Shares of companies developing stem cell therapies surged Friday evening on word that President Obama on Monday is expected to overturn restrictions that have choked funding for academic stem cell research.
President Obama pledged on the campaign trail to overturn the 2001 policy, which bans government funds for research that involves harvesting new embryonic stem cells. President George W. Bush, who set the policy, said the process is immoral because it destroys human embryos.
For the second time in as many months, the University of Wisconsin Varsity Band will perform in north central Wisconsin.
The band, the spring version of the famous UW Marching Band, will perform at 7 p.m. on Monday, March 9, at Mosinee High School, 1000 High Street. The performance will raise money for the Mosineeâ??s marching band, said Joe Martens of Mosinee, a member of the programâ??s organizing committee.
The Madison area and the University of Wisconsin are full of hockey history.
Much of that legendary history traces back to the late “Badger” Bob Johnson. He was the man known for the phrase “it’s a great day for hockey” and was an icon worldwide in the game of hockey.
Johnson was the UW hockey coach from 1966 to 1981 and lead them to become three-time national champions — 1973, 1977 and 1980 — before winning a Stanley Cup in 1991 in Pittsburgh.
Quoted: Sue Robinson, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has followed The Capital Times’ transformation, says it’s too soon to say whether the move online will succeed.
Quoted: But even well-qualified women choose technical educations and careers less often than men, said Amy Wendt, an electrical engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-director of the universityâ??s Women in Science & Engineering Leadership Institute.
Quoted: Walter Dickey, a University of Wisconsin-Madison law professor and former Department of Corrections secretary, said truth-in-sentencing has come with a high cost to the state. He doesn’t expect early release would have an impact on public safety. Those inmates eventually would be released anyway.
We don’t believe any public institution deserves a blank check from the taxpayers — especially at a time of economic distress.
But some austerity measures, designed to help the state grapple with a $5.5 billion budget shortfall, might produce short-term benefits at the expense of Wisconsin’s long-term well-being.
This week’s meeting of the Univer-sity of Wisconsin Board of Regents underscored the long-range danger.
A dreary day in Jefferson was nowhere near as gloomy as a day more than six years ago now that keeps leading Gail Bailey back to Greenwood Cemetery.
“I’ll never forget that day as long as I live,” said Bailey. “My whole world ended.”
Her son Eddy was a junior at UW Madison. On a November weekend, he made a trip a friend’s football game in LaCrosse. Less than three days later, Eddy died of meningitis.
A group of local grads might be going back to school. They won’t be going back as students, but with the hopes of making waves in the very classrooms that molded them, WISC-TV reported.
For the first time in the 18-year history of “Teach for America,” the program will be part of Milwaukee public schools. For many new graduates looking to work with today’s youth, this means their service to the community can be felt right at home.
Quoted: â??I donâ??t think that fluoride added to domestic potable water is a hazard,â? said UW-Madison water quality specialist Jim Peterson. â??Part of the problem with fluoride is that it was considered a Communist plot to kill all of us capitalists in the â??50s and is considered a governmental interference with individual rights by some vocal folks. … Bad but interesting science takes a long time to beat down,â? he said.
Between studying and going to class last week, second-year University of Wisconsin-Madison medical student Siavash Sarlati flew to the White House to brainstorm ideas for health care reform with President Barack Obama and other leaders.
Sarlati, a 24-year-old from Milwaukee, was one of seven citizens invited to join lawmakers, business leaders and others gathered in Washington, D.C., for a forum billed as a â??first stepâ? to health care reform.
Quoted: Andrew Reschovsky, an economist at UW-Madison, said school boards will be faced with increasing property taxes in an uncertain economic climate.
â??School boards that are making these decisions will be, if anything, under a lot of pressure to lower property taxes,â? Reschovsky said. â??Districts, particularly, property-poor districts, will get a lot of push back to lower property taxes.â?
If you become a patient at UW Hospital or any other UW Health organization, you should feel confident that decisions made on your case are in your interest, untainted by any financial relationships a doctor or other health professional might have with the medical industry.
For that reason, UW Health organizations should adopt the stricter conflict-of-interest policy recommended by a committee of UW doctors and health professionals.
My first instinct on hearing that Duke Ellington is now the first African-American to appear alone on a coin was to call Marsh Smith and sit him down at a table at Babe’s on Schroeder Road and get him to tell me the story of the Duke’s appearance at the Memorial Union in the 1950s, when Marsh was handling the Union’s public relations.
The blue “Washburn W” is disappearing from the university’s campus, a victim of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s “Walking W.”
The Washburn University Book Store conducted a sale last week that cleansed it of most of the T-shirts, coffee mugs and other paraphernalia bearing the blue W that UW-Madison contended in a lawsuit was too similar to its trademarked red W. Because of the lawsuit, all of the old W-branded items have to be removed from the bookstore by Monday.
President Obama plans to sign an executive order today largely ending eight years of limits on federal financing of human-embryonic-stem-cell research that have tangled university laboratories in bureaucracy while slowing advances in one of the most promising fields of medical research.
Mr. Obama is acting just three weeks after he signed an economic-stimulus measure that allocates more than $10-billion for medical research (The Chronicle, February 25). His move will now free some of that money for an avenue of work fraught with ethical and political dilemmas and yet loaded with potential for fighting mankindâ??s toughest diseases.
UW students say new code of conduct rules that could punish them for what they do off-campus go to far.
The Board of Regents is working on updating the student code of conduct, which hasn’t been revised for over ten years. The United Council of University of Wisconsin Students is participating in that process, but is not happy with some of the changes the board wants to make to chapter 17 cases.
A University of Wisconsin System spokesman said Gov. Jim Doyle’s budget does not skim 1 percent of donations meant for public broadcasting.
UW Extension Chancellor David Wilson warned publicly Thursday that Doyle’s budget might divert 1 percent of Wisconsin Public Radio and Wisconsin Public Television donations. He said he was hearing from upset donors and warned the plan could hurt contributions.
Fire crews were called Saturday to the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus to deal with a fire in the Engineering Centers building.
The building was evacuated. Authorities said that the fire was likely caused by a researcher putting test tubes into an oven, which is a standard procedure.
As colleges weigh this yearâ??s round of applications, high school seniors are not the only anxious ones.
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Just as nervously, colleges â?? facing a financial landscape they have never seen before â?? are trying to figure out how many students to accept, and how many students will accept them.
It is the moment some scientists have been waiting for. Monday, President Barack Obama is expected to overturn an 8-year limit on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.
These so-called master cells can turn into any type of cell in the body. Scientists believe their exploration and manipulation will lead to treatments for diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, and spinal cord injuries.
Researchers say the limits slowed progress of discoveries.
“The situation became so absurd,” said Professor Ronald Kalil at the UW School of Medicine,” That if you were working with these lines in a lab in which you had equipment that was funded by the federal government, you couldn’t use that equipment to look at the cells. In some cases, people just picked up and they went off campus.”
President Barack Obama is expected to sign an executive order on Monday reversing restrictions on federal funding of human embryonic stem-cell research.
In Madison, where the cells were first derived in 1998 by University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher James Thomson, the long-expected move should expand stem-cell research even as it diminishes the use of Thomsonâ??s cells nationwide, a campus scientist said.
“The demand for (Thomsonâ??s) cells will decrease,” said Dr. Tim Kamp, co-director of the universityâ??s Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Center. “But this will allow us to use stem-cell lines that were derived under more optimal conditions.”
Nearly 80 percent of hospitals in the state have standardized the colors of patient wristbands, but Meriter Hospital is the only one in Madison to have joined them.
Hospitals in Madison, meanwhile, continue to use different colors for warning labels on bags of medications.
Students working on college newspapers across the USA are learning an all-too-real-world lesson: Their papers face the same advertising revenue declines and expense cutbacks as their professional counterparts.
Since the start of the current school year, daily newspapers at schools including Syracuse University, New York University, the University of California-Berkeley, Ball State, Boston University and Georgia Southern have cut one edition a week â?? usually Friday’s â?? because of weak advertising.
When times were better, Susan and David Bersie considered sending their only son to an East Coast college where he could enjoy a traditional four-year education and broaden his life experiencesâ??an opportunity that his mom says she missed out on.
But as Jake Bersie, 18, nears the end of senior year at Carmel Catholic High School in Mundelein, the family faces an entirely different scenario. David was laid off from his marketing sales job in November. Susan is struggling to keep her small medical supplies business afloat.
Noted: Siavash Sarlati is a 24-year old Iranian-born, American citizen, and a medical student at the University of Wisconsin. After completing high school, he pursued a degree in Biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, graduating with honors. Siavash is currently a second-year medical student at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, and he hopes to pursue a Masters in Public Health. Siavash hosted a health care community discussion in December. He is interested in doing his residency in an under-served urban area.
Post-herpetic neuralgia, a complication of shingles, can be so exquisitely painful that some sufferers can’t stand for clothes to touch their skin during an episode.
So the idea of treating the pain with lots of capsaicin, the active ingredient in hot chili peppers, might seem odd.
But that’s exactly what scientists, such as Dr. Miroslav Backonja of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, have been studying with some success.
Gov. Jim Doyle should rethink his plan to require the University of Wisconsin to transfer money from private donations to help balance the state budget.
The governor is trying to plug a $5.7 billion budget shortfall and is using a combination of cuts in spending and new taxes to cover part of the deficit. The state will also use about $3 billion in money from the federal economic stimulus plan to makes ends meet.
Small farmers served by a university center that “keeps its feet in the dirt” worry that the resource is becoming endangered.
“We felt the center had great value the way it was,” says Dale Secher, who runs Carandale Farm near Oregon, of the UW-Madison’s Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems. “It was doing work in an area typically not worked on, and especially when you talk about the future of sustainability, this is very, very important. The center needs to survive in some place and some fashion.”
Quoted: So why are kids doing it? Bradford Brown, Professor of Educational Psychology and Human Development at UW Madison, says this is where communication has progressed for youths.
Despite their sometimes hard-hearted reputation, UW-Madison parking enforcers are writing fewer tickets and extracting less money from motorists than in prior years, according to a State Journal review of citations data.
And hereâ??s something to keep in mind: complaining about a ticket usually works. The university has dismissed 68 percent of the tickets appealed by motorists since 2005.
Proposed budget cuts would force the University of Wisconsin System to cut academic programs and impede its plans to educate more students and do more research, university officials warned Thursday.
President Kevin Reilly said the Growth Agenda – a long-term plan in which campuses boost enrollments, expand some academic programs and improve research – would be slowed under Gov. Jim Doyle’s budget.
Wednesday evening, at the Sa-Bai Thong restaurant on Odana Road, a distinguished-looking visitor from Thailand eased into a booth and smiled broadly as he was handed a copy of a newspaper story four decades old.
Pongsak Payakvichien is a legend in journalism in Thailand. When the Wisconsin Alumni Association (WAA) presented him with its Distinguished Alumni Award in 2000, they noted that he had “almost single-handedly brought about Thai journalism’s coming-of-age.”
Noted: Q: How do snow fences work?
A: Snow picked up by winds can reduce visibility and cover roads.
We cannot switch off the wind, but we can slow it down.
UW-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin on Thursday painted a grim picture of the universityâ??s fortunes under Gov. Jim Doyleâ??s proposed budget, saying it could result in the loss of faculty and staff, the elimination of courses, and caps on the numbers of students in popular programs.
Martin, speaking at a UW Board of Regents meeting, said she asked the deans of UW-Madison schools and colleges to explore how they would reduce 5 percent of their budgets, which roughly equals its share of cuts.
â??In every college, it would inevitably mean cuts in faculty lines, in academic staff and in graduate funding,â? Martin said.
Some said they believe University of Wisconsin Hospital Med Flight helicopter crash last May that killed all three onboard could have been prevented if the chopper had been equipped federally-recommended safety gear.
And some former Med Flight workers pointed to lax federal regulation and Med Flight’s management as reasons why the safety gear wasn’t on the Med Flight helicopter when it crashed.
The fatal crash of a University of Wisconsin Hospital Med Flight helicopter last May rocked the medical community and the families of the three victims, but some said they believe the tragedy could have been avoided.
A WISC-TV investigation into the Med Flight crash that killed three people found not just sorrow but also anger and frustration because the $4 to $5 million helicopter did not have $100,000 worth of safety equipment.
Noted: “Simply put, it takes about twice as much biomass to replace an equivalent weight of coal,” says Ken Ragland, UW-Madison emeritus mechanical engineering professor. Coal contains roughly 12,000 British thermal units of heat per pound, while dry biomass has about 6,000 to 9,000.
But energy yield is hardly the only consideration, he adds. “You also have to think about the moisture content. Biomass doesnâ??t start out dry â?? a green tree is half water.”
Ronald William Harrington, age 72, passed away unexpectedly at his home on Tuesday, March 3, 2009. Ronald worked for more than 37 years for the University of Wisconsin Physics Department prior to his retirement in 1993.
Maryan L. (Bakken) Bertelsen has died. Maryan worked for the University of Wisconsin Department of Behavioral Disabilities from 1967 to 1978. At the University of Wisconsin she was a friend and confidant of many graduate students, who often brought her mementos from around the world.
Vivian J. (Hall) Williams, age 89, passed away peacefully at Belmont Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Madison, on Tuesday, March 3, 2009. Vivian worked as a cook at a fraternity house at the University of Wisconsin for several years, and then she was employed by the University Hospital for 18 years until she retired.
Stephen Edward Horkan, age 96, died on Tuesday, March 3, 2009. Upon graduation in 1935 with a degree in PHB, Stephen was employed in the business office of the University of Wisconsin. During his 40-year career at the University, he held the titles of chief accountant, controller, assistant vice president and budget officer, and vice president emeritus.
Noted: In a much smaller study at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, seven patients with acute myeloid leukemia were scanned at various times during a week of aggressive chemotherapy. Normally, doctors wait a month after chemo is stopped to see if it worked. But the FLT PET scans offered an answer as soon as a day after treatment started.
“It’s always hard to get too excited about a study that just involves seven people,” said Dr. Mark Juckett, one of the authors. But “in these few patients, it looked like we could predict those who were going to respond well to chemotherapy and those who weren’t.”
Itâ??s a good thing Barry Alvarez was better at constructing a defense on the football field than he is at constructing one in the court of public opinion.
Last week, Alvarez, the University of Wisconsinâ??s football coach-turned-athletic director, offered a laughable defense for the Athletic Departmentâ??s Exceptional Achievement Award Policy in the wake of criticism from faculty who think the easily achieved performance bonuses are just another way to funnel money to coaches without making their salaries appear to be extravagant.
The manager of the landmark dairy store at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has been fired for selling outdated ice cream – but she claims her age, not the ice cream’s, is to blame.
Eileen Karre, 61, managed Babcock Dairy Store, which sells milk, cheese and ice cream made at the nation’s first dairy school. The store is a campus institution familiar to generations of dairy lovers in the region.
Her July 1 termination letter accuses her of selling ice cream past its expiration date and jeopardizing product quality and food safety at the $500,000 annual business.
Quoted: Walter Dickey, a University of Wisconsin-Madison law professor and former Department of Corrections secretary, said truth-in-sentencing has come with a high cost to the state. He doesn’t expect early release would have an impact on public safety. Those inmates eventually would be released anyway.
Washburn University is ahead of schedule in pacifying the University of Wisconsin-Madison over the use of a stylized letter “W.”
An agreement resulting from a trademark infringement lawsuit by UW-Madison called for all items bearing Washburn’s blue version of the letter — similar to UW’s red W — to be removed from the Washburn University Book Store by next Monday.
As if double-majoring in both physics and French wasnâ??t enough, UW-Madison senior Grant Teply decided to add a third major in math. Then he tacked on astronomy. And finally, for good measure, philosophy.
Teply, who is graduating this spring in a highly efficient four years, said his decision to quintuple major wasnâ??t exactly pre-meditated. Once he learned he could, his attitude was more one of, why not?
University of Wisconsin System leaders are questioning a provision in Gov. Jim Doyle’s budget that appears to use some income from private donations to help balance the state budget.
Doyle’s budget requires the system to cut 1 percent of its program revenue, or about $28.5 million, “to create additional efficiencies and balance the budget.”
UW System spokesman David Giroux said officials believe the budget would require campuses to transfer $10.7 million in income from gifts, donations and trust funds to the general fund. That doesn’t make sense, he said, and comes as universities increasingly rely on private funds instead of tax dollars for their operations.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison fraternity has voluntarily suspended its social activities while Madison police investigate an alleged October sexual assault at its Langdon Street house.
Madison Police Capt. Mary Schauf confirmed that police are investigating the reported assault at Sigma Chi, 221 Langdon St.
There have been no arrests but Schauf said there has been an active investigation since early October.
The multi-billion dollar state budget deficit is forcing the UW system to tighten its belt.
UW System must cut up to $174-million over the next two years, of which $25-million must be used for student financial aid. The money will come from schoolsâ?? auxiliary funds. As a result, UW-La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow says theyâ??ll have to delay projects and charge students $100 more a year to live in the dorms. (Fourth item.)
“The legislators need to rethink how to pay for financial aid and find another place to get that money,â? says Gow. â??Or, if it’s not available, then just reconsider this plan however well-intentioned it might be.”
UW System spokesman David Giroux says cuts are difficult to make and may affect student education. But, he says one thing they wonâ??t do is pass the buck along to students to make up losses.
Quoted: Thunder and lightning during a snowstorm is different from a run-of-the-mill snowstorm; it is extremely rareâ??fewer than 1 percent of observed snowstorms unleash thundersnow, according to a 1971 NSW study. But recorded observations of the phenomenon date back to 250 B.C., say ancient Chinese records translated in 1980 by atmospheric scientist Pao-Kuan Wang, now of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Others have come to the administrationâ??s defense. The Washington Postâ??s editorial board and the University of Wisconsin economist Menzie Chinn, for example, have noted that the White House numbers were in line with other economistsâ?? estimates, even if the White House estimates were on the more optimistic side.
Quoted: Ann Althouse of the University of Wisconsin Law School suggested yesterday that the reaction to Jindal and his speech might be racist: â??If thereâ??s someone of a different race, and you just have this gut feeling that somethingâ??s not quite right, why are you so confident that itâ??s not coming from racism?â?
Lillian Lueck Wagner, age 88, died on Tuesday, March 3, 2009. Lillian was employed as an administrative assistant at UW Residence Halls and in 1950, transferred to the UW Physical Plant, retiring in 1981.
On Monday afternoon, for what may have been the first time in 30 years, I was back in a classroom on the UW-Madison campus.
Like the old days, I tried to hide in the back row. Still, once I heard about this event, there was no keeping me away.
“This is like the Academy Awards,” Doug Bradley was saying into a microphone, up on stage. “Only a week later.”
Carl E. Gulbrandsen, WARF managing director, told the monthly WisBusiness.com luncheon that the new federal stimulus package is good news for UW-Madison research.
â??The university is in the sweet spot of the stimulus package,â? Gulbrandsen said Monday, singling out projects like the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery being built on campus, and the medical research, bio-energy and green energy sectors.
He said WARF, which helps spur UW-Madison research then licenses results to the private sector, is an â??83-year-old start-upâ? that has had â??one home run after anotherâ? dating back to Vitamin D discoveries in the 1920s.
Dozens of entrepreneurial University of Wisconsin-Madison students took part in a 100-hour “Wiscontrepreneur” challenge.
The contest required teams to use materials from the UW Swap shop — the campus store selling surplus equipment — to create a valuable, innovative or socially beneficial product.
“I think you learned a little bit about what it might take to be an entrepreneur. I hope some of you are invigorated with that spirit and are ready to take the plunge and do something with this,” Doug Bradley, of the UW-Madison Office of Corporate Relations, said to the participants.
Madison Alderman Eli Judge is working with UW-Madison students to develop a “Madison Property Ratings” website for the campus area.
The project will help renters and property owners by focusing on the quality of campus area housing in Madison.
The site will be similar to the already popular “Rate My Professor” site, but instead will enco
The Babcock Hall Dairy Store on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus is teaming up with the Wisconsin Film Festival to create a new ice cream flavor.
The flavor, called In The Dark, was unveiled on Monday morning and is a chocolate-packed concoction. The chocolate malt ice cream includes truffles, fudge swirls and pecans, WISC-TV reported.
