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Up and Comer

Findings

Vignette

Vital Signs

Here and Abroad

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Up & Comer

Name: David H. Gracias
Age: 36

Position: Assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the Whiting School of Engineering and the Institute for NanoBioTechnology

Stats: BS '94 in chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur; PhD '99 in physical chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley

Scouting report: "David is very innovative and has a wonderful imagination," says Konstantinos Konstantopoulos, professor and chair of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. "He manages to make things work, even if the idea for them initially seems as far-fetched as science fiction."

Research: Gracias develops tiny tools surgeons can use without the burden of tethered lines, tubes, or wires, which make the tools difficult to maneuver throughout the body. His lab developed "microgrippers," instruments the size of dust particles that can grab and remove living cells for biopsies, and are operable via biochemical or thermal signals, without electricity. His lab is also working to develop miniaturized electronics and "smart" devices that display the same characteristics as biological systems, such as assembling themselves within the body.

Mentors: "My parents and my siblings sowed the seeds of scientific pursuit within me at a young age. I've been influenced and aided by many towering scientific minds, including several Nobel Prize winners I've had contact with," Gracias says.

What's in a name? Although his surname might sound Portuguese or Spanish, Gracias is Indian, born in Mumbai. "Many people are curious how a person from India might be named David Gracias," he says. "My lineage is from Goa, a region on the west coast of present-day India bordering the Arabian Sea, and formerly the eastern capital of the Portuguese empire." — Michael Anft


Findings

Turn that noise down
Unlike the other senses, hearing involves modulation by the brain. Signals travel not only from the inner ear to the brain but from the brain to the ear. A team of American and Argentine researchers, including Paul Fuchs, professor of
otolaryngology at the School of Medicine, has found that nerve signals from the brain act through a protein to "turn down" the sensory hair cells within the cochlea and thus protect the ear from acoustic trauma. Fuchs and his co-researchers genetically altered the protein, nAChR, in mice to enhance its sound-limiting capability. They found that when subsequently exposed to loud noise, the altered mice suffered less permanent hearing damage. This was the first time scientists had demonstrated that nAChR's function could actually protect hearing. The research appeared in the January 20 online edition of PLoS Biology.

Mucus, now new and improved
Johns Hopkins researchers have found a way to improve mucus. Before you stop reading, understand that, throughout the body, mucus barriers bar entry to pathogens, allergens, and pollutants. But microscopic fibers in those barriers, called mucin fibers, naturally tend to bunch up, creating holes that harmful ultrafine particles can slip through. Principal investigator Justin Hanes, a researcher in the Whiting School's Institute for NanoBioTechnology, and his team found that application of a simple detergent decreased the size of the holes, thus significantly improving the mucus barrier's ability to snag tiny harmful particles. The findings appeared in the January 28 online edition of PLoS One.
— Dale Keiger


Vignette

As a freshman at Johns Hopkins in 1966, Neil A. Grauer, A&S '69, drew a comic strip for the News-Letter that included a blue jay. He also sketched blue jays to adorn the student newspaper's sports pages, and each week of lacrosse season, he would portray a jay trashing Hopkins' opponent — say, stirring a pot of Maryland terrapin soup. What he didn't know at the time was that lacrosse head coach Bob Scott was posting the drawings on the locker room's bulletin board to motivate his players. Over the years, the Neil Grauer blue jay, often known as the "NAG Jay," became the de facto mascot for Hopkins lacrosse. It has appeared on caps, drinking cups, umbrellas, T-shirts, polo shirts, sweatshirts, sweatpants, windbreakers, banners, posters, seat cushions, and travel bags.

Grauer claims no ornithological accuracy. "I just drew a bird," he says. "I'm not sure I even looked at a picture of a blue jay." In 1996, he began donating NAG Jay memorabilia to the Sheridan Libraries, and this spring the Milton S. Eisenhower Library has put part of the collection on exhibit. "Grauer's Blue Jay: A Hopkins Tradition" runs through May 25.

The cartoonist, now a senior writer for the Johns Hopkins Medical Office of Marketing and Communications, had one of his proudest moments when the players on the 2007 team elected to wear helmets decorated with his blue jay for their winning run through the NCAA national championship tournament. He also notes that his jay adorns the skin of more than a few former Hopkins players, who have the bird tattooed on various body parts. Some — Stephen Peyser, A&S '08, Peter Jacobs, A&S '95 — have gone public. But Johns Hopkins Magazine chooses to withhold the names of other players implicated in the tattoo cult, on the chance that their parents still don't know. — DK


Vital Signs

How to survive a brain bleed: tPA
A Johns Hopkins-led multicenter study of treatment for a deadly form of stroke found that application of tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) resulted in dramatically higher survival rates. Eighty percent of test subjects who received tPA survived intracranial hemorrhage, which normally kills 80 percent of untreated victims. What's more, tPA, delivered via catheter straight into the brain, resulted in significant reduction in disabilities after six months. The study, led by Daniel Hanley, professor of
neurology in the School of Medicine, was presented in February at the International Stroke Conference in San Diego.

Indoor pollution worsens asthma
Researchers from the Center for Childhood Asthma in the Urban Environment have found the severity of asthma symptoms in children is associated with increases in indoor particulate matter pollution. The study monitored children aged 2-6 for six months. Gregory B. Diette, co-director of the center and an author of the study, said in a press release, "Children spend nearly 90 percent of their time indoors, which makes understanding the effects of indoor air very important." The study, led by School of Medicine instructor Meredith C. McCormack, appeared in the February 2009 edition of Environmental Health Perspectives.

Gene mutations found in gliomas
Two gene mutations are involved in more than 70 percent of three common brain cancers, according to new research published in the February 19 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine. A team that included D. William Parsons, Victor Velculescu, and Bert Vogelstein of the Kimmel Cancer Center found mutations in the genes IDH1 and IDH2 in three forms of glioma. The findings raise possibilities of more precise diagnosis and new targeted treatments.
— DK


Here and Abroad

In February, a Johns Hopkins safety initiative to reduce blood stream infections in intensive care units (ICUs) was implemented in 30 states, a move with the potential to save $3 billion and 30,000 lives each year. The program has also expanded to Spain and, just this month, the United Kingdom, and could begin in Peru and Chile as well. The initiative is based on a checklist, developed by Peter Pronovost, director of the Johns Hopkins Quality and Safety Research Group, that outlines five steps to be followed when placing a central line catheter. Each year, in ICUs across the country, 80,000 people develop infections from such lines, and 30,000 to 60,000 die.

... Major Heather Levy, an assistant professor of military science in the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies and a member of the university's ROTC department, joined another team in March. This one, led by U.S. Deep Caving team president William Stone, was heading to the cloud forest of Ocotal, near Oaxaca, Mexico, to explore a cavern known as J2. J2 was discovered five years ago, and has only been explored to 1,200 meters. This expedition could find that it is part of the largest underground system on record. (No word as of press time.) "It's the hardest trip I've ever gone on," Levy said in an announcement before she left. "Anytime you don't get to see the sun for a week or more is challenging."

... In March, School of Nursing assistant professor Jason Farley, Nurs '08 (PhD), received a $50,000 faculty grant from the Johns Hopkins Center for Global Health. Farley, an expert in prevention and management of drug-resistant infections, says that the TB infection rate of nurses in low-resource settings is twice that of the general population. His research will take him to South Africa, where he will explore infection-control knowledge, attitudes, and practices in multidrug and extremely drug-resistant TB centers, assessing whether employers offer HIV testing to health care workers before they begin working in those settings.
—Catherine Pierre


Syllabus

Course: American Bibles

Instructor: Jared Hickman, assistant professor of English in the Krieger School

Course description: This course will examine texts drawn from across the Americas — from Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana to Melville's Moby-Dick to Euclides da Cunha's Os Sertes to Kushner's Angels in America — that are fundamentally biblical in their inspirations, aspirations, proportions, and allusions.

It will consider these texts' attempts, in the face of globalizing and secularizing forces like Atlantic slavery and German higher criticism, to affirm, undermine, appropriate, and redirect the authority of the ur-canonical text.

Reading list:
♦ The Book of Mormon
Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville
Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, by Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Bible According to Mark Twain, by Mark Twain
Os Sertões [Rebellion in the Backlands], by Euclides da Cunha
Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, by Tony Kushner
Magnalia Christi Americana, by Cotton Mather
New Worlds, Ancient Texts, by Anthony Grafton
Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman
♦ The Bible will need to be near at hand.
— DK


Bottom Line

1.9 billion: The estimated number of health care dollars saved by the Truth campaign, which works to reduce youth smoking. The American Legacy Foundation, created as part of the massive 1999 settlement of lawsuits brought by 46 states and five U.S. territories against Big Tobacco, launched the campaign in 2000. Aimed at children ages 12-17, Truth has used a combination of educational commercials on television, social networking Web sites, and grassroots outreach to take advantage of kids' natural rebelliousness by persuading them to rebel against Big Tobacco's marketing strategies and manipulation of facts. Researchers at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, led by David Holtgrave, director of the school's Institute for Global Tobacco Control, took data from a 2005 study published in the American Journal of Public Health that attributed 300,000 fewer youth smokers from 2000 to 2002 to the Truth campaign. Holtgrave et al. then ran a cost-utility analysis based on that data and calculated that the $324 million spent on Truth over that period resulted in $1.9 billion in averted health care expenses. In a press release, Holtgrave said, "Even under our most pessimistic analysis, the cost ... is substantially below the cost of other major prevention interventions and therefore its expansion would be an excellent public health investment." The Holtgrave paper, "Cost-Utility Analysis of the National truth(r) Campaign to Prevent Youth Smoking," appeared in the February online edition of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. —DK


JHUniverse
www.jhu.edu/listeningpost/forward

Six years ago, Johns Hopkins' Center for Civil Society Studies established the Listening Post Project to bring together roughly 1,000 nonprofit organizations, principally through the Internet, to generate and diffuse information and knowledge. Participating organizations would be sentries, of a sort, detecting developing challenges to the U.S. nonprofit sector and sharing ideas and information on how to respond.

In late February, the project issued a declaration titled "Forward Together: Empowering America's Citizen Sector for the Change We Need," as a public renewal of commitment by the signatories to serve as partners in taking on the challenges confronting the nation. The project also established a Web site to enable people to read the declaration, learn more about how to participate in national renewal, and become a signatory. For the United States to come out of its present crisis, says the declaration, "will require a recognition [on the part of everyone] that no one set of institutions has all of the answers or all of the resources needed to address the problems we face, and that cooperative action by all of our institutions — government, business, and nonprofit — holds the real key to the progress we need." —DK

Return to April 2009 Table of Contents

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