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Books > Science & Mathematics > Biology, life sciences > Human biology & related topics
One of the world's leading geneticists, Bryan Sykes has helped thousands find their ancestry in the British Isles. Saxons, Vikings, and Celts, which resulted from a systematic ten-year DNA survey of more than 10,000 volunteers, traces the true genetic makeup of the British Isles and its descendants, taking readers from the Pontnewydd cave in North Wales to the resting place of "The Red Lady" of Paviland and the tomb of King Arthur. Genealogy has become a popular pastime of Americans interested in their heritage, and this is the perfect work for anyone interested in finding their heritage in England, Scotland, or Ireland.
The mechanism of information transfer between cells is the subject of Introduction to Signal Transduction. Until recently various aspects of signaling by hormones were studied (and taught) under the subject of endocrinology, and signaling by neurotransmitters was the subject of neurochemistry. With growing awareness of the many similarities between hormonal and neurotransmitter signalling, recent years have witnessed the emergence of Signal Transduction as an independent discipline covering all aspects of information transfer between cells irrespective of the nature and source of the signals. This book is designed for senior undergraduate/graduate-level students interested in a basic understanding of the major participants in the cellular Signal Transduction pathways. The book covers the major topics in Signal Transduction: receptors, which recognize the signals at the cell surface; G-proteins, which transduce the signals; and adenylate cyclases, guanlate cyclases, and phospholipases, which generate second messengers. Chapters also focus on ion channels, phosphodiesterases, protein kinases, phosphoprotein phosphatases and nitric oxide, which participate in the cellular response to signals; the health consequences of defects in Signal Transduction proteins; and the central role Signal Transduction plays in drug abuse. The book is suitable for an introductory course in Signal Transduction as well as for self-study and review. It is recommended for biology and medical students, as well as for interdisciplinary science majors and pharmaceutical researchers.
Based on extensive field research, the essays in this volume illuminate the experiences of migrants from their own point of view, providing a critical understanding of the complex social reality in which each experience is grounded. Access to medical care for migrants is a fundamental right which is often ignored. The book provides a critical understanding of the social reality in which social inequalities are grounded and offers the opportunity to show that right to health does not correspond uniquely with access to healthcare.
Drawing heavily on the reminiscences of the Brownsville boys themselves, and skillfully integrating these with material from newspapers, books, and commentary of the time, Sorin creates an original and compelling picture of the communal and individual vitality that allowed an unusual and heartening social achievement.
Governmental social institutions are responsible for major policy decisions that deeply affect our everyday lives. This edited collection analyzes the effects of the main macro-social systems--law and politics, economic development, education, social welfare, health, mental health, transportation, housing, and religion--on the lives of African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans. The contributors, who are experts with the particular fields they address, reveal that macro-social systems are characterized by widespread, severe discrimination in the form of laws, attitudes, and behaviors towards ethnic minorities. Their analyses, which include both historical and contemporary perspectives, are accompanied by suggestions for policy measures aimed at improving the lives of ethnic minorities.
Retinoids have received considerable attention in recent years and due cognizance has been given to their versatility as biological response modifiers, as evidenced by the virtually explosive growth of literature in this field in the past few years. This volume has been designed to give a current state-of-the-art picture of retinoids. The perceived potential of retinoids in the treatment of certain disease stated has initiated attempts at identifying and synthesizing new retinoid derivatives with definable and selective effects on aberrant biological phenomena. Appropriately, therefore, we begin with the chemistry of retinoids and their derivatives together with discussions of their biological activity. Major advances have been made in understanding the mechanisms by which retinoids modulate physiological and phenotypic traits of cells. The transduction of retinoid signaling by the mediation of nuclear receptors of the steroid/thyroid receptor superfamily has now been studied extensively and the cloning and defining the characteristics of these receptors has been a focus of discussion in this volume. Retinoids also markedly modulate the transduction of extracellular signals such as those imparted by growth factors and hormones, and thus actively influence and control cellular proliferative patterns. Retinoids can alter epidermal growth factor receptor expression (Kawaguchi et al., 1994), responsiveness to thyroid hormone (Esfandiari et al., 1994; Pallet et al., 1994), inhibit the proliferative responses of hematopoietic progenitor cells to granulocyte colony stimulating factor (Smeland et al., 1994), and modulate secretion on interleukins by leukaemic cells (Balitrand et al., 1994), among other things. This has obvious implications for pharmacological manipulation of deregulated growth (Dickens and Colletta, 1993; Mulshine et al., 1993). Apoptosis is another component in the regulation of growth control. Apoptotic cell death is influenced by several agents and retinoids may function by interfering with apoptotic pathways of regulation of growth control and quite legitimately, therefore, the importance of this aspect of retinoid function has been duly recognized here.
The series comprises critical review articles that keep researchers in different areas of the field informed on the latest research results, ideas, and advances. Contributions to Volume 21 focus on: the clinically diverse diseases classified as peroxisomal disorders; X-linked immunodeficiencies; gen
The racially charged stereotype of "welfare queen"--an allegedly promiscuous waster who uses her children as meal tickets funded by tax-payers--is a familiar icon in modern America, but as Gunja SenGupta reveals in From Slavery to Poverty, her historical roots run deep. For, SenGupta argues, the language and institutions of poor relief and reform have historically served as forums for inventing and negotiating identity. Mining a broad array of sources on nineteenth-century New York City's interlocking network of private benevolence and municipal relief, SenGupta shows that these institutions promoted a racialized definition of poverty and citizenship. But they also offered a framework within which working poor New Yorkers--recently freed slaves and disfranchised free blacks, Afro-Caribbean sojourners and Irish immigrants, sex workers and unemployed laborers, and mothers and children--could challenge stereotypes and offer alternative visions of community. Thus, SenGupta argues, long before the advent of the twentieth-century welfare state, the discourse of welfare in its nineteenth-century incarnation created a space to talk about community, race, and nation; about what it meant to be "American," who belonged, and who did not. Her work provides historical context for understanding why today the notion of "welfare"--with all its derogatory "un-American" connotations--is associated not with middle-class entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, but rather with programs targeted at the poor, which are wrongly assumed to benefit primarily urban African Americans.
Evolutionary science is critical to an understanding of integrated human biology and is increasingly recognised as a core discipline by medical and public health professionals. Advances in the field of genomics, epigenetics, developmental biology, and epidemiology have led to the growing realisation that incorporating 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 utilise evolutionary thinking. It is written to be accessible to a broad range of readers, whether or not they have had formal exposure to evolutionary science. The general structure of the second edition remains unchanged, with the initial six chapters providing a summary of the evolutionary theory relevant to understanding human health and disease, using examples specifically relevant to medicine. The second part of the book describes the application of evolutionary principles to understanding particular aspects of human medicine: in addition to updated chapters on reproduction, metabolism, and behaviour, there is an expanded chapter on our coexistence with micro-organisms and an entirely new chapter on 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. The final two chapters of the volume are considerably expanded; they illustrate the application of evolutionary biology to medicine and public health, and consider the ethical and societal issues of an evolutionary perspective. A number of new clinical examples and historical illustrations are included. This second edition of a novel and popular textbook provides an updated resource for doctors and other health professionals, medical students and biomedical scientists, as well as anthropologists interested in human health, to gain a better understanding of the evolutionary processes underlying human health and disease.
This sweeping history of the Serbian people starts with the
settlement of the Slavs on the Balkan Peninsula in the seventh
century and ends with the dissolution of Yugoslavia at the end of
the twentieth. Drawing on his own research and on contemporary
literature, Sima Cirkovic looks at how the Serbs have fared through
the ages - struggling for independence against Byzantium, suffering
as slaves of the Ottoman sultans, and modernizing in a troubled
corner of south-eastern Europe.
Cirkovic's detailed account provides a counter-balance to traditionally one-sided political histories of the Serbs, paying close attention to the nation's socio-economic development. His narrative gives equal weight to the medieval and modern periods, but draws from the processes of both integration and disintegration that have characterized Serbian history. The book gives readers the historical background to the Serbs, providing an essential insight into recent events.
Most of the literature dealing with the origins of modern humans concentrates on the European sequence, where the Levant is referred to in passing as being problematic because it does not fit with the sequence of events documented in Europe. This is the first book that attempts to examine the issues specifically from the Levant, viewing it as central rather than peripheral to the problem. It also discusses in some depth the ramifications of possible interactions between the different hominids in the region. Rather than viewing the transition from the Middle to Upper Paleolithic as the time at which fully modern adaptive systems came to the forefront, emphasis is placed on the Middle Paleolithic itself in order to test hypotheses that hominids of this period were culturally archaic. Through an analysis of the archaeological evidence, it is concluded that by at least 100,000 years ago people of the period, usually regarded as being somewhat less than human were, on the contrary, fully modern in terms of their behavioral and cultural systems. This conclusion applies to both the Neanderthals and their anatomically modern contemporaries. The author further concludes that the cultural and behavioral differences between the two types were minimal and that there was a potential for interaction and acculturation between them. The possibility is raised that the Near East is the region in which modern human cultural adaptation arose and then dispersed to other regions.
This book takes a reproductive justice approach to argue that surrogacy as practised in the contemporary neoliberal biomarkets crosses the humanitarian thresholds of feminism. Drawing on her ethnographic work with surrogate mothers, intended parents and medical practitioners in India, the author shows the dark connections between poverty, gender, human rights violations and indignity in the surrogacy market. In a developing country like India, bio-technologies therefore create reproductive objects of certain female bodies while promoting an image of reproductive liberation for others. India is a classic example for how far these biomarkets can exploit vulnerabilities for individual requirements in the garb of reproductive liberty. This critical book refers to a range of liberal, radical and postcolonial feminist frameworks on surrogacy, and questions the individual reproductive rights perspective as an approach to examine global surrogacy. It introduces 'humanitarian feminism' as an alternative concept to bridge feminist factions divided on contextual and ideological grounds. It hopes to build a global feminist solidarity drawing on a 'reproductive justice' approach by recognizing the histories of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, age and immigration oppression in all communities. This work is of interest to researchers and students of medical sociology and anthropology, gender studies, bioethics, and development studies.
The yearning to remember who we are is not easily detected in the qualitative dimensions of focus groups and ethnographic research methods; nor is it easily measured in standard quantified scientific inquiry. It is deeply rooted, obscured by layer upon layer of human efforts to survive the impact of historical amnesia induced by the dominant policies and practices of advanced capitalism and postmodern culture. Darder's introduction sets the tone by describing the formation of Warriors for Gringostroika and The New Mestizas. In the words of Anzaldua, those who cross over, pass over . . . the confines of the normal.' Critical essays follow by Mexicanas, poets, activists, and educators of all colors and persuasions. The collection coming out of the good work of the Southern California University system relates to all locales and spectrums of the human condition and will no doubt inspire excellent creativity of knowing and remembering among all who chance to read any part thereof.
In the first book on Aztec dance in the United States, Ernesto Colin combines cultural anthropology, educational theory, and postcolonial theory to create an innovative, interdisciplinary, long-term ethnography of an Aztec dance circle and makes a case for the use of the metaphor of palimpsest as an ethnographic research tool.
This project of the European Ethnological Research Centre is planned in 13 volumes. Their overall aim is to examine the interlocking strands of history, language and traditional culture, in their international setting, that go into the making of a national identity. Other volumes cover Scottish ethnology; farming and landscape; Scotland's buildings; boats and fishing; coast and sea; the food and the Scots; hearth and home: the culture of the dwelling house; crafts, trades and professions; transport and communications; the individual and community life in Scotland; oral literature and performance culture; institutions of Scotland: religious expression; and institutions of Scotland: the law.
The age-friendly community movement is a global phenomenon, currently growing with the support of the WHO and multiple international and national organizations in the field of aging. Drawing on an extensive collection of international case studies, this volume provides an introduction to the movement. The contributors - both researchers and practitioners - touch on a number of current tensions and issues in the movement and offer a wide-ranging set of recommendations for advancing age-friendly community development. The book concludes with a call for a radical transformation of a medical and lifestyle model of aging into a relational model of health and social/individual wellbeing.
This book addresses how skeletons can inform us about behavior by describing skeletal lesions in the Gombe chimpanzees, relating them to known life histories whenever possible, and analyzing demographic patterns in the sample. This is of particular interest to both primatologists and skeletal analysts who have benefited from published data on a smaller, earlier skeletal sample from Gombe. The Gombe skeletal collection is the largest collection of wild chimpanzees with known life histories in existence, and this work significantly expands the skeletal sample from this long-term research site (49 chimpanzees). The book explores topics of general interest to skeletal analysts such as demographic patterns, which injuries leave signs on the skeleton, and rates of healing, and discusses both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the patterning of lesions. The book presents the data in a narrative style similar to that employed in Dr. Goodall's seminal work The Chimpanzees of Gombe. Readers already familiar with the Gombe chimpanzees are likely to appreciate summaries of life events correlated to observable skeletal features. The book is especially relevant at this time to remind primate conservationists of the importance of the isolated chimpanzee population at Gombe National Park as well as the availability of the skeletons for study, both within the park itself as well as at the University of Minnesota.
This book discusses fundamental discourses relating to health in Africa arising out of the consequences of endemic diseases in Africa. It identifies, explains and illustrates the contexts, challenges and efforts to combat these diseases. The book provides a unique comparative analysis of African contexts of health, thereby not ignoring the global contexts of health within which Africa exists. It follows a macro-analytic stance about health in Africa framed around significant/pressing issues. "Discourse of disease" is part of a profound sociological discourse of health in Africa, which provides a framework for students, academics and healthcare practitioners to understand the states of health and healthcare in Africa.
An anthropomorphic study of the black population in the United States, based on a study conducted in 1920.
On October 30, 1990, Germany was formally reunified through an extension of the legal, political, and economic structures of West Germany into the former German Democratic Republic. For East Germans this transformation has been a challenging process. Former values, orientations, and standards have been subject to severe scrutiny as reunification has affected virtually every area of life. Staab analyzes the development from the divided to the unified Germany and asks to what extent East Germans have adopted a national identity in line with that of the West Germans. He examines such identity markers as attitudes toward territory, economics, ethnicity, mass culture, and civic-political activity. Identifying a significant range of commonalities, he also finds striking features of mutually exclusive areas working to prevent a shared national identity. Scholars and other researchers dealing with German politics and contemporary history, political sociology, and nationalism will be interested in this book.
This book tells the story of the HIV epidemic in South Africa, and asks why, after more than three decades, it has not normalised. Despite considerable efforts to prevent infection, and ambitious targets set to end the epidemic by 2030, HIV infections are increasing among young women and treatment uptake and adherence have been uneven. Focusing on the years preceding and following treatment access, this book addresses why an end to AIDS may be misplaced optimism. By examining public discourses and private narratives about infection, illness and death, this work reveals the contradictions between the lived experiences of AIDS suffering on the one hand, and biomedical certainties on the other. Based on long-term ethnographic research in rural villages of the South African lowveld, and within HIV prevention interventions in South Africa more generally, this book offers an intimate perspective on the social and cultural responses to the epidemic. |
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