Cell line immortalisation is a growing component of African genomics research and biobanking. However, little is known about the factors influencing consent to cell line creation and immortalisation in African research settings. We contribute to addressing this gap by exploring three questions in a sample of Xhosa participants recruited for a South African psychiatric genomics study: First, what proportion of participants consented to cell line storage? Second, what were predictors of this consent? Third, what questions were raised by (...) participants during this consent process? 760 Xhose people with schizophrenia and 760 controls were matched to sex, age, level of education and recruitment region. We used descriptive statistics to determine the proportion of participants who consented to cell line creation and immortalization. Logistic regression methods were used to examine the predictors of consent. Reflections from study recruiters were elicited and discussed to identify key questions raised by participants about consent. Approximately 40% of participants consented to cell line storage. The recruiter who sought consent was a strong predictor of participant’s consent. Participants recruited from the South African Eastern Cape, and older participants, were more likely to consent; both these groups were more likely to hold traditional Xhosa values. Neither illness nor education were significant predictors of consent. Key questions raised by participants included two broad themes: clarification of what cell immortalisation means, and issues around individual and community benefit. These findings provide guidance on the proportion of participants likely to consent to cell line immortalisation in genomics research in Africa, and reinforce the important and influential role that study recruiters play during seeking of this consent. Our results reinforce the cultural and contextual factors underpinning consent choices, particularly around sharing and reciprocity. Finally, these results provide support for the growing literature challenging the stigmatizing perception that people with severe mental illness are overly vulnerable as a target group for heath research and specifically genomics studies. (shrink)

Several scenes of hoop game take place in a funerary context on steles and white figure lekythoi in the Greek classical period. The meaning of these scenes extends beyond the display of a mere entertainment. The hoop game is part of a network of references associating the deceased with the mythical model of Ganymede. The abduction of the Trojan prince expresses the emotion caused by the death of young indivuals and the hope for a form of immortalisation. On funerary (...) steles and white figure lekythoi, play is used as a metaphorical operator. The hoop game transforms the deceased into a new Ganymede with the promise of a blessed afterlife. (shrink)

The rise of genomic studies in Africa – not least due to projects funded under H3Africa – is associated with the development of a small number of biorepositories across Africa. For the ultimate success of these biorepositories, the creation of cell lines including those from selected H3Africa samples would be beneficial. In this paper, we map ethical challenges in the creation of cell lines.

The inevitability of death and the fragility while facing the imponderables of nature and the conflicts of coexistence have marked human life from its origins, turning it into a constant crisis and thwarting the persistent yearning for happiness. That is why the struggle to transcend the horizons of mortal limitations and attain the eternal bliss of the gods, or at least a glorious memory, constitutes an essential theme of the Homeric Poems, the first literary documents of the West. Their narrative (...) deals with the fundamental dilemma of heroes like Achilles or Odysseus: the need to overcome mortality, in the memory of the living, through aristeia, versus the risk of exceeding, through hybris, the limits imposed on their own share of happiness. The symbolic spectre of fratricidal wars, already present in archaic poetry, is intensified by Greek tragedy, and later by Roman epics, because of the terrible experiences of the Peloponnesian War and the bella ciuilia at the end of the Roman Republic. After the glorious and patriotic spolia opima of the historic Marcellus, disconcerting shadows are projected by Virgil on the fictional hero Aeneas, and a total subversion of the concept of aristeia dominates Lucan’s epic poem on the civil war between Caesar and Pompey: the bellica uirtus that immortalises the name of the warrior becomes a scelus nefandum, the soldiers are mere instruments and anonymous targets for slaughter, and the few named embody the supreme hybris of the parricides. Other poets and philosophers tried to find a positive balance, suggesting aurea mediocritas and the control of emotions, thus enriching the humanistic heritage of the ancient world. (shrink)

Science and expertise have been antithetical forms of knowledge in both the ancient and the modern world, but they appear identical in today’s postmodern world, especially in Science & Technology Studies literature. The ancient Athenians associated science with the contemplative life afforded to those who lived from inherited wealth. Expertise was for those lacking property, and hence citizenship. Such people were regularly forced to justify their usefulness to Athenian society. Some foreign merchants, collectively demonised in Plato’s Dialogues as ‘sophists’, appeared (...) so insulting to citizen Socrates, because they dared to alienate aspects of this leisured existence and repackage them as techniques that might be purchased on demand from an expert – that is, a sophist. In effect, the sophists cleverly tried to universalise their own alien status, taking full advantage of the strong analogy that Athenians saw between the governance of the self and the polis. Unfortunately, Plato, the original spin doctor, immortalised Socrates’ laboured and hyperbolic rearguard response to these sly and partially successful attempts at dislodging hereditary privilege. (shrink)

The study of haemopoiesis enables us to address one of the central questions of developmental biology, concerning the molecular mechanisms by which a multipotent cell develops into distinct differentiated progeny. Recent work(1) suggests specific roles for retinoic acid receptors at two distinct stages of haemopoiesis. Continuous cell lines of lymphohaemopoietic progenitors were established by infection with a retrovirus containing a dominant negative retinoic acid receptor. The cell lines depend on stem cell factor for their proliferation and can be induced to (...) diffentiate into B‐lymphocytes, erythrocytes, neutrophils, monocytes, mast cells and megakaryocytes. Since lymphohaemopoietic progenitors represent less than 0.01% of nucleated marrow cells, immortalised progenitors provide a valuable system with which to study haemopoiesis on a molecular level. (shrink)

The replication of linear chromosome DNA by DNA polymerase leads to the loss of terminal sequences, in the absence of a special mechanism to maintain ends or telomeres. This mechanism is known to consist of short terminal repeats and the enzyme telomerase, which contains RNA complementary to the DNA repeats. There is evidence that telomeric DNA continually decreases in size in the absence of telomerase, and this is followed by cellular senescence. Immortalisation of somatic cells is accompanied, at least (...) in some cases, by acquisition of telomerase activity. The cloning of DNA coding for the RNA component of telomerase has opened up some new experimental approaches, including the study of telomerases with mutant RNA(1,2). The telomere theory of cellular senescence appears to provide a molecular basis for the ‘Hayflick limit’ to human fibroblast growth. However the telomeres and behaviour of primary mouse cells are anomolous(3), and many immortalised human cell lines lack normal telomerase activity(4). These exceptions are not easily accommodated in the telomere theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.2 (2002) 303-321 [Access article in PDF] "The Peak on Which Abraham Stands": The Pregnant Moment of Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling Lasse Horne Kjaeldgaard When Søren Kierkegaard in the 1840s began his one-man crusade against the predominant philosophy of his time and place—the right Hegelianism that was en vogue among his contemporaries in Copenhagen—he chose his weapons with great circumspection. The indirect (...) form of communication, which he later advocated in more direct terms in his "Point of View," 1 was not only a maieutic means that helped the reader conceive of the latent and strictly private messages of the texts; it was also a strategy for Kierkegaard's undercover assaults on the Hegelian turn of the Geistesleben around him. By interweaving many of the Hegelian platitudes and self-confident pronouncements that circulated in the intellectual life of the day into the pseudonymous writings, Kierkegaard contested them with parody rather than argumentation. This is the local background against which these texts are structured and to which they are addressed in multiple and very subtle ways. That also goes for that of the pseudonymous writings which has become the best known but which may also be regarded as the most private and most secretive of them all, Fear and Trembling, published pseudonymously in 1843.Secrecy, silence, and unspeakable messages are abundantly thematized in Fear and Trembling, as one could expect from the name of the narrator, Johannes de Silentio. Silentio is a prominent member of the choir of pseudonymous figures Kierkegaard invented to communicate indirectly with his audience and in [End Page 303] the name of which he published his most celebrated works. The silence that Silentio speaks of is that of Abraham of the Old Testament, who was commanded by God to sacrifice his only son on Mount Moriah. Although Genesis 22 includes fragments of the dialogue between Abraham and Isaac on their way to the mountain, Silentio insists that Abraham remained silent on the essential issue: the command he acts upon. The unmediated message Abraham had received from God could not be conveyed, and he was therefore barred from communication and bereft of his community as he journeyed to the Mountain. Yet Silentio's discourse upon this silence in Fear and Trembling has given impetus to innumerable pages of commentary. The questions and answers he poses in his reflections upon Abraham's ordeal have called for critical attention and controversy since the time of its publication. His obsession with the biblical narrative certainly seems to have been passed on to many readers of Fear and Trembling, which, a recent commentator has remarked, "continues to haunt us like no other of [Kierkegaard's] writings." 2 So far, it would seem, then, that Kierkegaard was right when he predicted, in an undated journal entry, that "Fear and Trembling will be enough to immortalise my name." It has indeed been "read and translated into foreign languages," as he foresaw it would. 3Even so, what has passed unnoticed in its long history of reception is the significance of the titles that the manuscript text bore before it came to be called Fear and Trembling. On the title page the definitive appellation is placed together with two alternatives with less suggestion of pathos: "Movements and Postures" (Bevægelser og Stillinger) and "Between-each-other" (Mellemhver-andre). 4 Not much can be discerned from these unpeculiar phrases in isolation. However, tracing their history and significance through Kierkegaard's writings and beyond, will make it clear that Fear and Trembling was also dispatched to the narrow Hegelian community in Copenhagen for the purpose of questioning their literary and visual aesthetics and philosophy of history. Into the guerrilla warfare against them Fear and Trembling introduces a weapon of such sophistication that it has remained undetected so far: the power of the "pregnant moment." My aim here will be to demonstrate the way in which Fear and Trembling appropriates a principle of selection intended for the... (shrink)

Goethe and Friedrich Schiller stand together immortalised in Ernst Rietschel's statue at the centre of Weimar. In their lifetime, Goethe and Schiller shaped the culture of German-speaking lands, not only through their poetry, plays, and novels, but also in their role as editors of journals that helped to set the intellectual tone of the period. Schiller's journalDie Horen and Goethe'sPropyläen, although short-lived, were important literary vehicles of the period and provided a forum that brought scientists, historians, philosophers, and poets into (...) conversation with one another. The late 1700s and early 1800s were years of intense intellectual development in Germanspeaking lands; the arts flourished and aesthetics developed as a serious branch of philosophy.During the ‘Age of Goethe and Schiller’, philosophy was dominated by Kant's philosophy and its post-Kantian variations. A problem with traditional philosophical histories of this period is the overwhelmingly Hegelian reading of it, a reading that subsumes all of the so-called minor figures under the shadows of the great system builder, Hegel. Richard Kroner's influentialVon Kant bis Hegelof 1921 set the tone for this reading. Silenced by such narratives are the voices of the early German Romantics, a group of thinkers whose impudence created problems for them, and whose work posed hermeneutical challenges that continue to plague a proper understanding of the movement and the worth of its contributions. As we shall see, Hegel himself began to prepare the ground for a history of philosophy that would dismiss the contributions of the early German Romantics, a dismissal that is unfair and unfortunate: unfair because it is based on false characterisations of the movement, and unfortunate because such misreadings lead us to overlook the wealth of insights offered by the early German Romantics. (shrink)

This paper considers the impact of the AI R&D programme on human society and the individual human being on the assumption that a full realisation of the engineering objective of AI, namely, construction of human-level, domain-independent intelligent entities, is possible. Our assumption is essentially identical tothe maximum progress scenario of the Office of Technology Assessment, US Congress.Specifically, the first section introduces some of the significant issues on the relational nexus among work, education and the human-machine boundary. In particular, based on (...) a Russellian conception of rationality I briefly argue that we need to change our related conceptions of work, employment and free time, through a new human-centred education. On the human-machine boundary problem, I make a couple of tentative suggestions and put forward some crucial open questions.Section two discusses the impact of the emerging machine intelligence on human nature both as modification of its self-image, keeping human nature itself unchanged, and its potential for altering human nature itself. I briefly argue that: (i) in a certain context, the question of the supremacy or uniqueness of human intelligence loses much, if not all, of its ‘weight’; and (ii) appearance of Robot-X species would immortalise the human spirit. (shrink)

Novel biological entities such as cell lines and organoids do not typically fit into established conceptual categories, such as ‘human’ or ‘nonhuman’, ‘gift’ or ‘property’. This makes developing robust ethical principles or policy solutions difficult. In this article, we present a new approach to the ethics of novel biological entities, which we call ‘liminal bioethics’. We argue that some entities are best understood as liminal; we should not try to shoehorn them into existing categories or modify our concepts to suit (...) them. However, we must investigate which concepts help articulate an entity's liminal status most precisely. The choice of concepts, in turn, may suggest correspondingly liminal ethical principles or solutions for that entity. To demonstrate how this method works, we focus on immortalised cell lines as a test case, while also considering its implications for more recent breakthroughs in cell culture technology relating to organoids and assembloids. First, we demonstrate why the gift‐property distinction is inadequate for framing the liminality of cell lines. We then argue for cell lines as being located in a liminal conceptual space between body part and organism, and discuss the conceptual shift that this entails for understanding the status of cell lines and organoids. We suggest that ethical principles in relation to cell lines should reflect this particular liminality; for example, commercial exchange of cell lines seems more acceptable than with body parts, but some means of respecting cell lines' continuing human connection should still be in place. (shrink)