In Brief
Expert to discuss immigration policy and economic impact
George Borjas, a professor of economics and social policy at
the John F. Kennedy School of
Government at Harvard University, will discuss "Immigration
Policy and the Economic Impact of
Immigration," at 4 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 29, in the third event
in this year's Social Policy Seminar
Series, presented by the Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy
Studies, Department of Economics and
Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The event will take place in Room 526 of the Wyman Park
Building on the Homewood campus.
Borjas is also a research associate at the National Bureau
of Economic Research. He has written
extensively on labor market issues, and his research on the
economic impact of immigration is widely
perceived as playing a central role in the debate over
immigration policy in the United States and
abroad. His work appears regularly in publications including
The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times,
The Wall Street Journal and Le Monde.
Brody to speak at meeting about medical device
development
President William R. Brody will be the featured speaker this
week at a meeting of Hopkins
Medical Device Network, a student-run organization on the
Homewood campus that aims to encourage
medical device development.
The event, part of the Biodesign & Innovation Seminar
Series, will take place at 6:30 p.m. on
Thursday, Nov. 29, in the Charles Commons Ballroom.
Packard Center receives grant to screen 'old' FDA-approved
drugs
The Robert
Packard Center for ALS Research at Johns Hopkins has received
a three-year $1.5
million grant from the Cinque Foundation to support the screening
of thousands of drugs, already
approved by the Food and Drug Administration and on the market,
for their potential value in treating
people with ALS.
ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, is a progressive
and fatal neurodegenerative disease
marked by gradual and crippling paralysis that affects about
30,000 people in the United States. No
cure exists, so treatment is currently limited to palliative
care.
A team of researchers at Johns Hopkins, led by Packard
Center Director Jeffrey Rothstein,
says the value of hunting among already approved drugs is that
they have undergone extensive safety
testing and can be quickly used in clinical trials of ALS
patients.
That strategy previously worked to identify ceftriaxone, an
FDA-approved antibiotic commonly
prescribed to treat pneumonia, bacterial meningitis and Lyme
disease. Rothstein and his team
demonstrated the drug's effectiveness on cell cultures or slices
of spinal cord from rats that have an
ALS-like disease.
The new experiments will add two additional twists to the
search for drugs to treat ALS. First,
rather than screening single drugs, the researchers will be
working with millions of combinations of
drugs to learn whether some pharmaceuticals are more potent
against ALS when combined. Second,
the team will be testing these drugs for the first time on human
stem cellÐderived brain cells called
astrocytes, which are now known to be defective in ALS.
Slavic studies organization honors work by SAIS
author
Charles Gati, senior adjunct professor of Russian and
Eurasian studies at SAIS, is the winner of
the 2007 Marshall Shulman Book Award for his book Failed
Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest
and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt. The book was co-published in
2006 by Stanford University Press and
the Woodrow Wilson Center Press and appeared in English,
Hungarian, Russian, Polish and Slovak.
The prize, awarded annually by the American Association for
the Advancement of Slavic
Studies in cooperation with Columbia University's Harriman
Institute, is for "an outstanding
monograph dealing with the international relations, foreign
policy or foreign policy decision-making of
any of the states of the former Soviet Union or Eastern Europe."
It was presented Nov. 17 at a
ceremony in New Orleans.
Gati is the only scholar who has been awarded the prize
twice. He received it two decades ago
for Hungary and the Soviet Bloc (Duke University Press,
1986).
Heartfest set for Jan. 26; rock, soul, swing doc to be
honored
Heartfest — an annual benefit for the Johns Hopkins
Ciccarone Preventive Cardiology Center —
beats on for the 18th year, from 7:30 p.m. to midnight on
Saturday, Jan. 26, at Martin's West. The
evening includes heart-healthy food prepared by top chefs and
caterers, wine tasting by the Wine
Merchant and dancing to the rock, soul and swing band Stevie V. &
the Heart Attackers.
The celebrity honoree is Stephen Valenti, a cardiologist at
Howard County General Hospital and
founder of Stevie V. & the Heart Attackers; medical honorees are
the world-renowned physicians Eric
J. Topol and Peter O. Kwiterovich Jr.; and the community honoree
is Brady Vontran, teenage heart
patient and founder of Brady's Heart Foundation. Tickets are
$100. For more information, call the
Heartfest Helpline at 410-560-2230 or go to Heartfest.org.
Correction
A Nov. 12 story about Andre Levchenko's work on how bacteria
organize to survive hostile
environments incorrectly stated that test volumes in the chambers
he is using are in the nanomolar
range. It should have said nanoliter range.
GO TO NOVEMBER 26, 2007
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