Notebook

Table of Contents Push for Drug Policy Change FASEB's New President Neandertal R NOT US Brought to you by . . . Nerve-Wracking Procedure Leptin's Role Bulks Up Summer Reading Gene Causes Migraine -- And More SEEKING SOLUTIONS: Physician Leadership on National Drug Policy members Louis Sullivan, left, and David Lewis Pointing out, "Drug abuse is a public health problem; addiction is a chronic illness," David Lewis, director of the Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies at Brown University, and 37 of his colleagues have announced an initiative advocating a basic change in the way the United States deals with illicit drug use. Called Physician Leadership on National Drug Policy, the effort was announced at the New York Academy of Medicine on July 9. The group, according to Lewis, is "calling now for a fundamental shift from our reliance on the criminal justice system to the health and public health system." Lewis believes that physicians, who treat the health problems created by illicit drug use, should have a voice in national drug policy. He took this idea to the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which contributed about $250,000 to fund the group. Investor George Soros's New York-based Open Society Institute also is contributing to the initiative. Lewis says that nearly all the like-minded colleagues he contacted agreed to participate in the effort. The list includes former surgeon general Antonia Novello, former Food and Drug Administration commissioner David Kessler, former Health and Human Services Secretary Louis W. Sullivan, Harvard Medical School dean Joseph Martin, and Nobel laureate Frederick C. Robbins, director of the Center for Adolescent Health at Case Western Reserve University. The group intends to have an action plan by mid-1998. 'A CONSENSUS SOCIETY' : New FASEB president Ralph Yount notes the logistical difficulties in coordinating various constituent organizations. FASEB's NEW PRESIDENT The Bethesda, Md.-based Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) installed Ralph G. Yount, the Meyer Distinguished Professor and Professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry at Washington State University, Pullman, as its new president and chairman of the board on July 1. Speaking with The Scientist, Yount announced no changes in direction for the 84-year-old organization, which now includes 14 professional societies and 52,000 scientists. Four societies were added to FASEB's rolls within the last year, and Yount expects several more to be added "selectively." He notes that "the problem is coordinating the activities of that large number of societies. We operate as a consensus society, so we have to more or less agree on policies and procedures." FASEB's focus will continue to be on public affairs, particularly on National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health appropriations, says Yount. "The problem as I see it for science is if the budget negotiators and the administration stick with their agreement, there's going to be . . . flat funding for science and maybe even decreases beyond 1998. That's simply not tenable. We're going to be very active in contacting our champions on the Hill to make sure support for science continues to grow." It's a result certain to provide aid and comfort to every old stick-in-the-mud. The next time a fogey is upbraided for his Neandertal ideas, he can respond, "I am not a Neandertal (at least on my mother's side), and I've got the DNA to prove it!" In experiments reported in Cell on July 11 (M. Krings et al., 90 :1-20, 1997), a team of scientists from the University of Munich, the University of Arizona, the Rhineland Museum in Bonn, and Penn State University analyzed DNA from the very first Neandertal bones ever uncovered. The bones, extracted from a cave in Germany's Neander Valley in 1856 and estimated to be 30,000 to 100,000 years old, yielded tiny snippets of mitochondrial DNA, all of which is inherited matrilineally. In comparing the resulting 379-base-pair sequence to corresponding sequences from living humans, the researchers estimated that the evolutionary lines leading to humans and Neandertals diverged more than 500,000 years ago. This increases the likelihood that the Neandertals were a separate species of humans, an evolutionary dead end that left no descendants. The result, if confirmed, would also make it extremely unlikely that Neandertals interbred with modern humans, even though the two groups coexisted in Europe for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. United States television stations, many have which have declined to run commercials for condoms, will now have the opportunity to turn down commercials for a female contraceptive as well. Pharmacia & Upjohn Co., based in Kalamazoo, Mich., has released two television ads for Depo-Provera, an injectable form of medroxyprogesterone acetate that's administered once every three months. The commercials depict three scenarios: an apparently single woman who says, "I want to have kids some day, but not until I can give them the best life possible"; new parents who say, "Sure we plan to have another child, but not before Kelly learns to tie her shoes"; and a happy family whose mother says, "We always planned to have two children. Now that Rebecca's here, we're sure our family's just the right size." The commercials are being tested in four cities around the country, notes Pharmacia & Upjohn spokesman Ed Amat, but several stations have turned them down, some because of content and others because of the ads' unusual two-minute length. Fully half that time is occupied by slowly scrolling text listing Food and Drug Administration-mandated cautions and side effects. Regarding the ads' content, Amat states: "There's no suggestion of sex or anything like that. We felt as though we had a good message about an option for birth control." Scientists may have taken an important step toward more effective treatment for paralysis victims. On July 11, University of Florida researchers performed the United States' first nerve tissue transplant. Florida neurosurgeon Richard Fessler injected small pieces of human embryonic spinal cord cells directly into a cavity at the site of the paralyzed patient's spinal cord injury. The man operated on is one of 10 patients slated to undergo the procedure as part of a four-year pilot study. All of the patients have a chronic disorder known as syringomyelia, a condition characterized by the expansion of a cyst within the damaged spinal cord that causes a progressive loss of sensation and movement. The study follows similar work done with cats in 1992 in which 40 percent of the animals operated on regained at least partial walking ability (P. Reier et al., Experimental Neurology, 115 [1]:177-88, 1992). According to Fessler, this first attempt involving humans is purely a safety and efficacy study. "Our first goal was just to prove that we could do it safely," explains Fessler. "Our second goal is to demonstrate that the tissue we put in will live and will grow. And our third goal-what we would really would like to achieve-is for that tissue to grow enough to obliterate the cyst so that it stops getting larger." As of one week after the operation, the patient reportedly is doing well. "We probably won't know from six months to a year if the tissue's growing," predicts Fessler. "And my guess is that it will take two years or longer to see how much of the cyst we can actually fill." WEIGHTY FINDING: Sandra Hassink's research suggests that leptin plays a role in neonatal development. Leptin, a protein previously thought to be primarily a satiety regulator, apparently has some role in human growth as well. Pediatric researchers from the duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, Del., have identified the presence of leptin in placental tissues and in the blood of newborns, suggesting that leptin aids in intrauterine development. The study (S. Hassink et al., Pediatrics, 100 [1]:E1, 1997), led by Sandra Hassink, director of the Weight Management program at duPont and a clinical instructor of pediatrics at Jefferson Medical College, comes in the wake of well-publicized reports suggesting that increased blood leptin concentrations are somehow related to obesity in children and adults. Hassink's team enrolled 100 mother/newborn pairs; they took blood samples from the mothers and cord blood specimens from the newborns immediately after birth. Of the newborns, 13 percent were found to have higher leptin concentrations than their mothers, and all of the newborns had higher leptin concentrations than those common among children during puberty (when leptin levels typically increase preceding rapid growth). These findings indicate that leptin, produced by the placenta, plays some part in intrauterine and neonatal development. "The fact that [leptin is] a placental growth factor is fascinating to us," notes Hassink. "Leptin now appears integral not only to energy regulation, but also to growth. This really broadens out the spectrum of leptin's function." Further work must be done to determine exactly how and to what extent leptin affects development, she adds. NOVEL BACKGROUND: A newly published book by Jennifer Ball features chemistry grad students who play in a rock band. Looking for a novel to take to the beach? The recently published Catalyst by Jennifer Ball (Boston, Faber and Faber Inc., 1997) features a love triangle; a heroine who delivers singing telegrams; and plenty of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. But that's not all. It also contains scientific misconduct, simple explanations of chirality and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and the arachidonic acid cascade as a metaphor for the characters' interactions. The drama centers on telegram deliverer Shelby, married to chemistry grad student Max. They play in a rock band with two of Max's lab mates. Something fishy happens in the lab, Max and Shelby face a marital crisis, and the plot thickens. How did Ball manage to capture so accurately the angst of grad student life? She lived the adventure. Her husband is Michael Varney, director of chemistry at La Jolla, Calif.-based Agouron Pharmaceuticals Inc. They met 19 years ago in college, moved to New York so Varney could attend grad school-and yes, they play in a band, called Free Range Chicken. "I didn't want to play down the science" in the book, Ball tells The Scientist. "I wanted people to read up to my level." She reports some readers have expressed surprise at her depiction of "scientists who are not nerdy." She doesn't understand their reaction: "Because I have so many scientists in the book, of course they have to have different personalities." Ball, who calls Catalyst "probably about 40 percent autobiographical," adds: "I've met a lot of great, individual personalities that I wanted people to know about." Discovering a gene for a rare form of a common illness can ultimately help those with the more prevalent condition. So it may be for migraine, which affects millions (K.S. Brown, The Scientist, May 26, 1997, page 1). Consider the rare familial hemiplegic migraine. "It is a migraine attack, but in addition causes complete loss of motor abilities on one side of the body, lasting several hours to several days. Some patients lose consciousness," says Michel Ferrari, an associate professor of neurology at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands. Ferrari and coworkers recently identified the causative gene on chromosome 19. It encodes a calcium channel in neurons in parts of the cerebellar cortex, the brain stem, and the hippocampus (R.A. Ophoff et al., Cell, 87 :543-52, 1996). The researchers then looked for it in typical migraine. "Using 36 large Dutch families with regular migraine, we demonstrated that this gene is involved in normal migraine with or without aura," says Ferrari, who presented these results at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Study of Headache meeting on June 20. The researchers' long-term goal is to develop a prophylactic treatment for migraines. Scrutinizing the migraine gene revealed clues to two movement disorders. Although familial hemiplegic migraine results from amino acid substitutions, a truncated gene causes episodic ataxia, and a trinucleotide repeat produces spinocerebellar ataxia type 6. Sums up Ferrari, "Mutations in different sites in the gene have completely different clinical expressions." RETURN TO SENDER? Researchers at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., were all shook up last month as they celebrated director emeritus Leon Lederman's 75th birthday--and the 20th anniversary of the b quark, which he codiscovered--in a style fit for The King. Rocky Kolb, a Fermilab theoretical astrophysicist, had the idea for putting Lederman's face on the Elvis stamp; Dawn Donahue, a graphic design intern in the lab's Visual Media Services section, did the computer work to create it. The upsilon particle, the bound state of a b quark and an anti-b quark, was discovered in Fermilan's Proton Center in 1977. The anniversary was marked at a symposium hosted by the Illinois Institute of Technology, where Lederman is a professor of science. The stamp was unveiled at a July 1 dinner celebration.

Notebook

Become a Member of

Published In

August 1997

Related Research Resources

Nergal Networks: Where Friendship Meets Infection

Research Resources

Podcasts

Webinars

Videos

Infographics

eBooks

Maximizing Lentivirus Recovery

Unraveling Complex Biology with Five-Dimensional Multiomics

Resurrecting Plant Defense Mechanisms to Avoid Crop Pathogens

Seeing and Sorting with Confidence

Products

Product News

Waters Enhances Alliance iS HPLC System Software, Setting a New Standard for End-to-End Traceability and Data Integrity

Agilent Unveils the Next Generation in LC-Mass Detection: The InfinityLab Pro iQ Series

Agilent Announces the Enhanced 8850 Gas Chromatograph

Pioneering Cancer Plasticity Atlas will help Predict Response to Cancer Therapies