The mechanisms by which prolonged estrogen exposures, such as estrogen therapy and pregnancy, reduce thymus weight, cellularity, and CD4 and CD8 phenotype expression, have not been well defined. In this study, the roles played by the membrane estrogen receptor, G protein-coupled receptor 30 (GPR30), and the intracellular estrogen receptors, estrogen receptor alpha (ERalpha) and beta (ERbeta), in 17beta-estradiol (E2)-induced thymic atrophy were distinguished by construction and the side-by-side comparison of GPR30-deficient mice with ERalpha and ERbeta gene-deficient mice. Our study shows that whereas ERalpha mediated exclusively the early developmental blockage of thymocytes, GPR30 was indispensable for thymocyte apoptosis that preferentially occurs in T cell receptor beta chain(-/low) double-positive thymocytes. Additionally, G1, a specific GPR30 agonist, induces thymic atrophy and thymocyte apoptosis, but not developmental blockage. Finally, E2 treatment attenuates the activation of nuclear factor-kappa B in CD25(-)CD4(-)CD8(-) double-negative thymocytes through an ERalpha-dependent yet ERbeta- and GPR30-independent pathway. Differential inhibition of nuclear factor-kappaB by ERalpha and GPR30 might underlie their disparate physiological effects on thymocytes. Our study distinguishes, for the first time, the respective contributions of nuclear and membrane E2 receptors in negative regulation of thymic development.

78 percent of inmates at a state prison in Ohio tested positive for the novel coronavirus; one month later, 70 percent of those incarcerated at the federal prison in Lompoc, California, tested positive. 1 Although they are thousands of kilometers apart, the confirmed cases of coronavirus in these prison populations-with mostly Black prisoners-reveal that the increasing death counts are not an aberration but part of the ongoing tragedy that is built into the prisonindustrial system. Unfortunately, the prisons reused 90 percent of their air, creating a contagious incubator for the hundreds of inmates incarcerated there. The novel coronavirus spreads through the air, so for many people awaiting the end of their sentences their poorly ventilated cells have been sources of contagion.With 1.5 million people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and Black Americans being disproportionately incarcerated, the spread of the coronavirus pandemic for people living in forced confinement has resulted in prison becoming a "contagious incubator." 2 As the Lancet reported in May 2020, prisons do not have the capacity to contain the virus by isolating those infected; the COVID-19 pandemic has shown how closed environments provide ample opportunity for the virus to spread, often making medical staff and visitors, as well as other inmates, vulnerable to contagion. 3 The conditions in jails are even worse when people are denied adequate cleaning supplies. These facts about the COVID-19 crisis speak to a broader issue about the problems of confinement in a carceral state. During this public health crisis, advocates for incarcerated people, such as the ACLU, have called for the most vulnerable to be released for their own protection and that of those around them. 4 They have also called for further isolation and better ventilation to prevent more people from becoming infected. At first glance, one might interpret the prison coronavirus outbreak solely as a political question and regard the contagion there as an extension of a failed political system. Yet the conditions of prisoners point to something deeper, and behind

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How does the War on Terror intersect with what very quickly became known as the War on the Virus?' (p. xiii) This is the question at the heart of historian Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb's Epidemic Empire, a book threaded with directness and postcolonial criticism that breaks through disease poetics to show how war and security are continuously redefined in medical terms. Raza Kolb's mission is to explore how the dynamic epistemology of health is grounded in narrative and the incommensurability between the West and the rest. Even more interesting is the way Raza Kolb challenges historiographyand pedantic historiansby reinforcing an anticolonial tradition based on resistance to capitalism.Epidemic Empire is intricately structured and lofty, offering a timely contribution to the history of medicine and postcolonial studies. The book is made up of three parts: the disease poetics of empire; the body allegorical in French Algeria; and the viral diaspora. On the surface, these might seem like topics that lack common ground. But Raza Kolb reveals how the medicalization of colonized peoples shares rhetorical patterns, which is visible in how Islam features within the framework of the contagious vector. The structurea fluid chord in search of resolutionechoes the anxieties of what it means to live through ill health, or, indeed, a pandemic. The author states, provocatively, that '[t]he global pandemic media landscape has proven just as capable of accommodating Islamophobia as it has discursive histories of yellow peril and myths of East Asian weakness and infirmity' (p. xiv). Raza Kolb also notes that 'empire's disease poetics shapes colonial history and historiography and solidifies the intractable association between violence and epidemic' (p. 17). While metaphors are an extension of societal fear, they are also a vehicle for militarization, the peregrine that flows through the cultural and political outputs of the West. Raza Kolb reflects on how language can be repurposed as an amplification device against narratives that seek to erase, bury, and diminish, and that public health discourse is a dispersed mosaic of the living and the dead, the powerful and the colonized.The author explores how epidemiology emerged as an investigation of disease and demography, a discipline that tried to prevent the often-unrestrained course of epidemics. While there is a major difference between the origins of epidemiology and what it is