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Gay Health Advocates To Launch Journal Bioegineers, Move Over At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, even the plumbers are inventors New IIASA Head Named Horwitz Prize Honoree Building Blocks Cheeseburgers In Paradise Save A Species, Kill A Bill The San Francisco-based Gay and Lesbian Medical Association (GLMA), a health-advocacy group, has announced plans to launch the Journal of the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association. The quarterly, planned to begin publication in early 1997, will be the first peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary, scholarly journal focusing on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered health, according to GLMA. It will specialize in original clinical research and will also publish review articles, brief reports, topical essays, and news of lesbian and gay health. Topics expected to be addressed include HIV, gynecology, mental illness, sexually transmitted diseases, and oncology. The editors are Jocelyn White, an assistant professor of internal medicine at Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland, and Mark Townsend, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Louisiana State University School of Medicine in New Orleans. The journal will be published by Plenum Publishing Corp. of New York. According to GLMA, $50,000 has been raised toward the $200,000 goal to support publication. For information on manuscript submission, contact White at Department of Medicine, Legacy Good Samaritan Hospital, 1015 N.W. 22nd Ave., Portland, Ore. 97210. E-mail: whitejo@ohsu.edu. For further information, contact Susan Stone, Development Director, GLMA, 211 Church St., Suite C, San Francisco, Calif. 94114; (415) 255-4547. Fax: (415) 255-4784. of Technology, even the plumbers are inventors A PLUM IDEA: MIT plumber-turned-bioengineer Paul DeSantis holds patent for his invention. According to a January 5 news report by Reuters, MIT plumber Paul DeSantis turned medical inventor recently when he designed a new device to help his daughter Ashley combat stomach problems. Ashley was born in 1991 with a condition in which stomach acid refluxed into her esophagus, meaning she had to be fed by a tube with a special liquid formula through a permanent hole in her abdomen. However, gas build-up in Ashley's stomach sometimes caused the food to back up, resulting in discomfort and the risk of dehydration. The article said that DeSantis applied his knowledge of valves and pipes to Ashley's problem, likening it to MIT's heating system. He designed a tubing system that uses a small, one-way check valve and a Y-port for venting gas to prevent liquid food from backing up from the stomach. The valve sits just below a food bottle and the Y-port uses a valve to allow gas to escape up the tube from the stomach. After checking with an MIT mechanical engineering professor, he took the design to MIT's Technology Licensing Office. He was granted a United States patent on the feeding system last fall, and he and the university are now looking for a partner to manufacture and market the device. "When I say I'm from MIT, their eyes open a little wider,'' the article quoted DeSantis as saying. "I don't tell them I'm a plumber.'' Gordon J. MacDonald, a professor of international relations at the graduate school of international relations and Pacific studies at the University of California, San Diego, has been named director of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). The nongovernmental research institution, based in Laxenburg, Austria, near Vienna, was founded in 1972 primarily as a joint initiative by United States and Soviet governments. Among its 17 national member organizations is the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Mass. MacDonald, who takes office in August, has been chief scientist and vice president of the MITRE Corp., a Bedford, Mass., engineering company that provides technical and strategic guidance in information, communications, and environmental systems. He has also served on the President's Council on Environmental Quality and chaired various scientific committees for the White House during the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Clinton administrations. John Ahearne, chairman of the U.S. Committee for IIASA and executive director of Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society in Research Triangle Park, N.C., tells The Scientist that "the next phase of IIASA's growth is scientific, and MacDonald's expertise, which is in global change and the effects of population pressures on development, are two fields central to IIASA's mission." For its first two decades, IIASA brought East and West scholars together for joint studies on natural resources, demography, economics, management, and applied mathematics. After the Cold War ended, it shifted its focus to policy-oriented research on the human dimensions of global change. Now the organization sponsors studies addressing environmental, technological, and economic issues. BREWMEISTER: Leland Hartwell will be given the Horwitz Prize for his cell cycle research on brewer's yeast. Leland Hartwell, a professor of genetics at the University of Washington, has been selected to receive the 1995 Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize. The honor, which carries a $22,000 cash award, is given by Columbia University to recognize outstanding research in biology or biochemistry. The award ceremony, originally slated for January 10 at Columbia, has been postponed as a result of the early January blizzard that paralyzed the northeastern United States; at press time, a new date had not been set, according to a Columbia spokesman. Hartwell will be recognized for his contributions to cell-cycle research over the past three decades. Using brewer's yeast, he studies the genes that control cell division; in 1974, he identified the gene that initiates the process (L.H. Hartwell et al., Science, 183:46-51, 1974). He has also elucidated cell-cycle checkpoints -- early biochemical events that impinge on later ones and may hold some answers to preventing cancerous cell growth (L.H. Hartwell, T.A. Weinhart, Science, 246:629-34, 1989). This isn't Hartwell's first association with the Horwitz Prize: From 1964 to 1965, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow with cancer biologist Renato Dulbecco, who won the prize in 1973 and the Nobel Prize (with David Baltimore and Howard Temin) in 1975. The Horwitz prize has long been held by scientists to be a Nobel Prize predictor: Since the first award was given in 1967, 31 of 55 Horwitz prize recipients have gone on to win the Nobel in physiology or medicine, or in chemistry. The award honors Louisa Gross Horwitz, the daughter of Samuel David Gross, a 19th-century Philadelphia surgeon who pioneered suturing techniques and served as president of the American Medical Association. BONE STRUCTURE: 3-D model of the bone protein OP-1 Using X-ray crystallography, researchers have discovered the three-dimensional structure of a potentially marketable protein important in tissue development. The work-the result of a collaboration among several researchers from Creative BioMolecules Inc., a public biotech firm in Hopkinton, Mass.; Brandeis University; and Harvard Medical School-was published in last month's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (D. Griffith et al., 93:878-83, 1996). The protein-dubbed osteogenic protein-1 (OP-1)-is a member of the larger transforming growth factor-beta (TGF-b) family of signaling molecules. Amid TGF-b's myriad biological functions, these molecules are critical for cell differentiation during development and the regeneration of tissues after birth. For its family role, OP-1 induces the formation of new bone. "The goal of this and related research is to systematically characterize and map the cascade of events involved in tissue formation," said Charles Cohen, chief scientific officer at Creative BioMolecules, in a statement announcing the PNAS paper. OP-1 is currently in advanced clinical trials for orthopedic construction. THE FLIP SIDE: Purdue's Martha Belury found a nutritional benefit to cheeseburgers-for mice. A possible cancer-fighting agent might be found in the most unlikely place, according to a nutritionist from Purdue University. Forget oat bran or garlic. A polyunsaturated fat called conjugated dienoic linoleate acid (CLA), found primarily in cooked meat and processed-milk products such as cheese, has been shown to inhibit skin cancer in mice. In a review article (M.A. Belury, Nutrition Reviews, 53:83-9, 1995), Martha Belury, a professor of foods and nutrition at Purdue, describes experiments in which she fed CLA to cancer-prone mice. These rodents developed fewer tumors than similar, non-CLA-fed mice. Other researchers have also shown that CLA inhibits mammary cancer in rats and stomach cancer in other mice. Although Belury and colleagues don't know exactly how CLA works, some experiments suggest it might have antioxidant capabilities; selectively kill cancer cells; or replace other cancer-promoting fatty acids in the cell membrane. Emphasizing the fact that the relationship between dietary fat and cancer is far from clear-cut, Belury argues that her results at least warrant human clinical trials, especially because only small amounts of CLA are necessary for it to have an effect -- at least in mice. Fittingly, Belury's work was funded by the National Livestock and Meat Board. Biologists and environmentalists are gearing up to battle Congress over a pair of bills pending this winter. The object of their ire is a Senate bill to reauthorize the Endangered Species Act. According to a letter sent by 16 prominent biologists on November 29 to its sponsor, Sen. Dirk Kempthorne (R-Utah), the bill is tainted by "scientific fallacies and mistakes." The letter's authors-all presidents or former presidents of the Ecological Society of America (ESA), the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)-criticize the bill for, among other things, its unscientific definition of an "endangered" species, which is described as being "on an irreversible course to extinction" within 40 years. The scientists also had similar complaints about a House bill introduced in September by Rep. Don Young (R-Ark.). Among those who signed the letter are Rita R. Colwell, director of the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute and current president of AAAS; Jane Lubchenco, distinguished professor of zoology at Oregon State University, president-elect of AAAS and past president of ESA; and Paul R. Ehrlich, a professor of biological sciences at Stanford University and past president of AIBS.

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