Maeve O'Donovan

Recurrent microdeletions and microduplications of a 600-kb genomic region of chromosome 16p11.2 have been implicated in childhood-onset developmental disorders. We report the association of 16p11.2 microduplications with schizophrenia in two large cohorts. The microduplication was detected in 12/1,906 cases and 1/3,971 controls from the initial cohort, and in 9/2,645 cases and 1/2,420 controls of the replication cohort. The 16p11.2 microduplication was associated with a 14.5-fold increased risk of schizophrenia ) in the combined sample. A meta-analysis of datasets for multiple psychiatric disorders showed a significant association of the microduplication with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and autism. In contrast, the reciprocal microdeletion was associated only with autism and developmental disorders. Head circumference was larger in patients with the microdeletion than in patients with the microduplication. © 2009 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved.

I argue that Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex is not only a work of phenomenological existentialism; it is also a work of feminist epistemology. Understanding and reading Beauvoir's text as an early work of standpoint theory, the feminist critique that all knowledge claims are limited and dependent upon the concrete situations of their creators, makes possible a more appropriately existential---both allowing and requiring the reader to formulate her own conclusions and proscriptions, feminist---recognizing the situatedness of knowledge and the inability to obtain a 'view from nowhere,' and coherent ---consistent with Beauvoir's literary method and with the claims made in the introduction and conclusion, , reading of The Second Sex. ;In the introduction to the text, Beauvoir tells us, her readers, that the voice of the text is never clearly her own. Instead she tells us that there are at least three types of voice present in the text: men's voices, women's voices, and the voices of the social sciences. "I shall discuss first of all the light in which woman is viewed by biology, psychoanalysis, and historical materialism. Next I shall try to show exactly how the concept of the 'truly feminine' has been fashioned---why woman has been defined as the Other---and what have been the consequences from man's point of view. Then from woman's point of view I shall describe the world in which women must live..." ;Reading the text this way the title of each chapter becomes the name of the voice and position it adopts: for example, one reads ' biology's', ' five authors',' and 'the married woman's,' takes on the nature and origin of femininity

In asking scholars to reflect on the structures and practices of academic knowledge that render alternative knowledge traditions irrelevant and invisible, as well as on the ways these must change for the academy to cease functioning as an instrument of westernization rather than as an authentically global and diverse intellectual commons, the editor of this special issue of the Journal of Academic Ethics is envisaging a world much needed and much resisted. A great deal of the conversation about diversity in higher education emphasizes, rightly, the need for an international and ethnically diverse population of scholars and students. Less attention is paid to the value of cognitive diversity—the diversity of cognition generated by cognitive disabilities. As one aspect of intellectual diversity, cognitive diversity promises novel ways of thinking and new understandings of what knowledge is, who makes it, and how it is made. The unique value of cognitive diversity is its insistence on a radical shift in our conception of who can know and who can produce knowledge. Insisting on the inclusion, as scholars, of persons with minds labelled disabled, an epistemology of disability pushes us to reform the much criticized but still dominant notion of the expert and scholar as able-bodied and hyper-rational