The University of Wisconsin’s research foundation has signed its first licensing agreement with a private company to develop commercial products using embryonic stem cell technology developed at the school.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which holds the patents to human embryonic stem cell discoveries made at UW-Madison, and Chemicon International of Temecula, Calif., announced the agreement this week.
Brandon Gordon was a low-key New York City kid, his freshman roommate a Southern preppy boarding school grad who partied hard when he got to college. The year they spent living cheek-by-jowl in a Brown University dorm room produced few fond memories.
Susan Kurien is apart of that group called the Consumer Law Litigation Clinic. She says, “part of what our clinic tries to do is help clients who don’t necessarily have the means to hire their own attorneys. Our flexibility here at the clinic is that we are a non profit.”
The conference has reached a four-year deal that added the Insight Bowl in Tempe, Ariz., and the Champs Sports Bowl in Orlando, Fla., to the list of Big Ten bowl partners, starting in 2006.
After this season, the Big Ten will drop the Sun Bowl in El Paso, Texas, and the Music City Bowl in Nashville, Tenn.
Quoted: Barry Orton, a professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
I am an addict. And I�m not alone. There is a new addiction plaguing college campuses: online gambling.
In one case that briefly captivated national attention about student gambling in June 2003, a student at the University of Wisconsin murdered three roommates because he owed them thousands in gambling debts.
Gov. Jim Doyle announced Tuesday that he would use his veto power to provide nearly $50 million more in funding for students and staff in the University of Wisconsin System than had been approved by the Republican-controlled Legislature.
MADISON – Before Congress takes its traditional August break, the Senate may help decide the future of federal support for human embryonic stem cell research. Let’s hope a scientifically sound and ethical resolution is reached – and that states such as Wisconsin follow the lead.
STEVENS POINT – Recent high school graduate Megan Sedahl will be staying close to home for college, but her parents aren’t convinced that will make things easier when Sedahl goes off to school in the fall.
Sedahl, a 2005 graduate of Stevens Point Area Senior High, will begin classes in September as a full-time freshman at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. She’ll live in the dorms and in all other ways be a traditional college student.
Many an angler has waxed poetic about “the big one” that got away. But Zeb Hogan has a real fish tale: an actual catch of the world’s largest known freshwater fish.
It happened as the University of Wisconsin biologist was trekking across Mongolia, part of an 18-month scientific effort to study the world’s largest fish. While there, Dr. Hogan got the message he had been hoping for: an e-mail describing a newly caught catfish the size of a grizzly bear.
Actor Michael J. Fox brought his star power to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to tout a bill to expand federal research into human embryonic stem cells.
Anti-cloning legislation passed by the state Assembly last month has triggered a debate over what is more important: Economic development linked to the potential for new cures or ethical concerns over research that uses human embryos. The debate has pitted Republicans against Republicans and stem cell pioneer James Thomson against Rep. Steve Kestell (R-Elkhart Lake), the lawmaker behind the bill. Across the nation, other state legislatures are grappling with cloning concerns. The debate’s ramifications are particularly significant in Wisconsin, given the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s distinction as the place where human embryonic stem cells were first isolated and cultured and its reputation as a leader in life sciences research.
Madison has had its turn. Now the suburbs of Dane County are being recognized as among the country’s best places to live.
Middleton came in seventh Monday on a list released by CNN and Money Magazine, which “spent months looking for Great American Towns – where you would want to raise your children and celebrate life’s milestones,” according to their Web site.
Life on earth evolved from and interacts with an incomprehensibly vast and complex array of chemical entities. Until modern times, however, no single species affected the biosphere substantially. With industrialization and population growth, humanity now threatens the existence of hundreds of species, and perhaps the long-term health of the planet as a whole.
(Dr. Bruce Barrett is an assistant professor in the Department of Family Medicine at UW-Madison.)
Jolene Anderson and Caitlin Gibson should be listed as unofficial recruiters for the University of Wisconsin women’s basketball team.
That’s because Anderson and Gibson are doing their best to sell the Badgers’ program to prospective recruits.
Dear Editor: As an alum and now a faculty member at UW-Madison, I am saddened by the declining quality of resources for educational programs and the waning morale of my fellow UW employees….
Is the University of Wisconsin admitting too many students?
Newly appointed Regent Tom Loftus raised that issue Thursday as a reluctant Board of Regents approved a 6.9 percent resident tuition increase. The vote was 10 to 6.
Loftus, a former Assembly speaker and Democratic candidate for governor, said that in 1986 the UW System faced a similar issue and restricted enrollment. Now the system is back at historic high levels. In the last eight years the system has added 12,418 students, he said.
Dear Editor: I am an American, a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a daughter, granddaughter, sister, niece, cousin and friend. And I am a liberal. I am all these things and more, and I am living with an incurable, deadly disease. I have cystic fibrosis.
….Embryonic stem cells could provide treatments or cures for many diseases, not just cystic fibrosis. I want to ask you: How you can promise to fight for the lives of people who do not exist yet, and look living citizens in the eye and not fight for their lives?
Insurance coverage of medications that help people quit smoking rose 32 percent from 2002-04, according to a survey by the UW-Madison Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention.
Of the more than 3 million insured Wisconsin residents included in the 2004 survey, 74 percent have coverage for at least one stop-smoking medication through their health plans. In 2002, only 56 percent had that benefit.
The Assembly approved one of the nation’s toughest bans on human cloning Thursday despite concerns the bill would cripple embryonic stem cell research in the state where it was discovered.
The bill not only bans cloning to create a baby but also outlaws so-called therapeutic cloning that researchers say could advance the understanding of genetic diseases. It also would prohibit Wisconsin scientists from using embryos cloned in research labs in other states.
Two new awards were added to the already impressive list of honors presented over the years to Dr. Herbert Sandmire of Green Bay.
He was named the recipient of the Ralph Hawley Distinguished Service Award presented by the University of Wisconsin Medical Alumni Association Awards Committee and the Board of Directors at an awards banquet in Madison. It was given in recognition of his contributions to community, profession and to a broad segment of society.
Ron Reschke of Madison, whose friend died of stomach cancer, wanted to do something to fight the terrible disease. So he started walking.
Reschke left Madison more than seven weeks ago and has put one foot in front of the other all the way to La Crosse, Eau Claire, Ashland, Rhinelander and Merrill –more than 600 miles.
He took a break in Wausau over the weekend before starting what will be the second half of his journey through Appleton, Sheboygan, Milwaukee and finally back to Madison. He chose to visit cities with cancer centers.
Sometimes the simplest reactions to complicated problems can have great impact. Reschke has managed to raise thousands of dollars for the UW-Madison Comprehensive Cancer Center. His goal before he left was to collect $30,000, with all profit going to the center.
A proposal to give landmark status to the former Rennebohm’s drugstore at University and Randall avenues came in for tough sledding before the Madison Landmarks Commission.
The building at 1353 University Ave., built in 1925, is one of several in a run-down former commercial strip that would be demolished to make way for the first phase of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute for Discovery. Construction is tentatively scheduled to begin later this year.
A bill to make human cloning a crime in Wisconsin is nothing more than a “back-door attempt to criminalize embryonic stem cell research,” UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley says.
“That’s the only reason I can think of for banning a tool that could be used for good or for ill,” Wiley told state lawmakers on Monday.
Dear Editor: I do not believe our elected officials understand the importance of the availability of emergency contraception to University of Wisconsin students.
If women become pregnant because they were unable to use the morning-after pill, they will most likely seek surgical abortions. Those few who don’t have abortions might leave college, and possibly the state.
f you’ve never heard of the Madison-based group of doctors who’ve helped countless patients disfigured since birth or by violent civil war gain access to reconstructive surgeries – well, good.
These guys want to keep their humanitarian works quiet.
“We’re all below-the-radar people,” says Dr. John Noon, a co-founder of Eduplast and a clinical professor of plastic and reconstructive surgery at the UW-Madison.
A shaky, amateurish video shows everything in graphic detail: Four masked people break into darkened university labs, pour toxic chemicals onto computers and stacks of files, and release hundreds of research rats and mice. They spray-paint walls with slogans such as “Science not Sadism” and “Free the Animals.”
The November break-in at the University of Iowa’s Spence Laboratories – a crime for which there have been no arrests but for which the group Animal Liberation Front, or ALF, has claimed responsibility – is characterized by university and law-enforcement officials as terrorism.
Drinking vegetable juice, getting regular exercise, even brushing your teeth could offer protection against Alzheimer’s, a much-feared brain disease that affects 4.5 million people in the USA. Those and other findings were reported Sunday in Washington, D.C., at the first Alzheimer’s Association International Conference on the Prevention of Dementia.
Quoted: Mark Sager, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Medical School
WAUSAU (AP) – A Madison man walking around the state to support a new University of Wisconsin-Madison cancer research building took a break in Wausau over the weekend before embarking on the second half of his journey.
Ron Reschke left his home in Madison on April 29 and since then has traveled more than 600 miles, stopping in La Crosse, Eau Claire, Ashland, Rhinelander and Merrill.
Anyone caught cloning a human being in Wisconsin could face up to a decade in prison and a million dollars in forfeitures under a Republican bill that outraged stem cell scientists fear could handcuff their work in the state.
The measure would ban cloning to create babies. It also would outlaw so-called therapeutic cloning, a term for cloning human embryos for research such as extracting stem cells. Embryos are destroyed after taking out the cells.
The bill also would ban a practice called parthenogenesis, in which a female egg cell is stimulated to divide without fertilizing it.
Washington – Middle-aged sons and daughters of people with Alzheimer’s disease might be able to reduce their risk of getting the disorder through lifestyle measures such as exercise, avoiding gum disease, consuming alcohol in moderation, and drinking fruit and vegetable juices, according to new research from Wisconsin and elsewhere.
Madison native Ron Reschke knows what it is like to lose someone to cancer. Reschke lost a friend to the disease and decided he was not going to sit around and do nothing.
WAUSAU, Wis. (AP) – A Madison man walking around the state to support a new University of Wisconsin cancer research building is taking a break in Wausau this weekend before embarking on the second half of his journey.
Ron Reschke left his home in Madison on April 29 and since then he has traveled more than 600 miles, stopping in La Crosse, Eau Claire, Ashland, Rhinelander and Merrill.
The state Assembly once again put politics above patients’ medical needs when members voted almost entirely along party lines Tuesday in favor of the so-called “conscience protection” bill, AB 207.
The legislation would allow health professionals, without fear of repercussion, to refuse to participate in procedures such as extracting embryonic stem cells for research or removing a feeding tube, if the action conflicts with their moral or religious beliefs.
The state Assembly late Thursday narrowly passed a bill that would prohibit University of Wisconsin System health clinics from advertising, prescribing or dispensing the morning-after pill to students.
Madison-based Stratatech Corp. has received a federal grant of nearly $1 million it will use to work to enhance the ability of its engineered human skin products to promote the healing of chronic wounds.
….Stratatech’s products are based on a patented, unique source of pathogen-free human skin cells identified at the UW-Madison as being able to multiply indefinitely.
In a rare show of bipartisanship, two state lawmakers and a former top aide to Gov. Jim Doyle are proposing a $13.5 billion-a-year plan that would guarantee health insurance coverage for all Wisconsin residents.
The proposal was unveiled this morning during a hearing before the Assembly Medicaid Reform Committee.
The plan would require all employers – large and small – to pay into a statewide pool run by a new, private nonprofit corporation. The pool would be similar to the state’s unemployment compensation and workers’ compensation funds.
Dr. Hans W. Sollinger, 58, professor of transplant surgery at UW Medical School and chairman of the hospital’s Organ Transplantation Department, performed a record number of 379 kidney transplants in 2004 at UW Hospital.
“The quality of life with a kidney from a living donor is almost always better than a deceased donor’s kidney,” he said.
The state Assembly passed a bill Tuesday intended to protect health care and biotechnology workers who object on moral or religious grounds to performing certain procedures.
Sometimes, good intentions, like good deeds, not only go unrecognized but actually end up causing problems. An example is the decision earlier this year by health officials at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to advocate the use of emergency contraception for female students on spring break to prevent unwanted pregnancies.
Congress should leave the nation’s patent law alone, says the director of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
Carl Gulbrandsen is in Washington today to testify on the Patent Act of 2005 before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property. Gulbrandsen, who also serves on an advisory committee to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, spoke to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property last week.
In that testimony, he said the proposed legislation “chips away at the value of university patents for the benefit of certain industries and, thereby, diminishes the good that can come from university technology transfer.”
Farmers’ routine application of chemical fertilizers and manure to the land poses a far greater environmental problem to freshwater lakes than previously thought, potentially polluting the water for hundreds of years, according to new research.
In a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a University of Wisconsin-Madison expert blames the buildup largely on industrial agriculture’s excessive use of fertilizer and manure since the 1940s.
The concentration could cause the eutrophication of lakes for centuries as the treated soil slowly washes into lakes and streams, writes Stephen Carpenter, a professor of zoology and a leading expert on freshwater lakes.
Even empty political rhetoric can have disastrous consequences. The increasingly phony political posturing over stem cell research has the potential to ruin real lives and to wreck the state’s real economic future.
In his intriguing book “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” Thomas Frank advanced the idea that Republican politicians who pander to religious extremists on so-called cultural issues don’t really want to win.
According to Frank, Republican strategists are fully aware they can never hope to overcome the U.S. Constitution to outlaw abortion, force prayer in public schools or send people to prison for burning dry goods that happen to be red, white and blue.
Dear Editor: It was with frustration that I read about the amount of money the state has saved with the use of Navitus Health Solutions for prescription drug coverage for state employees. What the article didn’t mention is that many individuals have had to change to entirely different medications in place of ones they have taken for years with benefit. Often the new medication isn’t as effective or has bothersome side effects.
A $1.3 million federal grant announced last week is expected to loosen the logjam of nursing wannabes in Wisconsin and could help address nationwide concerns over nursing shortages. The University of Wisconsin System and a partnership of educators, job developers and employers plan to use the money from the U.S. Department of Labor to devise a faster way to encourage more Wisconsin nurses to teach.
Quoted: Jon Keevil, an assistant professor of heart and vascular care at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Did you know gasoline evaporating from that old can in your garage puts harmful pollutants into the air?
The Dane County Clean Air Coalition, in partnership with UW-Madison and the city of Madison, will try to put a dent into the old gas can supply Saturday during a gas can exchange at Goodman Park (formerly Franklin Field). The park is at 1402 Wingra Creek Parkway, off Olin Avenue.
A proposal to offer the option of health savings accounts to state employees encountered strong opposition from the Department of Employee Trust Funds at the State Capitol on Thursday.
Federal law authorizes individuals to establish health savings accounts into which they and their employers can make tax-exempt contributions that can be used to pay for certain medical expenses, in exchange for a high deductible health plan. The theory behind it is that individuals who are using their own money will not spend it as freely as they do now.
WASHINGTON – At the Senate’s first hearing Wednesday on a bill that would expand embryonic stem cell research, Dr. Su-Chun Zhang of the University of Wisconsin-Madison spoke in support of the measure, saying the United States was first to conduct breakthrough research on embryonic stem cells and shouldn’t be left behind.
“We Americans actually led the world by first establishing this human embryonic stem cell work. We should not be left out,” Zhang told the Senate Aging Committee. “The senators won’t let us down in leading the world in this area of promising research, which includes saving lives for all Americans.”
Zhang is a colleague of Dr. James Thomson, noted for founding the field of stem cell research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Mithridion Inc., a Fitchburg-based company that is developing drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease, has won the second annual Governor’s Business Plan Contest.
Mithridion, the top-scoring plan in the Life Sciences category, will receive $20,000 in cash and a year’s free rent at 525 Science Drive in University Research Park – an $80,000 value.
The firm’s co-founders are Jeff Johnson, an associate professor in the UW-Madison Pharmaceutical Sciences Division, and Trevor Twose, company CEO.
The U.S. Department of Labor has awarded the University of Wisconsin System $1.37 million to boost its university nursing programs and efforts to recruit and train health care educators. [Fourth item]
At first glance, the nation’s emotional debate over stem cell research seems a mere rerun of the unending dispute over abortion. Both involve the questions about protecting the development of human life, after all.
But there are important moral and religious distinctions between the two issues, and some groups that oppose abortion are not offended by stem cell experiments — even though they necessarily destory human embryos.
The state’s refusal to grant domestic partner benefits to its employees does not violate the Wisconsin Constitution, the attorney general argued in urging a Dane County judge to throw out a lawsuit challenging the decision.Six state employees filed suit in April claiming a state law excluding gay partners of state employees from health benefits violates the constitution’s equal rights protection clause, which guarantees equal treatment for people in similar situations.
In a brief filed late Friday, Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager denied the plaintiffs’ claim and pointed out a state appeals court rejected similar arguments in a 1992 decision.
Four Green Bay students attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison Medical School with dreams of having the title of ââ?¬Å?Dr.ââ?¬Â in front of their names took one step closer to their goals today by graduating this spring.
Quoted: James Stein, MD, principal investigator and codirector of the Preventive Cardiology Program and director of the Vascular Health Screening Program at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics, in Madison.
A state lawmaker said Thursday the Legislature needs to send a message of disapproval to the University of Wisconsin System after a school clinic urged students to get advance prescriptions for emergency contraception before leaving on spring break. (Fourth item)
Quoted: Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
WASHINGTON – Madison researchers and U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin hailed the passage by the House of Representatives of two bills that would relax restrictions on stem cell research.
After more than six hours of debate, the House voted Tuesday to pass two stem cell bills allowing federal funding for researchers to explore umbilical cord cells and extending embryonic stem cell research beyond limits imposed by the Bush administration.
A bipartisan group of senators is pushing the Senate leadership to take up the bills, but President Bush has vowed to veto the kind of bills that passed Tuesday.
A federal trial is scheduled next week involving major makers of scientific equipment, the University of Wisconsin and an entrepreneur, all over who can profit from a device most people know from high school chemistry.
At stake is millions of dollars in U.S. sales of the adjustable pipette, the syringe-like instrument that researchers around the world use to measure and transfer liquids from one container to another.
