Peter Jones came to the University of Wisconsin-Madison from the University of Bristol thanks to a scholarship from the Worldwide Universities Network, a global research and graduate education network that develops collaboration among 18 universities here and internationally — and helps individual students.
Dear Editor:
….There are different types of stem cells — embryonic, adult, and umbilical. I have no problem with, and in fact have supported, research efforts utilizing adult and umbilical stem cells. But embryonic stem cell research kills human life.
The successes of adult and umbilical stem cell research are widespread and well known and, as a result, I believe this is where we should focus our research — on proven, successful methods.
Dear Editor: We welcome the attention called by Monday’s Capital Times article (Is Warming our fault?) to Professor Reid Bryson’s lengthy and distinguished career. However, we wish to make it absolutely clear that his opinions on global warming are not shared by other scientists at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Climatic Research and Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.
The scientific evidence for human causation of global warming is now very strong, and gets stronger every year.
Q. After rains, why do worms slither out onto the pavement and “commit suicide?”
A. After a strong rain, the corpses of worms strewn across the pavement are a disgusting sight — or a pathetic one, depending on your sympathy for these slithery invertebrates.
But what’s the advantage of suicide? Teri Balser, an associate professor of soil and ecosystem ecology at UW-Madison, says the answer starts with the fact that worms breathe through their skin.
People with type 1 diabetes who smoke are more than twice as likely to have an episode of severe hypoglycemia, or very low blood sugar, as those who have never smoked, according to a new study.
Hypoglycemia can cause mental confusion, or even coma or seizures in severe instances. “Smoking, through its effect on hormone regulation and insulin clearance, has been hypothesized to result in severe hypoglycemia,” Dr. Ronald Klein, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and colleagues write in the journal Diabetes Care.
President Bush vetoed a bill that would allow new federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. Alta Charo, professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin Law School, talks about what the federal ban means to researchers. Charo spoke with Steve Inskeep.
A biofuel that outperforms ethanol could be easily made from fructose and, in future, glucose derived from the woody parts of plants, researchers claim.
Ethanol has been the biofuel of choice for many years and can be made from corn and other crops. Enzymes are used to break down the plant material to sugar, which is fermented to a boozy fuel. But ethanol has a number of problems, not least its low energy density, its volatility and its water-absorbing nature.
A recipe for fuel: take the carbohydrates like starch and cellulose that make up the majority of plants.
“It should be a great fuel,” says James Dumesic, a chemical engineer at the University of Wisconsinâ??Madison, who, along with his colleagues, discovered the new process, “DMF has the energy density of petroleum.”
The sugar found in fruit such as apples and oranges can be converted into a new type of low carbon fuel for cars, US scientists have said.
The fuel, made from fructose, contains far more energy than ethanol, the scientists write in the journal Nature.
A way of turning simple plant sugar into a fuel as powerful as petrol has been discovered by scientists.
Researchers in the United States have developed a way of converting fructose, the sugar that gives apples and oranges their sweet taste, into a fuel that can be burned to generate energy.
For years, chemists have been searching for a way to sidestep the use of crude oil as the root source of chemicals for fuels, aiming to replace it with inexpensive, non-polluting plant matter that is more environmentally friendly.
University of Michigan stem cell scientist Sean Morrison recently got a telephone call from a woman offering to donate her leftover embryos from a fertilization procedure for his studies on Parkinsonâ??s disease. What she didnâ??t know was that Michigan law prohibits research on human embryos. Morrison suggested that the woman contact a lab in another state.
Next door in Illinois, Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D) is promoting embryonic stem cell research in an effort to lure scientists and investors, in some cases from neighboring states. In 2005, Blagojevich sent a letter urging Missouriâ??s top scientists to move to Illinois rather than work under a cloud created by Missouri legislatorsâ?? ultimately unsuccessful efforts to ban research on human embryos.
Wisconsin reaction, to President Bush’s latest stem cell research veto. “It’s a bad day for researchers, and it’s a bad day for patients across the country,” says John Rogers, president of Whyte Hirschboeck Dudek Government Affairs in Milwaukee.
WASHINGTON, June 20 â?? President Bush on Wednesday issued his second veto of a measure lifting his restrictions on human embryonic stem cell experiments. The move effectively pushed the contentious scientific and ethical debate surrounding the research into the 2008 presidential campaign.
â??Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical,â? Mr. Bush said in a brief ceremony in the East Room of the White House. He called the United States â??a nation founded on the principle that all human life is sacred.â?
At the same time, Mr. Bush issued an executive order intended to encourage scientists to pursue other forms of stem cell research that he does not deem unethical. But that research is already going on, and the plan provides no new money.
As President Bush vetoed a bill on Wednesday that would have loosened his restrictions on stem-cell research, he offered an alternative policy that he said would strengthen the field in an ethical way, but that critics called nothing but spin.
The alternative policy, expressed in an executive order, calls for expanding certain types of stem-cell research that do not require the destruction of human embryos. But it proposed no new money for that research, which is already eligible for, and has received, federal financing.
“This was a political fig leaf and a redundant policy designed to give the president political cover” as he vetoed the bill, said Sean B. Tipton, a spokesman for the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research, which supported the bill. “He’s not going to fool American scientists.”
By DEB RIECHMANN
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) — Vetoing a stem cell bill for the second time, President Bush on Wednesday sought to placate those who disagree with him by signing an executive order urging scientists toward what he termed “ethically responsible” research in the field.
Bush announced no new federal dollars for stem cell research, which supporters say holds the promise of disease cures, and his order would not allow researchers to do anything they couldn’t do under existing restrictions.
Announcing his veto to a roomful of supporters, Bush said, “If this legislation became law, it would compel American taxpayers for the first time in our history to support the deliberate destruction of human embryos. I made it clear to Congress and to the American people that I will not allow our nation to cross this moral line.”
NimbleGen Systems has hit its home run.
Spun out of UW-Madison research, it was announced Tuesday that the DNA microarray company will be purchased by Roche, of Basel, Switzerland, one of the world’s giant drug and diagnostics companies, for $272.5 million.
MADISON, Wisconsin: Gene-chip maker NimbleGen Systems Inc. said Tuesday it will be bought out by pharmaceutical giant Roche in a deal worth $272.5 million (â?¬203.3 million).
Madison, Wis.-based NimbleGen announced in March it would file for public offering and had hoped to raise $75 million (â?¬56 million). But the company remained private and will be sold in its entirety to Roche, it announced in a news release.
Madison-based gene chip maker NimbleGen Systems, which in March filed for an initial public offering of stock, instead has been acquired by Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche Holding AG in a $272.5 million deal announced today.
NimbleGen, a UW-Madison spin-off founded in 1999, had filed for a proposed IPO of up to $75 million in common stock.
Reid Bryson, known as the father of scientific climatology, considers global warming a bunch of hooey.
The UW-Madison professor emeritus, who stands against the scientific consensus on this issue, is referred to as a global warming skeptic. But he is not skeptical that global warming exists, he is just doubtful that humans are the cause of it.
Q. Why do flowers smell, and why do plants smell, too?
A. The luscious aroma of flowers attracts lovers, and the biological role of that smell is similar: to attract pollinators.
Stem cell research holds out so much promise for addressing devastating diseases and conditions that support for it extends beyond lines of party and ideology.
Indeed, it can safely be said that opposition to federal research for embryonic stem cell research is now limited to an extremist fringe and the politically cynical.
Quoted: Stephen Snow, a professor of dermatology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
….More than 50 million Americans suffer from allergies, and the numbers continue to grow despite advances in antihistamines and other drugs. So why have we failed to reverse this trend?
“It’s time to look at the underlying causes of asthma and hay fever instead of only treating the symptoms,” says Gregg Mitman, a professor of medical history and history of science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Following his own advice, Mitman wrote the book “Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes.” In it, he traces the impact allergic disease has had on American life, culture and landscape since the 19th century.
It sounds like the setup for a dull economist’s joke. Who gets the better deal: the cautious economist who sells his house through a real estate agent, or his risk-taking colleague who finds a buyer on his own?
Two Northwestern University economists used Madison’s real estate market to find the answer.
Q Are the North Star and the Southern Cross the same?
A The North Star – real name, Polaris – and the Southern Cross, also known as the constellation Crux, both serve as navigational beacons but in different hemispheres.
Phil Pellitteri says they can sound like “lots and lots of tree frogs,” capable of long periods of “constant shrills” as they emerge after 17 years of slumber and spend the next month or more concerned mostly with perpetuating their species.
For the second time in less than a year, Congress has approved a bill expanding federal support for stem-cell research despite President Bush’s promised veto. The House of Representatives sent the bill to Mr. Bush on Thursday by a vote of 247 to 176, well short of the two-thirds majority required to override a veto.
The bill (S 5) was approved by the Senate in April by a tally, 63 to 34, that came closer to the two-thirds majority in that chamber. Mr. Bush confirmed in a statement after the House vote that he would veto the bill.
The Greater Milwaukee Foundation has awarded its annual Shaw Scientist prizes of $200,000 each to two young Wisconsin scientists whose work has shown promise for groundbreaking research.
Scott Kennedy, 38, an assistant professor of pharmacology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is using worms to study RNA interference, a mechanism that can turn off any gene in the genome. His research could lead to technology that could allow better treatment of human diseases.
Dazhong “Dave” Zhao, 38, an assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is researching the male reproductive cells in mustard weed plants, work that eventually could help create more robust crops.
The new experiments reveal the remarkable degree of control that scientists have recently gained over the highly complex inner workings of living cells.
Stem cell research is a big endeavor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where James Thomson first isolated human embryonic stem cells.
Thomson’s work fueled a research effort on the UW campus that cuts across a wide range of departments and spurred the creation of WiCell Research Institute, which has trained scientists from around the world to work with the cells. Thomson’s work also led the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation to secure three basic patents – the type that can be the underpinnings of whole new industries.
Scientists in the United States and Japan announced yesterday that they have developed artificial stem cells from adult mouse cells. If the approach can be retooled for humans, they say, it would avoid the ethical quicksand that surrounds the use of stem cells drawn from nascent human embryos.
“The real challenge is translating this to human cells, which seem far more resistant” to the kind of manipulation scientists used, notes Clive Svendsen, a stem-cell researcher at the University of Wisconsin’s Waisman Center in Madison, Wis. Still, he adds, “it is truly amazing that they can produce cells that look like embryonic stem cells.”
Three scientific teams published separate studies on Wednesday showing that embryonic stem cells can be made by reprogramming some of the genes in adult skin cells, without having to create an embryo â?? at least in mice.
â??Thereâ??s still a ways to go but at first blush, the results are very encouraging and itâ??s certainly a boost for the stem cell research business,â? said Terry Devitt, a director at the University of Wisconsinâ??s stem cell research programme. â??But we still have a bottleneck in the federal government. Weâ??re hamstrung because the research is inadequately funded.â?
While intriguing, a new approach for producing embryonic stem cells faces considerable hurdles before it can be used to develop medical treatments, executives from stem cell and other biotechnology companies said yesterday.
In particular, they said, the technique involves genetically altering cells, which could introduce new safety risks and make it harder to obtain regulatory approval.
Noted: Not only does it eliminate the ethical issues, he said, but it also might provide a way around stem cell patents held by the University of Wisconsin that some scientists and corporate executives say have hindered work in the field.
Significant steps toward producing embryonic stem cells without using human eggs, and in some cases without creating embryos, were published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, a development that could ease ethical concerns about such research.
The prospect of creating embryonic stem cells containing a patient’s own genetic information has provoked great excitement and research investment, as it has raised the possibility of using the cells to understand disease or transplanting them to treat diseases. But most methods developed for making the multitalented stem cells have required using unfertilized egg cells, which can be painful and risky for women to donate, and creating embryos, which must be destroyed to remove the stem cells. Both steps have raised ethical red flags.
By MALCOLM RITTER
AP Science Writer
NEW YORK (AP) — In a leap forward for stem cell research, three independent teams of scientists reported Wednesday that they have produced the equivalent of embryonic stem cells in mice without the controversial destruction of embryos.
They got ordinary skin cells to behave like stem cells. If the same could be done with human cells – a big if – the procedure could lead to breakthrough medical treatments without the contentious ethical and political debates surrounding the use of embryos.
Experts were impressed by the achievement.
Quoted (in 6/6/07 Capital Times): UW-Madison stem cell researcher Clive Svendsen)
Jared Campbell, 2, flailed his little arms at the iridescent soap bubbles floating around his head in the hall outside a University of Wisconsin research lab in Madison.
“Pow! Pow!” he said as he swiped them out of the air. Then his mom called his name, and he did something extraordinary. For a split-second, he turned his head and looked at her.
If the circumstances were different, it might be easy to side with some folks in the Town of Dunn in Dane County concerned about a proposed development. They fear that the development – a 520,000-foot facility employing up to 300 people – will interfere with the quiet rural nature of their community.
But the development isn’t a mall or some run-of-the-mill big-box store. On the contrary, it would be a high-security world-class federal laboratory to study animal illnesses, such as foot-and-mouth disease and bird flu. And the University of Wisconsin officials pushing for it didn’t settle on the site by tossing a dart at a map.
Summer time for kids means school is out, it’s time to play. Under the sun. In the heat. Running and jumping.
Or, at least it used to.
A new study out of the UW, published in the newly-released June issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, found that overweight middle school kids who’d seen progress in school-based curriculum for physical education, actually got less healthy over the summer.
â??We expected that summer vacation would actually promote more physical activity for kids, and that on their own, cardiovascular levels would actually increase. And what we found was cardiovascular went down,â? says Dr. Aaron Carrel, one of the five local researchers.
The UW-Madison is hosting about 100 talented minority and low-income undergraduate students from around the nation this summer to do graduate-level research with faculty members — in the hope they will decide to continue their education in Madison.
The Summer Research Opportunity Program, partially funded by the National Science Foundation, includes programs in 10 fields, ranging from neurology and biology to engineering and education.
This week, UW-Madison employees are marking the 100th anniversary of the campus experiment that started a century of vitamin research. On May 31, 1907, agriculture chemist Stephen Babcock launched an investigation on dairy cows called the Single Grain Feeding Study, a bland title that belies its revolutionary impact.
DODGEVILLE — Within minutes of starting her workday, Dr. Amy Robinson plunges her left arm into a cow’s rectum to determine on which side of the bovine’s uterus she will place a frozen embryo.
As a large animal veterinarian in rural Wisconsin, this task is not unusual, and Robinson, 32, goes about it with the matter-of-factness of an accountant creating a spreadsheet.
The two consumer groups that successfully challenged three, broad stem cell patents held by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s patent licensing arm said that it will make a “substantive response” to the university group’s defense of the patents.
Acting on re-examination requests by the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights and the Public Patent Foundation, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in early April rejected all claims on three patents held by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. WARF had two months to respond.
(MADISON) The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation or WARF is challenging the federal governmentâ??s preliminary rejection of three stem cell patents. In April, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced it would throw out the patents because discoveries made by University of Wisconsin researcher James Thomson were â??obvious,â? given earlier research. (Fifth item.)
The University of Wisconsin’s research arm challenged the federal government’s rejection of its patents covering human embryonic stem cell research on Thursday, defending researcher Jamie Thomson’s work as a “landmark invention.”
The California-based Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights and others are challenging patents that covr discoveries by Thomson, who was the first to grow and isolate human embryonic stem cells in 1998.
(Appears in 6/1/07 Capital Times)
Q. Why do we have fingernails?
Matthew Burns
Grade 7 Sennett Middle School
A Fingernails are essentially flattened versions of claws, and they evolved in all primates – including humans – to support broad fingertips, says UW-Madison anthropology professor John Hawks.
Clark Johnson will be spending the next several years of his career as a UW-Madison geologist doing something he never really dreamed of doing — looking for extraterrestrial life.
James Thomson’s breakthrough in growing human embryonic stem cells in 1998 is worthy of the patents he received because no researchers had done what he did, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation said Thursday, in response to the federal government’s preliminary rejection in March of three patents.
What is the best place to study the Earth’s climate? The Moon, according to one US researcher.
Shoapeng Huang, at the University of Wisconsin, has got hold of temperature records taken by instruments that were left on the Moon’s surface in 1971 by the Apollo 15 mission.
Madison, Wis. – Claiming that patents and publications used to uphold a challenge to its stem cell patents are irrelevant to the isolation and proliferation of human embryonic stem cells, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation has filed a response refuting an initial determination by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Those observations on relevancy, made by Carl Gulbrandsen, managing director of WARF, were supported by Dr. Colin Stewart, a stem cell researcher at the Institute of Medical Biology in Singapore.
With its patents on the stem cell work of University of Wisconsin-Madison professor James Thomson preliminarily rejected, the foundation that helps shepherd the school’s research discoveries to market fired back Thursday, saying the rejection was wrong on multiple counts.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison said Thursday that it has been awarded a $6.5 million grant from NASA to join a collaboration studying the origins and evidence of life on Earth.
With the National Aeronautics and Space Administration funds, Wisconsin researchers will become part of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute. The Institute focuses on the hunt for extraterrestrial life and early life on Earth by developing techniques and instruments to read the chemical signatures living organisms leave in rocks and minerals.
The Milwaukee region, once known as the “machine shop to the world,” must remake itself as the industrial “design shop of the world” if it is to compete in a landscape transformed by global economic forces, civic leaders said Wednesday in unveiling the Milwaukee 7s strategic economic plan.
The report by the seven-county economic development group said southeastern Wisconsins future hinges on its engineering talent, research-and-development capacity, its universities and its collective impulse to generate products and ideas.
A new study at UW-Madison will try to find answers to some of the most important questions women approaching menopause may have about hormone replacement therapy.
Q. Why do snakes shed their skin?
Joey Feuling
Grade 7
Sennett Middle School
A: Like a growing child outgrows clothes, a growing snake outgrows its skin.
If you’re lucky enough to live long enough, sometimes the world will come around to your way of thinking.
Professor Max Carbon retired from the UW-Madison nuclear engineering faculty 15 years ago and during both his working and retirement careers has been a rather lonely voice touting the virtues of nuclear power.
Wisconsin is leading the way in the cutting-edge science, WISC-TV reported. A 7-year-old University of Wisconsin Veterinary School and state Agriculture Department course is now teaching high-level animal health experts, public and private, how to test for VHS.Experts said that it’s important to collect a good tissue sample from some tiny fish organs.”Because of where the virus likes to live, they prefer that we get those organs because it’s more likely that they’ll be able to isolate virus from it,” said Patricia Fox, who works for veterinary services for the USDA in Madison.UW veterinarian Michael Maroney and Indiana Board of Animal Health veterinarian Jennifer Strasser said that VHS testing is easier said than done. But they said that learning the correct process is crucial, saying they need all the tools they can muster to battle their biggest fish threat ever.
Daryl Buss, dean of the School of Veterinary Medicine, weighs in with a letter to the editor on the proposed National Agro- and Biodefense Facility.
Madison, Wis. – Will Wisconsin join the biofuels parade as the marketplace elephant passes by – or follow behind with a shovel?
That question was raised by state Sen. Bob Jauch, the veteran Democrat from Poplar, during Tuesday’s Capitol debate over the state’s 2007-2009 budget bill. So far, the answer isn’t pretty.
UW-Madison entomologist Phil Pellitteri said the term “disorder” is often applied to poorly understood illnesses.
University of Wisconsin political scientist Charles Franklin has his own Web site on polling, Political Arithmetik, and partners on a second site, pollster.com.
These are two must-visit sites for those fascinated with political polling. On both sites, Franklin regularly publishes updated graphs of his “trend estimator,” something more sophisticated than, but similar to, a moving average showing the relative strengths of each presidential candidate in recent national polls.
Sigh. We hate to see missed opportunities and Wisconsin looks like it might miss out on a good one.
The state and the University of Wisconsin-Madison are making a pitch to have a high security national agro- and bio-defense lab just southeast of Madison, but the bid is being undercut by local opposition.
Town of Dunn residents are opposing the $450 million project out of safety concerns and worries that it won’t fit in with the quiet and rural character of their town.
They’ve started a letter writing campaign, convinced the Dane County Board and town board to oppose it and even have an opposition sampler on the town’s web site soliciting petitions and offering yard signs.
