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History at the heart of medicine
Get PDFFunding: This work was supported by Wellcome [209513]; a NWO Aspasia grant, Stichting Historia Medicinae, an unrestricted donation from Novo Nordisk Foundation to the NNF Center for Basic Metabolic Research [NNF18CC0034900], and the Groningen Research Institute for the Study of Culture.With a focus on the challenges of today and tomorrow in the critical medical humanities the role of history is often overlooked. Yet history and medicine are closely intertwined. Right now, with the surfacing of knotty problems such as changing demographics, chronic pain, loneliness and Long Covid – and the consequent necessity to change directions and policies – history seems more urgent than ever. However, historians of medicine have sometimes been reticent to play a role in medicine and policymaking. The recent and welcome development of the critical medical humanities has intervened in medicine in important ways, but often without clear engagement with the history of medicine. In this letter, we make a renewed case for coherence and collaboration between history of medicine, medicine, and medical humanities, emphasising the continuity and links between all three. The skills and focus of the historian of medicine bring crucial historical context to the table, enabling better understanding of medical collecting, new imaginative futures, profound critiques of key medical concepts, and understandings of the body through time. By emphasising what historians can do for medicine and medical humanities, we call for building historical work into how medicine, illness and health are understood now and in the future. We suggest three potential roles for historians: keepers of memories, conversation partners, and futurist thinkers.Peer reviewe
Geographical structure of the local segregation of migrants in (sub)urban China
Get PDFUnprecedented urbanisation in China has profoundly reshaped the country’s social-spatial structure. Owing to economic suburbanisation and urban redevelopment processes, migrants coming from rural areas are increasingly concentrated in suburbs rather than city centres. Against this backdrop, this paper focuses on residential segregation between migrants and locals, and on geographical (re)structuring between the city centre and suburb. Theil’s H Index is used to disaggregate the migrant segregation of each municipality into a within-suburb, a within-centre and a between-centre-suburb component. We use Census data for 258 municipalities in 2000 and 2010; we find that migrant segregation increased in this period. We ascribe this to the increasing segregation of migrants in suburban areas, which offsets the increasingly balanced distribution of migrants between the city centre and suburb. Segregation in city centres also increased slightly in this period. Unexpectedly, less economically developed municipalities, defined by their per capita GDP, tend to be more segregated than their more developed counterparts. Less developed municipalities also have a higher level of suburban employment and housing opportunities in the whole municipality, but feature more segregated suburban spaces and a polarised distribution of migrants between the centre and suburb.Peer reviewe
"Organ-in-a-column" coupled on-line with liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry
Get PDFFunding: This work was supported by the Research Council of Norway through its Centre of Excellence scheme, project number 262613, and project number 295910 (National Network of Advanced Proteomics Infrastructure). Support was also provided by UiO:Life Science and the Olav Thon Foundation.Organoids, i.e., laboratory-grown organ models developed from stem cells, are emerging tools for studying organ physiology, disease modeling, and drug development. On-line analysis of organoids with mass spectrometry would provide analytical versatility and automation. To achieve these features with robust hardware, we have loaded liquid chromatography column housings with induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) derived liver organoids and coupled the “organ-in-a-column” units on-line with liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS). Liver organoids were coloaded with glass beads to achieve an even distribution of organoids throughout the column while preventing clogging. The liver organoids were interrogated “on column” with heroin, followed by on-line monitoring of the drug’s phase 1 metabolism. Enzymatic metabolism of heroin produced in the “organ-in-a-column” units was detected and monitored using a triple quadrupole MS instrument, serving as a proof-of-concept for on-line coupling of liver organoids and mass spectrometry. Taken together, the technology allows direct integration of liver organoids with LC-MS, allowing selective and automated tracking of drug metabolism over time.Peer reviewe
“Chinese” studies for the twenty-first century
Get PDFThis is a slightly modified version of a presentation given to the Scottish Centre for China Research, University of Glasgow, 13 October 2022.Peer reviewe
Beyond uniform cyclotomy
Get PDFCyclotomy, the study of cyclotomic classes and cyclotomic numbers, is an area of number theory first studied by Gauss. It has natural applications in discrete mathematics and information theory. Despite this long history, there are significant limitations to what is known explicitly about cyclotomic numbers, which limits the use of cyclotomy in applications. The main explicit tool available is that of uniform cyclotomy, introduced by Baumert, Mills and Ward in 1982. In this paper, we present an extension of uniform cyclotomy which gives a direct method for evaluating all cyclotomic numbers over GF(qn) of order dividing (qn – 1)/(q – 1), for any prime power q and n ≥ 2, which does not use character theory nor direct calculation in the field. This allows the straightforward evaluation of many cyclotomic numbers for which other methods are unknown or impractical, extending the currently limited portfolio of tools to work with cyclotomic numbers. Our methods exploit connections between cyclotomy, Singer difference sets and finite geometry.Peer reviewe
Properties of the major Zn2+-binding site of human alpha-fetoprotein, a potential foetal plasma zinc carrier
Get PDFFunding: This work was financially supported by the Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2017-214) and BBSRC (BB/J006467/1 and BB/V014684/1).The foetal plasma protein α-fetoprotein (AFP) harbours a high-affinity zinc binding site that is likely involved in transport and delivery of essential zinc during foetal development. Based on a recent electron microscopy structure of AFP and aided by biophysical studies on an AFP-derived peptide, we present a refined 5-coordinate model for this site.Peer reviewe
Measuring the effectiveness of anti-cartel interventions in the shadow of recidivism
Get PDFIt is important to measure the effectiveness of Competition Authority (CA) anti-cartel enforcement, recognising that the total effect may be larger than the direct effect routinely measured by CAs because of the indirect/behavioural effects of interventions—primarily on deterrence. However, existing measurement methodologies assume that prosecuting and penalising cartels brings price fixing in an industry to an end forever. It is increasingly recognised that following successful prosecutions, collusion may re-emerge and that the extent of such recidivism depends on the structure of post-prosecution interventions. Failure to allow for possible re-emergence could produce biased measures of CA effectiveness. We develop a framework for measuring the effectiveness of anti-cartel interventions that admits that recidivism could arise depending on the nature of post-prosecution interventions. Our general model nests the no recidivism assumption as a special case and, hence, improves upon the existing methodologies. The new framework enables us to measure the extent of bias arising from the failure to allow for recidivism, and we show that it can be significant. We make a number of other significant extensions to the existing frameworks. In particular, we allow for indirect price effects as well as indirect deterrence effects and analyse the marginal effects of CA interventions.Peer reviewe
Analysing disease trajectories of multimorbidity through process mining techniques : a case study
Get PDFFunding: This work is independent research funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR, Artificial Intelligence for Multiple Long-Term Conditions (AIM), OPTIMising therapies, disease trajectories, and AI assisted clinical management for patients Living with complex multimorbidity (OPTIMAL study), NIHR202632).Multimorbidity is a global public health challenge, where an individual has two or more chronic conditions, making it difficult to treat and manage illnesses. Understanding the disease trajectories of multimorbidity is crucial for providing patient-centred care. Previous research has primarily employed regression-based approaches, which don’t consider the specific diseases involved and the order in which they occur. Process mining was recently proposed to address this gap, showing promising results in modelling disease trajectories across the entire spectrum of diseases. However, that study involved admissions to a single hospital, and hence the size of the dataset was much smaller than what is typically used in population-level studies on multimorbidity. In this paper, we present a case study where process mining techniques are applied to a much larger dataset of patients in Scotland. We present the disease trajectories discovered for the entire population, as well as stratified by sex. We also describe temporal patterns of disease trajectories, including trajectories with rapid progression. Finally, we discuss the experience of employing process mining within a trusted research environment, and we reflect on challenges that we faced when mining disease trajectories based on a large and complex dataset. Our main contribution involves providing additional evidence around the feasibility of disease trajectory modelling through process mining techniques, in particular when a much larger health dataset is involved
Sigmatropic rearrangement enables access to a highly stable spirocyclic nitroxide for protein spin labelling
Get PDFSpin labelling enables the study of biomolecules using electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy. Here, we describe the synthesis of a cysteine-reactive spin label based on a spirocyclic pyrrolidinyl nitroxide containing an iodoacetamide moiety. The spin label was shown to be highly persistent under reducing conditions while maintaining excellent EPR relaxation parameters up to a temperature of 180 K. After successful double spin labelling of a calmodulin variant, interspin distances were measured by the EPR experiment double electron–electron resonance (DEER) at 120 K.Peer reviewe
Extracting emerging events from social media : X/Twitter and the multilingual analysis of emerging geopolitical topics in near real time
Get PDFFunding: This work was supported by the School of Computer Science of the University of St Andrews.This study uses multiple languages to investigate the emergence of geopolitical topics on X / Twitter across two different time intervals: daily and hourly. For the daily interval, we examined the emergence of topics from February 4th, 2023, to March 23rd, 2023, at random three-hour intervals, compiling the topic modeling results for each day into a time series. For the hourly interval, we considered two days of data, June 1st, 2023, and June 6th, 2023, where we tracked the growth of topics for those days. We collected our data through the X / Twitter Filtered Stream using key bigrams (two-word phrases) for various geopolitical topics for multiple languages to identify emerging geopolitical events at the global and regional levels. Lastly, we compared the trends created by tracking emerging topics over time to Google Trends data, another data source for emerging topics. At the daily level, we found that our X / Twitter-based algorithm was able to identify multiple geopolitical events at least a day before they became relevant on Google Trends, and in the case of North Korean missile launches during this period, several languages identified more missile launches than the Google Trends data. As for the hourly data, we again found several topics that emerged hours before they started appearing on Google Trends. Our analyses also found that the different languages allowed for greater diversity in topics that would not have been possible if only one language had been used.Peer reviewe
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