A stable environment: surrogacy and the good life in Scotland

In this thesis I describe the claims that a group of people living in rural Scotland make about maternal surrogacy. For them, surrogacy is a topical issue that provokes speculative ethical judgements. This is in a context in which they are building good lives, strongly informed by environmentalist �ethical living� and local wildlife conservation. I describe the kinds of ideas they employ and reproduce in discussing the ethics of surrogacy to capture the nuanced judgements that go into ethical claim-making. I argue that, in order to understand these people�s ideas about what is natural and what is moral, they should be considered along with their more ordinary ideas and practices. I describe how some of the same concepts they use to talk about surrogacy figure in their conceptions of goodness and what makes a good life, in order to both contextualise and extend their ideas about the ethics of surrogacy. Through ethnography of their everyday lives, I show the importance of effort and care in the making of relationships with other people, animals and the land and in fashioning an ethical subjectivity. I analyse the connections between nature, kinship and ethics in lives that are structured by efforts to protect the natural world, feel closer to other people and experience a fulfilling life. I examine the importance of choice and money in enabling these lives and raise questions about the location and status of transcendent values in contemporary Britain. I discuss the temporal orientation of these people in relation to the influence of environmentalist ideas of impending ecological crisis and consider how this links with their ideas about how to live in the present as well as how these connect up with their ideas about parenthood and kinship

Looking into the Test Tube: The Birth of IVF on British Television.

The birth of Louise Brown, the world's first 'test-tube baby', has come to signify the moment at which technologically assisted human reproduction became a re ality. This was a highly mediated and visible reality, as this article explores through the example of a British television documentary about Louise Brown broadcast when she was just six weeks old, 'To Mrs Brown… A Daughter' (Thames Television, 1978). In the article, I discuss the programme alongside data from an interview with its producer, Peter Williams. Williams sought to convince the public that IVF was morally acceptable and to cultivate sympathy for the infertile through this film. I will consider how he went about this by focusing on the programme's visual presentation of Louise Brown, Peter Williams' aims in making the film and his sympathetic relationship with the 'pioneers' of IVF, gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe and physiologist Robert Edwards. I will conclude with a discussion of the political implications of this film and how it contributed to the normalisation of IVF at a pivotal moment in its history.Wellcome Trust grant number 10060

'The men who made the breakthrough': How the British press represented Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards in 1978.

This article examines how the British press represented Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards in the story of the birth of the first 'test-tube baby', Louise Brown. In 1978, the British press represented the birth of Louise Brown as both a success and a source of hope. The main pairs of protagonists in this story were Steptoe and Edwards and Lesley and John Brown, who metonymically represented British science and infertile couples, respectively. In the dominant 'success' narrative of the birth of Louise Brown as depicted in the British press in 1978, Edwards and Steptoe seemed to embody 'British' values of industriousness, perseverance, altruism, ingenuity and teamwork. Thus, their success was simultaneously a British success. With Louise Brown's birth, in-vitro fertilization came to stand for the potential happiness of infertile people and a bright future for British science and industry.Wellcome Trust grant 10060

Project IICE: Inspiring Interdisciplinary Collaboration Experiences

Project IICE was a multi-disciplinary learning experience designed for students at Southern New Hampshire University. Students worked together in teams to communicate scientific data that was initially collected by an Introductory Botany class. Students in this course measured trees and recorded variables, including tree height, diameter, species, and canopy cover. They shared the data with students in freshman Statistics courses, who analyzed mathematically for trends. Finally, students in Graphic Design used the data to create visual representations and icons. Students collaborated in groups that were randomly assigned across all of the courses to include members of each discipline. During the process, each student was required to help others in the group understand the meaning of the data, through the collection, analysis, and design phases. In the final group poster presentations, students explained the meaning and value of each part. The emphasis was on their ability to communicate the significance of each part of the process, which helped them appreciate how the discipline they were working in contributed to the overall success of the project. The real-world data provided a context for students to experience working in cross-discipline teams, and sharpened communication skills

The complete genome, comparative and functional analysis of Stenotrophomonas maltophilia reveals an organism heavily shielded by drug resistance determinants

The complete Stenotrophomonas maltophilia genome sequence suggests that it can act as a reservoir of antibiotic resistance determinants

Variable responses of individual species to tropical forest degradation

The functional stability of ecosystems depends greatly on interspecific differences in responses to environmental perturbation. However, responses to perturbation are not necessarily invariant among populations of the same species, so intraspecific variation in responses might also contribute. Such inter-population response diversity has recently been shown to occur spatially across species ranges, but we lack estimates of the extent to which individual populations across an entire community might have perturbation responses that vary through time. We assess this using 524 taxa that have been repeatedly surveyed for the effects of tropical forest logging at a focal landscape in Sabah, Malaysia. Just 39 % of taxa – all with non-significant responses to forest degradation – had invariant responses. All other taxa (61 %) showed significantly different responses to the same forest degradation gradient across surveys, with 6 % of taxa responding to forest degradation in opposite directions across multiple surveys. Individual surveys had low power (< 80 %) to determine the correct direction of response to forest degradation for one-fifth of all taxa. Recurrent rounds of logging disturbance increased the prevalence of intra-population response diversity, while uncontrollable environmental variation and/or turnover of intraspecific phenotypes generated variable responses in at least 44 % of taxa. Our results show that the responses of individual species to local environmental perturbations are remarkably flexible, likely providing an unrealised boost to the stability of disturbed habitats such as logged tropical forests