Act in Haste, Repent At Leisure

"My position at the time was that an allegation was all that  person should require to come to the conclusion that an accused person was guilty, and I accused those who disagreed with this of doing harm to survivors."

"I should have understood that supporting people who come forward about sexual violence does not require, and cannot justify, acting in ways that may lead others to conclude that unproven allegations are true, or failing to give the person accused a fair opportunity to be heard and considered."

"I should not have listened only to one side, or allowed that one-sided understanding to shape  my communications, my tweets, or my participation in the process. I also should not have allowed my own past negative experiences with others, or my experience learning about and working on issues of sexual violence, to cloud my judgment or prevent me from giving Mr. Galloway fair consideration." 

Chelsea Rooney, author, UBC creative writing program alumna

People walk past large letters spelling out UBC at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver on Nov. 22, 2015. The Supreme Court of Canada has dismissed an appeal by accusers of former University of British Columbia writing professor Steven Galloway, paving the way for his defamation case to go to trial. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

 

The 2015 event that caused a talented and admired professor of creative writing at University of British Columbia to be fired, illustrated starkly the delicacy with which women who accuse men of sexual impropriety are handled, as opposed to such allegations with total lack of proof which can taint an accused man for life whether or not he happened to be guilty or merely the victim of a spiteful female scheme to embarrass and ultimately destroy a man's reputation, social standing and employment.

 

By no means should charges of rape be handled with anything other than professional detachment to a criminal act which, when and if proven in a court of law, that calls for appropriate justice to be meted out in a prison sentence. By no means should a charge of this serious social and personal assault be taken as truthful revelation without evidence of some nature as proof of the crime having been committed. Yet a man totally innocent of the charge, without trial, could be consigned to the deepest heat of social condemnation.

 

Believing all women who come forward with charges of sexual misconduct against a male is almost visceral, and that is because most if not many women have at some time in their lives experienced inappropriate and sometimes criminal sexual abuse at the hands of a male relative, friend, acquaintance, co-worker, stranger in a casual or life-altering event or series of events that dissipates trust in the innocent intentions of all males.

 

Chelsea Rooney is the author of Pedal, a debut novel published with Caitlin Press and a finalist for the 2015 Amazon.ca First Novel Award, co-presented with The Walrus. Pedal was also nominated for the 2015 ReLit Award. Bio

 

Chelsea Rooney had no doubt in her mind that a professor she knew personally and had reason to have trust in, had sexually assaulted another University of British Columbia student in his class, as that student, unidentified by name but referred to as 'A,B,' claimed to have occurred years beforehand. Her conviction, without proof, prior to investigation -- which in the end was found by a retired judge whom the university tasked to investigate found unsubstantiated -- led her to embark on a mission to question other students to probe for similar abuse claims among them.

 

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She in fact, led a campaign to completely isolate and disengage Steven Galloway, as a sexual offender, someone persona-non-grata in polite society, undeserving of trust, much less that of a respected member of the professoriate at a well-regarded university. She took the step of urging others who "either experienced or witnessed incidents that can speak directly to our subject's character" to contact the media. The university obliged by suspending Professor Galloway, while formally extending their appreciation to his accuser, Rooney.

 

The investigation, conducted in 2016 by a retired judge, concluded following Professor Galloway's firing by the university, that the sexual assault had not in fact occurred. Further, that the additional complaints that Rooney had presented were "without merit". This was a story that had garnered national attention and with it, national condemnation. Of a kind no university seeks, and which no doubt helped spur its decision to terminate the accused man in June of 2016.

 

Now, Chelsea Rooney has second thoughts all those years afterward, referring to "serious and unproven allegations". Whereas when Professor Galloway had been cleared of wrongdoing through the investigation, she had stated to news media that the investigation report felt to her like "yet another slap in the face", for women whose claims of sexual violation should be believed unconditionally.

 

One can only wonder whether this complete alteration in Professor Galloway's one-time chief accuser's orientation and drive for punitive justice to be done could have anything much to do with the defamation lawsuit launched by former Professor Galloway in 2018 to clear his reputation. A trial date of October 5 was set. A pre-trial court hearing in 2021 on the lawsuit aired details in her determined damning of a man with whom she had positive professional experience with. And with whom she has settled. Her current disclaimers a matter of overdue conscience.

 

Writer Steven Galloway is pictured in his office at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver on March 31, 2014. (Ben Nelms/CBC)

 

"I am aware that prior to A.B. making these allegations, Mr. Galloway considered me a friend and had on multiple occasions gone out of his way to help me, with nothing asked in return."

"In my 2014 book I thanked him as someone 'who encouraged me to commit to writing at a very important time in my life'. That was a true statement." 

"I know that nothing I say now can undo the harm or give back the years affected by these events, but I am genuinely sorry for the part I played in causing that harm."

Chelsea Rooney, Steven Galloway accuser 

 

Vulnerability Discovered in Virus Causing COVID-19

"We're always looking for well, is there a chink in the armour? Is there a spot that is not changing so much, that we can direct antibodies to that spot?"

"That is the value of the new finding, that it tells us where to focus our attention."

"[The weak spot and master key 'unlock a whole new realm of treatment possibilities [having the potential to be effective against current or future variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus."

"The existence of a large number of mutations made it a much more effective escape artist from our immune system."

"We used very advanced imagining tools to literally zero in and cast a spotlight on the interaction of the spike protein with antibodies."

"It [antibody fragment] actually puts out a couple of fingers that still block the binding. So it achieves this effect by sitting next door." 

"It's an interesting physical block that sits close by, but not exactly at that site. And that may well be why [the site] has not mutated so much over time."

Dr.Sriram Subramaniam, study senior author

A nurse provides information to parents and children during the first week of COVID-19 immunization for children over six months at a Vancouver Coastal Health clinic in Vancouver on Aug. 4. (Ben Nelms/CBC)

 

The discovery of a "weak spot" in the virus causing COVID-19 has been isolated by researchers at the University of British Columbia. This discovery is seen as a potential avenue to pave the way for new treatments to be effective against all strains of the virus. Published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature Communications, the study asserts the "key vulnerability" is found in all major variants of the COVID virus.

Anticipating the future, researchers feel that exploiting that weakness could lead to new ways of fighting the disease that has caused the death of close to 6.5 million people worldwide since it was identified over two years earlier. Dr. Subramaniam is a professor in the faculty of medicine at the University of British Columbia who explained that his team studied the virus at an atomic level in hopes of finding that weak spot and to identify an antibody fragment attaching to it across the many mutations of the virus including surging Omicron subvariants.

Antibodies are are naturally produced by the body's immune system triggered to fight infection. They counteract viruses through attaching to them much like a key in a lock. Antibodies can be produced in a laboratory for administration to patients as a treatment, though over time as viruses mutate they become less effective.

The weak spot that Professor Subramaniam's team identified however, is constant in all seven major variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, so that one antibody could conceivably act as 'master key' which would be capable of overcoming the creation of extensive mutations of the virus. With the knowledge that the immune system typically responds to what it senses on the surface of the virus (the spike protein), the researchers began their search.

The concern with each new variant of COVID-19 has revolved around whether the immune system would be capable of recognizing the mutated form. The researchers discovered the weak spot to be located on the spike protein, leading the antibody fragment to neutralize the virus attaching to the spike protein, blocking the virus from entering human cells. 

It was also seen that the identified antibody fragment is special in that it attaches next to the site where the spike protein binds with human cells, and not directly on it. It then becomes in some ways, less like locking the door than stretching out an arm to block entry, to begin with.

An image from cryo-electron microscopy performed by University of British Columbia researchers shows how an antibody fragment, red, attaches to a weak spot on the virus that causes COVID-19, grey, to block the virus from binding with the human cells, blue. (Supplied by Sriram Subramaniam/University of British Columbia)

The Complexity of Nature's Human Neuro-wiring

"Addiction is a form of learning in the reward circuits of the brain. Where you don't get synapse strengthening, you aren't getting learning and you aren't getting addiction."
"Simply increasing cadherin would likely prevent [addicts] from learning anything new. That's not a very good trade-off."
Dr. Shernaz Bamji, neuroscientist, professor, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C.

Vice.com

"Researchers are pretty confident now that addiction is a form of learning where the same mechanisms involved in regular learning kind of go haywire and are used in a pathological way in a circuit of the brain."
"We wanted to figure out what was happening in the cellular and molecular level."
UBC PhD candidate Andrea Globa  

Professor Bamji and her team of collaborators have been working with genetically engineered mice in an effort to understand what motivates human beings to become addicted to habitual drug use. Their latest study was published recently by the journal Nature Neuroscience. Building on previous work done at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, the UBC team discovered that people with certain genetic mutations associated with a protein class called cadherins in their brains are more susceptible to substance abuse.

The mice they used in their study are unlike normal mice in that even after repeated injections of cocaine over a period of time, their behaviour showed no symptoms of addiction. This led the researchers to the assumption that genetics may be at play in the onset of addictive behaviour. Normal as well as the genetically engineered mice were injected with cocaine while in one area of a multi-sectioned cage. Mice were placed in the other section on alternating days to be injected with saline. Six days of alternating treatment passed and the mice were permitted to move freely to any of the cage's sections.

The cocaine-associated section was chosen preferentially by the normal mice while the high-cadherin mice bypassed that chamber, leading to the theory that the presence of additional cadherin interferes with the learned response to cocaine. "Normal mice always gravitate to the chamber where they received the drug, looking for that high, but the mutant mice didn't", explained Dr. Bamji. Cadherin interfered with the capacity of a specialized protein receptor to function at the point where neurons communicate chemically to form memories.

The brain's learning circuitry was unable to retain the pleasurable memory of cocaine when the connection between synapses failed to connect. The research team's conclusion has the potential to lead to a test identifying which individuals may be at greatest risk of addiction. With that knowledge people could be empowered to act on that personalized information. That a biochemical model for addiction exists and those people should proceed with the caution their genetic risk deserves.

Cadherin aids in the binding of cells and thus plays a vital role where brain circuits are strengthened during learning -- including learning that specific drugs deliver pleasure. Dr. Bamji had proceeded with the study on the theory that higher levels of cadherin present in the engineered mice might lead the way to increased addictive behaviour. The study results, however, indicated the reverse to be true. The researchers had engineered mice capable of producing excessive cadherin proteins in their brains.

Despite which, the engineered mice with increased cadherin did not respond to the tests by gravitating to the cage's chamber where they were introduced to cocaine, unlike the behaviour of the normal mice with less cadherin, but with the genetic marker leading to increased addiction. Still, a problem arose because of the fact that many synapses in the brain use the same learning strategy. If ongoing research reveals a protein or enzyme in the brain acutely specific to addiction functioning solely in the brain's reward circuitry, that protein or enzyme could present as a medication target.

Until then, it is highly unlikely that a strategic use of some chemical in pill form to medicate people with a genetic propensity to addiction could be formulated to offer protection against a very real harm mechanism  recognized as addiction.

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