Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes both ASU Theses and Dissertations, submitted by graduate students, and the Barrett, Honors College theses submitted by undergraduate students.
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- Genre: Doctoral Dissertation
Description
ABSTRACT Whole genome sequencing (WGS) and whole exome sequencing (WES) are two comprehensive genomic tests which use next-generation sequencing technology to sequence most of the 3.2 billion base pairs in a human genome (WGS) or many of the estimated 22,000 protein-coding genes in the genome (WES). The promises offered from WGS/WES are: to identify suspected yet unidentified genetic diseases, to characterize the genomic mutations in a tumor to identify targeted therapeutic agents and, to predict future diseases with the hope of promoting disease prevention strategies and/or offering early treatment. Promises notwithstanding, sequencing a human genome presents several interrelated challenges: how to adequately analyze, interpret, store, reanalyze and apply an unprecedented amount of genomic data (with uncertain clinical utility) to patient care? In addition, genomic data has the potential to become integral for improving the medical care of an individual and their family, years after a genome is sequenced. Current informed consent protocols do not adequately address the unique challenges and complexities inherent to the process of WGS/WES. This dissertation constructs a novel informed consent process for individuals considering WGS/WES, capable of fulfilling both legal and ethical requirements of medical consent while addressing the intricacies of WGS/WES, ultimately resulting in a more effective consenting experience. To better understand components of an effective consenting experience, the first part of this dissertation traces the historical origin of the informed consent process to identify the motivations, rationales and institutional commitments that sustain our current consenting protocols for genetic testing. After understanding the underlying commitments that shape our current informed consent protocols, I discuss the effectiveness of the informed consent process from an ethical and legal standpoint. I illustrate how WGS/WES introduces new complexities to the informed consent process and assess whether informed consent protocols proposed for WGS/WES address these complexities. The last section of this dissertation describes a novel informed consent process for WGS/WES, constructed from the original ethical intent of informed consent, analysis of existing informed consent protocols, and my own observations as a genetic counselor for what constitutes an effective consenting experience.
ContributorsHunt, Katherine (Author) / Hurlbut, J. Benjamin (Thesis advisor) / Robert, Jason S. (Thesis advisor) / Maienschein, Jane (Committee member) / Northfelt, Donald W. (Committee member) / Marchant, Gary (Committee member) / Ellison, Karin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This dissertation explores the functional purpose of imagination as it is enacted in the context of shaping large transitions in sociotechnical systems. Large sociotechnical systems undergoing profound transitions embody instantiations where societies experience profound changes in the ‘rules of the game’ that underpin the conduct of daily life. The forms of imagination that guide these transformations, known in the political theory literature as ‘imaginaries,’ play a profound yet undertheorized role in transition of sociotechnical systems from one configuration to another. Expanding on this relationship, the study draws on three case studies of energy systems change in the United States during 20th and 21st century. Each case study explores unique element of how actors at a variety of levels – transnational governance, regional electrification, and in-home energy marketing – define and the possibilities for ideal human and technological action and interaction through a transition. These actors defining the parameters of a new form of systems operation and configuration are as equally focused on defining how these new configurations shape fundamental ideas that underpin American democratic sensibility. Moreover, in the process of articulating a new configuration of energy and society – be that in terms of managing global resource flows or the automation of energy use in a residential home – questions of what makes an ideal member of a society are interlinked with new contractual relationships between energy producers and energy users. Transitions research could and should pay greater attention to the normative commitments emergent systems actors – as it is in these commitments we can chart pathways to redefine the parameters that underpin emergent transitions.
ContributorsTidwell, Abraham (Author) / Miller, Clark (Thesis advisor) / Adamson, Joni (Committee member) / Ellison, Karin (Committee member) / Richter, Jennifer (Committee member) / Smith, Jessica (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
Systems biology studies complex biological systems. It is an interdisciplinary field, with biologists working with non-biologists such as computer scientists, engineers, chemists, and mathematicians to address research problems applying systems’ perspectives. How these different researchers and their disciplines differently contributed to the advancement of this field over time is a question worth examining. Did systems biology become a systems-oriented science or a biology-oriented science from 1992 to 2013?
This project utilized computational tools to analyze large data sets and interpreted the results from historical and philosophical perspectives. Tools deployed were derived from scientometrics, corpus linguistics, text-based analysis, network analysis, and GIS analysis to analyze more than 9000 articles (metadata and text) on systems biology. The application of these tools to a HPS project represents a novel approach.
The dissertation shows that systems biology has transitioned from a more mathematical, computational, and engineering-oriented discipline focusing on modeling to a more biology-oriented discipline that uses modeling as a means to address real biological problems. Also, the results show that bioengineering and medical research has increased within systems biology. This is reflected in the increase of the centrality of biology-related concepts such as cancer, over time. The dissertation also compares the development of systems biology in China with some other parts of the world, and reveals regional differences, such as a unique trajectory of systems biology in China related to a focus on traditional Chinese medicine.
This dissertation adds to the historiography of modern biology where few studies have focused on systems biology compared with the history of molecular biology and evolutionary biology.
This project utilized computational tools to analyze large data sets and interpreted the results from historical and philosophical perspectives. Tools deployed were derived from scientometrics, corpus linguistics, text-based analysis, network analysis, and GIS analysis to analyze more than 9000 articles (metadata and text) on systems biology. The application of these tools to a HPS project represents a novel approach.
The dissertation shows that systems biology has transitioned from a more mathematical, computational, and engineering-oriented discipline focusing on modeling to a more biology-oriented discipline that uses modeling as a means to address real biological problems. Also, the results show that bioengineering and medical research has increased within systems biology. This is reflected in the increase of the centrality of biology-related concepts such as cancer, over time. The dissertation also compares the development of systems biology in China with some other parts of the world, and reveals regional differences, such as a unique trajectory of systems biology in China related to a focus on traditional Chinese medicine.
This dissertation adds to the historiography of modern biology where few studies have focused on systems biology compared with the history of molecular biology and evolutionary biology.
ContributorsZou, Yawen (Author) / Laubichler, Manfred (Thesis advisor) / Maienschein, Jane (Thesis advisor) / Creath, Richard (Committee member) / Ellison, Karin (Committee member) / Newfeld, Stuart (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
American Indian literature is replete with language that refers to broken or hollow promises the US government has made to American Indians, one of the most prominent being that the US government has not kept its promises regarding health services for American Indians/Alaska Natives (AI/AN). Some commenters refer to treaties between tribes and the US government as the origin of the promise for health services to AI/AN. Others point to the trust relationship between the sovereign nations of American Indian tribes and the US government, while still others assert that the Snyder Act of 1921 or the Indian Health Care Improvement Act (IHCIA) contained the promise for health care. While the US has provided some form of health care for AI/AN since the country was in its infancy, and continues to do so through the Indian Health Service, the promise of health services for AI/AN is not explicit.
Philosophers have articulated that a promise contains a moral obligation to fulfill it because of others’ expectations created by that promise. As the US government made its first promises in early treaties with AI/AN tribes and subsequently made promises in the years since, it is morally obligated to fulfill those promises, be they lying promises or not, because of resulting expectations. Yet, the US government has historically acted to restrict the rights of AI/AN—rights that include access to health services—through assimilation, separation, or termination policies. Further, the policies of the US government have kept the AI/AN populations socioeconomically impoverished, dependent on the US government for basic needs, and susceptible to health-compromising conditions.
Using case studies, this dissertation looks not only at the policies and events that directly affected health services and health status, but also at how those policies and events contributed to health outcomes and the expectations of AI/AN. Given the history of the US government in fulfilling (or not fulfilling) its promises, this dissertation examines the expectations of AI/AN for their own future health outcomes under the policy of self-governance.
Philosophers have articulated that a promise contains a moral obligation to fulfill it because of others’ expectations created by that promise. As the US government made its first promises in early treaties with AI/AN tribes and subsequently made promises in the years since, it is morally obligated to fulfill those promises, be they lying promises or not, because of resulting expectations. Yet, the US government has historically acted to restrict the rights of AI/AN—rights that include access to health services—through assimilation, separation, or termination policies. Further, the policies of the US government have kept the AI/AN populations socioeconomically impoverished, dependent on the US government for basic needs, and susceptible to health-compromising conditions.
Using case studies, this dissertation looks not only at the policies and events that directly affected health services and health status, but also at how those policies and events contributed to health outcomes and the expectations of AI/AN. Given the history of the US government in fulfilling (or not fulfilling) its promises, this dissertation examines the expectations of AI/AN for their own future health outcomes under the policy of self-governance.
ContributorsDrago, Mary (Author) / Maienschein, Jane (Thesis advisor) / Ellison, Karin (Committee member) / Herkert, Joseph (Committee member) / Hurlbut, James (Committee member) / Robert, Jason (Committee member) / Trujillo, Michael (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
In the fifteen years between the discovery of fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) in 1973 and the passage of alcohol beverage warning labels in 1988, FAS transformed from a medical diagnosis between practitioner and pregnant women to a broader societal risk imbued with political and cultural meaning. I examine how scientific, social, moral, and political narratives dynamically interacted to construct the risk of drinking during pregnancy and the public health response of health warning labels on alcohol. To situate such phenomena I first observe the closest regulatory precedents, the public health responses to thalidomide and cigarettes, which established a federal response to fetal risk. I then examine the history of how the US defined and responded to the social problem of alcoholism, paying particular attention to the role of women in that process. Those chapters inform my discussion of how the US reengaged with alcohol control at the federal level in the last quarter of the twentieth century. In the 1970s, FAS allowed federal agencies to carve out disciplinary authority, but robust public health measures were tempered by uncertainty surrounding issues of bureaucratic authority over labeling, and the mechanism and extent of alcohol’s impact on development. A socially conservative presidency, dramatic budgetary cuts, and increased industry funding reshaped the public health approach to alcoholism in the 1980s. The passage of labeling in 1988 required several conditions: a groundswell of other labeling initiatives that normalized the practice; the classification of other high profile, socially unacceptable alcohol-related behaviors such as drunk driving and youth drinking; and the creation of a dual public health population that faced increased medical, social, and political scrutiny, the pregnant woman and her developing fetus.
ContributorsO'Neil, Erica (Author) / Maienschein, Jane (Thesis advisor) / Hurlbut, James (Committee member) / Ellison, Karin (Committee member) / Wetmore, Jameson (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Moral status questions, (who and what counts morally) are of central concern to moral philosophers. There is also a rich history of psychological work exploring the topic. The received view in psychology of moral status accounts for it as a function of other mind perception. On this view, entities are morally considerable because they are perceived to have the right sort of minds. This dissertation analyzes and tests this theory, pointing out both empirical and conceptual issues with the received view. The results presented show that important moral intuitions (for example about unjustifiable interpersonal killing) cannot be explained by appealing to other mind perception. Some alternative views of the psychology of moral status are presented, as well as avenues for further research.
ContributorsLaTourelle, Jonathan Jacob (Author) / Creath, Richard (Thesis advisor) / Van Gelderen, Elly (Thesis advisor) / Robert, Jason (Committee member) / Ellison, Karin (Committee member) / Becker, D. Vaughn (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Informed Consent is a ubiquitous way of enshrining choice in the United States which regulates social relations in domains as varied as health, research, access to institutions, and prisons. Informed consent describes an imagined epistemic relationship between right knowledge and legitimate choice, where judgements of capacitation determine whether a person is the right sort of person to take up knowledge which will render them agential under conditions of asymmetrical power. It has been developed over and over to solve problems of injustice, where the injustice in question is understood in terms of undue infringement on individual autonomy, and the logic of informed consent is re-invented to reframe the problem at hand as a rightful matter of individual choice. It is imagined to respect autonomy, and to perform a transformative "moral magic" that makes the forbidden quotidian. This dissertation develops this account of informed consent through a series of cases, each of which explicates different aspects of the technopolitics of informed consent. It begins with genetic counseling as a paradigm case in the logic of informed consent: a well-developed field that emerged to inform people about genetics and genomics in the interest not only of individual reproductive choice, but in opposition to eugenic shaping of populations through genetic knowledge. Next, pro- and anti- abortion deployments of informed consent illustrate an epistemology of information itself, which is understood to agentialize as well as to serve as a site for refusing choice to those deemed incapacitated. Third, liability waivers and requests for student informed consent on university campuses during the pandemic show informed consent to be a tool for the exercise of biopolitics and, in particular, for making responsible subjects. Finally, civil libertarian opposition to migrant genetic testing on the grounds that migrants weren’t asked for consent demonstrates a tight coupling between consent, imaginations of just state-subject relations, and what it means to be recognized as a person. Ultimately, this dissertation argues for a practice of attention that sees informed consent as an important site for the exercise of power and offers frameworks for analyzing it as such.
ContributorsDietz, Elizabeth A (Author) / Hurlbut, Ben (Thesis advisor) / Reynolds, Joel M (Committee member) / Brian, Jennifer (Committee member) / Ellison, Karin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Computational tools in the digital humanities often either work on the macro-scale, enabling researchers to analyze huge amounts of data, or on the micro-scale, supporting scholars in the interpretation and analysis of individual documents. The proposed research system that was developed in the context of this dissertation ("Quadriga System") works to bridge these two extremes by offering tools to support close reading and interpretation of texts, while at the same time providing a means for collaboration and data collection that could lead to analyses based on big datasets. In the field of history of science, researchers usually use unstructured data such as texts or images. To computationally analyze such data, it first has to be transformed into a machine-understandable format. The Quadriga System is based on the idea to represent texts as graphs of contextualized triples (or quadruples). Those graphs (or networks) can then be mathematically analyzed and visualized. This dissertation describes two projects that use the Quadriga System for the analysis and exploration of texts and the creation of social networks. Furthermore, a model for digital humanities education is proposed that brings together students from the humanities and computer science in order to develop user-oriented, innovative tools, methods, and infrastructures.
ContributorsDamerow, Julia (Author) / Laubichler, Manfred (Thesis advisor) / Maienschein, Jane (Thesis advisor) / Creath, Richard (Committee member) / Ellison, Karin (Committee member) / Hooper, Wallace (Committee member) / Renn, Jürgen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Abortion is a controversial topic internationally. Most current debates about abortion concern when, if at all, it should be legal. However, researchers have shown many times that after an abortion ban, maternal and infant mortalities rise significantly, as women who seek out abortions do so regardless of abortion legality. So, is it possible to reduce abortions in a population without delegalizing abortion and, if so, how? Why do some countries have higher abortion rates than others in the presence of the same law?This dissertation answers both questions. First, I present historical evidence in the first comprehensive comparative analysis of all 15 post-Soviet countries, which have very similar abortion laws originating from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Second, I use those findings to build the first agent-based model (ABM) of unintended pregnancies in a hypothetical artificial population.
USSR was the only country in the world to complete its demographic transition through abortion instead of modern contraception, and the Soviet government passed the first law in the world to allow abortion upon request in 1920. After the USSR dissolution in 1991, post-Soviet countries maintained very similar abortion laws, but had very different abortion rates for most years. Analysis of fertility data from post-Soviet countries shows that the prevalence of some specific contraceptive methods, namely the rhythm method (r = 0.82), oral pill (r = 0.56), and male condom (r = 0.51) are most strongly correlated with high abortion rates, and that sex education is a factor that reduces the rates in otherwise similar countries (p = 0.02).
The ABM shows that even basic sex education results in fewer abortions than no sex education or abstinence-based sex education (p < 0.01). In scenarios without sex education, basic quality of post-abortion contraceptive counseling (PACC) is better than no PACC or low-quality PACC at reducing abortions (p < 0.01). Still, the higher the quality of sex education or PACC, the fewer abortions in the artificial population. The ABM is adaptive and policy makers can use it as a decision-support tool to make evidence-based policy decisions regarding abortion, and, potentially, other sociobiological phenomena with some adjustments to the code.
ContributorsZiganshina Lienhard, Dina A. (Author) / Maienschein, Jane (Thesis advisor) / Gaughan, Monica (Thesis advisor) / Laubichler, Manfred (Committee member) / Ellison, Karin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
The desire to start a family is something millions of people around the globe strive to achieve. However, many factors such as the societal changes in family planning due to increasing maternal age, use of birth control, and ever-changing lifestyles have increased the number of infertility cases seen in the United States each year. Infertility can manifest as a prolonged inability to conceive, or inability to carry a pregnancy full-term. Modern advancements in the field of reproductive medicine have begun to promote the use of Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) to circumvent reduced fertility in both men and women. Implementation of techniques such as In Vitro Fertilization, Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection, and Pre-Implantation Genetic Testing have allowed many couples to conceive. There is continual effort being made towards developing more effective and personalized fertility treatments. This often begins in the form of animal research—a fundamental step in biomedical research. This dissertation examines infertility as a medical condition through the characterization of normal reproductive anatomy and physiology in the introductory overview of reproduction. Specific pathologies of male and female-factor infertility are described, which necessitates the use of ARTs. The various forms of ARTs currently utilized in a clinical setting are addressed including history, preparations, and protocols for each technology. To promote continual advancement of the field, both animal studies and human trials provide fundamental stepping-stones towards the execution of new techniques and protocols. Examples of research conducted for the betterment of human reproductive medicine are explored, including an animal study conducted in mice exploring the role of tyramine in ovulation. With the development and implementation of new technologies and protocols in the field, this also unearths ethical dilemmas that further complicate the addition of new technologies in the field. Combining an extensive review in assisted reproduction, research and clinical fieldwork, this study investigates the history and development of novel research conducted in reproductive medicine and explores the broader implications of new technologies in the field.
ContributorsPeck, Shelbi Marie (Author) / Baluch, Debra P (Thesis advisor) / Maienschein, Jane (Thesis advisor) / Sweazea, Karen (Committee member) / Ellison, Karin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021