Kathleen Blake

Comparison of central administration of corticotropin-releasing hormone and urocortin on food intake, conditioned taste aversion, and c-Fos expression

Corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) is a potent regulator of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, and reduces food intake when administered into the third cerebral ventricle (i3vt). However, CRH also promotes conditioned taste aversion (CTA) learning which indicates that its anorectic effects are accompanied by aversive consequences that would reduce food intake independently of energy regulation. Urocortin (Ucn) is a closely related mammalian peptide that binds to both identified CRH receptor subtypes and also reduces food intake when administered i3vt. The present experiments compared the aversive consequences of i3vt administration of CRH and Ucn at doses that produced comparable decrements in food intake. Experiment 1 found that 1.0 microg Ucn and 2.0 microg CRH produced similar reductions in food intake. Experiment 2 demonstrated that, at these doses, CRH but not Ucn promoted robust and reliable CTA learning. A third experiment showed comparable increased c-Fos-like immunoreactivity after Ucn and CRH in forebrain and hindbrain structures associated with food intake. It is concluded that Ucn, at doses that reduce food intake to levels like that observed after administration of CRH, do not produce similarly aversive consequences.

BETWEEN ECONOMIES IN THE MILL ON THE FLOSS : LOANS VERSUS GIFTS, OR, AUDITING MR. TULLIVER'S ACCOUNTS

Mr. tulliver draws little attention from critics of The Mill on the Floss compared to his children, Maggie and Tom, and his finances are hardly ever looked at in any detail, just as other sections of George Eliots novel that concern economics are not. Yet George Eliot says Mr. Tulliver has his tragedy, as do his daughter and son, and it is precisely Mr. Tullivers money trouble, his bankruptcy, that sets the condition for the troubles of the next generation. I seek to trace a narrative logic for a novel that has seemed to many to strain plot coherence, and I do so by an economic analysis that allows a link to be drawn between such seemingly disparate tragedies as a fathers financial ruin and death and his childrens drowning, with the sister giving up love then life itself to reclaim her brothers favor, seeking in vain to rescue him from a flood.1 So I propose to audit Mr. Tulliverss accounts, with an eye to his discrepant accounting between loans and gifts. Mr. Tulliver confuses the two. He does so in a manner that reveals a distinction that Mr. Tulliver himself only dimly apprehends and disregards to his peril and that of his family. This is a distinction between economies: between capitalism and a precapitalist economy of gift exchange. The Mill on the Floss is set in a period of the latter 1820s-1830s when the newer economics was actively layering onto the still persistent older one. But a demarcation clear enough to abstract categorizing may be easily lost sight of, and Eliots characters sometimes operate according to the older, sometimes the newer economics, without heeding the difference. To such category confusion Eliot traces the tragedies of the father and the daughter and son. And she shows that it is most often transactions between the sexes, and sometimes but less often cross-class transactions between men, that are liable to bring characters to grief between economies. But in order to proceed to Mr. Tulliver and his accounts, we must distinguish basic principles of capitalism, governing loans, and of precapitalist gift exchange.