The prelude to successful human somatic gene therapy, i.e. the efficient transfer and expression of a variety of human genes into target cells, has already been accomplished in several systems. Safe methods have been devised to do this using non‐viral and viral vectors. Potentially therapeutic genes have been transferred into many accessible cell types, including hematopoietic cells, hepatocytes and cancer cells, in several different approaches to ex vivo gene therapy. Successful in vivo gene therapy requires improvements in tissuetargeting and new (...) vector design, which are already being sought. Gene‐transfer protocols have been approved for human use in inherited diseases, cancer and acquired disorders. Althouth the results of these trials to date have been somewhat disappointing, human somatic cell gene therapy promises to be an effective addition to the arsenal of approaches to the therapy of many human diseases in the 21st century if not sooner. (shrink)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1907 Excerpt:...gave opportunities for abuse which did not exist before. Where these powers were greatest, these abuses developed first and made the earliest public scandals. It was here that the business men themselves felt the need of remedies deeper reaching than those which the law could give. Combinations of merchants or (...) manufacturers or of financiers outside the regular lines of banking were a later thing, and therefore we are only at this moment correcting the evils which are incident to their conduct. It takes a long time for a man to learn to transfer a principle of morality which he fully recognizes in one field to another field of slightly different location and character, particularly if the application of strict morality in the new field is going to hurt his personal interest. I remember a story of a country court in a warranty case which furnishes an instance in point. One man had sold another a cow, and had represented that cow as possessing certain good qualities--adding, however, that he did not warrant her. The cow proved not to possess the qualities alleged, and the buyer sought to recover the purchase-money. As there was no dispute about the facts, the plaintiff's attorney thought that he had an easy case; for it is a well-established principle of law that a disclaimer of warranty in such a sale does not protect the transaction from the taint of fraud, if the matters in question were ones which the seller really could know and the buyer could not. He showed a sufficient number of legal precedents to illustrate this principle, but was somewhat dumbfounded when the opposing lawyer rose and said: "May it please the court, every one of the cases cited by my learned brother is a horse case. I defy him to produce one relating to horned cattle." The... (shrink)

Our study considers the governance, ethics and operational challenges associated with the acquisition, manipulation and commodification of ‘big data’ in the financial services sector. To the best of our knowledge, there are no published studies describing empirical research undertaken within companies in this sector to understand how they are responding to such challenges: our field-based research is a significant initial contribution in this respect. We describe the results of a micro-ethnographic study undertaken in a small-to-medium-sized company developing disruptive, technology-related platforms (...) and services in the banking and retail sectors based on big data and associated analytics: these are used to derive commercially valuable insights from personal customer data in exchange for cash back and targeted rewards. The company was found to employ a multi-level innovation governance approach, underpinned by an ethical strategy based on a principle of mutual benefit. Opt-in and informed consent for using data for specific purposes was supported by principles of data minimisation and anonymisation, with unrestricted use of secondary, anonymised and aggregated data to develop insights. Governance, which included contextual data protection legislation, payment-card industry data usage standards and internal corporate controls, presented as bespoke organisational practices relating to data security and privacy. These in total set the governance and ethics frame for big data innovation at the company within which it has had to be both adaptive and responsive under conditions of normative and regulatory uncertainty. (shrink)

Researchers are developing a fertility preservation technique?testicular tissue cryopreservation (TTCP)?for prepubescent boys who may become infertile as a result of their cancer treatment. Although this technique is still in development, some researchers are calling for its widespread use. They argue that if boys do not bank their tissue now, they will be unable to benefit from any therapies that might be developed in the future. There are, however, risks involved with increasing access to an investigational procedure. This article examines (...) four methods of expanding access to TTCP: (1) expansion of institutional review board (IRB)-approved research trials; (2) offering TTCP as an innovative procedure in hospitals; (3) offering TTCP as a standard practice in hospitals; and (4) commercialization of TTCP. The ethical and practical implications of each are evaluated through a comparison with umbilical cord blood banking (UCBB), a technology that has achieved widespread use based on similar claims of future benefit. (shrink)

In this new volume in the Oxford Psychology Series, the author presents a highly readable account of the cognitive unconscious, focusing in particular on the problem of implicit learning. Implicit learning is defined as the acquisition of knowledge that takes place independently of the conscious attempts to learn and largely in the absence of explicit knowledge about what was acquired. One of the core assumptions of this argument is that implicit learning is a fundamental, "root" process, one that lies at (...) the very heart of the adaptive behavioral repertoire of every complex organism. The author's goals are to outline the essential features of implicit learning that have emerged from the many studies that have been carried out in a variety of experimental laboratories over the past several decades; to present the various alternative perspectives on this issue that have been proposed by other researchers and to try to accommodate these views with his own; to structure the literature so that it can be seen in the context of standard heuristics of evolutionary biology; to present the material within a functionalist approach and to try to show why the experimental data should be seen as entailing particular epistemological perspectives; and to present implicit processing as encompassing a general and ubiquitous set of operations that have wide currency and several possible applications. Chapter 1 begins with the core problem under consideration in this book, a characterization of "implicit learning" as it has come to be used in the literature. Reber puts this seemingly specialized topic into a general framework and suggests a theoretical model based on standard heuristics of evolutionary biology. In his account, Reber weaves a capsule history of interest in and work on the cognitive unconscious. Chapter 2 turns to a detailed overview of the experimental work on the acquisition of implicit knowledge, which currently is of great interest. Chapter 3 develops the evolutionary model within which one can see learning and cognition as richly intertwining issues and not as two distinct fields with one dominating the other. Finally, Chapter 4 explores a variety of entailments and speculations concerning implicit cognitive processes and their general role in the larger scope of human performance. (shrink)

In recent decades it has become increasingly clear that a substantial amount of cognitive work goes on independent of consciousness. The research has been carried out largely under two rubrics, implicit learning and implicit memory. The former has been concerned primarily with the acquisition of knowledge independent of awareness and the latter with the manner in which memories not readily available to conscious recall or recognition play a role in behavior; collectively these operations comprise the essential functions of the cognitive (...) unconscious. This paper reviews the recent history of work on these issues, identifies some of the problems confronting researchers, and introduces a theoretical framework based on principles of evolutionary biology within which to view them. The argument is that the cognitive unconscious, despite its apparent sophistication, is of considerable evolutionary antiquity and antedates conscious cognitive systems by a considerable amount of time. Various entailments of this evolutionary perspective are explored including such issues as phylogeny and ontogeny of implicit processes, the robustness of the implicit functions as displayed by the capacity to resist disruptions from psychological and neurological disorders, the relationship between implicit cognition and intelligence, and individual differences in implicit cognitive abilities. (shrink)

"The past two decades have seen renewed scholarly and popular interest in the law and morality of war. Positions that originated in the late Middle Ages through the 17th century have received more sophisticated philosophical elaboration. Although many contemporary writers draw on ideas that figure prominently in Kant's moral philosophy, his explicit discussions of war have not been brought into their proper place within these discussions and debates. Kant argues that a special morality governs the permissible use of force because (...) of wars distinctive immorality. He characterizes war as barbaric, because in war might makes right - which side prevails does not depend on who is in the right. The very thing that makes war wrongful also provides the appropriate standard for evaluating the conduct of war, and the only basis for law governing war"--. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to put the work of the past several decades on the problems of implicit learning and unconscious cognition into an evolutionary context. Implicit learning is an inductive process whereby knowledge of a complex environment is acquired and used largely independently of awareness of either the process of acquisition or the nature of that which has been learned. Characterized this way, implicit learning theory can be viewed as an attempt to come to grips with the classic (...) epistemological issues of knowledge acquisition, representation and use. The argument is made that the process, despite its seeming cognitive sophistication, is of considerable evolutionary antiquity and that it antedates awareness and the capacity for conscious control of mentation. Various classic heuristics from evolutionary biology are used to substantiate this claim and several specific entailments of this line of argument are outlined. (shrink)

This book discusses and aims to clarify the issue of describing conduct and character as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, or as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. The book states that one of the main factors that have made this issue obscure is the illusion of some anti-naturalists that purely logical considerations can settle it. It clearly defines the limitations of the discussions: it is not concerned with the ‘other things’ people use to define conduct and character. The book attempts to consider the issue (...) from the purely logician point of view and suggests to the naturalists and anti-naturalists how their positions may be freed from logical faults. The book also introduces the ‘logic of ethics’, which is not a special kind or branch of logic, but rather an application of it. (shrink)

Arthur I. Miller is a master at capturing the intersection of creativity and intelligence. He did it with Einstein and Picasso, and now he does it with Pauli and Jung. Their shared obsession with the number 137 provides a window into their genius. --Walter Isaacson.

I introduce a mathematical account of expectation based on a qualitative criterion of coherence for qualitative comparisons between gambles (or random quantities). The qualitative comparisons may be interpreted as an agent’s comparative preference judgments over options or more directly as an agent’s comparative expectation judgments over random quantities. The criterion of coherence is reminiscent of de Finetti’s quantitative criterion of coherence for betting, yet it does not impose an Archimedean condition on an agent’s comparative judgments, it does not require the (...) binary relation reflecting an agent’s comparative judgments to be reflexive, complete or even transitive, and it applies to an absolutely arbitrary collection of gambles, free of structural conditions (e.g., closure, measurability, etc.). Moreover, unlike de Finetti’s criterion of coherence, the qualitative criterion respects the principle of weak dominance, a standard of rational decision making that obliges an agent to reject a gamble that is possibly worse and certainly no better than another gamble available for choice. Despite these weak assumptions, I establish a qualitative analogue of de Finetti’s Fundamental Theorem of Prevision, from which it follows that any coherent system of comparative expectations can be extended to a weakly ordered coherent system of comparative expectations over any collection of gambles containing the initial set of gambles of interest. The extended weakly ordered coherent system of comparative expectations satisfies familiar additivity and scale invariance postulates (i.e., independence) when the extended collection forms a linear space. In the course of these developments, I recast de Finetti’s quantitative account of coherent prevision in the qualitative framework adopted in this article. I show that comparative previsions satisfy qualitative analogues of de Finetti’s famous bookmaking theorem and his Fundamental Theorem of Prevision.The results of this article complement those of another article (Pedersen, Strictly coherent preferences, no holds barred, Manuscript, 2013). I explain how those results entail that any coherent weakly ordered system of comparative expectations over a unital linear space can be represented by an expectation function taking values in a (possibly non-Archimedean) totally ordered field extension of the system of real numbers. The ordered field extension consists of formal power series in a single infinitesimal, a natural and economical representation that provides a relief map tracing numerical non-Archimedean features to qualitative non-Archimedean features. (shrink)

. . . The book is enhanced by the polished and lucid style of Mr. Waley's translations.

Written in 1839 and chosen as the winning entry in a competition held by the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences, Schopenhauer's Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will marked the beginning of its author's public recognition and is widely regarded as one of the most brilliant and elegant treatments of free will and determinism. Schopenhauer distinguishes the freedom of acting from the freedom of willing, affirming the former while denying the latter. He portrays human action as thoroughly determined but (...) also argues that the freedom which cannot be established in the sphere of human action is preserved at the level of our innermost being as individuated will, whose reality transcends all dependency on outside factors. This volume offers the text in a previously unpublished translation by Eric F. J. Payne, the leading twentieth-century translator of Schopenhauer into English, together with a historical and philosophical introduction by Günter Zöller. (shrink)

The Human Genome Project is an expensive, ambitious, and controversial attempt to locate and map every one of the approximately 100,000 genes in the human body. If it works, and we are able, for instance, to identify markers for genetic diseases long before they develop, who will have the right to obtain such information? What will be the consequences for health care, health insurance, employability, and research priorities? And, more broadly, how will attitudes toward human differences be affected, morally and (...) socially, by the setting of a genetic “standard”? The compatibility of individual rights and genetic fairness is challenged by the technological possibilities of the future, making it difficult to create an agenda for a “just genetics.” Beginning with an account of the utopian dreams and authoritarian tendencies of historical eugenics movements, this book’s nine essays probe the potential social uses and abuses of detailed genetic information. Lucid and wide-ranging, these contributions will interest bioethicists, legal scholars, and policy makers. Essays: “The Genome Project and the Meaning of Difference,” Timothy F. Murphy “Eugenics and the Human Genome Project: Is the Past Prologue?,” Daniel J. Kevles “Handle with Care: Race, Class, and Genetics,” Arthur L. Caplan “Public Choices and Private Choices: Legal Regulation of Genetic Testing,” Lori B. Andrews “Rules for Gene Banks: Protecting Privacy in the Genetics Age,” George J. Annas “Use of Genetic Information by Private Insurers,” Robert J. Pokorski “The Genome Project, Individual Differences, and Just Health Care,” Norman Daniels “Just Genetics: A Problem Agenda,” Leonard M. Fleck “Justice and the Limitations of Genetic Knowledge,” Marc A. Lappé. (shrink)

This book gathers together for the first time an important body of texts written between 1672 and 1686 by the great German philosopher and polymath Gottfried Leibniz. These writings, most of them previously untranslated, represent Leibniz's sustained attempt on a problem whose solution was crucial to the development of his thought, that of the composition of the continuum. The volume begins with excerpts from Leibniz's Paris writings, in which he tackles such problems as whether the infinite division of matter entails (...) perfect points, whether matter and space can be regarded as true wholes, whether motion is truly continuous, and the nature of body and substance. Comprising the second section is Pacidius Philalethi, Leibniz's brilliant dialogue of late 1676 on the problem of the continuity of motion. In the selections of the final section, from his Hanover writings of 1677-1686, Leibniz abandons his earlier transcreationism and atomism in favor of the theory of corporeal substance, where the reality of body and motion is founded in substantial form or force.Leibniz's texts (one in French, the rest in Latin) are presented with facing-page English translations, together with an introduction, notes, appendixes containing related excerpts from earlier works by Leibniz and his predecessors, and a valuable glossary detailing important terms and their translations. (shrink)

The book presents an anthology of readings on the philosophy of science covering traditional issues, such as explanation, confirmation, and progress against a backdrop of historical case studies. Discusses the feminist philosophy of science to present a different perspective on the subject and chapters on medicine and psychology (dreaming) present applications of philosophy and science.

What evidence and what arguments can be produced in support of the controversial suggestion, first made by Leo Strauss now over 65 years ago, that most earlier philosophers wrote esoterically and, what is more, that they did so, not merely from fear of persecution, but with an eye to enhancing their pedagogical effectiveness? I argue here that the inherent paradoxes of philosophical education combined with the inherent shortcomings of writing led many earlier thinkers to see the pedagogical necessity of something (...) like the Socratic method. And esoteric writing - a rhetoric of riddling concealment - is the closest literary approximation to the Socratic method. (shrink)

Continuous first-order logic has found interest among model theorists who wish to extend the classical analysis of “algebraic” structures to various natural classes of complete metric structures. With research in continuous first-order logic preoccupied with studying the model theory of this framework, we find a natural question calls for attention. Is there an interesting set of axioms yielding a completeness result?The primary purpose of this article is to show that a certain, interesting set of axioms does indeed yield a completeness (...) result for continuous first-order logic. In particular, we show that in continuous first-order logic a set of formulae is satisfiable if it is consistent. From this result it follows that continuous first-order logic also satisfies an approximated form of strong completeness, whereby Σ⊨φ only if Σ⊢φ∸ 2-n for all n < ω. This approximated form of strong completeness asserts that if Σ⊨φ, then proofs from Σ, being finite, can provide arbitrarily better approximations of the truth of φ.Additionally, we consider a different kind of question traditionally arising in model theory—that of decidability. When is the set of all consequences of a theory recursive? Say that a complete theory T is decidable if for every sentence φ, the value φT is a recursive real, and moreover, uniformly computable from φ. If T is incomplete, we say it is decidable if for every sentence φ the real number φT∘ is uniformly recursive from φ, where φT∘is the maximal value of φ consistent with T. As in classical first-order logic, it follows from the completeness theorem of continuous first-order logic that if a complete theory admits a recursive axiomatization then it is decidable. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that questions about the semantics of rigid designation are commonly and illicitly run together with distinct issues, such as questions about the metaphysics of essence and questions about the theoretical legitimacy of the possible-worlds framework. I discuss in depth two case studies of this phenomenon – the first concerns the relation between rigid designation and reference, the second concerns the application of the notion of rigidity to general terms. I end by drawing out some conclusions (...) about the relations between rigid designation, semantic frameworks, reference, and essence. (shrink)