Politics, public discourse, and legislation restricting abortion has settled on a moderate orthodoxy: restrict abortion, but leave exceptions for pregnancies that result from rape and incest. I challenge that consensus and suggest it may be much harder to defend than those who support the compromise think. From both Pro-Life and Pro-Choice perspectives, there are good reasons to treat all abort...

Japan, known as a pro-choice country in terms of abortion, is currently facing the increase of "selective abortions" thanks to new prenatal screening. Efforts to restrict proliferation of new technology has not been successful and it is likely that Japan will turn pro-life by strictly enforcing the Maternity Protection Act (MPA), which prohibits abortions due to "fetal cause".

Research over the decades has shown clearly that human children act pro-socially starting from very early in life. In her recent paper, Dunfield (2014) has contributed to this wealth of research by proposing a framework in which to understand children's pro-social behaviors. Here, I aim to draw attention to some drawbacks of this framework as well as suggest directions for future research. Acco...

Results: PRO was most frequently a measurement of the patients quality of life (n = 88, 71%), a measurement of the patients symptoms (n = 22, 18%) or both (n = 11, 9%). Unfortunately, the majority of trials did not report on PRO at all (201 of 325; 62%). Of the remaining 124 trials, the mean PRORQS score was 5.0 on an 11 points scale. Among the 11 items included in the PRORQS, none was correctl...

The severe acute respiratory syndrome-associated coronavirus (SARS-CoV) 3C-like protease (3CL(pro) or M(pro)) is an attractive target for the development of anti-SARS drugs because of its crucial role in the viral life cycle. In this study, a compound database was screened by the structure-based virtual screening approach to identify initial hits as inhibitors of SARS-CoV 3CL(pro). Out of the 5...

Platelets are anuclear cytoplasmic fragments essential for blood clotting and wound healing. Despite much speculation, the factors determining their life span in the circulation are unknown. We show here that an intrinsic program for apoptosis controls platelet survival and dictates their life span. Pro-survival Bcl-x(L) constrains the pro-apoptotic activity of Bak to maintain platelet survival...

INTRODUCTION Patient-reported outcome (PRO) measures serve to capture vital patient information not otherwise obtained by primary study endpoints. This paper examines how PROs are utilized as endpoints in industry-sponsored metastatic breast cancer clinical trials. METHODS A search was conducted in the clinicaltrials.gov web site for trials involving common treatments for metastatic breast ca...

PRO 542 (CD4-IgG2) is a recombinant antibody-like fusion protein wherein the Fv portions of both the heavy and light chains of human IgG2 have been replaced with the D1D2 domains of human CD4. Unlike monovalent and divalent CD4-based proteins, tetravalent PRO 542 potently neutralizes diverse primary human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) type 1 isolates. In this phase 1 study, the first evaluation ...

BACKGROUND Chronic inflammation may be involved in combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and may help explain comorbid physical diseases. However, the extent to which combat exposure per se, depression, or early life trauma, all of which are associated with combat PTSD, may confound the relationship between PTSD and inflammation is unclear. METHODS We quantified interleukin (IL...