In The Art of Philosophy, Peter Sloterdijk traces the evolution of philosophical practice from ancient times to today, showing how scholars can remain true to the tradition of “the examined life” even when the temporal dimension no longer corresponds to the eternal. Building on the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Arendt, and other practitioners of the life of theory, Sloterdijk launches a posthumanist defence of philosophical inquiry and its everyday, therapeutic value. Patrick Duggan enjoyed this insightful and informative book a great deal, although found it to be unnecessarily dense in places.
Background: Attempts to translate basic stem cell research into treatments for neurologic diseases and injury are well under way. With a clinical trial for one such treatment approved and in progress in the United States, and additional proposals under review, we must begin to address the ethical issues raised by such early forays into human clinical trials for cell-based interventions for neurologic conditions. Methods: An interdisciplinary working group composed of experts in neuroscience, cell biology, bioethics, law, and transplantation, along with leading disease researchers, was convened twice over 2 years to identify and deliberate on the scientific and ethical issues raised by the transition from preclinical to clinical research of cell-based interventions for neurologic conditions. Results: While the relevant ethical issues are in many respects standard challenges of human subjects research, they are heightened in complexity by the novelty of the science, the focus on the CNS, and the political climate in which the science is proceeding. Conclusions: Distinctive challenges confronting US scientists, administrators, institutional review boards, stem cell research oversight committees, and others who will need to make decisions about work involving stem cells and their derivatives and evaluate the ethics of early human trials include evaluating the risks, safety, and benefits of these trials, determining and evaluating cell line provenance, and determining inclusion criteria, informed consent, and the ethics of conducting early human trials in the public spotlight. Further study and deliberation by stakeholders is required to move toward professional and institutional policies and practices governing this research.
Abstract There are several large-scale efforts to compare the sensitivities of tumor cells to chemotherapeutic drugs and small-molecule pathway probes. However, to date, none of these profiling efforts systematically probed malignant peripheral nerve sheet tumors (MPNST). We initiated a database of drug sensitivities of MPNST as part of a course in high-throughput screening. We first developed a panel of 130 drugs highly relevant to neurofibromatosis (NF1 and NF2) that included a comprehensive set of MEK, RAF, RAS, FTI, PAK, ERK inhibitors, a representative set of drugs against many other cancer pathways including Wnt, Hedgehog, p53, EGF, HDAC, as well as classical cytotoxic agents such as doxorubicin and taxol. Many of the drugs in our panel are in clinical trials themselves, or closely related to drugs in trials for NF1. The drugs were tested against cells in 384-well plates at eight concentrations ranging from .004 μM to 10 μM. Cells were allowed to attach overnight, incubated for 72 hours with drugs, and then analyzed for ATP content using ATPlite. To date, we have profiled nine MPNST cell lines (ST88-14, ST88-3, 90-8, SNF02.2, STS26, T265, S462TY, SNF96.2, SNF94.3) and one NF2 Schwannoma cell line (HEI193). We also tested several cell lines that were tested in other screens so that we can compare our results to the other databases. The IC50 was calculated as a common measure of how effective each drug is using GraphPad Prism software. NF1 cells were distinguished from NF2 cells and STS26 cells (a spontaneous MPNST cell line derived from a patient who did not have NF1) by their strong sensitivity to MEK and Bromodomain inhibitors. Some drugs, including cytotoxic agents, Pak inhibitors, and HDAC inhibitors, were broadly toxic, inhibiting growth regardless of NF1 and NF2 status. None of the drugs in our panel exclusively inhibited HEI193 cells. With this study we initiated a database to archive the drug sensitivities of NF1 and NF2 cells that will be expanded in future versions of our course. Sponsored by Children's Tumor Foundation. Citation Format: Jianman Guo, Michael Grovola, Grace Coggins, Patrick Duggan, Jiale Huang, Claire Song, Gabriela Witek, Danny Lin, Hong Xie, David Schultz, Simon Berritt, Jeffrey Field. The NF1 and NF2 pharmacome project, a course in high-throughput screening to identify targets and profile the sensitivity of MPNST cells to candidate drugs [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the AACR Conference on Advances in Sarcomas: From Basic Science to Clinical Translation; May 16-19, 2017; Philadelphia, PA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Clin Cancer Res 2018;24(2_Suppl):Abstract nr A29.
In this article Patrick Duggan interrogates The Paper Birds' 2010 production Others to explore the political and ethical implications of embodying the (verbatim) texts of others. Built from a six-month exchange of letters between the company and a prisoner, a celebrity (a very non-committal Heather Mills, apparently), and an Iranian artist, Others fuses live music with verbatim and physical theatre texts to investigate the ‘otherness’ of women from vastly divergent cultural contexts. With equal measures of humour and honesty the performance deconstructs these voices both to highlight their particular concerns and problems and to interrogate larger issues relating to ‘others’ with whom we have conscious or unconscious contact. The ethical implications of continuing or discontinuing the correspondences with the three women are explored, and trauma and embodiment theories are used alongside Lévinasian and Russellian theories of ethics to ask what an encounter with such others might teach us about ourselves, about the traumatized other and about the ethics of encounter within performance texts. Patrick Duggan is Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Exeter. A practising director, he has also taught extensively in the UK and Ireland as well as in Germany and the United States. He is author of Trauma-Tragedy: Symptoms of Contemporary Performance (Manchester University Press, 2012) and co-edited Reverberations: Britishness, Aesthetics and Small-Scale Theatres (Intellect, 2013) and a special issue of the journal Performance Research ‘On Trauma’ (Taylor and Francis, 2011).
This paper explores the political impact of protest actions that explicitly make use of performance practices in their execution, and takes the activist work of Margaretta D’Arcy as the central object of analysis. Concentrating on D’Arcy’s protest actions at Shannon Airport and her subsequent trial(s), the paper examines the ways in which Ireland’s ‘Guantanamo Granny’ tries to engage the Irish state in a ‘meaningful’ public debate about its ‘complicity’ in the global ‘war on terror’, despite a stated position of neutrality. This debate, the essay argues, is facilitated in part by D’Arcy’s capacity to turn the legal and disciplinary systems of the state back on themselves, so to speak. The contention is that by ‘ignoring’ risk, both physical and legal, and leveraging a lifetime’s experience and understanding of theatre and performance as a mechanism of protest, D’Arcy’s performative activist actions render the state ‘ridiculous’ socially, politically and legally.
