Despite the reality of intersex individuals whose biological markers do not necessarily all point towards a traditional binary understanding of either male or female, the vast majority of sports divide competition into categories based on a binary notion of biological sex and develop policies and regulations to police the divide. In so doing, sports governing bodies (SGBs) adopt an imperfect model of biological sex in order to serve their particular purposes, which, typically, will include protecting the fundamental sporting value of (...) fair competition. Yet, one potential consequence of enforcing such an approach would seem to be the exclusion or marginalization of individuals whose biological development does not fit within the binary model, whether due to genetics or through a choice to undergo medical intervention to better represent a chosen gender identity. Any such exclusion or marginalization will inevitably tend to undermine another fundamental value of sport, that of inclusivity. In the context of those with differences of sex development, SGBs appear to be faced with a difficult problem: dealing with a conflict between two fundamental values of sport. Different approaches to this problem have been suggested, with some academics proposing that sports organisations, in general, ought to prioritise fairness above, while others suggest the need to ‘balance’ competing values or even to prioritise inclusion over fairness. However, it is argued that any of these approaches are, in principle, justifiable as any sport should be free to prioritise or balance its own values. What seems more important for any SGB is the need for a rational and transparent justification of regulations that pursue fair competition at the expense of inclusivity. Furthermore, where fair competition and inclusivity are fundamental values, any such justification would seem to demand adherence to some basic norms. First, the regulations should be built on (and articulate) a consistent and principled basis of what ‘fair competition’ means in a particular sport. Second, any regulations should only exclude or restrict participation to the minimum degree necessary to achieve the sense of fair competition so articulated. Third, SGBs should be transparent about what their values are and where their priorities lie so that participants and other stakeholders are able to make an informed choice as to whether they wish to participate in, support, or be associated with a particular sport. With reference to the adoption of the Eligibility Regulations for Athletes with Differences of Sex Development (the ‘DSD Regulations’) by the International Association of Athletic Federations (IAAF), this article seeks to evaluate whether the approach of the IAAF satisfied these basic requirements. (shrink)

This article recovers mid-century proposals for sciences of concord and contextualizes them as part of a broader politics of commercial knowledge in eighteenth-century Britain. It begins by showing how merchants gained authority as formulators of commercial policy during the Commerce Treaty debates of 1713–1714. This authority held fast during the Walpolean oligarchy, but collapsed by the 1740s, when lobbying and patronage were increasingly maligned as corrupt by a ferment of popular republicanism. The article then explores how the Anglican cleric Josiah (...) Tucker and country pamphleteer Joseph Massie made use of this vacuum in authority to formulate a novel basis for the production of commercial knowledge. In pamphlets written between 1749 and 1760, they argued that the competing interests comprising the nation’s increasingly complex commercial system could only be reconciled and geared to the national interest through the establishment of a science which harnessed an impartial and systematizing epistemology, developing highly idealized accounts of the abstract market as a realm of concord which operated according to regular, rationally deducible principles. The conclusion suggests that their arguments introduced the foundational conceptual bases for later sciences of political economy and legitimated a new form of expertise in statecraft. (shrink)

Oncogenes are altered forms of normal cellular genes known as proto‐oncogenes. Several oncogenes encode enzymes that phosphorylate substrate proteins at tyrosine. In most of these cases the oncogene differs from its proto‐oncogene by multiple mutations that alter the structure of the encoded protein product. Here we discuss how structural changes might effect the regulation and substrate specificity of the protein kinase product of a protooncogene so that it gains the potential to transform cells.

The central premise of the book draws on the familiar observation that sport and state based legal systems are both rule governed practices that share a great deal in common: as the authors put it,...