In this action I will track the people and processes involved in adapting the novel The Fifth Sacred Thing as a transmedia phenomenon, whose stated goal is: “to help nurture and support the movements that are already growing to put our world on a path of peace, justice and ecological harmony”. I will focus on the producers’ intentions to “be faithful to the book’s artistic vision … but also … to the values of earth-care and social justice the book represents”. I will explore the ways that they work to “set new standards for environmental accountability in the film industry … bring resources into the inner city by networking with community organizations … put up a website with extensive resources and develop many ways that the people who are inspired by the vision can learn the skills they need to create it and connect with others who share it.” Together, the book’s artistic vision and the producers’ plans provide a rich case study in inventive approaches to creating, inclusive, innovative and secure societies. I will use this empirical case study to develop and test the concept of ‘imaginactivism’ as a way of thinking through the influences fictional or artistic cultural productions exert on social and political activism, and vice versa. I will pursue research skills training in new media research and production, as well as videoethnography, so that my research methods, dissemination, and public engagement mirror and extend the phenomenon I am investigating. This will enable me to meet the objectives of: producing articles and a monograph about the transmedia phenomenon of The Fifth Sacred Thing; articulating the methods to ground conceptual work on ‘imaginactivism’ through an empirical case study; disseminating the methods to academic audiences pursuing research on cultural production and social activism; disseminating a road map for linking cultural production and social and political action to cultural producers, activists and potential activist publics.

At present there are no biomarkers available that can definatively diagnose arthritis or measure the usefulness of many different treatment approaches that are available to help slow the progression of the disease and thereby improve the quality of life of the patient. Indeed, at present there are no means available to diagnose and distinguish between early stage rheumatoid arthtritis and early stage osteoarthritis; if this latter point could be achieved there would be substantial costs savings to the national health care providers in most countries worldwide. The objective of this proposal is to evaluate the capabilities of a panel of biomarker assays to detect different types of tissue breakdown or synthesis products in the blood, joint fluid and urine in large numbers of a medically well-characterised groups of patients with different stages in the progression and types of arthritic disease. These data will then be analysed for different patterns of expression of these substances with a view to identifying specific fingerprints of their occurrance that can be used in clinical trials, to diagnose different disease subtypes and also monitor the benefits of different treatment strategies. After these assays have been developed and validated using MRC funding these technologies will be transferred to an industrial partner so that they can become commercially available to hospitals and research institutions for use in clinical diagnosis and monitoring of treatments as well as for new drug discovery initiatives for treatment of arthritic diseases.

Please see relevant Section in Report of Past Progress

The commonest visual disorder of children is amblyopia (lazy eye), which affects 2-4% of the population. This project explores potential avenues for treating amblyopia in adulthood. Amblyopia is defined clinically as a deficit in visual acuity despite optimal refractive correction, due to some disruption of normal visual development during childhood. Amblyopia is usually treated by occlusion therapy (covering the good eye for a period of time to enforce the use of the amblyopic eye). The effectiveness of this procedure decreases with age. To date, it is not possible to restore normal vision in an amblyopic eye after the age of 8 years, the end of sensitive period of cortical plasticity. This project aims at restoring visual cortical plasticity in adulthood. We know that in the adult brain, the ability of neurons to form new connections is limited by a mesh of molecules surrounding them, the extracellular matrix, which becomes more and more rigid during adolescence. We plan to infuse enzymes into the visual cortex that will loosen up that matrix, and additional substances that are known to promote the outgrowth of neuronal processes. We hope that this combination strategy will reverse the loss of functional connections from the deprived eye to the visual cortex. We will employ functional brain imaging to assess whether visual cortex responses to stimulation of the amblyopic eye will have returned. We will test and refine our treatment using animals, and later on hope to develop it further for amblyopic patients who have suffered loss of vision in their good eye through illness or injury and have therefore become blind or severely visually impaired.