Infertility

In On Revolution, Arendt articulated two competing ontologies of human community.

Pointing to the stories of Cain and Abel and of Romulus and Remus, she claimed that the founding stories of "our biblical and secular traditions" conveyed a sobering truth: "whatever brotherhood human beings may be capable of has grown out of fratricide." But if human community originated in bloodshed—"in the beginning was a crime"—salvation commenced in peace: "in the beginning was the Word." Once again, action miraculously saves the world.

Yet Arendt never reconciles these two political ontologies.

If crime lies at the origin of community—and Arendt seems clearly to think violence the more historically probable ontology—then it is hard to see how words can avoid being tarnished.

And if action is as unconditioned and arbitrary as Arendt conceives it, how can it avoid becoming another form of violence?

But if the world and human community are founded in an order of love, peace, and plenty, then we—those rooted in Christian theology—would have to recognize that Arendt's difficulti...

"This research gives us important new information about fertility.

It’s a basic science finding, but it may provide answers for some of these women and, possibly, lead to better in-vitro fertilization therapies." In 2001, Freiman and colleagues at Berkeley published a paper in Science describing the essential role a transcription factor called TAF4b plays in the fertility of female mice.

Without this protein, egg-producing ovarian follicles didn’t develop properly.

The result: infertile mice.

The new research underscores TAF4b’s central role in normal reproduction.

The Brown and Berkeley team found that in the granulosa cells of the ovary, it triggers production of another protein, called c-Jun, and together they switch on a network of ovarian genes that help promote granulosa cell proliferation.

"The big surprise was c-Jun," Freiman said.

That's because this well-studied protein is found at high levels in damaged nerve tissue as well as in the tumors of certain cancers, including cancer of the skin and liver and in Hodgkin's lymphoma.

The new research is the first to connect c-Jun to this network of ovarian genes.

Freiman said the discovery reveals a potential connection between TAF4b and c-Jun a...