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Neurobiology:
'Baby Bells' Carry Molecular Dialogue Critical to Fertility |
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Health Care
Policy:
First National Healthplan 'Report Cards' Being Built From
the Ground Up
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Pediatrics:
Angelman Gene Not One of the Usual
Suspects |
Education:
NFL Jock Turns HMS Doc (To Be) |
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Public Health Study Finds Diet Affects Diabetes Risk
Second Route Found to Initiate Immune Response of T Helper
Cells
Change in Sleep Pattern Causes Mood Swing
Letter to the Editor
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Students Receive Kellogg Fellowships
First Chair in Urology at MGH Named for Walter S. Kerr
Honors & Advances
News Briefs
Being Down to Earth is Never Simple for Returned Astronauts
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Caught Between Fact and Fiction |
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BULLETIN
Students Receive Kellogg Fellowships
Charlene Brown, Myrtha Cesar, and Victoria
McGhee Smith have been selected by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to
receive its Community Based Training Fellowship for 1997. Each fellowship
award is $10,000, plus a $1,000 travel stipend. Fifteen second-
and third-year minority medical students were selected nationwide
to receive fellowships.
The program offers supervised, elective rotations
at community primary-care health centers in urban and rural areas
across the country, and concentrates on serving those who lack access
to health services because of geographic isolation, lack of providers,
or financial barriers. The program consists of two, eight- to ten-week
rotations at a designated Kellogg site, where each fellow will work
with her academic adviser in a community-based primary-care facility,
assisting in health-care delivery, community epidemiology, and health
education.
First Chair in Urology at MGH
Named for Walter S. Kerr
This March will mark the one-year anniversary of the establishment
of the Walter S. Kerr Professorship in Urology at Massachusetts
General Hospital. Scott McDougal, chief of Urology at MGH,
was the first to be appointed to the professorship. It is
the first and only chair in the Department of Urology at MGH.
Kerr graduated from Harvard College and
received his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania
Medical School. He received urologic training at MGH before
becoming a member of the staff. He also joined the faculty
at HMS, where he currently is clinical professor emeritus
of surgery. Kerr has spent more than 50 years in the Harvard
community and at MGH. He is also past president of the American
Urological Association.
McDougal, in addition to his appointments
at HMS and MGH, served as president of the American Board
of Urology and was recently awarded the Russell & Mary
Hugh Scott Award for Teaching and Education, presented by
the American Foundation for Urologic Disease, Inc. McDougal's
recent research interests include predictors of prostate cancer
and mechanisms of ammonium transport.
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Honors and Advances
The new senior vice president for science and technology
at HMS Beth Israel Deaconess Mount Auburn Institute for Education
and Research is Barry I. Eisenstein. Eisenstein comes to
the institute from Indiana, where he was vice president of Infectious
Disease and Clinical Development at Lilly Research Laboratories.
Eisentein also sits on the advisory council of the Howard Hughes
Medical Institute.
George Thorn, professor emeritus of medicine at HMS
has been awarded the 1997 Public Welfare Medal by the National Academy
of Sciences. Thorn's 40-year commitment to public welfare includes
leadership of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the country's
largest nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting medical education
and research. Thorn served as physician in chief of the Peter Bent
Brigham (now Brigham and Women's) Hospital from 1942 to 1972.
John Mannick, Moseley Distinguished Professor of Surgery
at HMS and surgeon in chief emeritus at Brigham and Women's
Hospital, was elected president of the Lifeline Foundation. The
foundation is an educational and research arm of the Joint Council
of the Society for Vascular Surgery and the North American Chapter
of the International Society for Cardiovascular Surgery. Mannick's
term began on January 1.
At the 1996 meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine
and Hygiene, Thomas H. Weller was awarded the Walter Reed
Medal in recognition of his accomplishments in the field of tropical
medicine. Weller, Richard Pearson Strong Professor Emeritus
of Tropical Public Health, was head of the Department of Tropical
Public Health from 1954 to 1981.
The Wellman Laboratories of Photomedicine at Massachusetts
General Hospital have received an $8 million grant from the U.S.
Department of Defense (DoD) for continuing research into the medical
use of lasers. The grant will fund a project that has already received
$42 million from DoD over the past 12 years and involves finding
medical applications for high-intensity, pulsed lasers, particularly
free-electron lasers.
James F. Gusella, the Bullard Professor of Neurogenetics
at HMS, shared the 1997 King Faisal International Prize in Medicine.
The prize, awarded for innovative research on degenerative diseases,
recognizes Gusella's work on Huntington's disease. In 1983, Gusella
succeeded in mapping the gene locus for the disease and, later,
unraveled the structure of the gene responsible for Huntington's.
News Briefs
Last month, Massachusetts General Hospital and
McLean Hospital celebrated the opening of the new MGH Obsessive
Compulsive Disorders Institute (OCD). The program, representing
the first collaboration between the Psychiatry Departments of MGH
and McLean, will be housed in McLean's Hill Center and will offer
partial hospitalization and residential treatment.
In January a memorandum of understanding was signed by South
Cove Community Health Center (SCCHC) and Beth Israel Deaconess
Medical Center outlining a partnership involving expanded community-based
care and hospital services for the Greater Boston Asian Community.
The agreement makes BID the principal hospital and network affiliate
for SCCHC's health center for adult care (medicine, obstetrics,
and gynecology). SCCHC is currently the primary community health
center through which BID serves the Greater Boston Asian population.
Lowell General Hospital recently joined the Dana-Farber/Partners
CancerCare network (DFPCC), making available DFPCC's cancer
care and research resources to a population outside Boston for the
first time. Lowell General is in the process of constructing a $12
million, 20,000-square-foot cancer center, which will operate in
collaboration with DFPCC. The center is due to open in the spring
of 1998.
Being Down to Earth Is Never Simple
for Returned Astronauts
Americans and Russians may sit side-by-side in space,
but they still do not always see eye-to-eye. When the Russians
insisted that American astronauts who had just returned
from the Mir space station remain lying down, many Americans
were frankly puzzled.
"It caused quite a bit of head scratching
for a little while," said Jim Pawelczyk, assistant professor
of physiology at Penn State University, at a Castle Society
event on January 17. As it turns out, the Russians were
on to something. In experiments, Pawelczyk found that most
newly returned astronauts could not maintain a standing
position for even ten minutes.
Why they could not stand—the problem
of orthostatic intolerance—is just one of the many
questions Pawelczyk will be trying to answer as one of four
payload specialists assigned to the Neurolab U.S. Space
Shuttle mission. Neurolab, which is a 16-day mission scheduled
for March 1998, is devoted to conducting experiments in
a wide range of scientific fields, from neural plasticity
and mammalian development to sleep and sensorimotor performance.
"The first
thing that jumped out that was absolutely remarkable was
that immediately after flight, nine out of 14 astronauts
could not complete 10 minutes ofstanding."
The mission represents the combined
effort of 26 principal investigators, including Charles
Czeisler, HMS associate professor of medicine, and Ken Kosik,
associate professor of neurobiology. It has the financial
support of five American agencies—NASA, NIH, NSF, and
the Office of Naval Research (ONR)—as well as the space
agencies of Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and Europe.
Only two payload specialists will actually
fly on the shuttle. The other two specialists will serve
in a ground capacity, said Pawelczyk. The decision about
who will fly will be made over the next several weeks.
Meanwhile, Pawelczyk has been designing
specific experiments to investigate the problem of orthostatic
intolerance. He is also undergoing Space Shuttle training.
"So in two weeks, I'll go off and go parasailing and jump
in the ocean and learn how to deploy life rafts," he said.
—Misia Landau
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