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A qualitative study of 21 whistleblowers in the UK focusing on the impact of their experiences of whistleblowing on their professional lives and physical and mental health. The majority of participants reported significant negative impact on their careers and there was cumulative effects on mental health throughout the process of whistleblowing. The study also explores the experience of legal processes after whistleblowing. The study includes an exploration of a psychoanalytic perspective on organisational problems and discusses the relevance of this theoretical approach to understanding the dynamics of whistleblowing.

The early years of the 21st century were marked by the increasing prominence of neuroscientific ideas in wider society. The proliferation of neuroscience has been accompanied by lively debate, alternately excited and apprehensive, about its societal significance. However, consideration of neuroscience’s cultural implications has largely remained speculative due to a paucity of research that directly examines how publics engage with neuroscientific ideas. Drawing on Social Representations Theory and the principles of embodied phenomenology, this thesis aims to map the contours of the neuroscientific knowledge that surfaces in ordinary, everyday life in contemporary Britain. Its investigation focuses upon two empirical contexts, cataloguing the representations of brain research that materialise in (i) the mainstream print media, and (ii) the common-sense understanding revealed by a series of semi-structured interviews with London residents. A content analysis of 3,630 newspaper articles confirms that the period 2000-2012 saw a steady expansion of neuroscience’s prominence in public dialogue, primarily within appeals to readers to optimise their brain function by moderating their mental activity, nutritional intake and lifestyle choices. Thematic analysis of 48 interviews, however, suggests that laypeople have remained largely unaware of the media attention afforded to neuroscience, with the brain occupying a negligible space in people’s day-to-day thought and conversation. Interview respondents situated brain research within the socially distant ‘other worlds’ of science and medicine, characterising direct experience of brain-related pathology as the only context that would motivate them to engage with neuroscientific knowledge. However, more latent meanings attached to the brain surfaced as the interviews progressed: the brain was also constituted as a tool over which individuals can exert control, and as a source of human variation, invoked to articulate and explain social differences. Through rigorous analysis of original empirical data, this thesis traces the paths by which neuroscientific ideas travel through the public sphere, distinguishes how they are elaborated and re-constituted en route, and explores the implications this may have for social life.

This paper reviews factors which affect the survival of the newborn lamb including some discussion ,on the incidence and cause of perinatal lamb mortality. Environmental conditions and physiological factors such as temperature regulation greatly influence lamb survival and are considered but the main concern of this review is how maternal behavioural traits at parturition affect the newborn lamb. Variation in ewe maternal behaviour is recognised but few .data exist to demonstrate whether ewe behaviour is related to lamb survival. Preliminary analyses of 1050 ewe behaviour records (1 to 5 score based on observations during tagging of lambs within 24 hours of birth) of six breed types and three age groups over one year were made. Least Squares Analysis of Variance showed that maternal behaviour was better by 0.26 of a score on average for each year increase in ewe age and by 0.18 of a score on average for each unit increase in litter size. Breed effect only reached statistical significance when two factor interactions and partial regressions involving breed were not included in the least squares model. When correction was made for litter size, age and breed of ewe, LW/LB increased by 0.03 on average for each unit increase in behaviour score. A small field trial involving differential nutrition (medium vs high) of 155 F-gene carrier ewes for 8 weeks over winter established a 5.5 kg liveweight difference. This nutrition treatment resulted in a 0.42 increase in the average maternal behaviour score in the lower nutrition group.

The bacterial pathogen Chlamydia trachomatis causes Trachoma, the worlds leading cause of preventable blindness and is also responsible for the most common curable sexually transmitted disease in the UK and United States. C. trachomatis is an obligate intracellular organism characterised by a unique and complex growth cycle. Its study presents many challenges since it has historically been recalcitrant to genetic manipulation and growth in the absence of a host cell. Nevertheless, the sequencing of the C. trachomatis genome and its relatively small size by comparison to genomes from other bacterial pathogens, has paved the way for studies at the proteomic level. This thesis describes the development and application of proteomic approaches to study C. trachomatis L2. To survey the expressed chlamydial proteome, a combination of the qualitative approaches, 2-DGE, MudPIT and GeLC-MS/MS; and the quantitative approaches AQUA, iTRAQ and LC-MSE were used. Collectively, the approaches efficiently identified 648 expressed proteins, representing ~72% of the predicted proteome of C. trachomatis L2, from both the infectious (elementary body, EB) and replicating (reticulate body, RB) form of the pathogen. In the infectious EB, the entire set of predicted glycolytic enzymes were detected, indicating that metabolite flux rather than de novo synthesis of this pathway is triggered upon infection of host cells. Further, proteomic analysis of the RB form also uncovered biosynthetic enzymes for chlamydial cell wall synthesis, indicating that peptidoglycan is produced in some form during growth in host cells. Comparison of the quantitative approaches iTRAQ and LC-MSE demonstrated that LC-MSE quantitative data was significantly more robust and extensive relative to iTRAQ data. In addition to information on relative amounts of these proteins between the two forms, LC-MSE data also yielded the cellular concentration (molecules per cell) for 489 proteins. This extensive set of absolute quantitation data permits estimates of the energy invested in the synthesis of various classes of proteins. The results indicate that C. trachomatis devotes most of its energy into maintenance of the translational machinery. However, it also expends significant amounts of energy into making cell envelope components and a set of hitherto hypothetical proteins. These proteins, which account for the bulk of the energy invested by the intracellular RB form of the pathogen as it converts to the extracellular EB form, highlight the importance of absolute quantitation data for understanding the biological processing status of the cell. The datasets also revealed a large number of proteins that were differentially expressed between replicating RBs and infectious EBs, ranging from 8.4-fold down-regulation to 3.5-fold up-regulation. Consistent with transcriptomic studies (Belland et al., 2003), proteins involved in protein synthesis, ATP generation, central metabolism, secretion and nutrient uptake were predominant in the metabolically active RB at 15 h PI. Although many of the proteins in these functional categories were down-regulated in EBs, proteins required for glycolysis, central metabolism, protein synthesis, and type III secretion were present in significant amounts in EBs suggesting that the infectious EB is primed ‘ready-to-go’ upon contact with the host cell.

The inflammatory response is critical to healing outcome after cutaneous injury. Our current understanding of the response to injury has been compiled from targeted studies on components expected to play a role. It was hypothesised that an unbiased approach to characterisation of soluble mediators within the injured tissue might identify additional components, thereby increasing our understanding of the cellular processes involved. The aim of this research was to develop and characterise a model of injury with the potential to identify novel mediators of the early response. Microdialysis was chosen as both the sampling method and the means by which the tissue was injured as probe insertion causes a single injury that can be sampled continuously without further damaging the tissue. Early injury responses were initially characterised in terms of changes in blood flow and known markers of the inflammatory response, using Laser Doppler Imaging and a bead-based cytokine flow cytometric assay, respectively. A shotgun proteomic analysis was then undertaken to characterise of the protein content of the fluid obtained using microdialysis, dialysate. The phosphorylation status of proteins was also characterised following the implementation and optimisation of a recently reported method that uses dendrimer conjugation chemistry to capture phosphopeptides. Blood flow and cytokine measurements in the dialysate confirmed the occurrence of a reproducible inflammatory response to the microdialysis injury. Proteomic analyses of dialysate suggests that it has a relatively simple protein composition and is dominated by highly abundant components. The identified proteins originate from both intra- and extracellular locations and play a range of roles, including regulation of coagulation, cellular ii communication, and the immune response. Several are likely to undergo post-translational phosphorylation and hence their phosphorylation status was also investigated. Using the phosphopeptide capture method, potentially novel phosphorylation sites were identified in two abundant proteins, albumin and apolipoprotein L1 at positions S603 and S314, respectively. Collectively, the data obtained in this investigation increase our knowledge of the proteins and processes involved in responses to injury, and suggest that microdialysis may be of some use for studies in this area. Further, analysis of protein phosphorylation in dialysate suggests that this is an informative approach that could shed light on extracellular signalling events that occur during the progression of the response to injury.