What Shall I Give My Children? The role of the Mentor in Gloria Naylor\u27s The Women of Brewster Place and Paule Marshall\u27s Praisesong for the Widow

The question Gwendolyn Brooks asks in her poem What Shall I Give My Children? is a central question asked by African Americans: how can I who am considered less than perfect by mainstream America give to my children a sense of their own self-worth? In a culture where being poor, black, and female triply marginalizes an individual, what kind of consciousness develops from such marginality? How does such marginality carry over into the next generation and into the community of other women? How does the power of mentoring and affiliation help women to overcome the institutional oppression leveled against them because of race, gender and class? Gloria Naylor and Paule Marshall create in their fictional worlds the answers to some of these questions

[Review of] Doris Jean Austin. After the Garden

Doris Jean Austin\u27s novel After the Garden unites the tragic themes of patricide and familial fury with the contemporary themes of class struggle within the black community of post-World War II America. At the center of this family saga is Elzina Tompkins, a beautiful young black woman who comes of age in the 1940s urban North. Her grandmother, Rosalie Tompkins, is a powerfully drawn figure whom Austin uses as one side of the equation to show the values of a black woman of some means, a woman who seeks to keep her granddaughter in the garden. The wayward Jesse James, one of Truselle James\u27 many illegitimate children, provides the other side of the equation in Elzina\u27s struggle to grow up. The sexual attraction she feels for Jesse is the very thing Rosalie has feared. Most of the novel details the married life of Elzina and Jesse, life after the garden

C/EBPbeta-2 confers EGF-independent growth and disrupts the normal acinar architecture of human mammary epithelial cells

BACKGROUND: The transcription factor, C/EBPbeta, is a key regulator of growth and differentiation in the mammary gland. There are three different protein isoforms of C/EBPbeta. C/EBPbeta-1 and -2 are transactivators, and differ by only 23 N-terminal amino acids present in beta-1 only. C/EBPbeta-3 (LIP) lacks the transactivation domain and represses transcription. Elevated C/EBPbeta-2 expression causes MCF10A normal human mammary epithelial cells to become transformed, undergo an epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT), and acquire an invasive phenotype. C/EBPbeta is a downstream transcriptional target of Ras signaling pathways and is required for Ras transformation of some cell types. Ras signaling pathways are activated in mammary epithelial cells by the ErbB receptor tyrosine kinase family. Therefore, we considered whether elevated C/EBPbeta-2 expression would resemble ErbB RTK activation in MCF10A cells. RESULTS: We show that elevated C/EBPbeta-2 expression confers EGF-independent growth in MCF10A mammary epithelial cells. However, MCF10A cells expressing C/EBPbeta-3 are not EGF-independent, and high C/EBPbeta-3 or LIP expression is incompatible with growth. C/EBPbeta-2 overexpression disrupts the normal acinar architecture of MCF10A cells in basement membrane cultures and induces complex multiacinar structures with filled lumen, similar to the consequences of aberrant ErbB2 activation. CONCLUSION: Given the ability of C/EBPbeta-2 to confer EGF-independent growth to mammary epithelial cells as well as its capability for disrupting normal epithelial architecture and causing EMT, it is worth considering whether inhibitors which target ErbB family signaling pathways could be less effective in mammary epithelial cells with elevated nuclear C/EBPbeta-2 expression

The Dormancy Dilemma: Quiescence versus Balanced Proliferation

Metastatic dissemination with subsequent clinical outgrowth leads to the greatest part of morbidity and mortality from most solid tumors. Even more daunting is that many of these metastatic deposits silently lie undetected, recurring years to decades after primary tumor extirpation by surgery or radiation (termed metastatic dormancy). As primary tumors are frequently curable, a critical focus now turns to preventing the lethal emergence from metastatic dormancy. Current carcinoma treatments include adjuvant therapy intended to kill the cryptic metastatic tumor cells. Because such standard therapies mainly kill cycling cells, this approach carries an implicit assumption that metastatic cells are in the mitogenic cycle. Thus, the pivotal question arises as to whether clinically occult micrometastases survive in a state of balanced proliferation and death, or whether these cells undergo at least long periods of quiescence marked by cell-cycle arrest. The treatment implications are thus obvious—if the carcinoma cells are cycling then therapies should target cycling cells, whereas if cells are quiescent then therapies should either maintain dormancy or be toxic to dormant cells. Because this distinction is paramount to rational therapeutic development and administration, we investigated whether quiescence or balanced proliferation is the most likely etiology underlying metastatic dormancy. We recently published a computer simulation study that determined that balanced proliferation is not the likely driving force and that quiescence most likely participates in metastatic dormancy. As such, a greater emphasis on developing diagnostics and therapeutics for quiescent carcinomas is needed.National Institutes of Health (U.S.). National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (Grant UH2TR000496

Surface Tethered Epidermal Growth Factor Protects Proliferating and Differentiating Multipotential Stromal Cells from FasL-Induced Apoptosis

Multipotential stromal cells or mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have been proposed as aids in regenerating bone and adipose tissues, as these cells form osteoblasts and adipocytes. A major obstacle to this use of MSC is the initial loss of cells postimplantation. This cell death in part is due to ubiquitous nonspecific inflammatory cytokines such as FasL generated in the implant site. Our group previously found that soluble epidermal growth factor (sEGF) promotes MSC expansion. Furthermore, tethering EGF (tEGF) onto a two-dimensional surface altered MSC responses, by restricting epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) to the cell surface, causing sustained activation of EGFR, and promoting survival from FasL-induced death. sEGF by causing internalization of EGFR does not support MSC survival. However, for tEGF to be useful in bone regeneration, it needs to allow for MSC differentiation into osteoblasts while also protecting emerging osteoblasts from apoptosis. tEGF did not block induced differentiation of MSCs into osteoblasts, or adipocytes, a common default MSC-differentiation pathway. MSC-derived preosteoblasts showed increased Fas levels and became more susceptible to FasL-induced death, which tEGF prevented. Differentiating adipocytes underwent a reduction in Fas expression and became resistant to FasL-induced death, with tEGF having no further survival effect. tEGF protected undifferentiated MSC from combined insults of FasL, serum deprivation, and physiologic hypoxia. Additionally, tEGF was dominant in the face of sEGF to protect MSC from FasL-induced death. Our results suggest that MSCs and differentiating osteoblasts need protective signals to survive in the inflammatory wound milieu and that tEGF can serve this function.National Institute of General Medical Sciences (U.S.) (GM069668)National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (U.S.) (DE019523

A human factors approach to analysing military command and control

This paper applies the Event Analysis for Systemic Teamwork (EAST) method to an example of military command and control. EAST offers a way to describe system level 'emergent properties' that arise from the complex interactions of system components (human and technical). These are described using an integrated methods approach and modelled using Task, Social and Knowledge networks. The current article is divided into three parts: a brief description of the military command and control context, a brief description of the EAST method, and a more in depth presentation of the analysis outcomes. Numerous findings emerge from the application of the method. These findings are compared with similar analyses undertaken in civilian domains, where Network Enabled Capability (NEC) is already in place. The emergent properties of the military scenario relate to the degree of system reconfigurability, systems level Situational Awareness (SA), team-working and the role of mediating technology. It is argued that the EAST method can be used to offer several interesting perspectives on designing and specifying NEC capability in military context