The Right to Be Fat

Why say Inside every fat person there is a thin person waiting to get out. For me, it\u27s more like Inside every fat person there is an even fatter person waiting get out. \u27 In its now famous paragraph from Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, the Supreme Court tried to delineate the scope of liberty that the Constitution guarantees: Our law affords constitutional protection to personal decisions relating to marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, child rearing, and education. . . . These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one\u27s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State . . .. As one would expect from a text that takes on the considerable task of outlining the scope of liberty, the Court\u27s words are emotive. They seem to convey a sense of the core dimensions of being and the amalgam of perspectives, choices, and practices that make individuals who they are. These are components so personal and vulnerable that the government should refrain from interfering with them. The Court\u27s conceptual framework concerning abortion here is useful when we try to determine the scope of constitutionally protected liberty, because it invokes an intuition about the most basic and private aspects of our lives - those aspects that are most one\u27s own and should not require any explanation or be subjected to any State intervention. What else in life, like the decision about whether to have an abortion, lies at the heart of liberty in that it defines one\u27s concept of existence, of meaning, and of the mystery of human lives? What other views, choices, and ways of living should not be formed under compulsion of the state? While some rights, such as free speech or religious freedom, clearly fall within this protected realm, there are territories of human existence that also lie at the heart of our liberty and define how we live, but are yet to be recognized as such by constitutional theory. In this Article, I visit one such uncharted territory and argue that American law should recognize a new realm of liberty: the realm of body size. Recognizing the right to be any body size as part of the general principle of liberty (and, more specifically, as part of autonomy and dignity) would entail that we cautiously scrutinize governmental policies aiming to create incentives for losing weight or deterrence against gaining weight, as well as some acts by private actors, and balance them vis-à-vis their potential infringement of the right. My principal contention is that the law has been blind to body size and shape, eating habits, and movement and exercise practices, due to a dualistic understanding of the relationship between mind and body. However, decisions pertaining to these domains of experience lie at the core of human existence, no less so than questions such as whether to become a parent, which church to join, or what views to hold and express. Due to economic, technological, and cultural changes, body size and the practices associated with it (such as dieting, exercising, and surgery) have become more meaningful in the lives of American legal subjects than ever before. Body size plays a role in shaping individual and social identity, but also it has become a central arena for policymakers, who routinely recruit the law in creating regulative instruments to encourage the slimming down of the U.S. population

Computational verification of protein-protein interactions by orthologous co-expression

BACKGROUND: High-throughput methods identify an overwhelming number of protein-protein interactions. However, the limited accuracy of these methods results in the false identification of many spurious interactions. Accordingly, the resulting interactions are regarded as hypothetical and computational methods are needed to increase their confidence. Several methods have recently been suggested for this purpose including co-expression as a confidence measure for interacting proteins, but their performance is still quite poor. RESULTS: We introduce a novel computational method for verification of protein-protein interactions based on the co-expression of orthologs of interacting partners. The performance of our method is analysed using known S. cerevisiae interactions, and is shown to overcome limitations of previous methods. We present specific examples of known and putative interactions that are detected by our method and not by previous methods, and suggest that they represent transient interactions that might have been conserved and stabilized in other species. CONCLUSION: Co-expression of orthologous protein-pairs can be used to increase the confidence of hypothetical protein-protein interactions in S. cerevisiae as well as in other species. This approach may be especially useful for species with no available expression profiles and for transient interactions

Comparative analysis indicates regulatory neofunctionalization of yeast duplicates

Comparison of the expression profiles of S. cerevisiae duplicate pairs with that of their pre-duplication orthologs in C. albicans identified a class of genes that may present cases of regulatory neofunctionalization

Ancient technology and punctuated change: Detecting the emergence of the Edomite Kingdom in the Southern Levant.

While the punctuated equilibrium model has been employed in paleontological and archaeological research, it has rarely been applied for technological and social evolution in the Holocene. Using metallurgical technologies from the Wadi Arabah (Jordan/Israel) as a case study, we demonstrate a gradual technological development (13th-10th c. BCE) followed by a human agency-triggered punctuated "leap" (late-10th c. BCE) simultaneously across the entire region (an area of ~2000 km2). Here, we present an unparalleled, diachronic archaeometallurgical dataset focusing on elemental analysis of dozens of well-dated slag samples. Based on the results, we suggest punctuated equilibrium provides an innovative theoretical model for exploring ancient technological changes in relation to larger sociopolitical conditions-in the case at hand the emergence of biblical Edom-, exemplifying its potential for more general cross-cultural applications

Opposite GC skews at the 5' and 3' ends of genes in unicellular fungi

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>GC-skews have previously been linked to transcription in some eukaryotes. They have been associated with transcription start sites, with the coding strand G-biased in mammals and C-biased in fungi and invertebrates.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We show a consistent and highly significant pattern of GC-skew within genes of almost all unicellular fungi. The pattern of GC-skew is asymmetrical: the coding strand of genes is typically C-biased at the 5' ends but G-biased at the 3' ends, with intermediate skews at the middle of genes. Thus, the initiation, elongation, and termination phases of transcription are associated with different skews. This pattern influences the encoded proteins by generating differential usage of amino acids at the 5' and 3' ends of genes. These biases also affect fourfold-degenerate positions and extend into promoters and 3' UTRs, indicating that skews cannot be accounted by selection for protein function or translation.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We propose two explanations, the mutational pressure hypothesis, and the adaptive hypothesis. The mutational pressure hypothesis is that different co-factors bind to RNA pol II at different phases of transcription, producing different mutational regimes. The adaptive hypothesis is that cytidine triphosphate deficiency may lead to C-avoidance at the 3' ends of transcripts to control the flow of RNA pol II molecules and reduce their frequency of collisions.</p