in Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences Role of interpersonal relationships in spiritual life.

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1 University Press Scholarship Online You are looking at 1-8 of 8 items for: keywords : cancer The Interpersonal and the Mystical William A. Richards and G. William Barnard in Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences Published in print: 2015 Published Online: May ISBN: eisbn: Role of interpersonal relationships in spiritual life. Principles of Evolutionary Medicine Publisher: Columbia University Press DOI: / columbia/ Peter Gluckman, Alan Beedle, Tatjana Buklijas, Felicia Low, and Mark Hanson Published in print: Published Online: May ISBN: eisbn: Item type: book Publisher: Oxford University Press DOI: / acprof:oso/ Evolutionary science is critical for an understanding of integrated human biology and is increasingly recognized as a core discipline by medical and public health professionals. Advances in the fields of genomics, epigenetics, developmental biology, and epidemiology have led to the growing realization that incorporation of evolutionary thinking is essential for medicine to achieve its full potential. This revised and updated second edition of the first comprehensive textbook of evolutionary medicine explains the principles of evolutionary biology from a medical perspective and focuses on how medicine and public health might utilize evolutionary thinking. The first part of the book provides a summary of the evolutionary theory relevant to understanding human health and disease, using examples specifically relevant to medicine. The second part describes the application of evolutionary principles to understanding particular aspects of human medicine: reproduction, metabolism, behavior, the implications of our coevolution with micro-organisms, and cancer. The two parts are bridged by a chapter that details pathways by which evolutionary processes affect disease risk and symptoms, and how hypotheses in evolutionary medicine can be tested. A further chapter illustrates the application of evolutionary biology to medicine and public health, with a number of new clinical examples. The final chapter uses a Page 1 of 5

2 historical perspective to consider the ethical and societal issues arising from the interface between evolution and medicine. Down in Big Blue s Toxic Plume in Upstate New York Peter C. Little in Toxic Town: IBM, Pollution, and Industrial Risks Published in print: 2014 Published Online: ISBN: eisbn: DOI: /nyu/ This chapter explores peoples' understandings of, negotiations with, and reactions to high-tech industrial pollution in Endicott, New York, the birthplace of the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM). Decades of chipboard manufacturing led to an increase of trichloroethylene (TCE) in an area locally referred to as the plume a 300-acre toxic plume filled with TCE, a cancer-causing chlorine cleaning solvent heavily used by the company. IBM's contamination of Endicott and how the local residents are affected calls for a perspective on socio-environmental experience that discerns the tangle of social, political, economic, and scientific forces shaping situations and events of technological disaster. In many ways, the struggle of residents living in the IBM Endicott plume is also a response to transformations in the political economy and ecology of the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. Cancer Peter Gluckman, Alan Beedle, Tatjana Buklijas, Felicia Low, and Mark Hanson in Principles of Evolutionary Medicine Published in print: Published Online: May ISBN: eisbn: Publisher: Oxford University Press DOI: / acprof:oso/ Cancer is the uncontrolled growth and spread of abnormal cells. The cellular abnormalities that characterize cancer generally represent dysfunction of the evolved control mechanisms that allow cooperative multicellularity. Cancer typically begins as a single clone of mutated cells, but the high mutation and proliferation rates of cancer cells result in the formation of multiple sub-clones in the tumor with diverse suites of mutations that respond differently to selective pressures within the tumor microenvironment (somatic evolution). This heterogeneity and high genetic variation within tumors represents a challenge for Page 2 of 5

3 chemotherapy in particular, because treatment-resistant cells are invariably present and undergo rapid clonal expansion after sensitive cells are killed. The incidence of cancer appears to be increasing worldwide as populations age, although there are wide variations by tumor type, geographical area, and demography. Lifetime cancer risk is modulated by evolutionary mechanisms such as environmental novelty, life-history traits, and burden of infection. Genomics and the Reproductive Body DOI: /nyu/ This chapter locates and describes an implicit reproductive politics in ovarian cancer genomics research. Genomics revives an ideology of femininity that reduces ovaries to their reproductive function. But it does so not in spite of feminist gains, but because of them. The implicit assumption in genomics discourse is that to deny life-saving operations is to necessarily embrace an identity rooted in the normatively gendered body. Paradoxically, the conditions for the organs' removal are structured by traditional ideas of reproduction and motherhood: ovaries can be conserved, but only for a time, and only to answer to the desires of young motherhood. Moreover, in contrast to those of white women, black women's ovaries are treated very differently prompting a discursive development that must be read against the backdrop of a long-standing discourse in the United States linking black women, reproduction, and poverty. Genomics and the Racial Body DOI: /nyu/ This chapter considers the context in which the BRCA subject is racially marked. The initial goal of BRCA sequencing may have been to serve Page 3 of 5

4 the needs of women in what are called cancer syndrome families, but it wasn't long before the prospect of wider applicability piqued the interests of researchers. Such a breakthrough occurred in 1995 with the description of three BRCA mutations found in women who were not related. It was simultaneously an ethnic turn, as the women with these three mutations all identified themselves as members of the Ashkenazim. Two years later, researchers published data gleaned from a study of African American women with breast cancer. Thus, this chapter argues that a sustained look at the race concept in a specific disease literature helps us understand not just whether the race concept exists, but how it persists. Genomics and the Polluted Body DOI: /nyu/ This chapter examines the direct links between women and industrialization, specifically by contrasting the gene-environment model (as envisioned by genomics) with theories of environmental breast cancer. It refers to the new science of gene-environment interaction as environmental genomics and argues that the latter rests on politically invested assumptions about heredity, risk, and the body namely, free-market ideology. Although environmental genomics by no means introduces such a logic into public health, it repackages it anew through a hereditarian-inflected rhetoric of progression, enabling the claim that we can rationalize environmental health interventions by identifying those who are truly at risk. Identifying and classifying persons at varying levels of hereditary susceptibility is not, however, progress as much as it is simply a different, albeit also value-laden, way of describing bodies, environments, and social relations. Lacerated Breasts: Medicine, Autonomy, Pain Amber Jamilla Musser in Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism Published in print: 2014 Published Online: ISBN: eisbn: DOI: /nyu/ Page 4 of 5

5 This chapter discusses Bob Flanagan s sadomasochistic plays; Audre Lorde s reflections on cancer; as well as Gilles Deleuze s theorizations of illness and masochism, to study the notion of desubjectification. Flanagan s plays shows how people cope with powerlessness that comes from within when pain comes from the body because of illness. Deleuze imagines masochism as a step away from the discipline of modernity and subjectivity; hence, it allows for the opening of new possibilities for thought and life. The most developed form of this argument comes from his work with Félix Guattari on the Body without Organs (BwO). Lastly, Lorde s reading of the erotic discusses communal self, scripting agency, and sexuality as affects of the plurality of subjectification. Page 5 of 5