Family Matters is an American television sitcom that debuted on ABC on September 22, 1989, and ended on May 9, 1997. However it moved to CBS, where it was shown from September 19, 1997, to July 17, 1998. A spin-off of Perfect Strangers, the series revolves around the Winslow family, a middle class black family living in Chicago, Illinois.[2] Midway through the first season, the show introduced the Winslows' nerdy neighbor Steve Urkel (Jaleel White), who was originally scripted to appear as a one-time character. However, he quickly became the show's breakout character (and eventually the main character), joining the main cast.[3]
The Family Matters
The series was a spinoff from the ABC sitcom Perfect Strangers; both shows aired Friday nights on ABC's primetime slot called "TGIF". Jo Marie Payton played Harriette Winslow, the elevator operator at a newspaper where Larry Appleton and Balki Bartokomous also worked. Reginald VelJohnson, who was coming off of growing fame from his role in Die Hard, made an appearance on the show as Harriette's husband Carl Winslow, a Chicago police officer. ABC and the producers loved the character Harriette for her great morale and quick-witted humor and decided to create a show that would focus on her and her family, husband Carl, son Eddie, elder daughter Laura, and younger daughter Judy (who appeared until the character was retconned after season four).[4]
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Kathy L. Hudson and Francis S. Collins discuss how and why the US National Institutes of Health worked with the family of Henrietta Lacks, the unwitting source of the HeLa cell line, to craft an agreement for access to HeLa genome data.
So, since March, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, has worked closely with Lacks' family. Together, we have crafted a path that addresses the family's concerns, including consent and privacy, while making the HeLa genomic sequence data available to scientists to further the family's commitment to biomedical research.
The German research team that in March this year posted the HeLa genome on open-access databases available through the European Bioinformatics Institute and the NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information did not violate any laws or rules. The action did, however, upset the Lacks family, and it drew criticism from many quarters2. The genome of these cells is not identical to Lacks' original genome. The cells carry the genetic modifications that allowed them to form a tumour and grow prolifically; and their passage in cell culture for more than six decades has led to other structural anomalies. Nonetheless, the sequence can reveal certain heritable aspects of Lacks' germline DNA, and can thus be used to draw inferences, admittedly of uncertain significance, about her descendants.
Over the past four months, with help from Skloot and academic leaders at Johns Hopkins, we met members of the Lacks family in Baltimore on three occasions. At their request, some family members also met separately with an NIH genetic counsellor and medical-genetics expert to learn more about what the data might say about family members, and the implications of having it in the public domain.
Applications for access to the sequence data will be rapidly reviewed by a newly formed HeLa Genome Data Access working group at the NIH, on which two members of the Lacks family will serve. We believe that this plan reflects the true partnership between the Lacks family and the biomedical-research community. We also ask that all researchers who generate or use genomic data from HeLa cells include in their publications an acknowledgement of the contribution of Lacks and the continued generosity of her family, such as that in Adey and colleagues' paper3.
It is important to note, however, that we are responding to an extraordinary situation here, not setting a precedent for research with previously stored, de-identified specimens. The approach we have developed through working with the Lacks family is unique because HeLa cells were taken and used without consent, and gave rise to the most widely used human cell line in the world, and because the family members are known by name to millions of people.
In her book Family Matters (Aperture, 2021), Gillian Laub's photographs of her family from the past twenty years, now collected in one volume, explore the ways society's biggest questions are revealed in our most intimate relationships.
Melinda Cooper: The family was necessarily at the heart of the neoliberal/neoconservative revolution from above because the Fordist compact was itself structured around the family. The Fordist family wage, which assigned white unionized men the waged role in productive labor and white women an unpaid role as domestic workers in the household, was a defining component of the Fordist division of labor. This is the compact that brought many unionized working men and their families into an expanded middle class. Rising wages for one class of workers (white men) was possible on condition that another class of workers was not paid (white women). For a long time, African American men were excluded from this compact altogether and African American women, like the poorest of white women, were still expected to work outside the home, often performing domestic work in the homes of others.
The policy reach of their project to reinstate the family was vast and extended to everything from welfare to education and fiscal policy. Their specific interest in reviving the poor laws took shape very early on and was first acted on by Ronald Reagan, during his time as Governor of California. Here Reagan tried to revive the existing, but dormant or deactivated state poor laws relating to everything from the care of aged parents to children in state institutions and single mothers on welfare. The latter project was obviously the most successful and was carried onto the federal stage by Clinton in the mid-1990s.
Even when neoliberals are talking about what seem to be the most neutral macroeconomic issues of monetary policy and public finance they are also talking about the family as an economic institution and the role it should be playing. Look at Milton Friedman and Gordon Tullock and Richard E. Wagner on inheritance; look at Gary Becker on parental investment and altruism; James M. Buchanan on the importance of family capital and moral order; or Richard Posner and Becker on the dangers of no-fault divorce and the jurisprudence of sexual privacy. These are not marginal preoccupations within their work. Yet strangely this is a dimension of neoliberalism that is always being actively forgotten or obscured and this clouds our understanding of what the neoliberal project of the 1970s was all about.
Of course, there are expressions of feminism and queer politics that can be defined as neoliberal, but like neoliberalism itself, their critique of normativity has become unmoored from any larger critique of wealth distribution and instead channels sexuality back into the moral and economic form of the family.
The family is central to the neoliberal/conservative alliance we now live in. It is as central to the current, post-Keynesian and post-Fordist economic regime as it was to Fordism. And yet while we have honed our critical skills in thinking about the role of the Fordist family wage in buttressing the whole architecture of Fordism, we have little experience in thinking about the role of the family in the current conjuncture. There is perhaps a good reason for this, beyond the habitual difficulty of recognizing the family as an institution. The neoliberal retreat from redistributive social spending tends to posit the family as if it were beyond the state, as if it were a spontaneous form of self-care and mutual aid arising beyond the space of overt social intervention and protecting us from the pervasive insecurity wrought by neoliberal economic reforms, and in this respect it is tempting to imagine that this is where we are resisting neoliberalism.
"It's about one family. We tell the story in three separate stories," James said. "I didn't reinvent the wheel with these stories. We just wanted to give it a voice and make it more comfortable for people to have these conversations.
Sheryl Heid is a caring and competent attorney with an ability to handle family legal needs in Fayette County, Pennsylvania. She focuses her practice on drafting wills and powers of attorney, divorce, custody and adoption, and estate planning for the residents of Fayette County, PA. Call today at 724-437-4700 for a confidential consultation on family law. Appointment times (including evenings and Saturdays by appointment) in Uniontown or Perryopolis, PA. are available to accommodate your schedule.
Immigration is a highly polarized issue in the United States, and negative attitudes toward immigrants are common. Yet, almost all Americans are descended from people who originated outside the country, a narrative often evoked by the media and taught in school curricula. Can this narrative increase inclusionary attitudes toward migrants? We draw from scholarship showing that perspective-taking decreases prejudice toward out-groups to investigate whether reminding Americans about their own immigration history increases support for immigrants and immigration. We propose that priming family experiences can indirectly stimulate perspective-taking and induce empathy toward the out-group, which we test with three separate survey experiments conducted over two years. Our findings show that priming family history generates small but consistent inclusionary effects. These effects occur even among partisan subgroups and Americans who approve of President Trump. We provide evidence that increased empathy for immigrants constitutes one mechanism driving these effects. 2ff7e9595c
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