Elizabeth Brown Research Articles

Abstract 3455: Prevalence of monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS) in a Western Nigerian population

Abstract Monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS) is a premalignant condition characterized by plasma cell production of monoclonal (M) protein and is a requisite precursor to multiple myeloma (MM). African American (AA) individuals have a two-fold higher incidence of MGUS and MM compared to White individuals. However, data are limited on individuals from Africa, especially using sensitive MGUS detection methods. We examined the prevalence of MGUS in a sample of the general population in Nigeria. Individuals aged 40 and over (n=343) were recruited through health promotion events in Ado-Odo Ota Local Government Area of Ogun State, Nigeria, and provided informed consent, a blood sample, and a short questionnaire. Serum was screened at Mayo Clinic for heavy chain (HC)-MGUS using the matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization-time of flight (Mass-Fix) assay, which has high sensitivity for detection of M-proteins; serum free light chains (FLC) were also measured. FLC was abnormal if the kappa (>0.26 mg/dL) or lambda (>0.33 mg/dL) light chain (LC) was elevated and FLC ratio (kappa/lambda) was outside the reference range (0.26-3.10). LC-MGUS was defined as an abnormal FLC in the absence of a HC. Age- and sex-adjusted prevalence rates were directly standardized to 2010 United States (US) population for comparison to published studies. Logistic regression was used to examine the association of age, sex, and BMI with HC-MGUS. The mean age of participants was 55 years (SD=10.9), and 74.6% were female. Of these, 216 (63%) had both parents from the Yoruba tribe, 89 (26%) from the Igbo tribe and 38 (11%) from other tribes. Overall, 33 participants (9.6%) had HC-MGUS, with 8 (2.3%) having an M-protein above 0.2 g/dL; 6 (1.7%) had LC-MGUS. HC-MGUS was predominantly IgG isotype (48.5%), followed by IgA (27.3%), biclonal (15.2%) and IgM (9.0%). Prevalence of HC-MGUS was 8.3% for ages 40-49, 7.7% ages 50-69 and 22% ages 70 and above. Standardized to the US population, age and sex adjusted MGUS prevalence ages 50 and older was 17.3% (95% CI: 9.8%-24.9%) and HC-MGUS was 14.7% (95% CI: 7.7%-21.8%), similar to previously published rates of HC-MGUS using Mass-Fix screening of AA individuals (16.5%, 95% CI: 12.2%-20.8%) (PMID: 35316833). In models that included age, sex and BMI, older age was positively associated with HC-MGUS (OR=3.1, 95% CI: 1.1-8.7 for ages 70+ compared to <50), while female sex (OR=0.53, 95% CI: 0.24-1.2) and overweight/obesity (OR=0.34, 95% CI: 0.16-0.75 for BMI > 25 vs. <25) were inversely associated with HC-MGUS. We observed similar prevalence of HC-MGUS at ages 50 and above among Western Nigerian and AA populations when screened using mass-spectrometry. Older age was positively associated with HC-MGUS while overweight and obesity were inversely associated. Studies of MGUS in indigenous African populations may provide insight to unique cancer risk factors compared to other populations. Citation Format: Celine M. Vachon, Cristine Allmer, Danelle Moonen, Aaron Norman, Joselle Cook, Susan Slager, Oluwakemi A. Rotimi, Opeyemi C. De Campos, Titilope M. Dokumu, David Murray, Shaji Kumar, Elizabeth Brown, Linda B. Baughn, Solomon Rotimi. Prevalence of monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS) in a Western Nigerian population [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2024; Part 1 (Regular Abstracts); 2024 Apr 5-10; San Diego, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2024;84(6_Suppl):Abstract nr 3455.

Serologic Response and Clinical Outcomes of SARS-CoV-2 Infection and Vaccination in Ozanimod-Treated Participants With Relapsing Multiple Sclerosis (P2-3.018)

Serologic Response and Clinical Outcomes of SARS-CoV-2 Infection and Vaccination in Ozanimod-Treated Participants With Relapsing Multiple Sclerosis (P2-3.018)

Female Hucksters and Produce Markets in the Great Lakes Region, 1830s–1890s

Female Hucksters and Produce Markets in the Great Lakes Region, 1830s–1890s Debra A. Reid (bio) Mary Judge had seen a bit of the world by the time she became a vendor at Detroit's City Hall Market. She remained a market fixture until her death. For over thirty years, newspaper reporters linked her, more than any other individual, with one cause célèbre, the city's public market. Judge catered to journalists, no doubt, but her entire cohort of female growers and hucksters found themselves in the news often. The media did not recognize them for bringing food to market, daily, between April and November. Instead, journalists often linked market women to the problems that the city hoped to solve if it closed the market. Vendors' wagons clogged downtown streets and created a public hazard, while their boisterous tactics and perceived unladylike behavior allegedly bordered on abuse. The media went even further by stressing the private challenges that individual women faced as evidence of the familial and social risks that resulted when women operated their businesses outside the bounds of patriarchy. This perpetuated the argument that the only good woman was a dutiful wife or ward working selflessly for a family's economic solvency. Judge's market story fits patterns well-documented in women's history. She became part of a sixty-year-old formal economy when she opened her stand in 1863. Yet, she selectively complied with regulations or outright defied them as need arose. Serena Zabin has documented comparable tactics among "poor white women" in colonial cities, women that she describes as "the linchpins" of informal economies. These women conducted business at a time when few women operated businesses outside the home, and most kept house and tended families under patriarchal authority. These informal economies continued into the early national period. Zabin argues, however, that informal trade and the poor White women who conducted it became [End Page 51] increasingly marginalized as common law perpetuated White male authority over commerce, earnings, real and personal property, and over the welfare of White men's wives, families, and wards.1 In Detroit, males authorized, regulated, administered, and managed the public market from its beginning. The first authorization coincided with Detroit's incorporation as part of the Old Northwest Territory in 1802. Then, city trustees established a market at the Detroit River and authorized appointment of a clerk to manage it. Little detail about this market exists, but in 1816, trustees approved construction of a market house in the center of Woodward Avenue below Jefferson Avenue (on the Detroit River side), financed with tax revenue. The markets in St. Louis, also a French-influenced midwestern city, followed a similar pattern with a market in the center of a wide avenue. Male clerks appointed by an elected common council administered the market.3 Growers, hucksters, and customers alike reflected Detroit's multi-ethnic population, with Indigenous, French, British, and Black and White Americans often crossing the fluid border between Detroit and Windsor, Canada. Antiquarian Silas Farmer romanticized this as he described the "black-eyed, olive-skinned maidens … from the Canada shore" who brought "garden-sauce and greens" to the earliest markets in little carts pulled by French ponies. In contrast, a newspaper account indicated that little demand for garden produce existed. Instead, many residents raised what they needed, and elderly men hauled surplus to the city markets in wheelbarrows. Only a few stands operated regularly, and they sold "celery, beets, lettuce, and similar vegetables, poultry and the like."4 Each ethnic group brought different perceptions of female status and authority to market operations, but the legal status of the women at the market resulted from a transfer of English common-law procedures to the new midwestern context. Elizabeth Brown has concluded that justices in the Wayne County court of Michigan Territory did not improvise, nor did they deviate from precedent. Instead, they followed English common-law procedures, as had justices in the eastern seaboard states. Changing situations prompted additional analyses, however, especially in the case of women, commerce, and property law. Justices cited two books in their decisions addressing the legal status of married women (femme covert) and single women...

The Elizabeth Brown Family of Charles City and New Kent County, VA: A Biographic Study of a Family of Black, Chickahominy, and European Ancestry

The Elizabeth Brown Family of Charles City and New Kent County, VA: A Biographic Study of a Family of Black, Chickahominy, and European Ancestry

In the News

Welcome to the April 2022 issue of C&RL News . We start out this month’s issue with highlights and key findings from the “2020 ACRL Academic Library Trends and Statistics Survey.” ACRL Academic Library Trends and Statistics Survey Editorial Board members Elizabeth Brown and Jeannette E. Pierce take a dive into the survey results, focusing on the impact of COVID-19 on academic libraries, trends in references and instruction, and EDI initiatives, including recruitment and retention. For a deeper dive into the state of academic libraries, watch for the 2022 edition of ACRL’s biennial “Top trends in academic libraries” article, coming up in the June issue of C&RL News .

The American Promise.

In April 2021, at a Congressional Ways and Means Committee hearing regarding proposed national investments in water infrastructure,1 a pediatrician (M.H.A.) held up a lead pipe excavated from the Flint home of Oscar and Elizabeth Brown. In the 1950s, Mr and Mrs Brown moved from Mississippi to Flint as part of the Great Migration. Fleeing the racism and oppression of Jim Crow south, millions of African Americans moved to cities like Flint, Detroit, and Chicago. They were hoping to find that elusive American Promise, hoping to build a foundation of prosperity, opportunity, and equality for their children and grandchildren that was not afforded to them or their ancestors.

The Capetian Century, 1214–1314 ed. by William Chester Jordan and Jenna Rebecca Phillips

Reviewed by: The Capetian Century, 1214–1314 ed. by William Chester Jordan and Jenna Rebecca Phillips Chris Jones Jordan, William Chester, and Jenna Rebecca Phillips, eds, The Capetian Century, 1214–1314 (Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, 22), Turnhout, Brepols, 2017; hardback; pp. xvi, 362; 27 b/w, 5 colour illustrations, 1 map; R. R. P. €100.00; ISBN 9782503567181. This collection originates in a conference held at Princeton in 2014 to mark two anniversaries in French history: the famous Battle of Bouvines and the death, a century later, of King Philip IV. As William Chester Jordan explains, the intention of the volume’s four sections is ‘fleshing out’ the existing narrative alongside further ‘interrogation’ of what has been labelled by some the âge d’or capétien (pp. xi–xii). The first section, ‘Royal Patronage and Expressions of Kingship’, begins with William Courtenay’s useful overview of royal relations with the University of Paris. M. Cecilia Gaposchkin subsequently offers a masterclass in the use of what can appear unpromising source material. Her analysis of moralized Bibles produced in royal circles provides convincing insights into Capetian conceptions of kingship in the 1220s–30s, a period lacking ‘mirrors for princes’ literature. Gaposchkin establishes these Bibles ‘promoted an ideal of Augustinian kingship, specific to the challenges of the early part of the thirteenth century, and informed by ecclesiastical priorities’ (p. 77). Her contribution sits alongside Anne Lester’s significant re-evaluation of the continuing importance of the Cistercian order to the Capetian dynasty, and Sean Field’s equally illuminating exploration of the parallel development of the office of king’s confessor and the role of inquisitor. Xavier Hélary’s examination of the reasons why French nobles chose to participate in the military campaigns of the later Capetians, which opens ‘Power and its Representation’, is notable for being one of few essays in the volume that takes us beyond the royal court and its immediate Parisian environs. Hélary’s conclusions generally convince, although his view that the nobility lost its taste for holy war remains open to debate. Brigitte Bedos-Rezak’s analysis of William of Auvergne’s understanding of seals provides a valuable new perspective on the thought of an under-studied mid-century figure. It rewards perseverance by those otherwise put off by the trappings of postmodernism. By contrast, Hagar Barak’s potentially interesting examination of ‘The Managerial Revolution of the Thirteenth Century’ is marred by its handling of the sources, particularly the baronial complaint of 1246. The latter was directed at ecclesiastical interference specifically; it should not be read as an indication of baronial resentment of lawyers and bureaucrats in general (p. 146). Julien Théry-Astruc’s analysis of William de Nogaret’s key role in the recasting of French kingship in religious terms forms a magisterial centrepiece to the book’s third section. In an expanded translation of his 2012 article, [End Page 217] Théry-Astruc convincingly argues that the Bernard Saisset affair of 1301 was a ‘breakthrough’ moment (p. 242) that shaped both the attack on Boniface VIII and the trial of the Templars. Elizabeth Brown’s own assessment of Philip IV’s ministers similarly reflects a mastery of the sources. Like Élisabeth Lalou on Robert Fawtier’s contribution to the history of Philip’s reign, Brown’s reflections on the mid-twentieth-century giants of Capetian historiography underlines that ‘[t] hey wrote the works that shape the questions we investigate and that structure the dimensions and nature of the quest in which we are engaged’ (p. 185). This draws our attention to one of this volume’s lacunae: it does not take the opportunity to reflect more deeply on what Jordan labels the ‘grand narrative’ (p. xi) that is the legacy of historians such as Fawtier and Joseph Strayer. In the final section, ‘Crusaders and Crusading Orders’, Jochen Burgtorf offers an intriguing reconstruction of the genealogy of a crusading family that originated in the Auvergne, providing a second perspective from beyond the court. However, like Helen Nicholson’s overview of the fate of the Templars post-trial, this essay seems, at best, tangential to the volume’s theme. Paul Crawford...

Two Tales of Lincoln and the Meaning of Democracy

Two Tales of Lincoln and the Meaning of Democracy Erik J. Chaput (bio) Elizabeth Brown Pryor. Six Encounters with Lincoln: A President Confronts Democracy and Its Demons. New York: Viking, 2017. 496 pp. Bibliography and Index. $35.00. Allen C. Guelzo. Redeeming the Great Emancipator. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. 208 pp. Index. $22.95. Though it was clear that Abraham Lincoln continued to struggle to define exactly what emancipation would mean for the slave, in his December 1862 annual message the president informed Congress that the civil war that had already claimed the lives of thousands of men was being fought to ensure that the American democratic experiment would endure. According to Lincoln, the United States was "the last best, hope of earth" for democracy. As historian Sean Wilentz has noted, "given the blows dealt to democratic governments in the Old World, it was easy enough for Lincoln and others to see America as a singular and even providential nation."1 The protection and promotion of a government by and for the people was as important to Lincoln as saving the Union and ending slavery. However, unlike John Adams or James Madison, Abraham Lincoln never put forth a detailed blueprint for how the tenets of democracy and republican government were to be structured. He was not an original policy thinker in that regard. He simply but forcibly maintained that slavery and democracy were incompatible, and the "fiery trial" of the war would eventually lead to a polity in which all men would be equal to one another. His job, as he had noted in the secession winter, was to protect the words "fitly spoken" in Jefferson's Declaration. Historians of the Civil War era, including James McPherson, James Oakes, Sean Wilentz, and Edward Ayers, generally give Lincoln high marks for his steadfast commitment to preserving a conception of democracy predicated on human equality. Elizabeth Brown Pryor, however, believes that historians need to adopt a more balanced and holistic approach to the study of the Lincoln presidency and how "Lincoln's republic was a government of, by, and for only some of the people" (p. 3). Pryor portrays a president whose vision [End Page 65] of democracy was limited and who repeatedly missed opportunities to aid not only the cause of freedom for black Americans, but also for women and Native Americans. Pryor, who was tragically killed just before her latest book went to press, is not afraid to attack the hallowed image of the sixteenth president. Lincoln's "saving grace is that he upheld a system that allowed for change even when he was not its champion" (p. 9). Overall, Six Encounters with Lincoln is one of the harshest assessments of the Great Emancipator to appear in recent years. "What we must question," the author writes "is whether in doing his best, he did the best for the country" (p. 8). Pryor, a prodigious researcher who examined hundreds of manuscript collections, paints a portrait of an embattled president, unsure of how to handle the pressures of office. Indeed, Pryor's harangue of Lincoln resembles a characterization Reverdy Johnson sketched for George McClellan at the height of the 1864 presidential campaign: His infirmity of purpose, his unsteadiness in any policy, his once expressed dislike to radicalism, his subsequent adoption of its worst features, his ignorant and mischievous interference with our military campaigns, his appointments, often against the advice of high military officers, of notorious incompetency—his frequent and nearly fatal changes of commanders.2 Pryor reconstructs six meetings Lincoln had during his presidency with figures who, while well known in some historical circles, are often not part of either biographical accounts or general narratives of the Civil War era. The author uses the "six encounters" with Lincoln in the White House in order to discuss the contours of American democracy, including civilian control of the military, civil liberties, the politics of emancipation, the fate of Native Americans, the role of women in the war, and the politics of reconstruction. Pryor curiously fails, however, early in the narrative to offer up an account of the ways in which Lincoln understood and used the word "democracy" in his political career, a...

Six Encounters with Lincoln: A President Confronts Democracy and Its Demons by Elizabeth Brown Pryor

Reviewed by: Six Encounters with Lincoln: A President Confronts Democracy and Its Demons by Elizabeth Brown Pryor Louise L. Stevenson (bio) Six Encounters with Lincoln: A President Confronts Democracy and Its Demons. By Elizabeth Brown Pryor. (New York: Viking, 2017. Pp. 496. Cloth, $35.00; paper, $18.00.) By now, readers of the books reviewed in this journal may be congratulating themselves that they have little more to learn about the sixteenth president of the United States and his administration. Abraham Lincoln’s one hundredth birthday and the sesquicentennial of the Civil War opened the floodgates for Lincoln studies. The more notable among them offered new understandings of the Republican struggle against slavery, the president as military commander, his relationship with the press, and the reaction to his death. Scholars even expanded the geographic scope of Lincoln [End Page 141] and Civil War studies to place the president’s republican beliefs and antislavery efforts within the context of the Atlantic world. Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s Six Encounters with Lincoln will jolt its readers from complacency. Based on exhaustive research in some 350 collections of family papers and diaries, plus visits to over fifty libraries and archives, her “six encounters” compellingly and gracefully open new perspectives on the Lincoln presidency. The author proposes that they all reveal the president as he struggled with the difficulties “of managing a republic and creating a presidency” (2)—in other words, as he contended with the demons inherent in governing a constitutional democracy. In the first two chapters, Pryor addresses these concerns. In chapter 1, she draws on her two decades of employment in the State Department to argue that Lincoln’s success in antebellum party politics mis-educated him for his role as commander in chief. He came to the White House unaware that the military functioned according to protocols of rank and hierarchy. This ignorance would produce the shambles of decision-making that preceded the reprovisioning of Fort Sumter in April 1861. Pryor’s Lincoln stands in bold contrast to the Lincoln presented by James McPherson in Tried by War: Lincoln as Commander in Chief (2008). Pryor next examines the totalitarian temptation of democratic government in wartime through an unexpected juxtaposition. Most historians explain Lincoln’s affection for humorists such as David Ross Locke and Robert Henry Newell (a.k.a. Petroleum V. Nasby and Orpheus C. Kerr) by suggesting that their spoofs offered the president relief from wartime worries. Pryor uses Lincoln’s taste for their writing to do more. She shows how they often rebuked him for military mismanagement and contested his administration’s impinging on civil rights in wartime. Thus, the author applies a humorous coating to the story already established by Mark E. Neely Jr. in The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (1991). In the next three chapters, Pryor departs from the theme of totalitarian temptation as a democratic demon to explore how enslaved Americans, women, and Native Americans challenged an ideal of democracy. Unfortunately, the ideal of democracy against which Pryor measures Lincoln is one that belongs to our age rather than to his. One sees the discrepancy between democracy as Lincoln lived it and as Pryor imagines it when she says that his “long-term vision for Native Americans, freedmen, and women rarely extended further than the limited vista of the complacent masses” (260). Fortunately, for the preservation of the republic and the freedom of the enslaved peoples, those complacent masses voted for Lincoln. [End Page 142] Setting aside Pryor’s presentism, her chapters on Lincoln’s engagement with Native Americans provide much new and intriguing information. While recent books such as John A. Haymond’s excellent The Infamous Dakota War Trials of 1862: Revenge, Military Law and the Judgment of History (2016) analyze the Minnesota uprising and Lincoln’s pardoning of all but 38 of the 303 Sioux condemned to death by military tribunal, no author has yet attempted to include the breadth of information that Pryor covers in this lengthy chapter. First, we learn that the Lincolns sometimes greeted Native Americans in the White House. For instance, Mary Lincoln invited a Seneca woman to sing at an 1861 reception. Most often, Native...

Abstract 1319: Epigenome-wide association study reveals differential DNA methylation consistent with progression of multiple myeloma

Abstract Purpose: Multiple myeloma (MM) is the second most common hematological malignancy in the US. It is characterized by a clonal expansion of plasma cells in the bone marrow and extramedullary sites and is preceded by two precursor conditions including monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS) and smoldering myeloma (SMM). Strong evidence suggests a germline and environmental etiology. However, efforts to characterize heritable changes in gene activity, such as DNA methylation, have not been widely reported. Methods: We examined epigenome-wide DNA methylation as markers of MGUS, SMM and MM in peripheral blood obtained from treatment-naïve European American cases with heavy-chain IgG or IgA MGUS (n=60), SMM (n=31) and MM (n=54) and age- and sex-matched controls (n=79) included from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, University of Chicago and the Mayo Clinic, Rochester [54.5% males; mean age, 64 years (range, 36 to 86)]. We quantified DNA methylation of over 450,000 CpG and non-CpG loci using the Infinium HumanMethylation450 array (Illumina). Differentially methylated positions were calculated using a general linear model framework adjusted for confounders and cellular heterogeneity. Results: A total of 6 CpGs were differentially methylated in MM cases compared to controls at a level of genome-wide statistical significance. MM was associated with hypomethylation at differentially methylated positions inside SBNO2 (P=3.37x10-10), WIZ (P=1.12x10-8), CA6 (P=4.29x10-8) and ADORA1 (P=3.68x10-8) as well as intergenic positions proximal to TNFRSF8 (Chr 1p36.22; P=2.24x10-9) and ENDOV (Chr 17q25.3; P=2.74x10-8). Each of these loci, with the exception of CA6 and ADORA1, were hypomethylated in each of the 3 plasma cell dyscrasia phenotypes including MGUS and SMM and MM cases compared to controls (P<0.03), albeit not at a level of genome-wide statistical significance. Conclusions: These preliminary findings suggest that differences in DNA methylation may contribute to altered risk of MM, as well as its precursor conditions, and may play a role in plasma cell dyscrasia progression as a consequence of heritable changes in gene activity due to past exposures. Replication in a large yet similarly well-characterized population is warranted. Citation Format: Stephen D. Gragg, Devin Absher, Xiangqin Cui, Christina Pillion, Richard Myers, Shaji Kumar, Luciano Costa, Brian Chiu, Celine Vachon, Elizabeth Brown. Epigenome-wide association study reveals differential DNA methylation consistent with progression of multiple myeloma [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2017; 2017 Apr 1-5; Washington, DC. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2017;77(13 Suppl):Abstract nr 1319. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2017-1319

Breakdown Is Built into It: A Politics of Resilience in a Disabling World

Resilience is an interdisciplinary concept that has been interrogated and investigated in a number of fields of research and practice including psychology, climate change, trauma studies, education and disaster planning. This paper considers its position within critical disability studies, popular understandings of disability and the emergence of a disability culture...

Book Review: Sudden Selector’s Guide to Biology Resources

Sudden Selector's Guide to Biology Resources. By Flora G. Shrode. Chicago: Association for Library Collections & Technical Services, 2012.85 p. $28.50 softcover (ISBN: 978-0-83898600-4) $13.50 PDF e-book. ALCTS/ CMS Sudden Selector's Series. Sudden Selector's Guide to Chemistry Resources. By Elizabeth Brown. Chicago: Association for Library Collections & Technical Services, 2012. 93 p. $28.50 softcover (ISBN: 978-0-8389-8591-5) $13.50 PDF e-book. ALCTS/CMS Sudden Selector's Series. The Sudden Selector's Series provides assistance to librarians who are assigned subjects for collection development with which they are unfamiliar. These two new guides in biology and chemistry are particularly welcome for librarians like me with an undergraduate degree in English. The authors have written these guides for those who possess only basic understanding of library reference needs and an elementary understanding of the sciences (Brown, xv). The guides are essentially annotated bibliographies; the authors pair excellent introductions to their topics with selected references for further information and exploration. The guides are clearly written and well organized, although there are variations in their structure. Each begins with an overview of its science, including description of the organization of in the discipline. The guide to chemistry provides an overview of chemists and how they approach information, followed by chapters on collection analysis, current awareness tools, the print literature, chemistry tools, approval plans, and general advice. The guide to biology includes chapters on election tools, databases, and current awareness sources. The guides feature both print and digital resources. The authors also include data repositories, additional specialized resources, and databases. There are few dated materials in the guide to chemistry, such as Lehninger's Principles of Biochemistry, the fourth edition, which was cited although fifth edition was published in 2008. In the guide to biology, some databases are marked free, some databases are marked subscription, but others are unmarked, rendering their status unclear (Shrode, 20). This confusion is but minor problem--the number and types of resources reviewed in the guides, including websites such as the Tree of Life web Project, Google Scholar, and selection of wikis, are impressive. As both guides deal with scientific inquiry, they address current and how to keep up with trends in biological and chemical research. Brown notes that applications of chemical principles to other scientific disciplines define today's research (3); Shrode indicates that a high degree of interdisciplinary crossover is evident in the literature (2). …

Evaluation of the B Cell Compartment in CVID and Respi Patients

S D A Y 819 Evaluation of the B Cell Compartment in CVID and Respi Patients Tracy Hwangpo, MD, PhD, Ewa Szymanksa, Cunren Liu, Marsha Brand, Elizabeth Brown, Harry Schroeder; UAB, UAB, AL. RATIONALE: Recent studies suggest that clinical symptoms in CVID can correlate with a reduction in the memory B cell compartment. We are characterizing various B cell populations of patients without disease, with CVID, and with REcurrent Sino-Pulmonary Infections and normal serum immunoglobulins (RESPI) as an effort to find distinguishing features among them. METHODS: Whole blood was collected from over 140 study subjects. Total lymphocytes, marginal zone-like B cells, IgM+ memory B cells, class-switched B cells, transitional B cells, immature B cells, and na€ive B cells were isolated and evaluated by flow cytometry. Immunoglobulins and HLA haplotyewere also examined. Unpaired t-test was used to analyze the means of these cells. RESULTS:We found that by disease phenotype, RESPI patients appear to have lower IgG levels compared to control patients. All B cell subsets were decreased in CVID patients, particularly classed-switchedmemory B cells. There is a gradient for marginal zone-like B cells, with CVID having the lowest numbers compared to RESPI and controls. IgM+ memory B cells were found to be lower in RESPI patients compared to controls. We also found patients with the B4/B88 haplotype tended to have lower B cell subsets. Analysis is ongoing for transitional, naive, and immature B cells. CONCLUSIONS: We postulate that the transition fromRESPI patients to CVID patientsmay involve the development of defects in B cell maturation signaling or memory B cell generation. We identified the distinctive features of lower IgM memory B cells in RESPI patients compared to controls. Characterizing the B cell compartment may elucidate their importance in disease identification and progression.

Elizabeth Brown 1932-2012-Paediatric nurse, social worker and campaigner

Elizabeth Brown 1932-2012-Paediatric nurse, social worker and campaigner

Minimal undergraduate teaching curriculum in Europe

Elizabeth Brown and colleagues have pointed out significant differences across the European Union in GP-training and in family medicine (FM) teaching.1 GP-training and the choice of general practice as a profession depend, to a large extent, on the level of FM teaching at undergraduate level. Only if we teach FM at this stage, can we introduce all of them to this discipline as framed by the European Definition. Only if we introduce …

Words of thanks to Dr. Alan H. DeCherney

With this issue of Fertility and Sterility, we mark the retirement of Alan H. DeCherney, M.D., Editor-in-Chief from 1997 to 2011. Dr. DeCherney has been the consummate editor, mentor, leader, educator, and physician scientist who has impacted Reproductive Medicine in ways that provide important lessons to all of us in this field. Alan serves as a role model to us all. He contributes to and advances our field on a daily basis; if only we all had his stamina, determination and commitment to excellence, advances in our field could be realized at a pace far exceeding that occurring today. Alan has been a “hands-on” Editor, intimately and continuously involved with the day-to-day management of the Journal, leading it to new heights during his tenure. Among his major innovations have been the modernization of the appearance of the Journal, with its changing cover designs, liberal use of color, and sleek and “downloadable” tables; the introduction of insightful editorials and a challenging “Controversies” section; and the use of technological advances (largely unseen by readers) but including monthly commentaries on the Internet on the contents of the Journal. He has always maintained that the Journal should be intellectually challenging while providing a forum through which young clinicians and investigators might advance their careers. His service to ASRM has also been immeasurable. He was President of ASRM (1994-1995), as well as President of the affiliates SART, SREI, and SRS, and has actively participated in ASRM Board meetings for over 20 years. Alan was one of the Founding Members of SART and was among the leaders of the effort to develop the SART registry. As President of SREI, he was instrumental in establishing the fellowship match. Alan is currently the Chief of the Reproductive Biology and Medicine Branch (RBMB) and Director of the Program in Reproductive and Adult Endocrinology (PRE) in the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health. Indeed, the hospital and department responsibilities listed in his curriculum vitae, including serving as Chair of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Tufts University School of Medicine from 1991 to 1996 and the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA from 1996 to 2002, span pages and pages and attest to his tireless contributions to our field. Throughout this time, his commitment to the advancement of Reproductive Medicine has never waivered and he has impacted the lives and successes of untold trainees and physicians on a daily basis. Indeed, his curriculum vitae lists more than 360 original published articles, documenting his personal clinical and scientific contributions. Alan opened the fifth successful IVF program in the United States two years after Norfolk’s success and just four years after the birth of Elizabeth Brown. He was among the first to recognize the importance of in vitro fertilization to the field of reproductive medicine, just as he was prescient in determining that endoscopic surgery would usher in a new era in gynecology. He was one of the early endoscopists in this country. These significant individual contributions pale beside the impact he has had on our field and its literature. Always an advocate for the young investigator and committed to the publication of groundbreaking manuscripts, he advanced the Journal to become the preeminent journal in our field, recognized throughout the world for its impact. In this way, Alan impacted not only the field in general, but advanced the individual career paths of the authors of the manuscripts, as promotions and successes in academic medicine for new investigators are closely tied to publication history. Alan has been forward thinking in his emphasis on global reproductive medicine with the initiation and successes of Indian, Chinese and South American versions of Fertility and Sterility, years before “global medicine” became a priority. His innovations have provided the framework for our Journal in its current form and the platform upon which our new editors will build their new vision of Fertility and Sterility. However, reviewing his accomplishments is inadequate to describe Alan DeCherney. His positive leadership style is laced with wit and charm. He has the unique ability to look at the world and himself with self-effacing humor—as all of us who interact with him know well. While we acknowledge and thank Alan sincerely for his enormous contributions to the ASRM, to the field of Reproductive Medicine and to the recent successes of Fertility and Sterility, we look to the future with expectation, as we realize that Alan’s indefatigable energies will soon be focused in new and different directions, but the outcome will remain the same: Reproductive Medicine will continue to benefit from the tireless commitment and contributions of Alan DeCherney, M.D. The entire field of Reproductive Medicine and ASRM in particular will always be extremely grateful to this dedicated and caring individual.

Armies of Peace: Canada and the UNRRA Years (review)

Reviewed by: Armies of Peace: Canada and the UNRRA Years Thomas Socknat (bio) Susan Armstrong-Reid and David Murray. Armies of Peace: Canada and the UNRRA Years. University of Toronto Press. xiv, 482. $65.00 Today Canada enjoys an international reputation as a peacemaker and promoter of human rights, but when and why did that develop? At least part of the answer is provided by Susan Armstrong-Reid and David Murray in their book, Armies of Peace: Canada and the UNRRA Years, a history of Canadian involvement in the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) from 1943 to 1947 and the impact of that experience on future Canadian attitudes and policies. In essence this is a triptych - three different but linked histories: diplomatic, institutional, and social. It begins with Canada's diplomatic efforts to test what it saw as the backbone of its new foreign policy as a 'middle power,' the functional principle - the idea that 'power should be a function of a nation's ability to contribute in a given area' - by securing a leading role in the first postwar international organization. Other nations, including the United States, were suspicious of that argument and, as the authors admit, Canada's participation in UNRRA owed less to [End Page 571] the 'functional principle' than to 'characters and circumstance.' The Canadian players included External Affairs stalwarts Lester Pearson and Hume Wrong as well as less well-known figures who pressed Canada's symbolic and real interests. Other than recognition, the main Canadian goal, somewhat self-serving, was to ensure that UNRRA purchased supplies from Canada. In fact, the issue of procurement preoccupied the Canadians and in the end, as one of the major suppliers of food items, Canada viewed the UNRRA years a success. The second part of the book examines the tangled web of UNRRA bureaucratic politics as experienced by Canadian UNRRAIDS, as staff members were known. Special attention is given to a number of women determined to assert themselves in a male-dominated world: Mary McGeachy, head of the Welfare Division, 'the only woman appointed to the executive level of UNRRA,' Charity Grant, director of a displaced-persons camp, Ethel Ostry, a principal welfare officer in various camps, and two social workers named Brown: Mabel Geldard-Brown in Greece and Elizabeth Brown in Jerusalem. They all experienced first-hand the frustrations and heartbreak resulting from bureaucratic red tape and internal and external political bickering, especially as UNRRA policy regarding wartime refugees shifted from relief to repatriation. Nevertheless, their conviction that 'they were making a difference' is supported by examples. The third section is devoted to UNRRA's medical mission and especially to the work of Canadian nurses in the Middle East, Greece, Italy, Occupied Germany, and China. Although they 'never expected to have to negotiate minefields of administrative rivalry, nationalist politics, gender, and professional authority while working on the front lines with UNRRA,' the authors argue that 'Canadian UNRRA nurses constituted a female educational elite who were professionally and temperamentally predisposed to seize the opportunity of pioneering new frontiers in international nursing.' In China, where the medical task was particularly challenging, UNRRA was assisted by voluntary agencies. Here Armstrong-Reid and Murray expand their research beyond UNRRA to include the colourful and thrilling story of the Canadian contingent to the Friends Ambulance Unit's China Convoy operating throughout the country hauling medical supplies, running hospitals, and combating epidemics. While the book provides a solid, serviceable account of Canada's diplomatic manoeuvring and the sometimes tedious bureaucratic problems with UNRRA, it is in recovering the historical memories of the Canadian UNRRAIDS in the field where the book really shines. Certainly, the section on UNRRA nurses is an important addition to the historiography of nursing. The concluding chapters focus on the long-range significance for Canada of the UNRRA experience. Many of the UNRRAIDS claimed that it had changed their lives and broadened their personal and professional [End Page 572] outlook, and the authors make a strong case that 'former UNRRAIDS shaped the contours of postwar Canada as educators and as advocates for improved health care and greater social justice' as well as for a more liberal immigration policy and...

Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee through His Private Letters (review)

Reviewed by: Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee through His Private Letters Michael Fellman Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee through His Private Letters. By Elizabeth Brown Pryor. (New York: Viking, 2007. Pp. 658. Cloth $29.95.) First, disclosure: as the author of a recent biographical study of Robert E. Lee, I have decided opinions about the subject of this book. In fact, I am usually so chary of intruding my views onto other later biographers of Lee (and William T. Sherman), that I turn down requests to review my “competitors.” Another part of me, however, sees such authors as fellow toilers in the vineyard, and, given my own limitations as a historian, looks to learning new things about a subject I have considered. No one, of course, has the last word on any historical subject, and every angle of vision, well, almost any, presents possibilities for discovery. Elizabeth Brown Pryor is an enormously assiduous collector of information—she claims to have read ten thousand manuscript documents while working on this book. And she is a patient reader of all this information, teasing out subtle insights, many of which had not occurred to earlier biographers. At her best, Pryor is a tough-minded and realistic critic of her subject. Especially impressive and original is her thorough analysis of Lee as a slave manager, particularly in the late 1850s, when his wife inherited Arlington [End Page 92] and her father’s slaves. Discounting Lee’s rather abstract regret that slavery existed, Pryor demonstrates more fully than has anyone else that he broke up every slave family on the plantation and that he had slave protesters severely whipped. She also discovered letters from several former slaves under Lee’s control who considered him a terrible man. Another considerably original chapter concerns Lee’s tenure as superintendent of West Point in the mid-1850s. Here Pryor demonstrates how much Lee wanted to avoid the appointment and how quickly he fled it when he had the chance. She also shows him as a rigid and distant authoritarian, far more resented than loved by the cadets. Much the same would apply to Lee’s last job, as a college president after the war, a subject about which Pryor is similarly revealing and persuasive. In addition to other glancing readings of Lee, many of which strike sparks, Pryor has read deeply into the letters of Mary Custis Lee and the Lee daughters (though not the sons to nearly the same degree). This becomes particularly revealing when Pryor thoroughly discusses the personal, familial, and material losses suffered by the extended Lee clan during the Civil War. If Pryor makes many fine readings of several episodes in Lee’s life, the biography lacks an overall argument or sustained analysis of central elements of Lee’s personality and political sensibility. This lack of acuity appears even in the title of the book: reading the man through his private letters is an antiquarian rather than an historical formula. All the major biographies of Lee, not in the least Douglas S. Freeman’s cloying three volumes, are based on considerable reading in Lee’s correspondence. In an interview distributed by her publisher, Pryor claims to have read a “huge number of newly discovered papers,” although she does not specify in the text or notes just which material is new. Nothing I noticed was all that earth-shatteringly different, and it is a pity the author failed to be specific about her documentary discoveries. The antiquarian sensibility also leads Pryor to open each chapter with several letters written by Lee or his extended family. As she rarely deconstructs those texts very fully, her choices often seem scattered, and they break up her narrative flow. Despite Pryor’s enthusing, Lee’s prose style is, on the whole, rather formulaic and conventional stuff, particularly as Lee grew older and more distant from human contact. I would add that I think it would prove a splendid addition to our understanding of Lee if Pryor were to be commissioned to edit his collected letters. Clearly, she has done more up-to-date spadework than anyone prior [End Page 93] to...

Review: Armies of Peace

ARMIES OF PEACE Canada and the UNRRA Years Susan Armstrong- Reid and David Murray Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. 482pp. $65.00 cloth (ISBN 9780-8020-9321-9)Between 1943 and 1947, hundreds of Canadians from all walks of life went to work for the United Nations relief and rehabilitation administration (UNRRA), an obscure international agency established by the allies in November 1943 to aid victims of the Second World War. As Susan ArmstrongReid and David Murray explain in their new book, Armies of Peace: Canada and the UNRRA Years, the organization aimed to prevent a replay of the economic and political catastrophes that destabilized the international system after the First World War. By helping refugees, fighting epidemics, and providing food and assistance at no charge to countries under axis occupation, the agency's architects believed UNRRA would hasten political and economic recovery and lay the foundations for a multilateral trading system. Together, they hoped these efforts would prevent a recurrence of the devastating economic depressions and wars endemic to the first half of the 20th century.Armstrong-Reid and Murray have attempted the first investigation of Canada's participation in this Herculean effort. Using a wide variety of sources from Canadian and international archives as well as the personal papers of key participants, the authors explore Canada's diplomacy and economic policies vis-a-vis UNRRA. The work also examines the role that individual Canadians played in the organization's operations: most of the book actually consists of colourful vignettes of Canadians who worked for the agency in various corners of the globe as administrators, medical specialists, social workers, supply officers, and nurses. The work concludes with an explication of the government's attitude towards UNRRA's dissolution, and a discussion of the postwar activities of the individuals who worked for the agency in Canadian national and international life.While this work offers much insight into the evidence it presents, readers looking for an overarching thesis or argument will be hard pressed to find one. For better or worse, the book is largely anecdotal, and may have benefited from more discipline, contextualization, and criticism. Some readers may also find problems with the book's method of focusing on a nationstate to tell the story of an international organization. Still, these issues do not take away from the exceptional nature of these authors' findings, which are the result of years of research and hard work. Armstrong-Reid and Murray have exposed many of the most intractable problems faced by international agencies, and they have rescued the heart-wrenching stories of many individual Canadians, such as Elizabeth Brown, who in spite of Zionist threats risked her life to repatriate Jewish refugees to Europe from Palestine, and Margaret Kilpatrick, who removed children from German homes to return them to their biological parents.These stories will be useful for scholars, foreign policy practitioners, and individuals pursuing careers in humanitarian aid work. For one thing, they reveal many of the personality traits that distinguish the successful international aid worker from the unsuccessful one: fortitude, resourcefulness, independence, adaptability, and humility. They tell us that these Canadians were usually highly educated humanitarians with a penchant for adventure; more often than not, they were women eager to escape the confines of a male- dominated society. Their experiences, we also learn, shaped the postwar world. Many of these Canadians devoted their careers to international aid work, manning the ranks of a panoply of new UN agencies: IRO, FAO, WHO, UNESCO, and UNICEF. Others sought to change Canada's immigration laws and reform its welfare, social, and medical systems as educators and activists.Historians and other scholars may be disturbed that these facts too often become ends unto themselves. …

Robert E. Lee: Heroic, But Not the Polio Vaccine

Robert E. Lee:Heroic, But Not the Polio Vaccine Daniel S. Margolies (bio) Elizabeth Brown Pryor. Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters. New York: Viking, 2007. xxiv + 640 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95. This thoughtful and sprawling book on the life and character of Robert E. Lee is sure to enlighten, annoy, impress, confound, and assuage just about every reader at some point. It will be read in these multiple ways no less because of the wide-ranging purposes it adopts and the broad audience it seeks than because of Lee's still-elusive essence. Reading the Man is an impressively researched volume and a well-told story, with just enough ingratiating nods to Lee's core virtues to mollify defenders and consumers of all-things-Lee and more than enough critical analysis of primary materials to interest and entice historians. This book will not supplant either the best overall Lee biography, which remains Emory Thomas's cogent and compelling Robert E. Lee (1995), or Michael Fellman's fine exploration into Lee's personality, The Making of Robert E. Lee (2000). Yet Pryor effectively builds upon these works, considers new materials, and offers some new insights. What is fresh in this book is her artful and rhythmic recreation of Lee's life amidst the cascade of his enduring and notable contradictions. As her title indicates, Pryor is self-consciously "reading the man" rather than simply telling his life. This book is as much character study as biography, with special attention given to Lee and his family rather than to his military exploits. Pryor mines (though not stridently) a revisionist vein rather than recapitulating the powerful and persistent abstractions of Lee as myth and messiah. She resists a sensationalistic accounting of Lee and his exploits or efforts to "compartmentalize him . . . [or] simply lionize him" (p. xiii). She wants readers to know and feel his "all too human existence" and the "heart-rending way he strove, but failed to achieve his dreams" (p. 470). Pryor wants readers to sense the "possibility of redemption" through Lee, and to know the "vagaries of human existence," and she is unashamed enough at the clichés to state it (p. 473). [End Page 385] While not exactly innovative in seeking to reverse unthinking Lee worship, Pryor does put her impressive talents to work bolstering and clarifying many crucial and distinctive points of critique about Lee's decision-making, moral and political stances, and character. She creates a portrait of Lee that is complex and ultimately critical, and she does so with a deep respect for, and use of, the sources. She declares her purpose to be stewarding "precious pieces of our past" in the form of Lee's personal writings and actions in order "to amplify our understanding of what constitutes heroism" (p. xiii). This book is thus presented as a study of his heroism, but it is accomplished in an extraordinarily delicate fashion. Pryor reaffirms Lee's core heroic image while ultimately questioning its purpose, meaning, and significance. Reading the Man coheres to the longstanding imperative of reassessing this complex and tragic figure while seeking simultaneously to acknowledge (if not celebrate) his accomplishments. To study Lee is, fundamentally, to grapple with this conundrum of linking personal integrity and enormous historical resonance with an evaluation of his final "transcendent importance" (p. 472). Pryor argues that "the greatest honor we can give Lee is to admire him for who he actually was, rather than as an imaginary creature, which only insults him by implying that the reality was inadequate" (p. 471). Pryor's well-supported and often corrosive reading of Lee observes this reality of "who he actually was" while sustaining the gaze of fascination for the man, detailing his many triumphs and strengths, and reaffirming him as a great (if fallible) man of history. She argues that Lee demonstrated "how strong is the potential power of one individual in a truly democratic society, and therefore how great the burden of responsibility" to make the right choices (p. 471). She recognizes that Lee holds, and likely always will hold, an exalted position in the states of...