When medical staffs at several hospitals in Taiwan were quarantined due to outbreaks of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, making communication between key researchers difficult, help came in the form of grid computing technology provided through the Pacific Rim Applications and Grid Middleware Assembly. This international high-tech collaboration, consisting of 14 founding institutions, was founded at the San Diego Supercomputer Center.
Peter Arzberger, director of the Life Sciences Initiative at UCSD and co-founder and chair of PRAGMA’s steering committee, was contacted by colleagues in Taiwan on May 15 and alerted that the severity of the SARS outbreak was overwhelming health infrastructure in Taiwan.
To remedy the situation, access to grid teleconferencing stations was set up inside and outside of the quarantined areas in order to allow physicians to communicate health expertise in the fight against SARS. Within 12 hours of the request, PRAGMA members from around the world, including institutions in China, South Korea and several in the United States, set up a video teleconference.
The California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology and the National Biomedical Computation Resource of UCSD were among the institutions in the United States included.
Nobel laureate to speak at Med. School graduation
Sydney Brenner, recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, will speak on “”The Worst Medical Student of 1950 — A Personal Memoir”” at commencement ceremonies for the UCSD School of Medicine on June 8.
Brenner, a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and a pioneer in genetics and molecular biology, was awarded the Nobel Prize for discoveries related to the genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death. His career has also included establishing the existence of RNA and demonstrating how the order of amino acids in proteins is determined.
His research also led him to work with the roundworm, which is now widely used in the study of genetics.
The School of Medicine’s Dean Edward W. Holmes and Chancellor Robert C. Dynes will hand out the Doctor of Medicine degree diplomas to 79 men and 65 women at the School of Medicine’s 32 annual commencement ceremony. The ceremony will begin on the school’s campus at 11 a.m.
Berkeley satellite finds secret to explosions
Pictures taken by the UC Berkeley’s NASA-launched Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager satellite have made the novel observation that gamma ray polarization arises from an area of highly structured magnetic fields that were found to be stronger than any others that have been observed in the universe.
Gamma ray bursts are flashes of gamma ray photons that blast off daily into the sky and are approximately as bright as a million, trillion suns. The recent observations provide scientists a new perspective in the driving force of the gamma ray bursts.
The polarization was also found to have underlying physical symmetry and, therefore, reflect extremely aligned magnetic fields. Previous observations have also showed that a supernova is the foundation of gamma-ray bursts.
While the discovery of polarization reveals that gamma ray bursts are powered through the formation of powerful, large-scale magnetic fields, theorists must still provide answers to why some supernovae result in organized magnetic fields.
Protein could help diabetics and burn victims
UCSD biologists have recently discovered that a protein fundamental to the embryonic development of fruit flies is also utilized by mammals in healing cuts and lacerations.
The “”c-Jun”” protein, also called the “”transcription factor”” because it turns genes on and off, brings cells together during the embryonic development of Drosophila fruit flies. The embryonic development process of sheets of cells fusing to the dorsal midline was observed to be similar to the way sheets of mammalian skin cells come together to heal wounds.
According to the head of the research team and associate professor Randall S. Johnson, even though the fusion of cells in making flies and healing skin are very different, his team’s research has shown that without the protein, cells in mouse skin cluster at the edge of a wound. Johnson said that designing drugs that would promote the chemical pathway would also improve the ability of diabetics to heal from cuts and wounds.
Discovering ways to improve wound healing would also be beneficial to burn victims and others who have slow healing of skin lesions.
