Umbilical cord blood banking: beyond the public-private divide

Umbilical cord blood is a source of haematopoietic progenitor cells, which are used to treat a range of malignant, genetic, metabolic and immune disorders. Until recently, cord blood was either collected through donations to publicly funded cord blood banks for use in allogeneic transplantation, or stored in commercial cord blood banks for use in autologous transplantation. The line between public and private cord blood banking is being blurred by the emergence of "hybrid" models that combine aspects of both the public and private systems. The authors describe these hybrid models and argue that their emergence is explained by both market forces and public sector policy They propose that the future of the sector will depend heavily on several key developments that will differentially affect public, private and hybrid banking models.     

Twenty years of progress in addressing domestic violence: an agenda for the next 10

The past 20 years have seen great strides in addressing violence against women by their male partners. Although the author cannot point to one single intervention or set of interventions as being the most effective, institutional reforms that have included coordinated community responses have had a positive impact. During the next 10 years, researchers must learn how to address the obstacles that prevent institutional responses from being more effective in addressing the needs of victims.     

Navigating tissue banking regulation: conceptual frameworks for researchers, administrators, regulators and policy-makers

In the "post-genomic" age of biomedical research, researchers often wish to utilise collections of human tissue. This type of research raises many ethical and legal issues and anyone wishing to use such collections is faced with an enormously complex set of regulatory requirements, many of which are still ambiguous, reflecting ongoing ethical and legal debate. Whilst there is no way of entirely avoiding such regulatory complexity and ambiguity, conceptual frameworks can assist those who wish to use, administer, authorise and generate policy on tissue banking research. Two conceptual frameworks are described here: a taxonomy of tissue banking practices, aimed at assisting those who need to ensure that tissue banks meet ethical and legal requirements; and a "syncretic" approach to policy-making, for those who wish to generate new policy, or streamline existing policy relating to tissue banking research.     

The ethical, legal and social implications of umbilical cord blood banking: learning important lessons from the protection of human genetic information

Internationally networked umbilical cord blood banks hold great promise for better clinical outcomes, but also raise a host of potential ethical and legal concerns. There is now significant accumulated experience in Australia and overseas with regard to the establishment of human genetic research databases and tissue collections, popularly known as "biobanks". For example, clear lessons emerge from the controversies that surrounded, stalled or derailed the establishment of some early biobanks, such as Iceland's deCODE, Autogen's Tonga database, a proposed biobank in Newfoundland, Canada, and the proposed Taiwan biobank. More recent efforts in the United Kingdom, Japan, Quebec and Tasmania have been relatively more successful in generating public support, recognising the critical need for openness and transparency, and ample public education and debate, in order to build community acceptance and legitimacy. Strong attention must be paid to ensuring that other concerns--about privacy, discrimination, informed consent, governance, security, commercial fairness and financial probity--are addressed in structural terms and monitored thereafter, in order to maintain public confidence and avoid a backlash that inevitably would imperil such research. Once lost, credibility is very difficult to restore.     

Reducing racial and ethnic health disparities: exploring an outcome-oriented agenda for research and policy

Eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in health status and health care, a major focus of Healthy People 2010, remains on the national agenda and among the priorities for the administration of President George W. Bush. Even though the elimination of racial and ethnic health disparities challenges the whole nation, individual states are on the front line of many initiatives and are often the focus of important policy efforts. In addition, it is important to focus on states because they are already responsible for much of the health and public health infrastructure, and several states have developed initiatives dating back to the release of Margaret Heckler's report on the gaps in health outcomes by race in 1985. This article makes the case for an outcome-oriented approach and provides a summary of lessons learned based upon preliminary investigations into constructing and applying two indices, the disparity reduction profile to measure effort and the disparity index to measure outcomes.     

Disease management: legal strategies for the next generation of managed care

The provision of proper and cost-effective healthcare to chronically ill patients is a crucial aspect of succeeding at managing care. An increasing number of managed care organizations are relying upon specialized outside providers to manage patients with such diseases. In such circumstances, this type of care is "carved out" and given to a specialized disease management organization. The authors discuss the strategies behind such arrangements, provide case studies of many of the specialized organizations providing such disease management, and analyze the legal issues that are likely to arise from such contractual relationships.     

Commentary: Promising answers,and the next generation of questions

The papers in this special issue will be immensely valuable in taking forward the agenda of research, practice and theory construction in the field of offender rehabilitation. Some have consolidated existing knowledge in specific areas and analysed its potential implications. Others have identified the key points at issue in the debate between different models of the rehabilitation process. Still others have explored or developed a number of relatively neglected matters, including the delivery of treatment within a coercive framework; the role of labelling in change and desistance processes; the importance of the therapeutic alliance in offence-focused work; and reconceptualisation of the responsivity principle within the framework of therapeutic jurisprudence. The present paper extracts some further principal themes from the spectrum of issues raised. Discussion of these is grouped under the four headings of theory construction, evidence accumulation, practical implementation, and ethical and political dimensions.     

Emotions and terrorism research: A case for a social-psychological agenda

Limited attention has been paid to the intersection of emotions and the etiology of terrorism. Instead, research priorities have tended to focus on the structural (e.g., poverty; weak and failing states), sociopolitical (e.g., U.S. foreign policy; a “clash of civilizations”), or codal (e.g., madrassas; Wahhabism). The aim here is to outline an agenda which transitions discourse related to the “body” of the terrorist (i.e., his/her historical and social positioning) to one focused on intrapsychic and interpersonal emotional processes. As such, scholarship's predictive and explanatory capacities will be heightened if it adopts a perspective grounded in the emotions of terrorists and their source communities, particularly for those phenomena that suggest a fluidity of movement of actors across a continuum of zealotry. Criminology and criminal justice are well suited to assess the expressive byproducts of humiliated fury, contempt, moral outrage, and disgust and how such emotions may distillate as impulses that form a basis for terror.     

Engineering human tissue and regulation: confronting biology and law to bridge the gaps

There are a number of difficulties confronting the regulation of human tissue engineered products, from the scientific, ethical and legal perspectives. Many of these issues are international in scope and any responses must consider the global implications of marketing and monitoring these products. The article argues that as tissue engineered products become more available regulatory authorities should not be pressured into adopting possibly inappropriate measures, but must consider all the factors relevant to human health, including the need for innovative regulatory mechanisms as well as innovative tissue products themselves.     

Envisioning the next generation of behavioral health and criminal justice interventions

The purpose of this paper is to cast a vision for the next generation of behavioral health and criminal justice interventions for persons with serious mental illnesses in the criminal justice system. The limitations of first generation interventions, including their primary focus on mental health treatment connection, are discussed. A person–place framework for understanding the complex factors that contribute to criminal justice involvement for this population is presented. We discuss practice and research recommendations for building more effective interventions to address both criminal justice and mental health outcomes.     

Ownership structure, regulation and the market for corporate control in the EU banking sector

This paper analyzes the efficiency of shareholder control and hostile takeovers as corporate governance mechanisms in the EU banking sector against the background of the existing corporate governance regulations and different ownership structures of banks in the EU. The results indicate the there is trade-off in EU corporate governance regulation between better investor protection and a higher efficiency of the market for corporate control. The main problem is differences in the ownership structure of banks in the EU banking sector. This implies that EU corporate governance regulations should be customized to the specific ownership structure of banks and not toward harmonising national regulations.     

新一代高通量测序技术及其法医学应用前景

随着大规模基因组学的兴起,多种高通量、低成本的新一代测序技术应运而生,并逐步被应用到生命科学研究的各个领域.本文对新一代测序技术进行综述介绍,并对其在法医学领域中的应用前景进行展望.