Matters (and metaphors) of life and death: How DNA storage doubles back on its promise to the world

Author(s):  
Madeleine Mendell ◽  
Mél Hogan ◽  
Deb Verhoeven
Keyword(s):  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neide Célia Ferreira Barros

This book analyzes the criminal processes of homicides or attempted homicides of women in Goiânia during the period of 1970-1984. We observed the gender power relations in the capital of Goiás, a border region, a mixture of country life elements and discourses of modernity. Hence, through case reports of women who suffered attacks on their lives in a period of intense changes, such as the organization of feminist groups in Brazil and the world, political and economic repercussions of the construction of Brasília in Goiás and mass immigration to Goiânia, we have pursued to understand what it meant socially to "be a man" and "to be a woman" in this capital and what consequences were brought into their bodies, concerning life and death, protection and punishment.


Author(s):  
Ariane Lewis ◽  
Andrew Kumpfbeck ◽  
Jordan Liebman ◽  
Sam D. Shemie ◽  
Gene Sung ◽  
...  

There are varying medical, legal, social, religious and philosophical perspectives about the distinction between life and death. Death can be declared using cardiopulmonary or neurologic criteria throughout much of the world. After solicitation of brain death/death by neurologic criteria (BD/DNC) protocols from contacts around the world, we found that the percentage of countries with BD/DNC protocols is much lower in Africa than other developing regions. We performed an informal review of the literature to identify barriers to declaration of BD/DNC in Africa. We found that there are numerous medical, legal, social and religious barriers to the creation of BD/DNC protocols in Africa including 1) limited number of healthcare facilities, critical care resources and clinicians with relevant expertise; 2) absence of a political and legal framework codifying death; and 3) cultural and religious perspectives that present ideological conflict with the idea of BD/DNC, in particular, and between traditional and Western medicine, in general. Because there are a number of unique barriers to the creation of BD/DNC protocols in Africa, it remains to be seen how the World Brain Death Project, which is intended to create minimum standards for BD/DNC around the world, will impact BD/DNC determination in Africa.


Author(s):  
Anda Kuduma

The article is dedicated to the evaluation of creative work by poet and translator Jānis Hvoinskis, and it characterises the content and artistic qualities of Hvoinskis’s poetry process. The main focus is on the representation of the phenomenon of the city as an essential and characteristic poetic chronotope segment in Hvoinskis’s poetry. The study aims to identify and assess the characteristic kinds of city concept formation and their importance in building Hvoinskis’s artistic style. The article highlights and evaluates the techniques for designing the artistic structure of the indivisible chronotope in Hvoinskis’s poetry. This view is based on the fundamental principles of phenomenology, i.e., an individual phenomenon (phainómeno) is crucial in the reflection of consciousness, inner temporality, intentionality, intersubjectivity, and lifeworld. In turn, the highlight of poetry subject’s primary condition and existential motifs is logically linked to the main ideas of existentialism in their attitude towards the reason of an individual’s existence, relationships to life and death, freedom of will and choice, determinism. The study’s theoretical and methodological basis includes the ideas of phenomenology theoreticians (Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others) and the theories of existentialism philosophers (Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre). Hvoinskis’s poetry allows us to speak about a city as a concept, i.e., as a universal and capacious generalising notion (which includes images, notions, symbols) from which its associative components – poetry themes, motifs, images – derive. Thus, it is possible to speak about the depth dimension of the city phenomenon. The city phenomenon in Hvoinskis’s poetry is the landscape that has been adopted as the centre of the world of the lyric subject in both poetry collections that have come out to date: “Lietus pār kanālu e” (Rain over the Channel e, 2009) and “Mūza no pilsētas N” (Muse from City N, 2019). The depth dimension in Hvoinskis’s poetry appears in the natural synthesis of mythical and real chronotope, associatively impressive and plastic imagery, expressive style kindred to surrealism poetics. The city appears as a modernism project created by the logic of industrialisation, simultaneously revealing a metaphysical dimension where symbolic images as constituents of a myth preserve the memory of wholeness of the world. The emotional atmosphere of Hvoinskis’s poetry is defined by the highly existential atmosphere – despite the harsh indifference created by the city, the sadness of existential loneliness, social distance, and aversion towards life, the poet makes the tragic and ugly strangely appealing without losing the feeling of lightness and hope. The poet’s intense intuition and imagination exhibit the congeniality with the 20th-century French modernists. Hvoinskis’s poetry muse is death, which implies life.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alicia Ryan

Childbirth has been a part of our lives since the beginning of time. Without the process none of us would be alive today. So why is it that maternal mortality remains one of the greatest inequities in the world? To date, approximately 500, 000 women die annually due to the lack of appropriate prenatal and obstetric care. Difficulties arising with childbirth cannot be predicted. However, the way in which we react to a situation can have a lasting, positive effect on the countries and the women who are at risk. The ways in which to help reduce the large number of maternal deaths in developing countries is not complicated and can be achieved if it is made a priority. In conclusion, there are multiple obstacles in regard to succeeding the highest achievable standard of health globally.  With the education of evolving scientific methods, and the collaboration of humanitarian views, the welfare and health of women and their children, can be internationally restored. With the education of evolving scientific methods, and the collaboration of humanitarian views, the welfare and health of women and their children, can be internationally restored.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 248-257
Author(s):  
Natalia Valerievna Chikina

The paper analyzes the works of a well-known poet and rock musician S. Karhu, who writes in the Karelian language. The aim of the study is to highlight the author’s artistic system of images. The following tasks were set for the study: to formulate the poet’s original concept, to scrutinize and comment on the images in Karhu’s lyrics. The object is verses from the first and so far only volume. The subject of the study is the specific ethnic traits of Karhu’s poetry, as seen in the system of images. Literary-historical and comparative methods were used in the analysis. The scientific novelty is in the absence of similar studies on the poet’s works. Systemic analysis of the ethnic sources, the evolution and genre choices of the Karelian language literature associated with the changing artistic consciousness are coming to the foreground in this time of global change, when preserving the people’s cultural heritage is especially important. The poet’s personal background has brought him into the sphere of artistic creativity, enabled him to verbalize the world of ethnic life that had been opened up to him. The article points out some specific features of the world of images, language and culture of the Karelian people. Karelian literature shows a tendency to use folklore heritage. The transformation of folk poetic symbolic images is arguably the most characteristic trait of folklorism in contemporary Karelian-language poetry, where folk poetry symbols tend to be equaled with the image of the native land. Karhu’s philosophical verses increasingly pose and confidently resolve the questions of good and evil, happiness and pain, life and death. It is essential for him that the character retains the folklore origins, for he deems it to be the spiritual source of modernity.


2020 ◽  
pp. 9-23
Author(s):  
Alexey V. Fedorov

The article proposes to consider the creative individuality of A.A. Fet as a poet-thinker. It places a special emphasis on his ideological views, expressed in his enthusiasm for the teachings of A. Schopenhauer’s and in disputes with L.N. Tolstoy; extensive epistolary material is involved (this correspondence with Ya.P. Polonsky, L.N. and S.A. Tolstoy, N.N. Strakhov, K.R. and others); a brief overview of the critical reviews of contemporaries on the poet’s poetry collections is given. Here, Fet’s philosophical lyrics are analyzed in particular detail (first of all – the late, period of “Evening Lights”, in which there is an understanding of the universal categories of being – life and death, good and evil, the world and man, time and eternity), some parallels are drawn with F.I. Tyutchev. The article traces the development of spiritual and religious issues in the work of Fet’s (gospel stories and motives, the image of the Lord, the genre of prayer, etc.). The article raises the question of expanding the concept of “poet-thinker” taking into account the category “mind of the heart” designated by Fet himself. From these positions, his poem “I am waiting, embraced by anxiety...” from the “Evening Lights” collection is analyzed. Considering Fet’s work as “the poetry of thought” does not cancel, but enriches his airy image in our minds, allows us to present Fet’s personality in more volume, to clarify and expand the idea of the real complexity and versatility of his artistic nature, to come closer to understanding “lyrical insolence” as “the property of great poets” (words of L.N. Tolstoy about A.A. Fet).


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 9.1-9.9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miriyam Aouragh ◽  
Seda Gürses ◽  
Helen Pritchard ◽  
Femke Snelting

The COVID-19 pandemic will go down in history as a major crisis, with calls for debt moratoriums that are expected to have gruesome effects in the Global South. Another tale of this crisis that would come to dominate COVID-19 news across the world was a new technological application: the contact tracing apps. In this article, we argue that both accounts ‐ economic implications for the Global South and the ideology of techno-solutionism ‐ are closely related. We map the phenomenon of the tracing app onto past and present wealth accumulations. To understand these exploitative realities, we focus on the implications of contact tracing apps and their relation with extractive technologies as we build on the notion racial capitalism. By presenting themselves in isolation of capitalism and extractivism, contact tracing apps hide raw realities, concealing the supply chains that allow the production of these technologies and the exploitative conditions of labour that make their computational magic manifest itself. As a result of this artificial separation, the technological solutionism of contract tracing apps is ultimately presented as a moral choice between life and death. We regard our work as requiring continuous undoing ‐ a necessary but unfinished formal dismantling of colonial structures through decolonial resistance.


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 264-280
Author(s):  
E. N. Proskurina ◽  

The article is devoted to the images and motives of the East in the poetry of the author of the Eastern emigration Boris Volkov (1894, Ekaterinburg – 1954, San Francisco). The work of this poet, writer, publicist is still unknown to the domestic reader, although during his lifetime he had a fairly wide publication geography: from Harbin to San Francisco. However, his works were never reprinted, and the manuscript of the novel “The Kingdom of the Golden Buddhas” is considered lost. The analysis involved Volkov’s book of poems “In the dust of foreign roads”, published in Berlin in 1934. Of its four parts, the oriental flavor is especially distinct in the first. Individual works of this part constituted the object of study of this article. The autobiographical substrate of Volkov’s poetry is revealed, the intersection of motives and imagery with the poetic world of Gumilyov is shown. The influence of the Eastern world, its philosophical teachings on the creative worldview of Volkov is investigated. In his poetic thinking, traces of Sufism, Islam, and the philosophy of Lao Tzu are palpable. Exotic images of China and Mongolia weave an intricate pattern in the first cycles of the book, integrating into the depicted biographical circumstances and expanding their semantic palette. “Alien” is trying hard to become “ours” at the level of a philosophical attitude to the world and the fate of the poet himself. He is close to the poetic attitude of the inhabitants of the East to life and death, based on ancient traditions and customs. The poems reflect the confusion of the experiences of the lyrical hero, warrior and wanderer, who has found a place in life as a result of an action-packed duel with fate.


2021 ◽  
pp. 13-14
Author(s):  
Tusharindra Lal ◽  
Riya Kataria ◽  
Priyadarshee Pradhan

Euthanasia or assisted suicide has been a matter of contention for many years with various types of euthanasia including voluntary, non-voluntary, involuntary, active and passive euthanasia being argued for around the world. This article highlights the types of euthanasia while analyzing the ethical, legal, economical and spiritual dilemmas surrounding them. It also compares euthanasia laws of countries around the world with the Indian stand taken by the Supreme Court in legalizing passive euthanasia. There exists a ne line between life and death. It is the duty of a medical practitioner to assess these situations critically while preserving a patient's autonomy. To deny a person the right to end their life with dignity is equivalent to depriving them of a meaningful existence.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1969 ◽  
Vol 44 (5) ◽  
pp. 752-756
Author(s):  
D. W. Winnicott

In brief, it is exciting that adolescence has become vocal and active, but the adolescent striving that makes itself felt over the whole world today needs to be met, needs to be given reality by an act of confrontation. Confrontation must be personal. Adults are needed if adolescents are to have life and liveliness. Confrontation belongs to containment that is non-retaliatory, without vindictiveness, but having its own strength. It is salutary to remember that the present student unrest and its manifest expression may be in part a product of the attitude that we are proud to have attained toward baby care, and child care, Let the young alter society and teach grownups how to see the world afresh; but, where there is the challenge of the growing boy or girl, there let an adult meet the challenge. And, it will not necessarily be nice. In the unconscious fantasy these are matters of life and death.


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