Feminist Biography

After examining some of the difficulties feminists have with biography as a tool for women's history, the author explores the possibilities of feminist biography (its purpose, content and form) in order to distinguish it from conventional biography and to suggest that it may be a logical next step in feminist historical scholarship

Gossip in History

Comment résumer un discours bilingue sur le commérage? What a task! The author dares to suggest that what really goes on at the annual meetings of the CHA is gossip. Que les historiens préfèrent V appeler "le parler boutique" indique leur malaise devant le commérage. And yet gossip, rich in information, evaluation and entertainment is much more descriptive of what historians actually do at the CHA. In order to explain the uneasiness surrounding the word gossip the author traces the origin and changing meanings of the word gossip /commérage. In both French and English the word follows an identical etymological course through history and somewhere around the sixteenth century, the word acquires the modern sense of a chattery woman. The author links this new meaning of the word to a series of other changes, associated with the Scientific Revolution of the same period, the results of which were the subordination of women. Gossip became a language of powerlessness. But it is also a language special to women, revealing a rich oral culture. Without quite knowing it, historians use aspects of that culture in their own work for they are constantly analyzing the changing norms of any given society. The author illustrates the importance of gossip for premodern societies but argues that as many illustrations can be found for the twentieth century, even in Canada. She concludes by suggesting that gossip may be the historian's clue to deciphering what was really going on in Canadian history which, for ease of reference, she divides into three chatty parts. Une histoire du commérage pourrait tout révéler. . ..How to write a résumé of a bilingual speech about gossip? La belle affaire! L'auteur a osé suggérer que ce qui se passe véritablement aux réunions de la Société historique du Canada, c'est du commérage. Historians' preference for the word shop-talk to describe their personal communication is an indication of the disdain for gossip. Et pourtant, le commérage, riche en information, évaluation et amusement décrit beau- coup mieux ce que font les historiens lors de leurs congrès annuels. Pour expliquer cet écart, l'auteure retrace les origines et les changements survenus à travers ï histoire du mot commérage I gossip. Les deux, tout en ayant des antécédents linguistiques diffé- rents, ont exactement le même sens et poursuivent le même chemin étymologique à travers les siècles. Au même moment, aux environs du seizième siècle, les deux mots commencent à signifier une femme bavarde et l'auteure lie ce changement à une série d'autres survenus en même temps, qui ont eu pour résultat la subordination des femmes. Le commérage devient le langage des impuissantes. Mais il est aussi un langage particulier aux femmes et révèle une culture orale d'une grande richesse. Sans le savoir, les historiens utilisent cette richesse dans leur propre oeuvre car ils sont toujours à la recherche des normes d'une société donnée, du moment de ses changements et des moyens qu'ils empruntent. L'auteure offre plusieurs illustrations de l'importance du commérage dans les sociétés dites prémodernes mais elle en trouve aussi en plein vingtième siècle canadien. Elle termine en suggérant de prêter l'oreille aux commères du passé pour permettre une meilleure compréhension de ses trois divisions de l'histoire canadienne. A history of gossip might tell it all

Small binding-site clearance delays are not negligible in gene expression modeling

Accepted author manuscript.During the templated biopolymerization processes of transcription and translation,a macro molecular machine, either an RNA polymerase or a ribosome, binds to a specific site on the template. Due to the sizes of these enzymes,there is a waiting time before one clears the binding site and another can bind.These clearance delays are relatively short, and one might think that they could be neglected. However,in the case of transcription, these clearance delays are associated with conservation laws,resulting in surprisingly large effects on the bifurcation diagrams in models of gene expression networks.We study an example of this phenomenon in a model of a gene regulated by a non-coding RNA displaying bistability. Neglecting the binding-site clearance delays in this model can only be compensated for by making ad hoc, unphysical adjustments to the model’s kinetic constants.Ye

Mathematical modeling of eIF5B-mediated non-canonical translation initiation as a chemotherapeutic target

Glioblastoma is an extremely aggressive brain cancer that has a median survival time of 15 months, and a 95% mortality rate within 5 years. Standard-of-care therapy has not changed in over 15 years, and has unfortunately been limited in success. Glioblastomas tend to grow rapidly, creating hypoxic conditions within their cells. Under these conditions, the alpha subunit of eIF2 is phosphorylated, resulting in its inability to deliver the initiator tRNA to the ribosome during canonical translation initiation. In healthy cells, if the stress persists and is not alleviated, this may trigger a form of programmed cell death known as apoptosis. However, cancer cells exploit a non-canonical translation initiation pathway that replaces eIF2 with eIF5B to deliver the tRNAi to the pre-initiation complex. Some anti-apoptotic proteins are translated using this pathway, such as X-linked inhibitor of apoptosis (XIAP). The XIAP mRNA contains an IRES element which allows it to be translated using this non-canonical pathway. XIAP is up-regulated in glioblastoma cells, and therefore the eIF5B-mediated non-canonical translation initiation pathway is a promising therapeutic target for those suffering from this deadly disease. In this thesis, ordinary differential equation (ODE) and delay-differential equation (DDE) models are assembled to analyze the canonical and non-canonical translation initiation pathways. Four inhibitor classes are proposed and examined for both pathways. Results are presented in the forms of sensitivity analyses, 3D surface plots and contour plots which allow us to determine several potentially therapeutically effective combinations of inhibitor concentrations and KD values for each mode of inhibition. The results indicate that a direct eIF5B inhibitor or non-canonical ternary complex inhibitor are the most promising therapeutic targets.New Frontiers in Research Fun