Harriet Hardy, protégé of Alice Hamilton, spent 1948 in the Health Division of Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. The contemporary campaign for federal legislation to compensate nuclear workers brought to the fore living retirees in whose cases of occupational illness Hardy had a role in diagnosis or case management. A third case is documented in archival records. Methods of participatory action research were used to better document the cases and strategize in light of the evidence, thereby assisting the workers with compensation claims. Medical and neuropsychological exams of the mercury case were conducted. Hardy’s diary entries and memoirs were interpreted in light of medicolegal documentation and workers’ recollections. Through these participatory research activities, Harriet Hardy’s role and influence both inside and outside the atomic weapons complex have been elucidated. An important lesson learned is the ongoing need for a system of protective medical evaluations for nuclear workers with complex chemical exposures.

Natural selection and other components of evolutionary theory are known to be particularly challenging concepts for students to understand. To help illustrate these concepts, we developed a simulation model of microevolutionary processes. The model features all the components of Hardy-Weinberg theory, with population size, selection, gene flow, nonrandom mating, and mutation all being demonstrated in the simulations. By using this freely available computer model, students can develop and test hypotheses with replicated virtual experiments. Because the model is an agent-based simulation, there is biologically realistic variability in the results. Students using the model see results both numerically and graphically and these are reinforced by an animation of the virtual fish in the simulated experiment.

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Many female characters in Thomas Hardy’s novels clearly illustrate one of the Victorian stereotypes of women: the proper, submissive housewife or the rebellious, independent dreamer. Hardy does not demonstrate how women should be, but rather how society pressures women to conform to the accepted image. Hardy progresses from subtly criticizing society, as seen in The Return of the Native and The Woodlanders, to overtly condemning gender roles and marriage in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. The characters of Thomasin, Mrs. Yeobright, and Grace Melbury illustrate those who submit to society’s expectations; and Eustacia Vye, Felice Charmond, Tess Durbyfield, Sue Bridehead, and Arabella Donn illustrate the stereotypical seductress. Hardy’s female characters seem to experience especially harsh or condemning circumstances due to the social expectations placed upon them. These unpleasant events earn readers’ sympathy and work to subvert the traditional limiting views of women.

Alleles, genotypes and haplotypes (combinations of alleles) have been widely used in gene-disease association studies. More recently, association studies using diplotypes (haplotype pairs on homologous chromosomes) have become increasingly common. This article reviews the rationale of the four types of association analyses and discusses the situations in which diplotype-based analyses are more powerful than the other types of association analyses. Haplotype-based association analyses are more powerful than allele-based association analyses, and diplotype-based association analyses are more powerful than genotype-based analyses. In circumstances where there are no interaction effects between markers and where the criteria for Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium (HWE) are met, the larger sample size and smaller degrees of freedom of allele-based and haplotype-based association analyses make them more powerful than genotype-based and diplotype-based association analyses, respectively. However, under certain circumstances diplotype-based analyses are more powerful than haplotype-based analysis.

This dissertation explores the subject of heredity and its novelistic treatment c. 1850-1900. Though hereditary phenomena had long been incorporated into literary works, heredity acquired an unprecedented significance with Darwin’s theory of evolution. It became a central fact of life, generating both fascination and fear, but its exact workings remained unknown until the turn of the century. This left novelists some experimental leeway in creating fictional universes and characters in accordance with the nascent naturalistic worldview and in struggling with its philosophical implications. While work on nineteenth-century literature and science has focused significantly on evolution, I demonstrate that heredity is a more immediate human concern and is more intuitive to the form of the novel. The works considered here by George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Thomas Hardy grapple with an increasingly deterministic view of biology but also with other forms of inheritance, for most of the conditions that constitute and determine our lives are inherited. Chapter one discusses how the metaphor of inheritance became a powerful tool for portraying the complexities of life in a post-theological age. This dissertation is grounded in the history of science, and, beyond the common language shared between science, philosophy, and literature, I examine the role of narrative in the study of heredity, particularly in medical case histories, which formed an early point of contact with the novel. Chapter two is on Eliot’s treatment of the inextricable workings of legal, cultural, and biological inheritance in The Mill on the Floss, showing how the mismatch between theory and reality regarding these matters demoralizes the novel’s protagonists and inhibits their development. Chapter three contextualizes The Picture of Dorian Gray in the history of art and science, reading Dorian’s portrait as a device suggestive of metaphysical inheritance and the disruption of personal development, and the ancestral portraits in Dorian’s gallery as indications of the biological heredity that drives his self-destruction. Chapter four looks at Hardy’s technique of genealogical narrative and overdetermination in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and the novel’s engagement with debates over the value of pedigree and the pessimistic view of determinism at the century’s end. / 2020-09-29T00:00:00Z

In Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles a relationship exists between the symbolical sacrifice of Tess at Stonehenge and her association with fertility, ritual, and mythic cycles of seasonal death and rebirth. Because Hardy associates Tess with fertility, reproductive power, and seasonal change, she personifies nature and closely resembles the earth mother goddess Demeter. Ritual is evident in her participation in the May-Day club revel, in her intended suicide under the mistletoe, and in her manner of killing Alec d1Urberville. Myth cycle culminates with a fertility ritual in the powerful sacrificial incident at Stonehenge, for, although Tess physically dies at Wintoncester, she symbolically dies at Stonehenge. Following her execution, the significance of her symbolic death at Stonehenge becomes apparent in her rebirth in 'Liza-Lu, In the Demeter-Persephone myth, two anthropomorphic entities, the mother and the maiden, enact the single phenomenon of organic nature--the principle of life seen in the seasonal growth of vegetation. Tess, then, as mother symbolizes the end of the old year's crops, while 'Liza-Lu as maiden signifies the fructification of Tess's seed in the burgeoning fertility of the new year. By being reborn in 'Liza-Lu, Tess thus completes the mythic pattern of seasonal changes.

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This dissertation concerns nineteenth-century British novelists’ representations of unachieved aspirations. Through a blend of affect theory, materialist literary criticism, and formalist analysis, I examine a particularly frustrating problem addressed by these writers: the gap between a dream of social mobility and a reality of class paralysis for many working-class people. I am interested in the tropes of imprisonment, constraint, and confinement through which Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, and Arthur Morrison pondered this problem. I take into account these writers’ own limitations and imperfect social-progress ideology of melioration. These metaphors highlight the exploitation of impoverished people by the very institutions purportedly meant to encourage and mobilize them. In this project, I draw on Lauren Berlant’s theory of cruel optimism, Carolyn Lesjak’s study of the depleasurization of work in the Victorian novel, and Bruce Robbins’s theory of mobility and welfare as frameworks for interpreting what Victorian middle-class fiction writers do with the lived experience of poverty.