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AbstractThe global distribution of laboratory mouse strains is valued for ensuring the continuity, validity and accessibility of model organisms. Mouse strains are therefore assumed mobile and able to travel. We draw on the concept of ‘animal mobilities’ (Hodgetts and Lorimer 2019) to explain how attending to laboratory mice as living animal, commodity and scientific tool is shaping how they are transported through contemporary scientific infrastructures and communities. Our paper is framed around exploring how animal strains travel, rather than animals, as we show that it is only through understanding strain mobility that we can explain how and why live animal movement can be replaced by germinal products. The research is based on qualitative fieldwork in 2018 and 2019 that included 2 weeks ethnography and interviews with key informants involved in the movement of laboratory animals. The empirical analysis discusses practices that relate to managing biosecurity and animal welfare concerns when moving laboratory animal strains. In closing we reflect more broadly on the contemporary ‘ethico-onto-epistemological’ (Barad, 2014) entanglement that shapes who or what travels to support laboratory science data-making practices, and the intensity of care ‘tinkering’ practices (Mol and Law 2010) that facilitate the movement. We explain how a laboratory animal strain exceeds its value solely as a mobile and thus exchangeable commodity, illustrated in how values that relate to animal sentience and infection-risk supports its material transformation. Consequently, it is becoming increasingly common for non-sentient germinal products – embryos and gametes - to replace live sentient animals when being moved.

AbstractThis article examines a niche space: youth clubs created by small voluntary organizations for ‘gifted children’ in 1970s and 1980s Britain. It asks how individualism shaped everyday life and demonstrates how youth culture was much broader than just the permissiveness that dominates the literature. Gifted children are currently missing from accounts of modern Britain, which focus on mainstream educational categories. Yet, including them in our analysis provides new insights into the diversity of youth cultures that existed in these decades. Drawing on new uncatalogued archives, and centrally poetry, letters, and stories from young people themselves, the article shows that conservative and radical visions co-existed. Young people shaped their own culture, subverting and challenging ideas of themselves as distinctive future leaders.

Since the 1980s, some commercial airline pilots and flight crews in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia began to report an illness they believed was caused by exposure to contaminated cabin air. Despite a body of scientific research and health activism calling for this condition, termed Aerotoxic Syndrome (AS), to be classified an occupational illness, it has not been accepted as a clinical entity because its causation remains contested. This article contends that debates over the recognition of AS have been shaped by the politics of science and what can be considered evidence of a causal link; the burden of proof lay with survivors and their allies rather than with airlines and manufacturers. The history of AS shows the challenges of reacting to health risks in a global industry that provides an important form of transportation, and enjoys considerable political and economic influence. It also reveals that at the heart of commercial jet air travel remains an unresolved public health issue, and those who claim to be suffering from AS expected prompt recognition, reform and assistance in light of scientific research and personal testimony, as well as a range of chemical, medical, legal and air safety reports.

This article presents the findings of a study about the history of aversion therapy as a treatment technique in the English mental health system to convert lesbians and bisexual women into heterosexual women. We explored published psychiatric and psychological literature, as well as lesbian, gay, and bisexual archives and anthologies. We identified 10 examples of young women receiving aversion therapy in England in the 1960s and 1970s. We situate our discussion within the context of post-war British and transnational medical history. As a contribution to a significantly under-researched area, this article adds to a broader transnational history of the psychological treatment of marginalised sexualities and genders. As a consequence, it also contributes to LGBTQIA+ history, the history of medicine, and psychiatric survivor history. We also reflect on the ethical implications of the research for current mental health practice.

AbstractThis article argues that the movement of dogs from pounds to medical laboratories played a critically important role in debates over the use of animals in science and medicine in the United States in the twentieth century, not least by drawing the scientific community into every greater engagement with bureaucratic political governance. If we are to understand the unique characteristics of the American federal legislation that emerges in the 1960s, we need to understand the long and protracted debate over the use of pound animals at the local municipal and state level between antivivisectionists, humane activists, and scientific and medical researchers. We argue that the Laboratory Animal Care Act of 1966 reflects the slow evolution of a strategy that proved most successful in local conflicts, and which would characterize a “new humanitarianism”: not the regulation of experimental practices but of the care and transportation of the animals being provided to the laboratory. Our analysis is consistent with, and draws upon, scholarship which has established the productive power of public agencies and civil society on the periphery of the American state.

Background: Pre- and intra-operative language mapping in neurosurgery patients frequently involves an object naming task. The choice of the optimal object naming paradigm remains challenging due to lack of normative data and standardization in mapping practices. The aim of this study was to identify object naming paradigms that robustly and consistently activate classical language regions and could therefore be used to improve the sensitivity of language mapping in brain tumor and epilepsy patients.Methods: Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from two independent groups of healthy controls (total = 79) were used to generate threshold-weighted voxel-based consistency maps. This novel approach allowed us to compare inter-subject consistency of activation for naming single objects in the visual and auditory modality and naming two objects in a phrase or a sentence.Results: We found that the consistency of activation in language regions was greater for naming two objects per picture than one object per picture, even when controlling for the number of names produced in 5 s.Conclusion: More consistent activation in language areas for naming two objects compared to one object suggests that two-object naming tasks may be more suitable for delimiting language eloquent regions with pre- and intra-operative language testing. More broadly, we propose that the functional specificity of brain mapping paradigms for a whole range of different linguistic and non-linguistic functions could be enhanced by referring to databased models of inter-subject consistency and variability in typical and atypical brain responses.

The Lancet Countdown is an international collaboration that independently monitors the health consequences of a changing climate. Publishing updated, new, and improved indicators each year, the Lancet Countdown represents the consensus of leading researchers from 43 academic institutions and UN agencies. The 44 indicators of this report expose an unabated rise in the health impacts of climate change and the current health consequences of the delayed and inconsistent response of countries around the globe—providing a clear imperative for accelerated action that puts the health of people and planet above all else.\ud \ud The 2021 report coincides with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26), at which countries are facing pressure to realise the ambition of the Paris Agreement to keep the global average temperature rise to 1·5°C and to mobilise the financial resources required for all countries to have an effective climate response. These negotiations unfold in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic—a global health crisis that has claimed millions of lives, affected livelihoods and communities around the globe, and exposed deep fissures and inequities in the world's capacity to cope with, and respond to, health emergencies. Yet, in its response to both crises, the world is faced with an unprecedented opportunity to ensure a healthy future for all.

AbstractBackgroundHansen’s disease (leprosy), widespread in medieval Europe, is today mainly prevalent in tropical and subtropical regions with around 200,000 new cases reported annually. Despite its long history and appearance in historical records, its origins and past dissemination patterns are still widely unknown. Applying ancient DNA approaches to its major causative agent,Mycobacterium leprae, can significantly improve our understanding of the disease’s complex history. Previous studies have identified a high genetic continuity of the pathogen over the last 1500 years and the existence of at least fourM. lepraelineages in some parts of Europe since the Early Medieval period.ResultsHere, we reconstructed 19 ancientM. lepraegenomes to further investigateM. leprae’sgenetic variation in Europe, with a dedicated focus on bacterial genomes from previously unstudied regions (Belarus, Iberia, Russia, Scotland), from multiple sites in a single region (Cambridgeshire, England), and from two Iberian leprosaria. Overall, our data confirm the existence of similar phylogeographic patterns across Europe, including high diversity in leprosaria. Further, we identified a new genotype in Belarus. By doubling the number of complete ancientM. lepraegenomes, our results improve our knowledge of the past phylogeography ofM. lepraeand reveal a particularly highM. lepraediversity in European medieval leprosaria.ConclusionsOur findings allow us to detect similar patterns of strain diversity across Europe with branch 3 as the most common branch and the leprosaria as centers for high diversity. The higher resolution of our phylogeny tree also refined our understanding of the interspecies transfer between red squirrels and humans pointing to a late antique/early medieval transmission. Furthermore, with our new estimates on the past population diversity ofM. leprae, we gained first insights into the disease’s global history in relation to major historic events such as the Roman expansion or the beginning of the regular transatlantic long distance trade. In summary, our findings highlight how studying ancientM. lepraegenomes worldwide improves our understanding of leprosy’s global history and can contribute to current models ofM. leprae’s worldwide dissemination, including interspecies transmissions.

Anomia (word-finding difficulties) is the hallmark of aphasia, an acquired language disorder most commonly caused by stroke. Assessment of speech performance using picture naming tasks is a key method for both diagnosis and monitoring of responses to treatment interventions by people with aphasia (PWA). Currently, this assessment is conducted manually by speech and language therapists (SLT). Surprisingly, despite advancements in automatic speech recognition (ASR) and artificial intelligence with technologies like deep learning, research on developing automated systems for this task has been scarce. Here we present NUVA, an utterance verification system incorporating a deep learning element that classifies 'correct' versus' incorrect' naming attempts from aphasic stroke patients. When tested on eight native British-English speaking PWA the system's performance accuracy ranged between 83.6% to 93.6%, with a 10-fold cross-validation mean of 89.5%. This performance was not only significantly better than a baseline created for this study using one of the leading commercially available ASRs (Google speech-to-text service) but also comparable in some instances with two independent SLT ratings for the same dataset. Under review