Jimmy Carter and the Presidential Library System

Ralph Waldo Emerson felt that the study of history was significant to the individual for what it revealed about his own life. The monuments of other ages should be studied until the student lives along the whole line of temples and sphinxes and catacombs, passes through them all with satisfaction, and they live again to the mind, or are now. The interest with which he might have viewed his own nation\u27s monuments in the form of presidential libraries can only be surmised. He might have been appalled that the simple democratic nation he knew in the 1840s had come to erect imposing memorials to its presidents. On the other hand, it is difficult to imagine him finding fault with the efforts to preserve and make available to its citizens the written record of the country\u27s chief executives. Certainly, it is much easier to make the There and Then of history, the Here and Now of knowledge, if the full documentary record of a time is preserved

Transparent Vessels?: What Organ Donors Should Be Allowed to Know about Their Recipients

After a long search, Jonathan has finally found someone willing to donate a kidney to him and thereby free him from dialysis. Meredith is Jonathan's second cousin, and she considers herself a generous person, so although she barely knows Jonathan, she is willing to help. However, as Meredith learns more about the donation process, she begins to ask questions about Jonathan: “Is he HIV positive? I heard he got it using drugs. Has he been in jail? He's already had one live donor, so what happened to the first kidney? Did he forget to take his drugs or something?” The transplant center must, then, decide if Meredith is, in fact, entitled to answers to these kinds of questions. According to the Consensus Statement on the Live Organ Donor, “It is incumbent on the transplant center to provide full and accurate disclosure to potential donors of all pertinent information regarding risk and benefit to the donor and recipient.” But whether answers to the Meredith's questions count as “pertinent information regarding the risk and benefit” is the issue at hand.</jats:p

MuSiC: Identifying mutational significance in cancer genomes

Massively parallel sequencing technology and the associated rapidly decreasing sequencing costs have enabled systemic analyses of somatic mutations in large cohorts of cancer cases. Here we introduce a comprehensive mutational analysis pipeline that uses standardized sequence-based inputs along with multiple types of clinical data to establish correlations among mutation sites, affected genes and pathways, and to ultimately separate the commonly abundant passenger mutations from the truly significant events. In other words, we aim to determine the Mutational Significance in Cancer (MuSiC) for these large data sets. The integration of analytical operations in the MuSiC framework is widely applicable to a broad set of tumor types and offers the benefits of automation as well as standardization. Herein, we describe the computational structure and statistical underpinnings of the MuSiC pipeline and demonstrate its performance using 316 ovarian cancer samples from the TCGA ovarian cancer project. MuSiC correctly confirms many expected results, and identifies several potentially novel avenues for discovery