Origin of a novel regulatory module by duplication and degeneration of an ancient plant transcription factor.

It is commonly believed that gene duplications provide the raw material for morphological evolution. Both the number of genes and size of gene families have increased during the diversification of land plants. Several small proteins that regulate transcription factors have recently been identified in plants, including the LITTLE ZIPPER (ZPR) proteins. ZPRs are post-translational negative regulators, via heterodimerization, of class III Homeodomain Leucine Zipper (C3HDZ) proteins that play a key role in directing plant form and growth. We show that ZPR genes originated as a duplication of a C3HDZ transcription factor paralog in the common ancestor of euphyllophytes (ferns and seed plants). The ZPRs evolved by degenerative mutations resulting in loss all of the C3HDZ functional domains, except the leucine zipper that modulates dimerization. ZPRs represent a novel regulatory module of the C3HDZ network unique to the euphyllophyte lineage, and their origin correlates to a period of rapid morphological changes and increased complexity in land plants. The origin of the ZPRs illustrates the significance of gene duplications in creating developmental complexity during land plant evolution that likely led to morphological evolution.

Doctor Gunning S Bedford (1806-70) and the search for safe obstetric care, 1833-70.

In 1800 many European doctors were practitioners of the new midwifery, which improved the safety of childbirth for mothers and their infants. This study explores the role of Dr Gunning S Bedford Jr as an obstetric innovator who promoted the new midwifery in the USA from 1833 to 1870. Two strands of ideas converge to shape Bedford's obstetric instruction. First, Bedford's Catholic faith forbade the destruction of a living child to resolve a difficult birth. Catholic believers and the hierarchy admired Bedford for his care of indigent patients and his opposition to abortion. Second, Bedford's practice of the new midwifery allowed him to challenge the existing standard of care among practitioners. As an educator, through anatomical instruction and clinical training, he provided medical students with the skills necessary to resolve deliveries safely. Thus, he advocated the exclusion of untrained practitioners and midwives from the birth room. Bedford also promoted new forms of intervention, such as the caesarean operation, that would improve the safety of obstetrics in the future. Although his ideals of safe obstetrics were not fully realized in his lifetime, his instruction to students in the new midwifery raised the existing standard of care.

The chapel and the operating room: the struggle of Roman Catholic clergy, physicians, and believers with the dilemmas of obstetric surgery, 1800-1900.

By 1800, the Roman Catholic Church and organized medicine faced the dilemma of how to resolve cases of obstructed births. American physicians usually practiced destructive operations, like craniotomy, in an attempt to save the lives of mothers. The church allowed such operations after the death of the infant. A new technique of surgery, the cesarean operation, offered hope that both patients would survive childbirth. Medical progress, and an emerging Catholic belief that the fetus was human, prompted Catholic physicians to advocate the new operation, and stirred a renewed debate among European theologians on the propriety of craniotomy. In America, the broad Christian tradition promoted by the Catholic Church began to inform medicine on the moral and ethical parameters of surgery. American physicians, for their part, engaged in their own debate on the propriety of the cesarean operation. This article, focusing on the cesarean debate, reveals the intersections of Catholicism and medical progress amid the growth of obstetric surgery from 1800 to 1900.