response, most likely by altering microglia

Young Adults with Cleft Lip and Palate: Personal Perspectives of Transition of Care

Children with cleft lip/palate receive team care which typically ends at eighteen. Young adults then need to transition into an adult-centered model of care. A paucity of literature exists regarding their perspective on transition of care experience. This research explores the experiences of young adults with CLP regarding their transition of care process, within the person-centered ICF framework

A Comparison of the Population Genetic Structure and Diversity between a Common (\u3cem\u3eChrysemys p. picta\u3c/em\u3e) and an Endangered (\u3cem\u3eClemmys guttata\u3c/em\u3e) Freshwater Turtle

The northeastern United States has experienced dramatic alteration to its landscape since the time of European settlement. This alteration has had major impacts on the distribution and abundance of wildlife populations, but the legacy of this landscape change remains largely unexplored for most species of freshwater turtles. We used microsatellite markers to characterize and compare the population genetic structure and diversity between an abundant generalist, the eastern painted turtle (Chrysemys p. picta), and the rare, more specialized, spotted turtle (Clemmys guttata) in Rhode Island, USA. We predicted that because spotted turtles have disproportionately experienced the detrimental effects of habitat loss and fragmentation associated with landscape change, that these effects would manifest in the form of higher inbreeding, less diversity, and greater population genetic structure compared to eastern painted turtles. As expected, eastern painted turtles exhibited little population genetic structure, showed no evidence of inbreeding, and little differentiation among sampling sites. For spotted turtles, however, results were consistent with certain predictions and inconsistent with others. We found evidence of modest inbreeding, as well as tentative evidence of recent population declines. However, genetic diversity and differentiation among sites were comparable between species. As our results do not suggest any major signals of genetic degradation in spotted turtles, the southern region of Rhode Island may serve as a regional conservation reserve network, where the maintenance of population viability and connectivity should be prioritized

Making Democracy Harder to Hack

With the Russian government hack of the Democratic National Convention email servers and related leaks, the drama of the 2016 U.S. presidential race highlights an important point: nefarious hackers do not just pose a risk to vulnerable companies; cyber attacks can potentially impact the trajectory of democracies. Yet a consensus has been slow to emerge as to the desirability and feasibility of reclassifying elections—in particular, voting machines—as critical infrastructure, due in part to the long history of local and state control of voting procedures. This Article takes on the debate—focusing on policy options beyond former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson’s decision to classify elections as critical infrastructure in January 2017—in the U.S., using the 2016 elections as a case study, but putting the issue in a global context, with in-depth case studies from South Africa, Estonia, Brazil, Germany, and India. Governance best practices are analyzed by reviewing these differing approaches to securing elections, including the extent to which trend lines are converging or diverging. This investigation will, in turn, help inform ongoing minilateral efforts at cybersecurity norm building in the critical infrastructure context, which are considered here for the first time in the literature through the lens of polycentric governance

Who tugs at our heart strings? The effect of avatar images on player generosity in the dictator game.

The present research was motivated by a prior study, where several wallets, each containing a photo of either a baby, a puppy, a family, or an elderly couple, were scattered across a city in the United Kingdom (Wiseman, 2009). Most of the wallets containing a photo of a baby were returned compared to less than a third of wallets containing a photo of an elderly couple. To investigate further, in a series of three studies we examined, using a pseudo online version of the dictator game, possible subtle cues supporting prosocial behaviour by manipulating the type of avatar used by the recipient of the donation made by the 'dictator'. Overall, it emerged that participants showed significantly higher levels of generosity towards babies, and older people, supporting the notion that perceptions of vulnerability and need drive prosocial behaviour

Biochemical abnormalities in COVID-19 : a comparison of white versus ethnic minority populations in the UK

Aims: Public Health England has identified that in COVID-19, death rates among ethnic minorities far exceeds that of the white population. While the increase in ethnic minorities is likely to be multifactorial, to date, no studies have looked to see whether values for routine clinical biochemistry parameters differ between ethnic minority and white individuals. Methods: Baseline biochemical data for 22 common tests from 311 SARS-CoV-2 positive patients presenting to hospital in April 2020 in whom ethnicity data were available was retrospectively collected and evaluated. Data comparisons between ethnic minority and white groups were made for all patient data and for the subset of patients subsequently admitted to intensive care. Results: When all patient data were considered, the ethnic minority population had statistically significant higher concentrations of C reactive protein (CRP), aspartate aminotransferase and gamma-glutamyl transferase, while troponin T was higher in the white group. A greater proportion of ethnic minority patients were subsequently admitted to intensive care, but when the presenting biochemistry of this subset of patients was compared, no significant differences were observed between ethnic minority and white groups. Conclusion: Our data show for the first time that routine biochemistry at hospital presentation in COVID-19 differs between ethnic minority and white groups. Among the markers identified, CRP was significantly higher in the ethnic minority group pointing towards an increased tendency for severe inflammation in this group

Resting-State Connectivity Biomarkers of Cognitive Performance and Social Function in Individuals With Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorder and Healthy Control Subjects

BACKGROUND: Deficits in neurocognition and social cognition are drivers of reduced functioning in schizophrenia spectrum disorders, with potentially shared neurobiological underpinnings. Many studies have sought to identify brain-based biomarkers of these clinical variables using a priori dichotomies (e.g., good vs. poor cognition, deficit vs. nondeficit syndrome). METHODS: We evaluated a fully data-driven approach to do the same by building and validating a brain connectivity-based biomarker of social cognitive and neurocognitive performance in a sample using resting-state and task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (n = 74 healthy control participants, n = 114 persons with schizophrenia spectrum disorder, 188 total). We used canonical correlation analysis followed by clustering to identify a functional connectivity signature of normal and poor social cognitive and neurocognitive performance. RESULTS: Persons with poor social cognitive and neurocognitive performance were differentiated from those with normal performance by greater resting-state connectivity in the mirror neuron and mentalizing systems. We validated our findings by showing that poor performers also scored lower on functional outcome measures not included in the original analysis and by demonstrating neuroanatomical differences between the normal and poorly performing groups. We used a support vector machine classifier to demonstrate that functional connectivity alone is enough to distinguish normal and poorly performing participants, and we replicated our findings in an independent sample (n = 75). CONCLUSIONS: A brief functional magnetic resonance imaging scan may ultimately be useful in future studies aimed at characterizing long-term illness trajectories and treatments that target specific brain circuitry in those with impaired cognition and function