Statutory interpretation: New comparative dimensions

Horst Klaus Lück

'Being in the same boat': ethnographic insights into an adolescent cancer unit

Cancer may be considered a particularly challenging diagnosis for adolescents. Treatment for adolescents in the United Kingdom may be provided in paediatric or adult settings or, more rarely, in specialist adolescent cancer units. An ethnographic approach was adopted to gather ‘insiders’ views of one such unit using in-depth interviews with patients, parents and professionals, as well as non-participant observation of key events. Two data themes ‘cancer and the cancer unit’ and ‘changes over time’ are discussed in this paper. Benefits of the unit included shared understandings and the manner in which the privations of adolescent cancer were contained and managed by those involved

Amino Assets: How Amino Acids Support Immunity

Amino acids are fundamental building blocks supporting life. Their role in protein synthesis is well defined, but they contribute to a host of other intracellular metabolic pathways, including ATP generation, nucleotide synthesis, and redox balance, to support cellular and organismal function. Immune cells critically depend on such pathways to acquire energy and biomass and to reprogram their metabolism upon activation to support growth, proliferation, and effector functions. Amino acid metabolism plays a key role in this metabolic rewiring, and it supports various immune cell functions beyond increased protein synthesis. Here, we review the mechanisms by which amino acid metabolism promotes immune cell function, and how these processes could be targeted to improve immunity in pathological conditions

Achieving change in the NHS: a feasibility study to introduce a home-based cancer chemotherapy service

A major focus of current health policyin the United Kingdom is the development of services that meet the public’s expectations. To achieve this there is a need to evaluate current provision to ensure that the best use is made of finite resources. The studyreported here adopted an interview approach to examine an existing outpatient chemotherapy service, and to consider the feasibilityof introducing a home based model. Following a review of literature on this topic data were obtained from in-depth interviews with patients and professionals regarding the present service. These were then combined with an analysis of service contracts and financial estimates. The poor quality of much of the costrelated information limited the conclusions which could be drawn, and emphasised the need for access to more accessible and robust financial information upon which to base change. The studyalso illustrated the benefits of feasibility studies; especially when cost-effectiveness and patient satisfaction are the driving forces behind proposed changes to clinical services

Aboriginal adolescent girls : cultural identity formation and resilient trajectories

Master of Social Work (M.S.W.

Achieving change in the NHS: a feasibility study to introduce a home-based cancer chemotherapy service

A major focus of current health policyin the United Kingdom is the development of services that meet the public’s expectations. To achieve this there is a need to evaluate current provision to ensure that the best use is made of finite resources. The studyreported here adopted an interview approach to examine an existing outpatient chemotherapy service, and to consider the feasibilityof introducing a home based model. Following a review of literature on this topic data were obtained from in-depth interviews with patients and professionals regarding the present service. These were then combined with an analysis of service contracts and financial estimates. The poor quality of much of the costrelated information limited the conclusions which could be drawn, and emphasised the need for access to more accessible and robust financial information upon which to base change. The studyalso illustrated the benefits of feasibility studies; especially when cost-effectiveness and patient satisfaction are the driving forces behind proposed changes to clinical services

Learning dynamical information from static protein and sequencing data

Many complex processes, from protein folding to neuronal network dynamics, can be described as stochastic exploration of a high-dimensional energy landscape. While efficient algorithms for cluster detection in high-dimensional spaces have been developed over the last two decades, considerably less is known about the reliable inference of state transition dynamics in such settings. Here, we introduce a flexible and robust numerical framework to infer Markovian transition networks directly from time-independent data sampled from stationary equilibrium distributions. We demonstrate the practical potential of the inference scheme by reconstructing the network dynamics for several protein folding transitions, gene-regulatory network motifs and HIV evolution pathways. The predicted network topologies and relative transition time scales agree well with direct estimates from time-dependent molecular dynamics data, stochastic simulations and phylogenetic trees, respectively. Owing to its generic structure, the framework introduced here will be applicable to high-throughput RNA and protein sequencing datasets and future cryo-electronmicroscopy data