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Supreme Court Nominee Sotomayor Would Be Sixth Catholic On Bench
If Judge Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter, she would be the sixth Roman Catholic currently on the court, the New York Times reports. According to the Times, although Sotomayor was raised Catholic and attended a Catholic high school, she appears to be in line with the majority of U.S. Catholics who identify themselves with the faith but do not regularly go to Mass or become heavily involved in religious life. Several studies have shown that Catholics who rarely or never attend mass are more liberal on political and cultural issues than those who attend more regularly, the Times reports. For example, a Gallup poll released in March found that 52% of Catholics who do not attend church regularly say abortion is morally acceptable, compared with 24% of Catholics that are regular churchgoers. A White House spokesperson said that Sotomayor "currently does not belongs to a particular parish or church, but she attends church with family and friends for important occasions" (Goodstein, New York Times, 5/31).According to the Boston Globe, the number of Catholics on the court has increased sharply over the past two decades, a shift from earlier years when there generally was one "Catholic seat" on the bench. Although Supreme Court experts say that the increase in the number of Catholic justices reflects a fall in anti-Catholicism over the past half-century, they also note that Catholic justices" views have not always aligned with the Church"s teachings and that a judge"s faith is not necessarily an indicator of how he or she will rule on issues like abortion rights or gay marriage. Current Catholic Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts all are in favor of either overturning Roe v. Wade or returning the issue of abortion to the states, the Globe reports. However, there have been previous Catholic justices, such as Justice William Brennan, who were avid supporters of abortion rights (Paulson, Boston Globe, 5/30).Cathleen Kaveny, a professor of law and theology at the University of Notre Dame, said, "I don"t think there is any one Catholic stance on the law," adding, "You"ll have judges who are pro-life personally who are going to rule that [Roe] is the law of the land."Sotomayor "Formidable Counterweight" to Catholic Men on Court, Opinion Piece Says "If anyone should be worrying" about Sotomayor as the sixth Catholic on the Supreme Court, "it"s the five who are already there," former Catholics for Free Choice President Frances Kissling writes in a Salon opinion piece. Roberts, Alito, Kennedy, Scalia and Thomas "all seem cut from the same traditional Catholic (and Federalist Society conservative) mold," Kissling writes, noting that all five voted in Gonzales v. Carhart to uphold the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. If confirmed, Sotomayor"s experience with the other justices "is likely to change [her] as well -- and make her an even more formidable counterweight to the male Catholic bloc," according to Kissling. "There is nothing more likely to radicalize a "moderate" Catholic woman of even marginal religiosity than daily exposure to Catholic men who think women need to be protected from making money or making bad and sad abortion choices," Kissling contends (Kissling, Salon, 5/31).
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Region's Top Psychologists To Share Research In Sheffield
Around 100 of the region"s psychologists are meeting in Sheffield on 26th June 2009 to hear the latest theories and research, at the British Psychological Society"s North East of England branch Annual Conference.
News of the day
New Book: 'Punishment And Prisons' -- Leading Criminologist Argues For A New Way Of Thinking
Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC (19th June 2009) - Prison should be abolished in its current form, according to Joe Sim, Professor of Criminology at Liverpool John Moores University.
Diagnostics

Stem Cells Not The Only Way To Fix A Broken Heart

Researchers appear to have a new way to fix a broken heart. They have devised a method to coax heart muscle cells into reentering the cell cycle, allowing the differentiated adult cells to divide and regenerate healthy heart tissue after a heart attack, according to studies in mice and rats reported in the July 24th issue of the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication. The key ingredient is a growth factor known as neuregulin1 (NRG1 for short), and the researchers suggest that the factor might one day be used to treat failing human hearts. "To my knowledge, this is the first regenerative therapy that may be applicable in a systemic way," said Bernhard KÃøhn of Children"s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School. For instance, he added, people might one day go to the clinic for daily infusions of NRG1 over a period of weeks. "In principle, there is nothing to preclude this going into the clinic. Based on the all the information we have, this is a promising candidate." He emphasized, however, that further studies would be required to demonstrate safety before such treatment could be tested in human patients. The heart had long been considered an organ largely incapable of repairing itself. Heart muscle cells, also known as cardiomyocytes, do proliferate during prenatal development. Soon after birth, however, the cells become binucleated, meaning that they have two nuclei, and withdraw from the cell cycle, giving rise to the notion that adult cardiomyocytes are terminally differentiated and incapable of further proliferation. However, recent evidence has shown that adult heart muscle cells can replace themselves at some low level, with perhaps half of the cells in the heart turning over in the course of a lifetime, KÃøhn said. The new study provides multiple lines of evidence for this turnover ability - including video of the cells in action - and shows that neuregulin1 can ramp up the process. In the current study, the researchers first tested the ability of various molecules to spur cell division in cultured cardiomyocytes. If cardiomyocytes are to reenter the cell cycle along the border zone of injury, the researchers surmised that there must be an extracellular signal that triggers the response, KÃøhn explained. They looked to several factors known to drive cardiomyocyte proliferation during prenatal development. Of those, NRG1 had the most significant effect, inducing the division of those cardiomyocytes with one nucleus instead of two. By manipulating the NRG1 receptor up or down, the researchers showed they could increase or decrease cardiomyocyte proliferation in living animals. Moreover, injecting NRG1 in adult mice sparked cardiomyocyte cell-cycle activity and promoted the regeneration of heart muscle, leading to improved function after the animals suffered a heart attack. That regeneration could not be traced to undifferentiated progenitor cells, they report. The researchers say they aren"t sure whether NRG1 is responsible for the natural repair process, but their findings show that it clearly can enhance it. They also note that the NRG1 receptor and NRG1 itself are always present in the adult heart, though it is not clear if they are in the right place or in sufficient quantities. "Collectively, we have identified the major elements of a new approach to promote myocardial regeneration," the researchers wrote." Many efforts and important advances have been made toward the goal of developing stem-cell based strategies to regenerate damaged tissues in the heart as well as in other organs. The work presented here suggests that stimulating differentiated cardiomyocytes to proliferate may be a viable alternative that could be developed into a simple strategy to promote myocardial regeneration in mammals." Before making the leap to the clinic, KÃøhn"s group intends to further explore how the treatment works at the fundamental level. They will also characterize the regenerative response in pigs, which have more in common with humans than rodents do, before testing the approach in human patients. Ultimately, such a treatment might serve as a useful alternative or complement to treatments designed to seed damaged hearts with regenerative stem cells, KÃøhn said. The researchers include Kevin Bersell, Children"s Hospital, Boston, MA; Shima Arab, Children"s Hospital, Boston, MA; Bernhard Haring, Children"s Hospital, Boston, MA, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA; and Bernhard Kuhn, Children"s Hospital, Boston, MA, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA. Cathleen Genova Cell Press


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