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Objective To compare aneuploidy rates among IVF cycles using preimplantation genetic testing for monogenic disorders (PGT-M) and aneuploidy (PGT-A) compared to IVF cycles using PGT-A alone, and to determine the likelihood of obtaining at least one usable embryo in cycles using PGT-M+PGT-A compared with cycles using PGT-A alone. Design Retrospective cohort study. Subject All IVF cycles for patients aged 18-45 undergoing PGT-A with or without concurrent PGT-M at a single genetics laboratory from November 2019 to March 2023. Exposure Use of PGT-M+PGT-A versus use of PGT-A alone. Main Outcome Measures Per-cycle aneuploidy rate stratified by age, and per-cycle likelihood of obtaining at least one usable embryo stratified by age and inheritance pattern of monogenic disease. Results A total of 72,522 IVF cycles were included; 4,255 cycles (5.9%) using PGT-M+PGT-A and 68,267 cycles (94.1%) using PGT-A alone. The PGT-M+PGT-A group was younger than the PGT-A alone group (<35 years old: 56.1% vs 30.5%, p<0.001). The majority of PGT-M cycles were performed for autosomal dominant pathogenic variants (42.4%), followed by autosomal recessive (36.5%), X-linked dominant (13.3%), and X-linked recessive (7.5%). The median number of embryos biopsied was higher in PGT-A alone compared to PGT-M+PGT-A cycles for patients aged <35, but it was equivalent in all other age groups. Age stratified aneuploidy rates did not significantly differ between PGT-M+PGT-A compared with PGT-A alone cycles. The probability of having a usable embryo declined with increasing age across all inheritance patterns. Compared with PGT-A alone, PGT-M+PGT-A cycles for patients aged ≤40 across all inheritance patterns were significantly less likely to yield a usable embryo (p<0.01), except in cycles for autosomal recessive diseases in the 38-40 age group and X-linked recessive diseases in the 35-37 age group. There were no consistent differences seen between groups in patients over 40. Cycles for patients with autoso

When Gao Xingjian was proclaimed Nobel Laureate of Literature in 2000, it drew attention to his significant body of literary works that included a collection of short stories, titled Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grandfather (1989), two autobiographical novels titled Soul Mountain (1990) and One Man’s Bible (1999), as well as seventeen plays, three of which when performed in Beijing in the early 1980s, had turned him into an instant celebrity, not just in China, but internationally. His plays Absolute Signal (1982), Bus Stop (1983), and Wild Man (1986) were well known in the English- speaking world soon after their publication in Chinese. However, when his next play, The Other Shore (1986), was banned after a few rehearsals, he relocated to Paris in 1987. His play Escape (1990) about the 4 June 1989 military crackdown on student protesters in Tiananmen Square, resulted in a “virtual ban” on his writings, which could no longer be published, sold, or performed in the People’s Republic of China. This meant that both the author and his works had been airbrushed out of existence, and that Gao Xingjian research would find it impossible to take root in China. Gifted with extraordinary artistic sensibilities and boundless curiosity, Gao was born in Republican China in 1940 into a cosmopolitan family environment and established precocious reading habits from an early age. His formal education began after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, and he subsequently enrolled in a five-year French course at the Foreign Languages Institute in Beijing (1957–1962), where he read widely on modern and contemporary French authors, European writings in French translation, and also in premodern Chinese writings. Such writings were all banned beyond the walls of the Institute library, and Gao’s prolific reading would inform what he began to write in secret for his personal enjoyment, because what he wrote clearly failed to conform with the national guidelines for cultu

In her article "Aesthetics in Gao's Soul Mountain" Mabel Lee analyses Nobel Laureate 2000 Xingjian Gao's aesthetics. Transnational conglomerates today control the book industry from publishing house to bookshop and through aggressive market strategies they exert considerable influence on readers. Nonetheless, there are writers who refuse to capitulate to market demands and seek only to actualize their aesthetic ideas in the creation of literary texts. One such writer is Gao, author of the novel Soul Mountain. Lee posits that Gao's aesthetics is founded on the close interrogation of both Chinese and European models and practices and explores specific aspects of Gao's aesthetics and how these are embedded in his novel Soul Mountain. In an Appendix the article includes lists of Gao's works in Chinese and English, as well as a list of studies on his oeuvre.

In her paper, "Nobel in Literature 2000 Gao Xingjian's Aesthetics of Fleeing," Mabel Lee explores the aesthetic dimensions of Gao Xingjian's play Taowang (Fleeing 1990), and its significance in establishing the recurring motif of "fleeing" in Gao's later writings on literature. Lee argues that the intensely emotional times during which Gao wrote Fleeing were comparable to those seventy years earlier confronting May Fourth writers. Urging his compatriots not to be "bystanders," Lu Xun, the most influential of May Fourth writers, had chosen to allow his creative self to suicide, as shown in the prose-poems of Yecao (Wild Grass 1927). For Gao Xingjian, however, such heroic gestures are anathema. He is prepared to be a "bystander" and he refuses adamantly to sacrifice his creative self. Although the play is undeniably an aesthetic appraisal of a specific political event, Fleeing is resoundingly a declaration for literature that is unburdened by politics.

In her article, "Nobel Laureate 2000 Gao Xingjian and his Novel Soul Mountain," Mabel Lee introduces Gao Xingjian, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature of 2000. Lee is the translator of several of Gao's works from the Chinese into English, including the Nobel's main text of reference, Soul Mountain (first published in Chinese in 1990). Lee's article combines descriptions of Gao's biographical background and its relevance to his work and writing with a brief analysis of literary aspects of Gao's work based on tenets of the comparative literary and cultural studies approach. As is evident in Gao's texts, Lee explains that Gao refuses to enter political and ideological debates in or with his texts and that Gao, consequently, argues vehemently against the inroads on the individual in modern times wreaked by tyrannical politics, mob action, religious fundamentalism, and crass commercialism. For Gao the creation and production of literature represents the solitary act of the individual and thus the return to the author, in theory and practice. In the history of literature, of significance is the fact that this is the first time the Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to an author on the basis of a body of work written in the Chinese language.