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Obama Pushes Democrats, Attacks Republicans, Campaigns For Public Support
"President Obama is becoming more personally invested in rallying the public and Congress behind a healthcare overhaul, even as some Republicans raise the stakes in the debate by claiming that defeating his plan would undermine his presidency," the Los Angeles Times reports. Obama will defend his push for health reform in a series of public events this week, as he and senior aides press Democratic lawmakers to support the versions of pending legislation still circulating in congressional committees (Parsons and Levey, 7/21).
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Biotech Leaders, Patient Advocates Highlight Cutting-Edge HIV/AIDS Therapies, Need For Next Generation Treatments
Leaders in biotechnology research and patient advocacy joined forces today at the 2009 BIO International Convention to discuss the latest breakthroughs in HIV/AIDS treatments. Following a keynote speech by Sir Elton John focused on the needs of the HIV/AIDS community, representatives of biotech companies previewed the next generation of treatments while patient advocates reiterated the need for new therapies, particularly for those who have developed resistance to existing medications. Researchers are developing new therapies that are more effective in treating HIV/AIDS, including an AIDS vaccine and new methods of delivery that hold the potential to increase patient compliance.
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Gallup Poll Reflects Cultural, Political Changes In Abortion Views, Opinion Piece Says
"There were all kinds of ways to misunderstand" the meaning of a recent Gallup poll that found for the first time that more U.S. residents identify themselves as "pro-life" than as "pro-choice," Time columnist Nancy Gibbs writes in an opinion piece. Gibbs writes that although Gallup "attributes the new numbers to Republicans purifying their views," that trend is "to be expected" because "when fewer people call themselves Republican, the party condenses into a pool of true believers." According to Gibbs, the real drivers of the shift are "the people in the middle who are constantly weighing which restrictions are reasonable." Gibbs notes a recent Pew poll that found that while "a majority of independents said abortion should be legal in most cases as recently as October, just 44% do so now." This finding "may inspire some introspection on the part of the political operatives in both parties who attribute the Republicans" present frailty to its orthodoxy on social issues," Gibbs says, adding that the GOP"s "message, on abortion at least, may be closer to mainstream than Democrats care to acknowledge."Gibbs continues, "I think the numbers, inadequate and simplified though they may be, reflect deeper changes -- some generational, some legal, some technological." She writes that people younger than age 30 "are more opposed to abortion than those older" and that she "wonder[s] if younger women are now sure enough of their sexual autonomy and their choices generally, that they don"t view limits on abortion as attacks on their overall freedom." At the same time, "the political context" has changed, Gibbs says. She adds, "The very meaning of the labels adjusts; calling yourself pro-choice at a time when a liberal Democratic President and allies in Congress are lifting abortion restraints may imply no qualms at all, and that"s not where most people are." She continues, "People always want to apply the brakes to whichever side has the momentum" because the "stakes are too high, the pain too private ... to see the issue treated as an ideological toy or fundraising tool." Gibbs concludes, "President Obama got in trouble in his talk last August with Rick Warren for saying that the question of when life begins was "above my pay grade." But just because he was glib doesn"t mean he was wrong" (Gibbs, Time, 5/18).
Diagnostics

Possible Genetic Link To Cause Of Pregnancy Loss And Disorders

Scientists at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) have published new findings about a cause of a condition at the root of genetic disorders such as Down Syndrome, pregnancy loss and infertility. Called aneuploidy, the condition is an abnormal number of chromosomes, and the research team found that if a mother"s egg cell has a mutation in just one copy of a gene, called Bub1, then she is less likely to have offspring that survive to birth. The findings appear in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences for the week of July 13. Sundar Venkatachalam, an assistant professor of biochemistry and cellular and molecular biology at UT Knoxville, originally was studying the gene for a possible connection to colon cancer, when he found his lab mice showed strange fertility characteristics. "Where you would normally expect a female to have eight to 10 pups, there were only one or two pups that survived to term in the litters of females that had one copy of Bub1," said Venkatachalam. "So this was unusual when we were looking for cancer effects, especially in this group of females." Ordinarily, both copies of a gene in a chromosome must carry the same mutation in order for an organism to be adversely effected, but the drastic effects of a single mutation were unexpected. Venkatachalam, working with pathologist Robert Donnell at the UT College of Veterinary Medicine and LBNL researcher Francesco Marchetti, also found that the harmful effects of this mutation increased with a mother"s age. As the female mice got older, there was eventually a complete loss of their ability to support a full-term pregnancy that lined up with an increase in aneuploidy. The same is true in humans: the chance of having an aneuploid pregnancy increases with the age of the mother. For the past several years, scientists have used mice to study the genetic causes of aneuploidy. They"ve zeroed in on mutations in a handful of genes as the culprits, including Bub1. The gene plays a role in a checkpoint that ensures that chromosomes are properly divided during meiosis, the cell division process that enables a stem cell to become an egg. This checkpoint hiccups when Bub1 is mutated, sometimes producing an egg with an extra chromosome or an egg with a missing chromosome. The team linked the issue to females by mating both a male with one bad copy of the gene with a normal female and a female with a bad copy of the gene with a normal male. When the female carried the bad copy, there were fewer births. Further research revealed this is because aneuploidy was generated in the egg and passed on to the single-cell zygote that forms when a sperm fertilizes an egg. And this led to the loss of the embryo. "This work certainly points to Bub1 having a role in maternal age-induced fertility issues," said Venkatachalam. "Now that we know the gene seems to have this role, the next big question is why, and we hope to continue the research in that direction." "Heterozygosity for a Bub1 mutation causes female-specific germ cell aneuploidy in mice" was published in the July 13-17, 2009 online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Funding for the work came from UT Knoxville"s Department of Biochemistry, Cellular and Molecular Biology and the U.S. Department of Energy. Jay Mayfield University of Tennessee at Knoxville


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