Darwin and Reductionisms: Victorian, Neo-Darwinian and Postgenomic Biologies

This article compares the open-ended Darwinism of Charles Darwin, George Lewes, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy with reductive post-Weismann and early eugenist views and more recent neo-Darwinian ideas including literary Darwinism. It argues that some Victorians had a clear sense of the complexities of the natural world, and of the centrality of environment to life. This awareness contrasts with the processes of divorce and isolation that underpin neo-Darwinian understandings of evolutionary development. But biologists and philosophers of biology are now emphasising the complex and dynamic relations between organism and environment in ways that would have appealed to Darwin's contemporaries. The article establishes that there are significant parallels between mid-Victorian and postgenomic thought

Review of After Darwin: Animals, Emotions, and the Mind

This extremely interesting and well organized collection of 11 original essays and an \u27Afterword\u27 is not greatly concerned with George Eliot, although it would seem every major Victorian concern somehow ends by involving her. As a study that aims at what its title indicates, it includes George Eliot and G. H. Lewes as direct subjects, hut only in one essay, Angelique Richardson\u27s \u27George Eliot, G. H. Lewes, and Darwin: Animals, Emotions, and Morals\u27. Although, she concedes, both \u27maintained human distinction in their writing\u27 (p. 137), George Eliot felt and expressed through anthropomorphism, a real kinship with animals. With Lewes (whose final volume of Problems of Life and Mind she completed), she saw - and dramatized through her emphasis on the unconscious - the physical basis of emotions. Middlemarch, we know, completed publication in the same year as Darwin\u27s Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, 1872, but George Eliot\u27s concern with manifestations of feeling through the physical was clear from the start of her career in her developing, changing relations to physiognomy and then phrenology. The concern is evident in her correspondence also and the treatment of animals in the early novels, where she is very much aware of a physiology of emotions, and - as she would be throughout her works - almost obsessed with the possibilities of sympathy. Nevertheless, the true hero of this book is Darwin himself, whose Expression of the Emotions is the starting point for almost all of the essays, which are designed to study, with primary attention to the way emotions are expressed and analyzed, the relation between humans and animals from Darwin\u27s time to our own. The book is self-consciously interdisciplinary, in the way, we might say, George Eliot was, considering \u27the tempting range of relevancies called the universe\u27, finding connections among physiology and morality and animals and literature and the mind. The contributions, from scholars distinguished in medicine, psychiatry, ecology, history of science, and of course literature, are compact and, remarkably, virtually all of high quality, even when the primary task is only to summarize the status of research in some related subfield

Hidden chromosomal abnormalities in pleuropulmonary blastomas identified by multiplex FISH

BACKGROUND: Pleuropulmonary blastoma (PPB) is a rare childhood dysontogenetic intrathoracic neoplasm associated with an unfavourable clinical behaviour. CASES PRESENTATION: We report pathological and cytogenetic findings in two cases of PPB at initial diagnosis and recurrence. Both tumors were classified as type III pneumoblastoma and histological findings were similar at diagnosis and relapse. In both cases, conventional cytogenetic techniques revealed complex numerical and structural chromosomal abnormalities. Molecular cytogenetic analysis (interphase/metaphase FISH and multicolor FISH) identified accurately chromosomal aberrations. In one case, TP53 gene deletion was detected on metaphase FISH. To date, only few cytogenetic data have been published about PPB. CONCLUSION: The PPB genetic profile remains to be established and compared to others embryonal neoplasia. Our cytogenetic data are discussed reviewing cytogenetics PPBs published cases, illustrating the contribution of multicolor FISH in order to identify pathogenetically important recurrent aberrations in PPB

Human-animal elision: a Darwinian universe in George Eliot’s novels

No abstract available

Altimetry for the future: Building on 25 years of progress

In 2018 we celebrated 25 years of development of radar altimetry, and the progress achieved by this methodology in the fields of global and coastal oceanography, hydrology, geodesy and cryospheric sciences. Many symbolic major events have celebrated these developments, e.g., in Venice, Italy, the 15th (2006) and 20th (2012) years of progress and more recently, in 2018, in Ponta Delgada, Portugal, 25 Years of Progress in Radar Altimetry. On this latter occasion it was decided to collect contributions of scientists, engineers and managers involved in the worldwide altimetry community to depict the state of altimetry and propose recommendations for the altimetry of the future. This paper summarizes contributions and recommendations that were collected and provides guidance for future mission design, research activities, and sustainable operational radar altimetry data exploitation. Recommendations provided are fundamental for optimizing further scientific and operational advances of oceanographic observations by altimetry, including requirements for spatial and temporal resolution of altimetric measurements, their accuracy and continuity. There are also new challenges and new openings mentioned in the paper that are particularly crucial for observations at higher latitudes, for coastal oceanography, for cryospheric studies and for hydrology. The paper starts with a general introduction followed by a section on Earth System Science including Ocean Dynamics, Sea Level, the Coastal Ocean, Hydrology, the Cryosphere and Polar Oceans and the ‘‘Green” Ocean, extending the frontier from biogeochemistry to marine ecology. Applications are described in a subsequent section, which covers Operational Oceanography, Weather, Hurricane Wave and Wind Forecasting, Climate projection. Instruments’ development and satellite missions’ evolutions are described in a fourth section. A fifth section covers the key observations that altimeters provide and their potential complements, from other Earth observation measurements to in situ data. Section 6 identifies the data and methods and provides some accuracy and resolution requirements for the wet tropospheric correction, the orbit and other geodetic requirements, the Mean Sea Surface, Geoid and Mean Dynamic Topography, Calibration and Validation, data accuracy, data access and handling (including the DUACS system). Section 7 brings a transversal view on scales, integration, artificial intelligence, and capacity building (education and training). Section 8 reviews the programmatic issues followed by a conclusion

Altimetry for the future: building on 25 years of progress

In 2018 we celebrated 25 years of development of radar altimetry, and the progress achieved by this methodology in the fields of global and coastal oceanography, hydrology, geodesy and cryospheric sciences. Many symbolic major events have celebrated these developments, e.g., in Venice, Italy, the 15th (2006) and 20th (2012) years of progress and more recently, in 2018, in Ponta Delgada, Portugal, 25 Years of Progress in Radar Altimetry. On this latter occasion it was decided to collect contributions of scientists, engineers and managers involved in the worldwide altimetry community to depict the state of altimetry and propose recommendations for the altimetry of the future. This paper summarizes contributions and recommendations that were collected and provides guidance for future mission design, research activities, and sustainable operational radar altimetry data exploitation. Recommendations provided are fundamental for optimizing further scientific and operational advances of oceanographic observations by altimetry, including requirements for spatial and temporal resolution of altimetric measurements, their accuracy and continuity. There are also new challenges and new openings mentioned in the paper that are particularly crucial for observations at higher latitudes, for coastal oceanography, for cryospheric studies and for hydrology. The paper starts with a general introduction followed by a section on Earth System Science including Ocean Dynamics, Sea Level, the Coastal Ocean, Hydrology, the Cryosphere and Polar Oceans and the “Green” Ocean, extending the frontier from biogeochemistry to marine ecology. Applications are described in a subsequent section, which covers Operational Oceanography, Weather, Hurricane Wave and Wind Forecasting, Climate projection. Instruments’ development and satellite missions’ evolutions are described in a fourth section. A fifth section covers the key observations that altimeters provide and their potential complements, from other Earth observation measurements to in situ data. Section 6 identifies the data and methods and provides some accuracy and resolution requirements for the wet tropospheric correction, the orbit and other geodetic requirements, the Mean Sea Surface, Geoid and Mean Dynamic Topography, Calibration and Validation, data accuracy, data access and handling (including the DUACS system). Section 7 brings a transversal view on scales, integration, artificial intelligence, and capacity building (education and training). Section 8 reviews the programmatic issues followed by a conclusion

Effect of remote ischaemic conditioning on clinical outcomes in patients with acute myocardial infarction (CONDI-2/ERIC-PPCI): a single-blind randomised controlled trial.

BACKGROUND: Remote ischaemic conditioning with transient ischaemia and reperfusion applied to the arm has been shown to reduce myocardial infarct size in patients with ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) undergoing primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PPCI). We investigated whether remote ischaemic conditioning could reduce the incidence of cardiac death and hospitalisation for heart failure at 12 months. METHODS: We did an international investigator-initiated, prospective, single-blind, randomised controlled trial (CONDI-2/ERIC-PPCI) at 33 centres across the UK, Denmark, Spain, and Serbia. Patients (age >18 years) with suspected STEMI and who were eligible for PPCI were randomly allocated (1:1, stratified by centre with a permuted block method) to receive standard treatment (including a sham simulated remote ischaemic conditioning intervention at UK sites only) or remote ischaemic conditioning treatment (intermittent ischaemia and reperfusion applied to the arm through four cycles of 5-min inflation and 5-min deflation of an automated cuff device) before PPCI. Investigators responsible for data collection and outcome assessment were masked to treatment allocation. The primary combined endpoint was cardiac death or hospitalisation for heart failure at 12 months in the intention-to-treat population. This trial is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT02342522) and is completed. FINDINGS: Between Nov 6, 2013, and March 31, 2018, 5401 patients were randomly allocated to either the control group (n=2701) or the remote ischaemic conditioning group (n=2700). After exclusion of patients upon hospital arrival or loss to follow-up, 2569 patients in the control group and 2546 in the intervention group were included in the intention-to-treat analysis. At 12 months post-PPCI, the Kaplan-Meier-estimated frequencies of cardiac death or hospitalisation for heart failure (the primary endpoint) were 220 (8·6%) patients in the control group and 239 (9·4%) in the remote ischaemic conditioning group (hazard ratio 1·10 [95% CI 0·91-1·32], p=0·32 for intervention versus control). No important unexpected adverse events or side effects of remote ischaemic conditioning were observed. INTERPRETATION: Remote ischaemic conditioning does not improve clinical outcomes (cardiac death or hospitalisation for heart failure) at 12 months in patients with STEMI undergoing PPCI. FUNDING: British Heart Foundation, University College London Hospitals/University College London Biomedical Research Centre, Danish Innovation Foundation, Novo Nordisk Foundation, TrygFonden