| Inside Uptown & 'Round About |
CONTENTS
Take me to this brief:
Lung cancer gene -- UC-led study
suggests link
UC scientist wins Lasker Award
-- Nobel may be next
Aerospace engineering's 75th --
Rocket launch at NASA
State of the university
-- President lists UC successes
No surprise -- Cincy
is top college basketball city
Medical breakthroughs
-- Cancer, stroke and dementia
Pizzeria rehab
-- DAAP talent does design, renovation
$14 million in gifts
-- Eye research, justice, athletics
UC’s new food
science bachelor’s -- First one in Ohio
Cox chairs UC Trustees
-- Tom Humes appointed
Classical superstar on CCM
faculty --Awadagin Pratt
Habitat for Humanity
-- UC builds its second house
Genetic
link to lung cancer
University of Cincinnati scientist Marshall Anderson has uncovered evidence
that may lead to the actual gene that predisposes a family to lung cancer.
Anderson and collaborator Susan Pinney, also of UC, led a national research
consortium that announced last July it had made a major breakthrough in
the fight against the leading cause of cancer death in the United States.
This is the first suggestion that lung cancer, long tied to cigarette
smoking and other external causes, might also be an inherited disease.
It may also help explain why some people get lung cancer even if they
never smoked.
“The discovery of genes for other types of cancer has led to better
understanding of those diseases, which in turn can lead to better strategies
for treatment and prevention,” says Anderson. “We hope that
uncovering a gene or genes responsible for lung cancer will do the same
for this devastating disease.”
Researchers have traced the gene to a narrow genetic region, but once
the actual culprit is unveiled, doctors will be able to determine whether
a family has a bad gene, then tell those who carry it to take precautions,
he says.
“We’re confident the gene is there,” Anderson says.
“We’ve seen evidence with every analytical model we’ve
used. We’ll find it.”
News release about possible lung cancer gene
UC Center for Genome Information
UC researcher wins “American
Nobel”
Last fall, UC scientist Elwood Jensen won a Lasker
Award, the nation’s highest honor for medical research and often
a precursor to the Nobel Prize, for his pioneering breast cancer research.
Historically, Ohio has had only one other Lasker winner -- UC researcher
Albert Sabin,
who developed the oral polio vaccine at UC in the ‘50s.
It was also in the 1950s, at the University of Chicago, that Jensen discovered
some breast tumors have receptors for estrogen and others do not, a discovery
that revolutionized breast cancer treatment and now saves and/or prolongs
the lives of more than 100,000 women yearly. Jensen is a visiting professor
at the Vontz
Center for Molecular Studies today.
The Lasker Award is widely known as “America’s Nobel”
because nomination and selection processes are equally rigorous as those
for the Nobel Prize, with judges who are the world’s top scientists.
Many Lasker recipients have gone on to receive the Nobel Prize.
More about Jensen's background
State of Ohio pays tribute to UC scientist
Jensen's acceptance remarks
| UC |  |
Aerospace engineering's 75th
Propelled by the same spirit that led its founder 75 years ago, the university’s
aerospace engineering department continues to climb.
Department founder Bradley Jones was barnstorming across America in the
early ‘20s when his WWI commanding officer tracked him down and
asked him to lead navigation and instrumentation development at McCook
Field in Dayton, Ohio. It paid off.
Jones made national headlines in 1926 when he navigated the first nonstop
flight -- from Dayton to Boston -- solely by instrumentation. Charles
Lindbergh even credited a compass developed by Jones for allowing him
to stay on course during his transatlantic flight from New York to Paris
in 1927.
Two years later, when UC asked Jones to head up its new aeronautical engineering
program, Jones contacted Orville Wright. Together, the two developed a
comprehensive curriculum that combined practical experience with mechanics,
navigation and design.
A similar curriculum structure continues to lead UC’s aerospace
engineering co-op students. In 2003, students took first place in an international
tilt to develop plans for a greenhouse prototype on Mars. Last year, several
students designed, built and launched a 20-foot rocket more than 15,000
feet into the air from a NASA base in Virginia.
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