Teaching Python for Data Science: Collaborative development of a modular & interactive curriculum.

We are bioinformatics trainees at the University of Michigan who started a local chapter of Girls Who Code to provide a fun and supportive environment for high school women to learn the power of coding. Our goal was to cover basic coding topics and data science concepts through live coding and hands-on practice. However, we could not find a resource that exactly met our needs. Therefore, over the past three years, we have developed a curriculum and instructional format using Jupyter notebooks to effectively teach introductory Python for data science. This method, inspired by The Carpentries organization, uses bite-sized lessons followed by independent practice time to reinforce coding concepts, and culminates in a data science capstone project using real-world data. We believe our open curriculum is a valuable resource to the wider education community and hope that educators will use and improve our lessons, practice problems, and teaching best practices. Anyone can contribute to our Open Educational Resources on GitHub.

Mono-Causal and Multi-Causal Theories of Disease: How to Think Virally and Socially about the Aetiology of AIDS.

In this paper, I utilise the tools of analytic philosophy to amalgamate mono-causal and multi-causal theories of disease. My aim is to better integrate viral and socio-economic explanations of AIDS in particular, and to consider how the perceived divide between mono-causal and multi-causal theories played a role in the tragedy of AIDS denialism in South Africa in the early 2000s. Currently, there is conceptual ambiguity surrounding the relationship between mono-causal and multi-causal theories in biomedicine and epidemiology. Mono-causal theories focus on single, typically microbial, sources of illness and are most concerned with infectious diseases. By contrast, multi-causal theories allow for multiple factors to underpin a disease's aetiology, including socio-economic and behavioural factors, and they usually focus on chronic non-communicable diseases. However, if these theories are taken to be strictly distinct, this prevents the inclusion of both microbial and socio-economic factors in a single explanation of any particular disease. This strict distinction became a problem when trying to explain the disproportionate prevalence of AIDS in southern Africa and ultimately contributed to the tragedy of AIDS denialism in South Africa. In tandem with viewing how the perceived divide between multi-causal and mono-causal theories underpinned AIDS denialism, I examine Thabo Mbeki's specific role, while acknowledging that AIDS is being deprioritised on a broader international level. Overall, I will demonstrate that any long-term plan to eliminate AIDS will require viral and socio-economic factors to be considered simultaneously and that such a theoretical approach requires a clearer understanding of the underlying concepts of disease aetiology.

Objectivity in science and law: A shared rescue strategy.

The ideal of objectivity is in crisis in science and the law, and yet it continues to do important work in both practices. This article describes that crisis and develops a shared rescue strategy for objectivity in both domains. In a recent article, Inkeri Koskinen (2018) attempts to bring unity to the fragmented discourse on objectivity in the philosophy of science with a risk account of objectivity. To put it simply, she argues that we call practitioners, processes, and products of science objective when they identify and manage certain important epistemic risks. We endorse this view and attempt to tailor Koskinen's strategy to the problem of objectivity in the legal context. To do so, we develop a novel notion of phronetic risk, and argue that we call practitioners, processes, and products of law objective when they identify and manage certain important epistemic and/or phronetic risks. Our attempt to rescue objectivity is especially important for work at the intersection of law and psychiatry. For that intersection represents a place where skeptical worries about objectivity in science and law work in tandem to pose serious critical challenges to contemporary practice; and our rescue strategy represents a promising way to negotiate those challenges.

Chronicles of communication and power: informed consent to sterilisation in the Namibian Supreme Court's LM judgment of 2015.

The 2015 judgment of the Namibia Supreme Court in Government of the Republic of Namibia v LM and Others set an important precedent on informed consent in a case involving the coercive sterilisation of HIV-positive women. This article analyses the reasoning and factual narratives of the judgment by applying Neil Manson and Onora O'Neill's approach to informed consent as a communicative process. This is done in an effort to understand the practical import of the judgment in the particular context of resource constrained public healthcare facilities through which many women in southern Africa access reproductive healthcare. While the judgment affirms certain established tenets in informed consent to surgical procedures, aspects of the reasoning in context demand more particularised applications of what it means for a patient to have capacity and to be informed, and to appropriately accommodate the disruptive role of power dynamics in the communicative process.

Impact of CYP2D6 intermediate metabolizer alleles on single-dose desipramine pharmacokinetics.

This study utilized cytochrome P450 2D6 (CYP2D6) genotypes to explain variability of desipramine pharmacokinetics in a cohort of non-poor metabolizer individuals. In an interaction study utilizing desipramine as a probe, genotyping for the CYP2D6*3, *4, *5 and *6 alleles was used to screen out CYP2D6 poor metabolizers. Individuals were categorized according to these and additional alleles (CYP2D6*2, *9, *10, *17, *41 and x2). Genotypes of individuals heterozygous for two or three of *2, *17 and *41 alleles were confirmed by molecular haplotyping. Pharmacokinetic parameters of desipramine were analysed according to CYP2D6 category. Molecular haplotyping was necessary to definitively categorize four of 16 individuals. A subject who had unusually high plasma elimination half-time, exposure and metabolic ratios carried an intermediate metabolizer (IM) *9 allele in combination with a non-functional allele. This combination has a population frequency of less than 1 : 200. Individuals with *1/*1, *1/*2 and *2/*2 genotypes had lower than average plasma elimination half-time, exposure and metabolic ratios. For desipramine, additional genotyping of CYP2D6 IM alleles helped define subgroups of the CYP2D6-positive cohort. This suggests that genotyping for IM alleles will aid in interpretation of clinical trials involving CYP2D6 substrates. Due to the diversity of IM alleles, molecular haplotyping may be necessary to fully characterize CYP2D6 genotype-phenotype relationships.