This analysis enriches our view of a crucial decision, highlights institutional opportunities and constraints and provides insight into the then dominant attitudes of reproductive scientists and clinicians towards human conception research.
Contemporary scientific and clinical knowledges and practices continue to make available new forms of genetic information, and to create new forms of reproductive choice. For example, couples at high risk of passing on a serious genetic condition to their offspring in Britain today have the opportunity to use Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD) to select embryos that are unaffected by serious genetic disease. This information assists these couples in making reproductive choices. This article presents an analysis of patients' experiences of making the decision to undertake PGD treatment and of making reproductive choices based on genetic information. We present qualitative interview data from an ethnographic study of PGD based in two British clinics which indicate how these new forms of genetic choice are experienced by patients. Our data suggest that PGD patients make decisions about treatment in a complex way, taking multiple variables into account, and maintaining ongoing assessments of the multiple costs of engaging with PGD. Patients are aware of broader implications of their decisions, at personal, familial, and societal levels, as well as clinical ones. Based on these findings we argue that the ethical and social aspects of PGD are often as innovative as the scientific and medical aspects of this technique, and that in this sense, science cannot be described as "racing ahead" of society.
In Escherichia coli, efficient mutagenesis by UV requires the umuDC operon. A deficiency in umuDC activity is believed to be responsible for the relatively weak UV mutability of Salmonella typhimurium LT2 compared with that of E. coli. To begin evaluating this hypothesis and the evolutionary relationships among umuDCrelated sequences, we cloned and sequenced the S. typhimurium umuDC operon. S. typhimurium umuDt restored mutability to umuD and umuC mutants of E. coli. DNA sequence analysis of 2,497 base pairs' (bp) identified two nonoverlapping open reading frames spanning 1,691 bp that were 67 and 72% identical at the nucleotide sequence level to the umuD and umuC sequences, respectively, from E. coli. The sequences encoded proteins whose deduced primary structures were 73 and 84% identical to the E. coli umuD and umuC gene products, respectively. The two bacterial umuDC sequences were more similar to each other than to mucAB, a plasmid-borne umuDC homolog. The umuD product retained the Cys-24-Gly-25, Ser-60, and Lys-97 amino acid residues believed to be critical for RecA-mediated proteolytic activation of UmuD. The presence' of a LexA box 17 bp upstream from the UmuD initiation codon suggests that this operon is a member of an SOS regulon. Mu d-P22 inserts were used to locate the S. typhimurium umuDC operon to a region between 35.9 and 40 min on the S. typhimurium chromosome. In E. coli, umuDC is located at 26 min. The umuDC locus in S. typhimurium thus appears to be near one end of a chromosomal inversion that distinguishes gene order in the 25-to 35-min regions of the E. coli and S. typhimurium chromosomes. It is likely, therefore,' that the umuDC operon was present in a common ancestor before S. typhimurium and E. coli diverged approximately 150 million years ago.' These results provide new information for investigating the structure, function, and evolutionary origins of umuDC and for exploring the genetic basis for the mutability differences between S.typhimurium and E. coli.
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