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House Recesses, Democrats Reflect On Accomplishments And What's Ahead
House Democrats celebrated late last week the passage of a health reform bill out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, but they still face a lot of work when they return in September, Roll Call reports.
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Editorials Respond To Selection Of Sotomayor As Supreme Court Nominee
Several newspapers recently published editorials on President Obama"s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Summaries appear below.~ Boston Globe: "Some liberal activists hoped that Obama would seek a firebrand to counter [Supreme Court Justice] Antonin Scalia, the darling of the right," but "Sotomayor has made her reputation not on hot-button social issues but on matters ranging from environmental regulation to the baseball business," a Globe editorial states. It adds that while Sotomayor "presumably shares Obama"s support for abortion rights, she upheld the Bush administration"s restrictions on family-planning activities" by international groups that received U.S. funding. Now, "conservative groups have seized upon an offhand remark in 2005" when she described the "federal appeals courts as the place "where policy is made" ... as evidence that Sotomayor would legislate from the bench," the editorial states, adding. "The attack is disingenuous." The editorial concludes, "Short of any unexpected revelations about her record or her philosophy, though, the Senate should confirm Sonia Sotomayor," adding that in addition to her "intriguing" personal background she "also has the experience to make an excellent Supreme Court Justice" (Boston Globe, 5/27).~ Chicago Tribune: Sotomayor "has to bring more than diversity to the court," a Tribune editorial states, adding that the "evidence so far suggests that she is up to the job." One "would expect a nominee chosen by Obama to be on the liberal side of the judicial spectrum," but some of her rulings "suggest otherwise," according to the editorial. While Sotomayor "has stressed that the "duty of a judge is to follow the law, not to question its plain terms,"" on the bench, "she ruled against an abortion-rights group challenging" the Bush administration"s "global gag rule," the editorial notes, among other rulings that "could be characterized as "conservative decisions"." However, "the point is not that she"s a closet conservative -- it"s that ideology didn"t seem to determine her decisions," according to the editorial. The "Senate has a responsibility to undertake a thorough examination of her record and her thinking," the editorial states, concluding, "But for now, it looks as though her critics have a tough task ahead of them" (Chicago Tribune, 5/27).~ Los Angeles Times: "Sotomayor doesn"t possess the political experience that would be brought to the court"s cloistered chambers by Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D) or Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano," but "she satisfies Obama"s other criteria: experience, erudition and, as he put it, "a common touch and a sense of compassion, an understanding of how the world works and how ordinary people live,"" a Times editorial states. Sotomayor"s "experiences as a Latina raised in a housing project who went on to excel at Princeton and Yale don"t in themselves qualify her for the court," but these facts do "complement her sterling credentials and equip her with perspectives that could illuminate legal issues that come before her," the editorial continues. Senate Republicans "should accord her the same respect [they] demanded for Bush"s nominees and end the tiresome tit-for-tat that has cheapened the confirmation of federal judges and deprived the bench of some of the nation"s most capable legal minds," the editorial concludes (Los Angeles Times, 5/27).~ Philadelphia Inquirer: "Sotomayor would bring to the court a diversity it has lacked for most of its history," an Inquirer editorial states. Although "[c]onservatives want to make an issue out of President Obama"s search for "empathy" in a nominee" and "criticize Sotomayor for a speech in 2001 in which she said that being a woman of color affects her decisions," neither comment "is sinister nor shocking," according to the editorial. It concludes, "The Senate has a duty to examine Sotomayor"s qualifications rigorously and fairly. But she appears to have the experience and the
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Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy Holds 15th Annual Connect Conference In Atlanta
Patricia A. Furlong, Founding President and CEO of Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy (PPMD), the largest non-profit organization in the United States focused on finding a cure for Duchenne muscular dystrophy (Duchenne), announced that PPMD will be honoring United States Senator Johnny Isakson and the American Football Coaches Association (AFCA) with "Change It Champion" awards at the 2009 Connect Conference in Atlanta, Georgia on Saturday, June 27. Other award recipients include Darius Weems and Logan Smalley from the acclaimed documentary "Darius Goes West."
Public Health

Hydrogen Peroxide In The Immune System

When you were a kid your mom poured it on your scraped finger to stave off infection. When you got older you might have even used it to bleach your hair. Now there"s another possible function for this over-the-counter colorless liquid: your body might be using hydrogen peroxide as an envoy that marshals troops of healing cells to wounded tissue. Using the zebrafish as an animal model, researchers in the lab of Harvard Medical School professor of systems biology Timothy Mitchison and Dana Farber Cancer Institute professor Thomas Look have discovered that when the tail fins of these creatures are injured, a burst of hydrogen peroxide is released from the wound and into the surrounding tissue. Teams of rescue-working white blood cells respond to this chemical herald, crawl to the site of damage, and get to work. "We"ve known for quite some time that when the body is wounded, white blood cells show up, and it"s really a spectacular piece of biology because these cells detect the wound at some distance," says Mitchison. "But we haven"t known what they"re responding to. We do know something about what summons white blood cells to areas that are chronically inflamed, but in the case of an isolated physical wound, we haven"t really known what the signal is." These findings are reported in the June 4 issue of the journal Nature. Philipp Niethammer, a postdoc in Mitchison"s lab, and Clemmens Grabber, a postdoc in Look"s lab, initiated this research project with no interest in wound healing. Rather, they were studying a groups of molecules called reactive oxygen species, or ROS. These small oxygen-derived molecules, of which hydrogen peroxide is one, have the potential to be both helpful and hurtful. Niethammer and Grabber were simply curious to find ways to detect ROS molecules in an organism. To do this, they took a gene engineered to change color in the presence of hydrogen peroxide and inserted it into zebrafish embryos. Once the embryos entered the larvae stage after a few days, this synthetic gene spread throughout the entire body, essentially "wiring" the fish so that any discreet location in which hydrogen peroxide appears would glow. But how do you coax the fish to produce a reactive chemical like hydrogen peroxide in the first place? Since white blood cells have long been known to produce hydrogen peroxide, one obvious way to initiate chemical production would be to inflict a small wound onto the fish, and then, using microscopy, observe patterns of this chemical as white blood cells gathered around the wound. But much to the researchers surprise, they found that hydrogen peroxide immediately appeared at the wound site, prior to the arrival of any white blood cell, and quickly disseminated into neighboring tissue. They repeated the experiment, this time in zebrafish where they"d disabled a protein that was previously discovered to produce hydrogen peroxide in the human thyroid gland. Not only did hydrogen peroxide not appear at the wound site, but white blood cells failed to respond to the injury. "This was our real eureka! moment," says Niethammer. "We weren"t too surprised that we could block hydrogen peroxide production through this technique, but what we didn"t expect at all was that white blood cells wouldn"t respond. This proved that the white blood cells needed hydrogen peroxide to sense the wound, and move towards it." Of course, zebrafish are not people, and while our genomes share many similarities with these tiny fish, it isn"t yet clear that natural selection has conserved this process throughout the evolutionary family tree. Still, these findings offer something of a conceptual shift in how to view human conditions where hydrogen peroxide plays a role. "When we look at how hydrogen peroxide works in people, this really starts getting intriguing," says Mitchison. In the human body, hydrogen peroxide is produced primarily in three places: lung, gut, and thyroid gland. Because hydrogen peroxide, and the proteins responsible for producing other ROS molecules, are especially present in lung and gut, the researchers hypothesize that human diseases relevant to these findings would include any in the lung and gut that involve disproportionate levels of white blood cells, like asthma, chronic pulmonary obstruction, and some inflammatory gut diseases. "Our lungs are supposed to be sterile; our guts are anything but," says Mitchison. "It"s very logical that both those tissues produce hydrogen peroxide all the time. Perhaps in conditions like asthma, the lung epithelia is producing too much hydrogen peroxide because it"s chronically irritated, which, if our findings translate to humans, would explain inappropriate levels of white blood cells. This is certainly a question worth pursuing." Mitchison is currently laying the groundwork for investigating this hypothesis. This research was funded by the National Institutes of Health. Full Citation: Nature, June 3, 2009; 459 (7247) "A tissue-scale gradient of hydrogen peroxide mediates rapid wound detection in zebrafish" Philipp Niethammer(1), Clemens Grabher(2, 3), A. Thomas Look(2, 4), Timothy J. Mitchison(1) * Departement of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School, Boston MA * Department of Pediatric Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA * Current address: Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe GmbH, 76344 Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany * Division of Hematology/Oncology, Department of Pediatrics, Children"s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA David Cameron Harvard Medical School


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