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A.
The Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative
Narrator:
This is Science Today. The National Institute
on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health,
has announced a five-year, 60 million dollar Alzheimer’s
Disease Neuroimaging Initiative. More than 50 sites
across the United States and Canada will participate,
including the University of California at Berkeley.
Dr. William Jagust, a professor of public health
and neurosciences, will lead the initiative’s research
on PET scans as a predictor of Alzheimer’s disease.
Jagust:
We’ve developed a team that’s working together
and has the job of standardizing how the PET scans
are done, because in order to compare them across
all these sites, we have to be very careful about
how we do the scans and acquire the PET data.
Narrator:
The PET scans will be used to measure glucose metabolism
in the brain – reductions of which are known to
be present in Alzheimer’s disease.
Jagust:
The goal here is to see if these changes in glucose
metabolism will predict who’s going to go on to
develop Alzheimer’s and also, it will help us plan
drug trials in the future.
Narrator:
For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.
B.
The California Current: A Fascinating Part of our
Natural World
Narrator:
This
is Science Today. A newly established program called
the California Current Ecosystem will look into
the ecosystems off the California coast as never
before. Mark Ohman, a researcher at the University
of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of
Oceanography, will lead the program. Ohman say the
California Current site is a highly productive ecosystem
that sustains a variety of life.
Ohman:
It’s a fascinating part of our natural world and
we need to understand that better to be able to
manage it better. In a more practical sense, we
depend on a variety of living marine resources from
the California Current – a variety of fish populations,
marine invertebrates, kelp forests and marine mammals
and in order to sensibly manage their resources,
we have to understand the dynamics of the ecosystem
in which they function.
Narrator:
The California Current Ecosystem site will benefit
from more than 50 years of research conducted by
the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations.
For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.
C.
Time a Big Factor in the Discovery of Two New Superheavy
Elements
Narrator:
This is Science Today. The recent discovery of two
new superheavy elements to add to chemistry’s Periodic
Table was a collaborative effort between Russian and
American scientists. Joshua Patin of the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory served as a primary
data analyst and says in essence, time was on their
side. Using an accelerator in Russia, they were able
to run the experiment for a month – here in the States,
reserving accelerator time is much more limited.
Patin:
It’s more of a cultural thing in the sense that our
leader of the collaboration in Russia is an academician
– he has scientific control over the experiments that
are performed at that cyclotron, so therefore if he
wants to run an experiment, he can pretty much say,
let’s run the experiment. We had to run a month to
see four atoms, so you’re thinking one atom per week
if you’re successful and statistically, you’re dealing
with a very small number of occurrences and events
actually happening and so you could run for maybe
two weeks and not see something.
Narrator:
For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.
D.
A Population-Based Study of Emergency Room Departments
Narrator:
This is Science Today. According to a national population-based
study, four out of five Americans who visit emergency
room departments are insured and have primary care
physicians. The results, analyzed by Dr. Ellen Weber
of the University of California, San Francisco, dispels
a common belief that the overuse of emergency departments
are caused by people who don’t have insurance or doctors.
Weber:
One of the implications of that myth has been policy,
which has been to assign everybody and every insurance
company a primary physician with the hope that that
will keep them from coming to emergency departments.
Narrator:
Instead, Weber say the problem may be with the outpatient
health care system not being able to adequately handle
the needs of patients.
Weber:
Patients cannot get in to see their physicians when
they need to. Emergency departments are open twenty-four
hours a day and many people don’t have their emergencies
between 9-to-5. This is not a matter of convenience,
as a lot of people like to think, it’s really a matter
of need.
Narrator:
For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.
E.
Doing Research in the Interest of the Public Good
Narrator:
This is Science Today. Researchers at the
University of California, Berkeley have teamed up
with a small biotech company and a non-profit pharmaceutical
to produce a simpler, inexpensive way to make an anti-malarial
drug called artemisinin, which is extracted from the
Chinese sweet wormwood plant. Chemical engineer Jay
Keasling says pharmaceutical companies haven’t developed
a biotechnology process like theirs because there
is no motivation.
Keasling:
The reason that a university has teamed up
with a small biotech company and a nonprofit pharmaceutical
is that we can do the basic science without this motivation
for a profit. We can do research in the interest of
the public good.
Narrator:
Keasling’s lab has developed a way to combine genes
from three separate organisms to create a chemical
factory to produce the drug at 1/10th the current
cost.
Keasling:
The impact of doing research in this particular area
is that we could save one to two million lives every
year if we can supply this drug inexpensively.
Narrator:
For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.
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