Organ Transplants: Ethical, Social, and Religious Issues in a Multicultural Society

Recent advances in the fields of organ donation and organ transplant have introduced new hope for the treatment of serious diseases. However, this promise has been accompanied by several issues. The most common issue raised is ethical implications, but in a multicultural society like Malaysia, additional concerns arise pertaining to social and religious issues. These concerns needs to be addressed as attitudes toward and acceptability of organ donation varies according to social, culture, and religion. The diverse cultural, religious, and traditional concepts pertaining to organ donation may hamper its acceptability and cause a lack of willingness to donate organs. The purpose of this article is to briefly explore the ethical issues involved in organ transplant and the various religious opinions on organ donation. It is hoped that this knowledge and understanding may benefit both health care providers and patients in a multicultural society like Malaysia

Organ transplants: ethical, social, and religious issues in a multicultural society

"Recent advances in the fields of organ donation and organ transplant have introduced new hope for the treatment of serious diseases. However, this promise has been accompanied by several issues. The most common issue raised is ethical implications, but in a multicultural society like Malaysia, additional concerns arise pertaining to social and religious issues. These concerns needs to be addressed as attitudes toward and acceptability of organ donation varies according to social, culture, and religion. The diverse cultural, religious, and traditional concepts pertaining to organ donation may hamper its acceptability and cause a lack of willingness to donate organs. The purpose of this article is to briefly explore the ethical issues involved in organ transplant and the various religious opinions on organ donation. It is hoped that this knowledge and understanding may benefit both health care providers and patients in a multicultural society like Malaysia." [author's abstracts

Electrometer system measures nanoamps at high voltage

Floating electrometer eliminates major source of error since any leakage from electrometer case, which is at high voltage, appears only as load on high voltage supply and not as part of current being measured. Commands to and data from floating electrometer are transferred across high voltage interface by means of optical channels

Understanding Search Trees via Statistical Physics

We study the random m-ary search tree model (where m stands for the number of branches of a search tree), an important problem for data storage in computer science, using a variety of statistical physics techniques that allow us to obtain exact asymptotic results. In particular, we show that the probability distributions of extreme observables associated with a random search tree such as the height and the balanced height of a tree have a traveling front structure. In addition, the variance of the number of nodes needed to store a data string of a given size N is shown to undergo a striking phase transition at a critical value of the branching ratio m_c=26. We identify the mechanism of this phase transition, show that it is generic and occurs in various other problems as well. New results are obtained when each element of the data string is a D-dimensional vector. We show that this problem also has a phase transition at a critical dimension, D_c= \pi/\sin^{-1}(1/\sqrt{8})=8.69363...Comment: 11 pages, 8 .eps figures included. Invited contribution to STATPHYS-22 held at Bangalore (India) in July 2004. To appear in the proceedings of STATPHYS-2

β-synuclein potentiates synaptic vesicle dopamine uptake and rescues dopaminergic neurons from MPTP-induced death in the absence of other synucleins.

Synucleins, a family of three proteins highly expressed in neurons, are predominantly known for the direct involvement of α-synuclein in the aetiology and pathogenesis of Parkinson's and certain other neurodegenerative diseases, but their precise physiological functions are still not fully understood. Previous studies have demonstrated the importance of α-synuclein as a modulator of various mechanisms implicated in chemical neurotransmission, but information concerning the involvement of other synuclein family members, β-synuclein and γ-synuclein, in molecular processes within presynaptic terminals is limited. Here we demonstrated that the vesicular monoamine transporter 2 (VMAT2)-dependent dopamine uptake by synaptic vesicles isolated from the striatum of mice lacking β-synuclein is significantly reduced. Reciprocally, reintroduction, either in vivo or in vitro, of β-synuclein but not α- or γ-synuclein improves uptake by triple α/β/γ-synuclein deficient striatal vesicles. We also showed that the resistance of dopaminergic neurons of the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNpc) to subchronic administration of the Parkinson's disease-inducing prodrug 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine (MPTP) depends on the presence of β-synuclein but only when one or both other synucleins are absent. Furthermore, proteomic analysis of synuclein-deficient synaptic vesicles vs those containing only β-synuclein revealed differences in their protein compositions. We suggest that the observed potentiation of dopamine uptake by β-synuclein might be caused by different protein architecture of the synaptic vesicles. It is also feasible that such structural changes improve synaptic vesicle sequestration of 1-methyl-4-phenylpyridinium (MPP+), a toxic metabolite of MPTP, which would explain why dopaminergic neurons expressing β-synuclein and lacking α-synuclein and/or γ-synuclein are resistant to this neurotoxin

Thermal Emission as a Test for Hidden Nuclei in Nearby Radio Galaxies

The clear sign of a hidden quasar inside a radio galaxy is the appearance of quasar spectral features in its polarized (scattered) light. However that observational test requires suitably placed scattering material to act as a mirror, allowing us to see the nuclear light. A rather robust and more general test for a hidden quasar is to look for the predicted high mid-IR luminosity from the nuclear obscuring matter. The nuclear waste heat is detected and well isolated in the nearest narrow line radio galaxy, Cen A. This confirms other indications that Cen A does contain a modest quasar-like nucleus. However we show here that M87 does not: at high spatial resolution, the mid-IR nucleus is seen to be very weak, and consistent with simple synchrotron emission from the base of the radio jet. This fairly robustly establishes that there are "real" narrow line radio galaxies, without the putative accretion power, and with essentially all the luminosity in kinetic form. Next we show the intriguing mid-IR morphology of Cygnus A, reported previously by us and later discussed in detail by Radomski et al. (2002). All of this mid-IR emission is consistent with reprocessing by a hidden quasar, known to exist from spectropolarimetry by Ogle et al. (1997) and other evidence.Comment: 21 pages, 5 figure