Category: Health

WASHINGTON — Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist on Friday threw his support behind House-passed legislation to expand federal financing for human embryonic stem cell research, breaking with President Bush and religious conservatives in a move that could impact his prospects for seeking the White House in 2008.

Dear Editor: Your column called stem cell research foes narrow-minded and illogical, and not caring for “actual people.” But you never mentioned adult stem cell research, which is morally acceptable and has already provided miraculous results, including repair of damaged spinal cords.

Your opinion seems to be that the more important issue is jobs for researchers paid for by funds extracted from Wisconsin taxpayers. If you are looking for good jobs that will do good for actual people, a good place to start would be to support progressive, forward-thinking and effective adult stem cell research.

Halvor Vermund, 88, the first chief of radiation therapy at the University of Wisconsin, died July 21 from a cycling injury in Oslo, Norway.

Vermund helped refine the use of radiation, in the context of surgery and chemotherapy, in the treatment of cancers, particularly of the head and neck. His first research paper was published in 1953, and his 99th research paper will be published later this year.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.