The molecular aspects of the microtubule system is a research area that has developed very rapidly during the past decade. Research on the assembly mechanisms and chemistry of tubulin and the molecular biology of microtubules have advanced our understanding of microtubule formation and its regulation. The emerging view of tubulin is of a macromolecule containing spatially discrete sequences that constitute functionally different domains with respect to self‐association, interactions with microtubule associated proteins (MAPs) and specific ligands. Recent studies point to the (...) role of the carboxyl‐terminal moiety of tubulin subunits in regulating its assembly into microtubules. These investigations combined with further studies on the spatial relationships between tubulin domains should provide new insights into the detailed structural basis of microtubule assembly. (shrink)

A partir da construção histórica dos três modelos identificados no constitucionalismo latinoamericanopor Roberto Gargarella, o presente trabalho explora o núcleo diferenciador das propostas de organização e exercício do poder de matriz radical (também chamada de republicana), sobretudo por meio do pensamento de José Gervasio Artigas (Uruguai), Francisco de Paula Gonzales Vigil (Peru), Manuel Murillo Toro (Colômbia) e Francisco Bilbao (Chile). Na sequência, busca-se apontar os mecanismos inconciliáveis entre o modelo radical e aquele adotado pela Constituição brasileira vigente, com o (...) fim de evidenciar as mudanças imprescindíveis à verticalização do regime democrático no que diz respeito à organicidade constitucional. (shrink)

This paper is a response to the opening of new lines of research on CSR and SMEs (Thompson & Smith, 1991; Spence, 1999; Moore & Smith, 2006; Spence, 2007). It seeks to explore the business case for CSR in this corporate segment. The paper, which is based on four case studies of medium-sized firms in the automotive sector, took the distinctive approach of trying to understand the nature of CSR-like activities developed not by best-in-class CSR-driven companies but by purely competitiveness-driven (...) firms. The case studies provide explicit evidence that the CSR activities of SMEs and the notion of social capital are interrelated, turning social capital into a powerful instrument to better explain what academic literature has called silent CSR practices . The analysis that follows questions some of the basic tenets that underpin the branch of business ethics that deals with the nature of SMEs' approach to CSR. Four basic concerns, which take the form of propositions for further research, serve as the basis for this analysis: a) A definition of CSR that includes most of the actions taken by all companies in the territory contributes no academic value to the discipline b) Any study of the motivation behind these CSR actions must reflect their essentially pragmatic nature. Actions are linked to social values but also, more importantly, to the nature of the competitive environment c) Business ethics must seek common ground with other more sociological disciplines if it is to explain the reasons behind this type of action d) Any study of this kind of practice requires a dual approach: a) normative when using tools developed by CSR; and b) descriptive and instrumental using the notion of social capital. (shrink)

Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats genome editing has already reinvented the direction of genetic and stem cell research. For more complex diseases it allows scientists to simultaneously create multiple genetic changes to a single cell. Technologies for correcting multiple mutations in an in vivo system are already in development. On the surface, the advent and use of gene editing technologies is a powerful tool to reduce human suffering by eradicating complex disease that has a genetic etiology. Gene drives are (...) CRISPR mediated alterations to genes that allow them to be passed on to subsequent populations at rates that approach one hundred per cent transmission. Therefore, from an anticipatory biomedical ethics perspective, it is possible to conceive gene drive being used with CRISPR to permanently ameliorate aberrant genes from wild-type populations containing mutations. However, there are also a number of possible side effects that could develop as the result of combining gene editing and gene drive technologies in an effort to eradicate complex diseases. In this paper, we critically analyse the hypothesis that the combination of CRISPR and gene drive will have a deleterious effect on human populations from an ethical perspective by developing an anticipatory ethical analysis of the implications for the use of CRISPR together with gene drive in humans. (shrink)

En el presente artículo se hace un análisis del cuento “¡Tierra!”, de Pedro Gómez Valderrama, desde dos perspectivas: la de cuento histórico y la del erotismo. El análisis, que evalúa los aspectos históricos recreados por el autor en el relato, confronta las fuentes históricas que éste utiliza para la construcción de su cuento e intenta indagar en la posición desde la que se interpretan literariamente los hechos, en la cual el erotismo es fundamental. Para, finalmente, señalar que el cuento presenta (...) el descubrimiento de América como el hallazgo de una utopía. (shrink)

In this paper I survey some recent developments in experimental philosophy and discuss their bearing on two leading theories in epistemology: Contextualism and Interest Relative Invariantism. In the first part of the paper, I survey some general issues of how experimental philosophy may be relevant to assessing contextualism and IRI. In the second part, I discuss and critique some of the recent experimental work.

Name der Zeitschrift: Byzantinische Zeitschrift Jahrgang: 107 Heft: 2 Seiten: 691-710.

The prospect of replication of human beings through genetic manipulation has engendered one of the most controversial debates about reproduction in our society. Ideology is clearly influencing the direction of research and legislation on human cloning, which may present one of the greatest existential challenges to the meaning of creation. In this article, I argue that, in view of the possibility that human cloning and other emerging technologies could enhance physical and cognitive abilities, there is a need for a different (...) way of thinking about life, new technologies and creation. New scientific discoveries require a shift in the way psychology takes responsibility to help individuals and society. Today, psychology needs to follow the progress that humans are taking toward a transhuman stage of development as a transition to a later posthuman stage. (shrink)

En un contexto de transformaciones profundas en la sociedad boliviana, el autor plantea que más que una nueva teoría de la sociedad boliviana se requiere desarrollar otra mirada. En esta dirección, el presente artículo busca plantear un esquema renovado sobre las referencias desde las cuales deben encuadrar el debate los bolivianos y bolivianas. El texto aborda la construcción de matrices culturales, explicitando la moderna y la andina, y conecta matriz cultural con institucionalidad, para proponer una institucionalidad andina.

The aim of this work is to discuss "Darwinism: its past, its present, its future", a lecture given in 1875 by Miranda Azevedo as one of the "Popular Lectures of the Gloria Neighborhood, Rio de Janeiro". In this lecture Azevedo elaborates the concepts of evolution, human evolution, progress and the idea of man as the pinnacle of evolution and the master of the selective laws governing nature. We will analyze the article, published in 1876, that contains the full text of (...) Azevedo's lecture. Of particular importance is his affiliation to Haeckel, something already commented on in Brazilian historiography. But, unlike other studies devoted to the theme, I will examine in detail Azevedo's text, attempting to show how he relates hereditary and selective evolutionary processes to thinking about how future Brazilian generations could progress. (shrink)

The health emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic revealed limitations in health systems worldwide, making it necessary to establish a bioethical framework that provides tools to drive health professionals’ decision-making amid scarce health resources. Bioethical models such as principlism, utilitarianism, and personalism seek to focus clinical decisions on respect for people’s rights and dignity, thus protecting the medical practice. Personalism provides a person-centered approach to respect for human dignity during health emergencies to avoid giving material meaning to the individual. Decision (...) criteria are required to face bioethical conflicts in clinical practice, reducing the legal, emotional, and ethical burden of decision-making in pandemic situations. (shrink)

The article investigates from the book “Images despite everything”, by Georges Didi-Huberman (2020), four remaining photographs of Crematorium V in Auschwitz-Birkenau, taken in August 1944, by the Greek Jew Alberto Errera, a member of the Sonderkommando. It is noteworthy that it is his photographic gesture invested with the most intense emotional sense (pathos) that gives his images an indicial character that effectively operates as testimony (superstes) allowing one to imagine what is considered “unimaginable” by “Holocaust metaphysicians”. Reacting to the thesis (...) of the impossibility of representing the gas chambers, according to which any attempt to configure them would be a falsification of suffering by concession to aestheticization, the article states that it is necessary to know what is possible, whatever it is about the pain that took place there. It is also evident that it is the “zones of opacity” in Alberto Errera’s photos that, by conveying the pathos, activate the imagination and force the viewer’s thoughts. It is its “out of framing” that, mobilizing the gaze without stopping, from the icon to the index and from that to that, does not operate as an interdiction, but, on the contrary, it is what makes one see and know something more about what happened there. Finally, it can be concluded that Alberto Errera’s gesture transformed the “historical reality”, made of horror and upheaval, into a possibility of memory for the future, using only a remnant of celluloid. (shrink)

s book, Hermeneutic Dialogue and Social Science: A critique of Gadamer and Habermas, intends to present an account of debates on objectivity in the social sciences, in stressing the political and epistemological responsibility, in public spheres, to those who want to create a fairer understanding of societies and history, without demonizing natural enterprises or leaving social studies out of acute critical questioning. Key Words: dialogue • hermeneutic • social sciences • natural sciences • method.

The aim of this work is to present the thesis “On the Ontogenetic Evolution of the Human Embryo in its Relations with Phylogenesis,” by Affonso Regulo de Oliveira Fausto, published in Brazil in 1890. To our knowledge, it was one of the first Brazilian academic works focused specifically on evolution. It was also the first doctoral thesis that addressed the topic of recapitulation in order to analyze what was then called the progressive evolution of the human species in tandem with (...) the embryological development of the individuals that would constitute the Brazilian “type.” In the present work, we analyze the author’s thesis in relation to its sources, concepts, as well as the country’s political context at the time of its publication. Fausto’s text, in which he explicitly recognized the influence of Ernst Haeckel’s recapitulation theory, represents a window to understand better a concept of nation based on science and on the idea of inexorable progress that was accepted in Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century. (shrink)

Using a standard trust game, we elicit trust and reciprocity measures in a representative sample of adult players in Montevideo, the capital city of Uruguay, a country that received a sizeable influx of Venezuelan and Cuban migrants, has lower internal disparities than other Latin American countries and exhibits relatively better levels of tolerance towards migrants. We find no statistically significant differences in trust levels of Uruguayans towards countrymen versus migrants and mixed results regarding reciprocity, with migrants exhibiting a flatter response (...) to trust than their local counterparts. (shrink)

The present article tries to emphasize the roll of the experimental logic in the process of education-learning of the methodology of the investigation. Its treatment usually appears as material for the later boarding of the explanation or the calls explanatory designs or explanatory reconnaissanc..

A topological duality is presented for a wide class of lattice-ordered structures including lattice-ordered groups. In this new approach, which simplifies considerably previous results of the author, the dual space is obtained by endowing the Priestley space of the underlying lattice with two binary functions, linked by set-theoretical complement and acting as symmetrical partners. In the particular case of l-groups, one of these functions is the usual product of sets and the axiomatization of the dual space is given by very (...) simple first-order sentences, saying essentially that both functions are associative and that the space is a residuated semigroup with respect to each of them. (shrink)

Millikan [2000] has levelled a number of persuasive criticisms against Cummins's [1996] theory of mental representation. In this paper, I pave a middle path in the debate between Cummins [2000] and Millikan [2000] to answer two questions. How are representations applied to targets? How is the content of a representation determined? The result is a new theory of mental representation, which I call narrow structuralism.