Good work, little soldier: Text and pretext

This article reads the relation between Denis's Beau Travail and Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 film Le Petit Soldat as a film-on-film variant of film-on-book adaptation. The model informing this reading is not so much intertextual as pretextual. The principal points of contact between the two films discussed are 'actor' (Michel Subor), 'character' (Bruno Forestier) and 'narrator' (Forestier/Galoup). The use in Beau Travail of Le Petit Soldat is compared with and differentiated from the use of Melville's 'Billy Budd, Sailor'. The conclusion arrived at is that the film-on-film relation can be read as a development of the mirror motif borrowed from Godard by Denis, in order to replace abyssal models of intertextual infinity with the finitudes of abyssal reflexivity. This is to offer a model of pretextuality that is not dependent on privileging the pretext: implicit is the suggestion that Beau Travail and Le Petit Soldat may be read as a single, if hybrid, text

The point in time: Precise chronology in early godard

This essay considers the significance of reference to chronologically specific material (including newspapers, magazines, radio broadcasts, graffiti) in Godard’s first three films of the 1960s - Le Petit soldat/The Little Soldier (made 1960, released 1963), Une femme est une femme/A Woman is a Woman (1961) and Vivre sa vie/My Life to Live (1962), and in Pierrot le fou/Crazy Pete (1965) - arguing that such ephemeral traces of a period can serve as a means of access to the political import of these films, and also are part of a larger concern in Godard with questions of time and history, questions that he is still asking thirty or forty years later, in works like Histoire(s) du cinéma/Histories of Cinema (1998) and Éloge de l’amour/In Praise of Love (2001). © Intellect Ltd 2003

Guinea pigs sublethally infected with aerosolized Legionella pneumophila develop humoral and cell-mediated immune responses and are protected against lethal aerosol challenge. A model for studying host defense against lung infections caused by intracellular pathogens.

We have employed the guinea pig model of L. pneumophila infection, which mimics Legionnaires' disease in humans both clinically and pathologically, to study humoral and cell-mediated immune responses to L. pneumophila and to examine protective immunity after aerosol exposure, the natural route of infection. Guinea pigs exposed to sublethal concentrations of L. pneumophila by aerosol developed strong humoral immune responses. By the indirect fluorescent antibody assay, exposed guinea pigs had a median serum antibody titer (expressed as the reciprocal of the highest positive dilution) of 32, whereas control guinea pigs had a median titer of less than 1. Sublethally infected (immunized) guinea pigs also developed strong cell-mediated immune responses. In response to L. pneumophila antigens, splenic lymphocytes from immunized but not control animals proliferated strongly in vitro, as measured by their capacity to incorporate [3H]thymidine. Moreover, immunized but not control guinea pigs developed strong cutaneous delayed-type hypersensitivity to intradermally injected L. pneumophila antigens. Sublethally infected (immunized) guinea pigs exhibited strong protective immunity to L. pneumophila. In two independent experiments, all 22 immunized guinea pigs survived aerosol challenge with one or three times the lethal dose of L. pneumophila whereas none of 16 sham-immunized control guinea pigs survived (p less than 0.0001 in each experiment). Immunized guinea pigs were not protected significantly from challenge with 10 times the lethal dose. Immunized but not control animals cleared the bacteria from their lungs. This study demonstrates that guinea pigs sublethally infected with L. pneumophila by the aerosol route develop strong humoral immune responses to this pathogen, develop strong cell-mediated immune responses and cutaneous delayed-type hypersensitivity to L. pneumophila antigens, are protected against subsequent lethal aerosol challenge, and are able to clear the bacteria from their lungs. The guinea pig model of L. pneumophila pulmonary infection is as an excellent one for studying general principles of host defense against pulmonary infections caused by intracellular pathogens

Is it possible for a perovskite p-n homojunction to persist in the presence of mobile ionic charge?

Recently Cui et al. reported on the fabrication a p-n homojunction perovskite solar cell (PSC) using stoichiometric control of sequentially-deposited perovskite layers. The authors propose that the junction leads to an enhanced electric field in the perovskite absorber resulting in improved charge separation. In this response to Cui et al. 2019 we show that the experimental data presented in the paper does not directly support this claim. Furthermore, Cui et al.'s thesis is not compatible with the large body of existing literature showing that mobile ionic defects present in methyl-ammonium lead iodide (MAPI) and its derivatives are highly mobile at room temperature. Using drift diffusion device simulations we show that large densities of mobile ionic charge in the system are likely to the screen any beneficial effects of a p-n homojunction.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figures, Response to a published article by Cui et a

There is no correlation between c-Myc mRNA expression and telomerase activity in human breast cancer

Background Telomerase is a ribonucleoprotein enzyme that synthesises telomeres after cell division and maintains chromosomal length and stability thus leading to cellular immortalisation. The hTERT (human telomerase reverse transcriptase) subunit seems to be the rate-limiting determinant of telomerase and knowledge of factors controlling hTERT transcription may be useful in therapeutic strategies. The hTERT promoter contains binding sites for c-Myc and there is experimental and in vitro evidence that c-Myc may increase hTERT expression. Materials and methods RNA was extracted from 18 breast carcinomas and c-Myc mRNA expression was estimated by quantitative reverse transcriptase-PCR (RT-PCR) with Taqman methodology. These tumours had already been analysed for ER and PgR status using ligand-binding assays and had had their DNA ploidy and S-phase fractions measured by flow cytometry. Telomerase activity had already been determined by using a modified telomeric repeat and amplification protocol (TRAP) assay. Results Telomerase activity ranged from 0 to 246 units of Total Protein Generated (TPG), where one unit of TPG was equal to 600 molecules of telomerase substrate primers extended by at least three telomeric repeats. Median levels of TPG were 60 and mean levels 81. There was no significant correlation between levels of c-Myc mRNA expression, telomerase activity, S phase fraction or PgR. There was a significant negative correlation with ER status. Conclusion Although the hTERT promoter contains potential binding sites for c-Myc oncoprotein, we have found no correlation between c-Myc mRNA levels and telomerase activity