Voices off: Stanley Milgram's cyranoids in historical context.

This article revisits a forgotten, late project by the social psychologist Stanley Milgram: the 'cyranoid' studies he conducted from 1977 to 1984. These investigations, inspired by the play Cyrano de Bergerac, explored how individuals often fail to notice when others do not speak their own thoughts, but instead relay messages from a hidden source. We situate these experiments amidst the intellectual, cultural, and political concerns of late Cold War America, and show how Milgram's studies pulled together a variety of ideas, anxieties, and interests that were prevalent at that time and have returned in new guises since. In discussing the cyranoid project's background and afterlife, we argue that its strikingly equivocal quality has lent itself to multiple reinterpretations by historians, psychologists, performers, artists, and others. Our purpose is neither to champion Milgram's work nor to amplify the critiques already made of his methods. Rather, it is to consider the uncertain, allusive, and elusive aspects of the cyranoid project, and to seek to place that project in context, whilst asking where 'context' might end. We show how the experiments' range of meanings, in different temporal registers, far exceeded the explanatory rubric that Milgram and his intellectual critics provided at that time, and ponder the risk for the historian of making anachronistic or teleological assumptions. In short, we argue, cyranoids invite our open-ended exploration of 'voices offstage' in social and psychological relations, and offer a useful tool for thinking about historical context and the nature of historical interpretations.

Thinking About Denial.

This essay considers the frequent and varied uses of 'denial' in modern political discourse, suggests the specific psychoanalytic meanings the term has acquired and asks how useful this Freudian concept may be for historians. It notes the debates among historians over the uses of psychoanalysis, but argues that concepts such as 'denial', 'disavowal', 'splitting' and 'negation' can help us to understand both individual and group behaviour. The authors dwell, especially, on 'disavowal' and argue it can provide a particularly useful basis for exploring how and why states of knowing and not knowing co-exist. Historical examples are utilized to explore these states of mind: most briefly, a fragment from a report about the war criminals, produced by an American psychiatrist at the Nuremberg Trial; at greater length, the political arguments and historical writings of an eighteenth-century slave-owner; and finally, a case in a borough of London in the late-twentieth-century, where the neglect, abuse and murder of a child was shockingly 'missed' by a succession of social agencies and individuals, who had evidence of the violence available to them.

Developmental and extracellular matrix-remodeling processes in rosiglitazone-exposed neonatal rat cardiomyocytes.

OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to investigate the effects of rosiglitazone (Avandia(®)) on gene expression in neonatal rat ventricular myocytes. MATERIALS & METHODS: Myocytes were exposed to rosiglitazone ex vivo. The two factors examined in the experiment were drug exposure (rosiglitazone and dimethyl sulfoxide vs dimethyl sulfoxide), and length of exposure to drug (½ h, 1 h, 2 h, 4 h, 6 h, 8 h, 12 h, 18 h, 24 h, 36 h and 48 h). RESULTS: Transcripts that were consistently expressed in response to the drug were identified. Cardiovascular system development, extracellular matrix and immune response are represented prominently among the significantly modified gene ontology terms. CONCLUSION: Hmgcs2, Angptl4, Cpt1a, Cyp1b1, Ech1 and Nqo1 mRNAs were strongly upregulated in cells exposed to rosiglitazone. Enrichment of transcripts involved in cardiac muscle cell differentiation and the extracellular matrix provides a panel of biomarkers for further analysis in the context of adverse cardiac outcomes in humans. Original submitted 15 November 2013; Revision submitted 14 February 2014.

"In pursuit of the Nazi mind?" The deployment of psychoanalysis in the Allied struggle against Germany.

This paper discusses how psychoanalytic ideas were brought to bear in the Allied struggle against the Third Reich and explores some of the claims that were made about this endeavour. It shows how a variety of studies of Fascist psychopathology, centered on the concept of superego, were mobilized in military intelligence, postwar planning and policy recommendations for "denazification." Freud's ideas were sometimes championed by particular army doctors and government planners; at other times they were combined with, or displaced by, competing, psychiatric and psychological forms of treatment and diverse studies of the Fascist "personality." This is illustrated through a discussion of the treatment and interpretation of the deputy leader of the Nazi Party, Rudolf Hess, after his arrival in Britain in 1941.

Novel scoring methods in virtual ligand screening.

Several different approaches have been proposed in the last decade to assess the binding affinity of a virtual small molecule ligand to a target protein, particularly with respect to screening large compound databases. Here we review the methods that have been proposed, and discuss techniques for optimizing scoring functions that have been applied in industrial settings.