She probes black holes to fathom the early days of our universe.
If you can see a star with your naked eye, Amy Barger probably isn’t interested in it. What gets her going are the faraway objects invisible to anything but the most powerful instruments. I’m just really fascinated by what’s going on at the edge,” she says. The farther out, the better.”
A 34-year-old astronomer who works part of the year at the University of Hawaii-Manoa has been named as one of Popular Science’s “Brilliant 10” young researchers.
Amy Barger, who studies black holes and other phenomena with data from telescopes in space and on Mauna Kea, was named as one of “the most dynamic, promising young researchers at institutions around North America.”
Barger divides her time now between the University of Wisconsin-Madison and UH-Manoa, where she works from January through the summer.
MADISON, Wis. ââ?¬â? Thomas Sutula wants to discover drugs that would treat epilepsy and a host of other brain diseases, except the University of Wisconsin-Madison neurologist says an arcane state law has stood in his way.
Sutula, chairman of UW’s neurology department, is a founder of NeuroGenomeX, which hopes to develop research pioneered at UW. But a state law barring public employees who start private companies from signing contracts worth more than $15,000 with the university has slowed the company’s development, he said.
After a decade of preparation, the UW Medical School is poised to become the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. Despite the concerns of UW-Milwaukee officials and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, the change in name – deserved recognition of a school-wide effort to incorporate more public health initiatives – is important for all of Wisconsin.
This is the first part of a series profiling members of the Board of Regents, the governing board for the University of Wisconsin System.
Mark Bradley sat quietly at the Board of Regents meetings in Madison last week, listening intently to university administrators, deans, professors, a state senator and a mayor express their concerns about a plethora of issues facing the state�s public higher education system.
As vice president of the Board of Regents, Bradley is immersed in public education. Three of his children are enrolled in public universities and he himself benefited from a public education and a University of Wisconsin law degree.
Negotiations between city�s Landmarks Commission and UW-Madison officials over the fate of a former Rennebohm drug store have been put off until next year.
The 80-year-old building, at the corner Randall and University avenues, is at the west end of the site for the proposed $375 million Institute for Discovery.
New research from Stanley Dodson’s lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows that minute concentrations of antibiotics and other drugs, in a variety of combinations, can kill, disrupt, alter and disfigure the bodies and reproductive abilities of Daphnia, a small invertebrate considered a keystone of freshwater food chains.
A high-tech business group is to meet this week in Oconomowoc. The location, between Madison and Milwaukee, is symbolic.
The goal is to emphasize the importance of linking the academic brainpower, entrepreneurial energy and industrial might of the state’s two largest cities to generate economic growth.
But the promise of synergy between Madison and Milwaukee has been long discussed and mostly unfulfilled. Last week, at a Board of Regents meeting, officials from Milwaukee demonstrated one of the reasons: petty rivalry.
The UW System Board of Regents passed a controversial proposal Friday to rename the UW-Madison Medical School to the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Representatives from UW-Milwaukee as well as Tom Barrett, Milwaukee mayor, contested the proposal on the grounds that the Milwaukee campus is better suited for a school of public health.
Most people who live in Wisconsin will tell you that Milwaukee is not exactly a shining beacon on a hill. While its condition cannot quite be described as abysmal, Milwaukee is simply a city that has been left behind. Sadly, if the University of Wisconsin successfully receives something it is currently seeking, Milwaukee will be left behind once more.
Recently, UW requested to rename its medical school the ââ?¬Å?UW School of Medicine & Public Health.ââ?¬Â One could easily dismiss this plan as attempting little more than a rearrangement of the medical schoolââ?¬â?¢s title. However, to do so would be to ignore the impending changes such a shift would bring.
Thomas Sutula wants to discover drugs that would treat epilepsy and a host of other brain diseases, except the University of Wisconsin-Madison neurologist says an arcane state law stands in his way.
Sutula, chairman of UW’s neurology department, is a founder of NeuroGenomeX, which hopes to develop research pioneered at UW. But a state law barring public employees who start private companies from signing contracts worth more than $15,000 with the university has slowed the company’s development, he said.
Gov. Jim Doyle and several state lawmakers want to change that by exempting UW System researchers from that law, which is designed to discourage state workers from privately benefiting at taxpayers’ expense.
The University of Wisconsin Medical School got its wish Friday as the Board of Regents unanimously agreed to approve the renaming of the school to the ââ?¬Å?University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health,ââ?¬Â effective Nov. 11 this year.
The name change is not without conditions, however. As part of the resolution the regents directed the medical school to immediately commence a ââ?¬Å?good faith dialogueââ?¬Â with the City of Milwaukee and the chancellor of UW-Milwaukee on specific strategies to address the public health issues facing portions of the impoverished city.
Despite impassioned pleas from Milwaukee officials, the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents approved changing the name of its Madison-based medical school to also reflect its status as the state’s public health school.
Mayor Tom Barrett visited the regents on Thursday, imploring them to hold off on the name change. Milwaukee, with its rampant health problems, needs a public health school, he said, and the Madison designation would effectively kill any prospects of that happening.
….The name change, from the UW Medical School to the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, will take effect Nov. 11.
Remember middle school gym class?
If you were a little overweight, not very coordinated and perhaps shy, it was a pretty miserable experience. But a study by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers at River Bluff Middle School in Stoughton could change all that.
….”Even a small change in the amount of physical activity showed beneficial effects on body composition, fitness and insulin levels in children,” the authors wrote in a study that was published this week in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.
Thomas Sutula wants to discover drugs that would treat epilepsy and a host of other brain diseases, except the University of Wisconsin-Madison neurologist says an arcane state law has stood in his way.
Sutula, chairman of UW’s neurology department, is a founder of NeuroGenomeX, which hopes to develop research pioneered at UW. But a state law barring public employees who start private companies from signing contracts worth more than $15,000 with the university has slowed the company’s development, he said.
Gov. Jim Doyle and several state lawmakers want to change that by exempting UW System researchers from that law, which is designed to discourage state workers from privately benefiting at taxpayers’ expense.
UW-Madison is losing a top researcher and the prominent center he oversees to Florida State University.
The Applied Superconductivity Center, which has been at UW-Madison for more than 20 years, will move to Tallahassee early next year, taking with it some $2 million in research grants and as many as 30 staff and student researchers, including professor and center director David Larbalestier.
Paul Peercy, dean of the UW- Madison College of Engineering, said he tried to keep Larbalestier but couldn’t match the financial incentives or new opportunities offered by Florida State.
If Americans learned anything from Hurricane Katrina, it’s the importance of a public health network in impoverished urban areas, Milwaukee Mayor Tom
Barrett told the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents.
He implored the board to stop a fast-tracked, little-publicized plan to designate the UW-Madison Medical School as the state’s public health college. But the argument failed to win over the board’s Education Committee, which voted without dissent to recommend the designation to the full board, which planned to vote today.
Guest Column: C. Coe and E. Sandgren
Upon reading Leslie Hamilton’s Sept. 29 guest column in the State Journal, we were struck by the large cultural void that has emerged between people.
UW-Madison is losing a top researcher and the prominent center he oversees to Florida State University. The Applied Superconductivity Center, which has been at UW-Madison for more than 20 years, will move to Tallahassee early next year, taking with it some $2 million in research grants and as many as 30 staff and student researchers, including professor and center director David Larbalestier.
Paul Peercy, dean of the UW- Madison College of Engineering, said he tried to keep Larbalestier but couldn’t match the financial incentives or new opportunities offered by Florida State.
Physicians have been prescribing emergency contraception for decades. According to the United States Food and Drug Administration, the drugs – commonly referred to as the morning-after pill – are approved “for use in preventing pregnancy after intercourse when standard contraceptives have failed, or when no contraceptives were used at all.” Clinical trials have found emergency contraception is safe and effective. But scientists, policy makers and the public disagree on the issue of improving access to this drug.
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.
