Breathing new life into failed nerve endings, University of Wisconsin scientists developed new lithium-battery technology to power various medical devices implanted into patients suffering from muscular disorders.
While the Wisconsin legislature continues to bungle its way through narrow-minded and politically-motivated debates over stem cell research, it’s important to note the National Institute of Health’s establishment of the first and only National Stem Cell Bank here at Wisconsin’s WiCell Research Institute.
(WISC-TV Editorial)
If you or a loved one has diabetes, Parkinson’s disease or a spinal cord injury, you need to do two things.
First, send Gov. Jim Doyle flowers and a nice note.
Second, look in the mirror and admit you’re a loser.
Hey, I know it sounds harsh, but I’m a loser, too.
A “unique array” of strengths helped UW-Madison land the first and only National Stem Cell Bank, a $16 million award that should boost Wisconsin’s biotech industry, officials said Monday.
Wisconsin has scored again in the exciting and competitive world of stem-cell science.
UW-Madison’s latest coup is a $16 million grant to establish the federal government’s first National Stem Cell Bank, a research and distribution center that will boost efforts to develop life-saving medical treatments.
Guess which news item is out of step with public opinion in the state, the nation and the world?
The state of Wisconsin grants $1 million and loans another $1 million to a company formed by Dr. James Thomson, a UW-Madison researcher so renowned that the words ââ?¬Å?Nobel Prizeââ?¬Â practically circle his head. The company has technology that could revolutionize drug discovery.
The bird flu has turned into such a big problem in southeast Asia, that president Bush is already talking about a militaryââ?¬â??enforced quarantine, should the bird flu pop up here.
“And who best to be able to effect a quarantine? One option is the use of a military that’s able to plan and move.”
To keep that from happening, scientists around the world are working on preventing the spread of the bird flu to humans … and a lot of that work is being done in Madison, in the Uââ?¬â??W’s medical research departments.
All modern varieties of potatoes trace their roots back to a single species that was grown in what is now southern Peru more than 7,000 years ago, a team of U.S. and British scientists report. The findings challenge theories that potatoes were first cultivated in Bolivia or Argentina or that farmers bred them several different times in several different places. The study in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzed the DNA of 360 wild and cultivated potato varieties and the results clearly identified a single species, says David Spooner, a Department of Agriculture researcher at the University of Wisconsin who led the study.
Quoted: David Spooner, a Department of Agriculture researcher
A Wisconsin-based research group will run the nation’s first federally financed embryonic stem cell bank, the National Institutes of Health said this week. The WiCell Research Institute, a non-profit set up in 1999 to support stem cell research at the University of Wisconsin, will store and distribute the cells under a federal plan to reduce the cost of using them. In 2001, President Bush limited federal funding to projects involving 78 lines of embryonic stem cells that already were in existence. He said taxpayer dollars should not pay for the destruction of human embryos. That policy has stifled the field, some researchers say, and only 22 lines are now available for use.
In what advocates deem a huge victory for the state, the WiCell Research Institute announced Monday it had been chosen as the federal government’s first and only National Stem Cell Bank. The bank’s four-year, $16 million contract with the National Institutes of Health will allow UW-Madison to categorize stem cell lines and distribute these cell lines to researchers around the country.
A leading Wisconsin biotechnology research institute will house the nation�s first stem-cell bank, Gov. Jim Doyle announced at a press conference at University of Wisconsin Research Park Monday.
The nation’s first and only bank of federally approved embryonic stem cells will be housed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, federal officials announced Monday. That is where it most properly and deservedly belongs.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The first cultivated potato was grown in what is now Peru, researchers said on Monday, and it originated only once, not several times, as some experts had proposed.
Their genetic study shows the first potato known to have been farmed is genetically closest to a species now found only in southern Peru, the U.S. and British researchers said.
“This result shows the potato originated one time and from a species that was distributed in southern Peru,” said David Spooner, a U.S. Department of Agriculture researcher at the University of Wisconsin who, led the study.
MADISON, Wis. – A Wisconsin-based research group will run the nation’s first embryonic stem cell bank under a four-year, $16 million federal contract, officials announced Monday.
The National Institutes of Health said on Monday that it had selected a research affiliate of the University of Wisconsin at Madison to run the federal government’s national repository for human embryonic stem cells. The affiliate, the WiCell Research Institute, will sell batches of the cells for $500 each, a 90-percent reduction in the price it and other suppliers have charged for the cells they own.
The nation has its first ever (and so far, only) bank for stem cells, and it’s in west Madison. It’s located at University Research Park. The goal is to lump most of the existing stem cell lines in one place, which could cut costs and speed up research.
Nimblegen Systems is the first Madison company to benefit from Monday’s announcement by the National Institutes of Health to base the National Stem Cell Bank at the WiCell Research Institute.
Emile Nuwaysir, vice president of business development at Nimblegen, said Monday his company is a partner in the four-year contract WiCell was awarded by the NIH. Nimblegen will receive $1 million for its work ââ?¬Å?characterizingââ?¬Â human embryonic stem cell lines.
Madison, Wis. — The WiCell Research Institute’s announcement Monday that it has been awarded a prestigious four-year, $16 million federal contract to create the nation’s first National Stem Cell Bank is a sign of respect for the state’s pioneering and innovative approach to the new field of research.
But, in the face of continued Wisconsin legislative opposition to embryonic stem cell research, the path forward is anything but simple.
The new National Stem Cell Bank is physically a no-frills outfit.
The distribution room is about the size of your average bedroom, equipped with a couple of hooded lab benches, freezers, computers and red swivel chairs.
Yet, despite its humble appearance, it’s the pride of Wisconsin researchers, government officials and university leaders.
The siting of the nation’s first stem cell bank at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is a direct result of the university’s unparalleled infrastructure supporting embryonic research, said Chancellor John Wiley.
“In reality, few institutions have the right pieces and could actually deliver,” Wiley said this morning at a news conference at the WiCell Research Institute at the University Research Park.
Among the important entities identified by Wiley were the Waisman Center, Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, WiCell and the research park.
(From the 10/3/05 print edition of The Capital Times)
Although UW-Madison has long been a forerunner of stem cell research, the university received what could be its greatest distinction in the field yet by landing a contract for the nation’s first and only stem cell bank.
A University of Wisconsin consciousness and sleep expert will soon receive a national award to fund further studies aimed at uncovering the mysteries of sleep. The university announced Giulio Tononi won the National Institutes of Healthââ?¬â?¢s ââ?¬Å?Pioneer Awardââ?¬Â last week, becoming one of 13 scientists nationwide to win.
WAUKESHA (AP) – Researchers will study Waukesha County children’s food, the air around them and even the dust in their homes as part of nationwide study of environmental influences on health.
The goal is to find ways to prevent and treat health problems such as autism, birth defects, diabetes and heart disease.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison was named Thursday as one of six centers that will help complete the first phase of the study, led by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
ââ?¬Â¢ Announcement: University of Wisconsin-Madison will be the site for the nation’s first stem cell bank, which will house all stem cell lines available for federal funding.
ââ?¬Â¢ Goal: The bank’s goal is to reduce the costs researchers pay for the cells while monitoring their quality.
ââ?¬Â¢ Reaction: “Everybody has understood that banking is crucial to moving the field forward. This is a concrete step and we’re doing it first,” said UW-Madison bioethicist Alta Charo.
Wisconsin will soon house the nation’s first stem cell bank.
WiCell Research Institute, a subsidiary of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, has been awarded a $16.1 million, four-year National Institutes of Health contract to establish a national stem call bank at its facilities, according to contracting officer Lynn Furtaw.
The center will acquire, store, characterize and distribute the human embryonic stem cell lines currently approved for federal funding.
Gov. Jim Doyle has scheduled a news conference on Monday to announce the Wisconsin siting of the stem cell bank.
UW-Madison will be home to the newly created National Stem Cell Bank, Gov. Jim Doyle’s office said Friday.
The nation’s first embryonic stem-cell bank, awarded in a competitive process by the National Institutes of Health, presumably will be at the WiCell Institute. WiCell is a subsidiary of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which holds a patent on stem-cell work by UW-Madison researcher James Thomson.
WARF controls five of the 22 available stem-cell lines eligible for federal funding under President Bush’s 2001 policy. According to the NIH, the new bank will consolidate the other lines in one location, maintain them and distribute them to researchers at a cost less than what researchers now pay to study them.
The other lines are housed in Athens, Ga.; San Francisco and labs in Australia, Israel, Korea and Sweden.
Later this month, the Wisconsin Biotechnology and Medical Devices Association will hold its annual conference near the middle of what has been the widest chasm in the state – the 72-mile stretch of highway between Madison and Milwaukee.
The association’s decision to locate its conference in Oconomowoc is a sign of the thaw that has begun in the icy relations between Wisconsin’s two biggest cities.
Wisconsin is poised to be the nation’s first and only hub for federally approved human embryonic stem cell lines.
Gov. Jim Doyle is to officially announce on Monday that Wisconsin will become home to the National Institutes of Health’s National Stem Cell Bank.
Deep sleep literally disconnects the brain, or at least the higher regions of the brain from one another, so that consciousness fades, according to researchers who used new brain-imaging techniques to document the altered state of mind.
The findings, published today in the journal Science, offer some of the first direct clues about how the brain alters our state of consciousness during sleep and may also help in better understanding some brain disorders.
Wisconsin Right to Life wants to make it clear: Follow its directives or there will be consequences.
On Thursday the powerful anti-abortion lobby sent out a sharply worded news release taking aim at three “pro-life” state senators who supported an exemption to therapeutic cloning in the human cloning ban that passed the Republican-controlled Senate earlier this week.
As we slip into deep sleep, higher regions of our brains take a vacation from each other, disconnecting so much that consciousness is snuffed out and a once highly integrated organ becomes separated, according to a groundbreaking experiment by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers.
With flu season officially beginning Saturday, health authorities in Wisconsin are optimistic that the panic- inducing vaccine shortages of the past two years won’t strike again.
But they’re fretting over another, increasingly worrisome, prospect: that bird flu in Asia might start infecting people more easily. That could enable the virus, which has killed 60 people in Southeast Asia so far, to explode into a worldwide flu outbreak worse than any seen since 1918, when as many as 50 million people died.
Madison, Wis. — The state Senate voted 21-12 on Wednesday, short of a veto-proof majority, to ban all forms of cloning in Wisconsin, though it is likely that Gov. Jim Doyle will veto the bill.
The bill was supported by all Republicans and two Democrats: Sen. Jeff Plale, D-South Milwaukee, and Sen. Roger Breske, D-Eland.
The Wisconsin state Senate passed a bill Wednesday that bans all human cloning in the state, a move that UW-Madison officials said will negatively impact the university’s scientific research reputation and endanger stem cell research.
The Wisconsin State Senate passed a bill banning all forms of human cloning Wednesday.
Wisconsin leaders moved quickly to condemn the state Senate’s passage of a ban on reproductive and therapeutic cloning.
“The failure of the Wisconsin State Senate to amend Assembly Bill 499, which effectively criminalizes a promising area of biomedical research, sends a frightening message to Wisconsin’s research community,” University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor John Wiley said in a prepared statement Wednesday.
“Scientists in many fields view this with alarm,” Wiley added. “It is a message that special interests can close off legitimate avenues of scientific discovery.”
Gov. Jim Doyle also criticized the Senate’s action.
– The Hastings Center, Garrison, N.Y.,
– Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University
– The University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioethics, founded by former Hastings fellow Arthur Caplan
– The Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, which is affiliated with Trinity International University in Deerfield, Ill.
– Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine
Any given Sunday morning, a bioethicist somewhere in America suits up for a TV appearance on the hot issue of the day or stands by a hospital bed to consult on a wrenching dilemma. Should doctors prolong the life of a baby born without a brain? Should they be allowed to help the terminally ill kill themselves by prescribing a lethal drug dose? Should there be limits on embryonic stem cell research? But who are these people opining on what we should do?
Clones. Brain implants. Genetically engineered sports cheats. Members of the President’s Council on Bioethics have chewed on a steady diet of science fiction favorites in the panel’s first four years. In pondering technologies not expected to bear fruit for years, the council, led by American Enterprise Institute fellow Leon Kass, has defined its mission as being a search for a ââ?¬Å?richerââ?¬Â bioethics, concerned with preserving human dignity amid the advance of biotechnology.
Our three-year-old daughter often refuses to wear anything other than pink, and she mothers soft toys; and while our eight-month-old son has shown no noticeable preference for blue or for watching the soccer with me, it�s probably only a matter of time.
However, a scientific study just published in American Psychologist provides strong reasons to doubt that there are many inborn differences between genders. Janet Shibley Hyde, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has shown that in most cases psychological differences are small or non-existent.
The chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee urged Waukesha County leaders Wednesday to join in creating a regional research university that he said will stimulate the economy.
The Legislature on Wednesday sent Gov. Jim Doyle a bill that would make Wisconsin the eighth state to ban human cloning, but the governor insisted that the real target is stem cell research and promised to veto the measure.
Several scientists at the UW- Madison’s Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies believe there is a significant story about Hurricane Katrina that has been left untold by the mainstream media. These hurricane researchers are convinced that accurate storm forecasting in the days leading up to Katrina’s landfall kept the death toll from being in the millions.
University of Wisconsin scientists tracking a strain of influenza which has jumped from horses to dogs say it could potentially infect humans, though it is unlikely.
A University of Wisconsin research center received a large sum of money for small-scale technology research Monday. The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center ââ?¬â? devoted to nanotechnology education and development ââ?¬â? successfully renewed its grant with the National Science Foundation after undergoing nearly a year of mandatory application protocols, receiving an additional $14.8 million in funding.
The Wisconsin State Senate approved a bill Tuesday allowing health-care providers and health-care facility employees to refuse to partake in medical procedures based on moral or religious beliefs without the risk of dismissal.
The Wisconsin State Senate voted by unanimous consent Tuesday to pass a bill that will encourage the donation of umbilical-cord blood of newborn children, but legislators blocked a vote to ban human cloning which will instead be intended for a vote today.
The Wisconsin Senate moved one step closer to banning cloning for reproductive and research purposes.
Senators on Tuesday night killed by one vote an amendment that would have exempted therapeutic cloning from the bill – amounting, in effect, to the body’s tentative approval of the cloning ban.
But Democrats objected to a final vote on the controversial measure, authored by Sen. Joe Leibham, R-Sheboygan, and Rep. Steve Kestell, R-Elkhart Lake, pushing the bill onto today’s Senate agenda.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Pomegranate juice, a deep red juice becoming popular as a health drink, works against prostate cancer cells in lab dishes and in mice, U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday.
Prostate tumors shrank in mice infected with human prostate tumors who drank pomegranate juice, the researchers report in this week’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Veterinary health officials are worried that a new strain of influenza that infects dogs could pose serious health problems for dogs, but so far it appears unlikely to make humans sick.
Dr. Christopher Olsen, a professor of public health at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Veterinary Medicine, said the strain of influenza virus appears to be most closely related to a form of influenza that infects horse
Abortion rights opponents rejoiced Tuesday as the state Senate passed several bills involving embryos, fetuses and newborns in an unusual session almost exclusively devoted to social issues.
“I don’t think we’ve ever had a day like this before,” said Barbara Lyons, executive director of Wisconsin Right to Life, which supported the measures on human cloning, fetal pain, a health-care worker “conscience clause” and umbilical cord blood donation. “It has been a tremendous day for pro-life policy.”
Madison, Wis. – A company co-founded by acclaimed stem cell researcher James Thomson will receive $2 million in state financing, Gov. Jim Doyle announced Monday.
The State Senate was poised today to pass a bill banning human cloning – with no exception for research to fight crippling diseases – after an initial vote Tuesday showed the ban had enough votes to pass.
Cellular Dynamics International – the young company founded by UW-Madison stem- cell research pioneer Jamie Thomson and his partners – is getting a $2 million jump-start from the state.
A UW-Madison center for nanotechnology has snagged millions in federal dollars to pursue research toward stem-cell medical breakthroughs and computer displays that one day might be rolled up like a poster.
Juan de Pablo, director of UW-Madison’s Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, said he learned Monday that the National Science Foundation is awarding his center $14.8 million to continue its work over the next six years. The federal agency is funding a select few centers around the country that do research into materials and nanotechnology, the science of working at incredibly small scales.
Cellular Dynamics International is on a fast track, with high hopes of becoming the first company to get stem-cell technology into the marketplace and the first to show a profit – in spite of major stem- cell efforts in other states, such as California.
Housed in the MGE Innovation Center at University Research Park, Cellular Dynamics expects to start providing drug screening services in early 2006. The company will use cells derived from kidney cells, modified to have some properties of human heart cells, to test drugs for heart patients.
Gov. Jim Doyle announced $2 million in new state funding for a Madison-based firm that applies stem cell research technology for drug development and screening.
Doyle said the state will provide a $1 million technology development grant and an additional $1 million in technology development loans to Cellular Dynamics International Inc., which was founded by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers James Thomson, Craig January and Timothy Kamp.
During an appearance at the firm’s headquarters Monday morning, Doyle vowed to veto a bill banning so-called human cloning, which is up for action in the state Senate today.
Madison, Wis. — A proposed ban on all human embryonic cloning in the state will be voted on in the state Senate Tuesday, a proposal opposed by many in the medical research community.
The proposed ban, known as AB 499 in the Assembly and SB 243 in the Senate, would outlaw not only cloning for reproductive purposes but also what proponents call therapeutic or research cloning, in which an embryo is created with identical DNA as an original subject for the purposes of harvesting stem cells after the first several days of development. The embryo is destroyed in the process.
A different kind of flu bug – the canine flu – has come early for some, and as a surprise to others.
Dog Owner Anne Khodadad says, “our vet hasn’t said anything about canine flu.”
Dr. Christopher Olsen explains, “it’s a new entity, we haven’t thought about dogs as being hosts for influenza infections in the past.”
Pomegranates, the loneliest fruit in the produce section, could be a man’s best friend.
Revered in legend and ignored by most shoppers, the fruit inhibited the growth of prostate cancer cells in a laboratory dish and slowed the growth of human prostate cancer cells injected into mice, according to a University of Wisconsin-Madison study published today
