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39 stories in May 2005
The Arnold Arboretum's program for preschoolers that serves the area Head Start brings very excited kids to a lovely, engaging and stimulating nature setting.
New delivery technology paves way for disease therapies
A new way to administer therapeutic RNA molecules that efficiently guides them to cells throughout the body is being reported by researchers at the Harvard-affiliated CBR Institute for Biomedical Research and Harvard Medical School (HMS). The technique couples the homing ability of antibodies and an avid RNA-binding protein from sperm to deploy the RNAs in [...]
Pros and amateurs team up for discovery
For the first time, amateur and professional astronomers have teamed up to discover a new planet circling a distant star. The planet was detected by looking for the effect of its gravitational field on light from a more distant star, a technique known as “microlensing.” It is only the second world to be discovered using [...]
Exercise shown to promote breast cancer survival
Exercise plays a role in preventing breast cancer, and research strongly suggests that breast cancer patients who are more physically active improve their self-esteem and body image. Now, a landmark study from the Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) finds that exercise after diagnosis may help breast cancer patients live longer.
‘Brown fat’ cells hold clues for possible obesity treatments
In laboratory studies of mouse cells, the research team identified genes that govern how precursor cells give rise to mature brown fat cells. There are two main types of fat cells in the body- white, designed to store energy for use in times of need, and brown, which burn energy and generate heat, leading scientists [...]
“Based on this study’s results, showing the importance of personal contact with violence, the best model for violence may be that of a socially infectious disease,” says Felton Earls, MD, HMS professor of social medicine and principal investigator of the study. The study, a project that included interviews of children and teenagers from Chicago neighborhoods, [...]
Seeing the universe’s most powerful explosion
Reporting in the May 12 issue of Nature, astronomers announced that they have penetrated the heart of the universe’s most powerful explosion – a gamma-ray burst (GRB). Using the PAIRITEL (Peters Automated Infrared Imaging Telescope) robotic telescope on Mount Hopkins, Ariz., they detected a flash of infrared light accompanying the burst of high-energy radiation that [...]
Imaging may not be major driver of hospital cost increases
“There have been several news stories and reports from insurers claiming that imaging costs are catching and even surpassing drug costs as major drivers of health care inflation,” says Scott Gazelle, M.D., MPH, Ph.D., and an MGH radiologist who is director of the Institute for Technology Assessment. “Those of us who work in imaging believe [...]
Magnetic stimulation may improve stroke recovery
Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation treatment improved motor function in a small group of people. For the stimulation, an insulated wire coil is placed on the scalp, and an electrical current is passed through the coil, creating a magnetic pulse that stimulates the cortex. The study involved 14 people, ages 35 to 63, eight of whom [...]
Amateur and professional astronomers team to find new planet
Astronomer Scott Gaudi of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics believes that microlensing has the potential for wide use in the future: “With improving technologies and techniques, the first Earth-sized planet may be found by microlensing.” Last year marked the first discovery made using microlensing. This second find establishes the immediate usefulness of the technique in [...]
As many as one out of three people in the world are infected with the bacteria that causes tuberculosis, public health experts estimate. That could lead to a global plague were it not for the fact that only one out of 10 infected people actually develops the disease. Still, TB is a major global health [...]
Broken hearts may mend after all
Although adult muscle cells become inflexible after differentiation, these cells temporarily loosen the structure to divide in fetal development. Mark T. Keating found that in some lower vertebrates, heart tissue regenerates without the scarring seen in mammals. This seems to occur by proliferation of existing cardiomyocytes, not stem cells. Felix Engel, an HMS research fellow [...]
Insulin prods development of type 1 diabetes
Joslin Diabetes Center researchers Diane Mathis’s and Christophe Benoist’s finding that the lymph node draining the pancreas was intrinsic to the autoimmune response in mice made David Hafler, HMS professor of neurology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, wonder if something similar was happening in people. In the May 12, 2005 Nature, he and his colleagues [...]
Breathing restored after severe spinal-cord injury
Keeping an animal functioning after a cervical spinal cord injury is nearly impossible. An American researcher developed the lower spinal cord rat model in the early 1900s. He found that lesioning the spinal cord of dogs between the eighth and tenth thoracic vertebrae produced hind-limb paralysis while letting animals stay self-sufficient. Yang Teng, director of [...]
Kudzu cuts alcohol consumption
Scott Lukas, professor of psychiatry at McLean, a psychiatric hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School, says these results inspired his team to test on humans. The study was conducted on 14 men and women, average age 24 years, in a “laboratory” apartment where each person was allowed to drink as many as six beers. After [...]
Task Forces on Women release findings
Harvard’s Task Forces on Women Faculty and on Women in Science and Engineering, appointed three months ago to address concerns of women faculty and women in science throughout the University, Monday (May 16) released reports calling for large-scale changes in the way the University recruits faculty and supports women and underrepresented minorities pursuing academic careers. [...]
Social determinants key in who gets good care
Kerala is one of the poorer states in India, and yet it enjoys India’s highest life expectancy and lowest infant mortality rates. This seeming anomaly has caused many to wonder what Kerala is doing right. Dan Brock thinks the answer may be found through work on the social determinants of health. “The principal explanation is [...]
HMS examines ethics of Internet organ donation
Desperation and frustration are prompting some patients with failing organs to turn to modern technology and the Internet to bypass lengthy organ donation waiting lists and find donors themselves. The practice, which has resulted in several transplants already through a locally run Web site, has sparked a discussion over its ethics, a topic debated Thursday [...]
Aspirin use may protect against colon cancer recurrence, reduce risk of death
“Our data are intriguing because they showed that aspirin use notably reduced the risk of recurrence in patients with advanced colon cancer, but more research is needed before any treatment recommendations can be made about the regular use of aspirin,” says Charles Fuchs, M.D., M.P.H., of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and lead author [...]
Harvard Task Forces on Women release findings and recommendations
Harvard's Task Forces on Women Faculty and on Women in Science and Engineering, appointed three months ago to address concerns of women faculty and women in science throughout the University, today released reports calling for large-scale changes in the way the University recruits faculty and supports women and underrepresented minorities pursuing academic careers.
Drug combination boosts survival rate in head and neck cancers
Previous studies have shown that using combination chemotherapy of cisplatin and 5-fu yields a 25 to 50 percent rate of complete pathological responses (the tumor disappeared). Robert Haddad, M.D., and his colleagues found that adding the drug docetaxel to the cisplatin and 5-fu regimen significantly increased the complete pathological response rate to 89 percent. Using [...]
Low-fat dairy may help reduce risk of type 2 diabetes
The consumption of low-fat dairy foods may reduce men’s risk of developing type 2 diabetes, according to a study in the May 9 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine. The report from researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), and Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) – the first large-scale, prospective [...]
Researchers ID antigen for type 1 diabetes
Type 1 diabetes, diagnosed in children and adults, is an autoimmune disease that occurs when the pancreas no longer produces insulin. Diabetes, which ranks as the fifth-deadliest disease in the United States, has reached critical proportions, affecting 18.2 million people, or 6.3 percent of the population. To address what many consider a growing epidemic, scientists [...]
Harvard ‘Foresters’ put forward bold new plan
n a new scientific report titled “Wildlands and Woodlands: A Vision for the Forests of Massachusetts,” David Foster, director of Harvard University’s Harvard Forest, is calling, along with his colleagues, for a bold new land protection effort to stave off accelerating forest fragmentation in Massachusetts. “The time has come to step up to the challenge [...]
Health conference looks at the numbers
The topic of health statistics took center stage last week as practitioners from around the world discussed the critical role statistics play in identifying and addressing health disparities during a Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) symposium last week (May 5). School of Public Health Dean Barry Bloom said the information conveyed by health statistics [...]
Radcliffe conference looks at biological systems
With the rapid advance of technology opening new frontiers of knowledge, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study looked at the increasingly detailed understanding of biological systems last week (May 6) as well as the potential of that knowledge for future applications. The Radcliffe Institute’s “Designing Biology” conference drew about 300 to a daylong program of [...]
Breathing easier after spinal cord injuries
njuries to the upper spinal cord can take a victim’s breath away. Most people don’t know that breathing difficulties are the leading cause of disease and death after such injuries. Indeed, respiratory failure causes more deaths than limb paralysis does, and survivors often become dependent on ventilation machines. For the first time, Harvard researchers successfully [...]
Left- or right-brain? Genes may tell the story
According to HHMI investigator Christopher A. Walsh, postdoctoral fellow Tao Sun, and their colleagues at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, their discovery that a gene called LM04 is expressed differently on the two sides of the brain may help understand how one side of the brain is dominant in most people. [...]
Robotic telescope penetrates heart of universe’s most powerful explosion
Cullen Blake, a graduate student at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and lead author on the paper, said that the simultaneous observation of infrared light with a gamma-ray burst was unprecedented. This observation was made possible by PAIRITEL’s ability to aim at objects quickly and automatically. PAIRITEL pointed at the burst minutes after the Integral [...]
Brain chemical serotonin involved in early embryo patterning
A study published in the May 10, 2005, Current Biology has ramifications for neuroscience, developmental genetics, evolutionary biology and, possibly, human teratology (a branch of pathology and embryology concerned with abnormal development and congenital malformations). Among other results, the study, which was carried on frog and chick embryos: • Provides the first molecular support for [...]
The study’s lead author, Megan Gerber, a practicing physician at Cambridge Health Alliance and instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, notes: “Our study hopes to raise physician awareness of how common domestic violence is in practice, especially among women who exhibit adverse health behaviors. Physicians regularly screen for tobacco and alcohol use in their [...]
Study finds men who consume more dairy products have lower incidence of diabetes
A report from researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) – the first large-scale, prospective examination of a relationship between dairy intake and diabetes risk – analyzes data from the HSPH-based Health Professionals Follow-up Study. “Our study found that men consuming higher levels of [...]
Low-fat dairy foods may help reduce risk of type 2 diabetes
“Our study found that men consuming higher levels of dairy products, especially low-fat dairy foods, had a significantly lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes during a 12-year period,” says Hyon Choi, M.D., Dr.PH, director of Outcomes Research in the MGH Rheumatology Unit and the paper’s lead author. Recent research has implied that dairy foods [...]
T cell misfits may spell autoimmunity
For a would-be T cell, the journey from cradle to grave is likely to be brief. After leaving the bone marrow, the immature immune cell travels directly to the thymus, where it undergoes a winnowing process. To become a mature T cell, it must learn to attack alien proteins and not those peptides produced by [...]
Vitamin B6 is involved in approximately 100 reactions in the body, including protein and red blood cell metabolism. The nervous and immune systems also need it to function efficiently. In addition, vitamin B6 is important for the synthesis and maintenance of DNA – two processes that are likely involved in the development of colorectal cancer. [...]
Zaldarriaga probes universe’s start
Matias Zaldarriaga is peering back into time to find his roots – and the roots of everything else ever created. Zaldarriaga, named professor of astronomy in July, is an expert in cosmology, which is the study of the origins and evolution of the universe. A theoretical astrophysicist, Zaldarriaga is trying to understand the faint cosmic [...]
Researchers induce heart cells to proliferate
In the best-documented effort to date, researchers from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School have successfully induced adult heart-muscle cells to divide and multiply. Heart-muscle cells, or cardiomyocytes, were previously considered incapable of replicating in mammals after birth, which is why heart attack is such a problem: Once [...]
Drops in drops hold practical promise
A team of Harvard researchers has developed a technique that allows the precise formation of double emulsions – droplets within droplets – that offers new ways to deliver drugs, nutrients, and other consumer and industrial products. The team, led by Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics and Professor of Physics David Weitz, devised a technique [...]
Pigeons saved by rump feathers
Alberto Palleroni was a pigeon-napper. At night he haunted silos and other roosting places, snatching hundreds of startled birds. Then, he and his friends would change their feathers. By carefully cutting, stripping, and gluing, they switched rump feathers between two types of pigeons. Those that got white feathers on their rumps fared much better than [...]
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