Norman B. Smith was diagnosed with inoperable liver cancer by his doctor at LA's Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, who prescribed medical marijuana. Now, Cedars-Sinai has removed Mr Smith from the list of liver-transplant candidates...because he tested positive for marijuana, which their own doctor prescribed.
Hospital officials are insisting that Smith stop using marijuana for at least six months, undergo random drug testing, and participate in weekly substance-abuse counseling before they will consider putting him back on the list.
L.A. Hospital Denies Liver Transplant to Medical Marijuana User Despite Prescription from Its own Doctor
(via Reddit)
Tags: catch 22, cedars-sinai, health, la, reddit, war on some drugs
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CAIRO ? Egypt's stock market took a beating for the third consecutive day and the cost of insuring its sovereign debt soared as protests and violence in the capital raised questions about the country's stability days before pivotal parliamentary election.
The Egyptian Exchange's benchmark EGX30 index fell by almost 3.1 percent within minutes of the start of trade and extended its slide to 3.6 percent by midday, blowing past the 3,800 point level seen by brokers as a key support level.
The declines built on the previous day's 4 percent slide and dragged its year-to-date decline down to over 47 percent.
The losses marked the 10th consecutive trading session in which the market ? one of the worst performing emerging market indices in the world ? suffered a slide as a result of Egypt's tenuous political situation.
Egypt's five-year credit default swaps ? the cost of insuring its sovereign debt against default, climbed 25 basis points to 563 basis points, according to data service provider Markit.
With the first parliamentary elections since the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak slated for Nov. 28, the fourth day of clashes between demonstrators and security forces spotlighted the challenges the country faces as it tries to move toward a democratic system.
"We passed the support point, so the only thing that will stop further declines in the market is fixing the political situation in the country," said Khaled Naga, a senior broker with Mega Investments. "We have to wait and see what happens."
While far from presenting a united front, the activists massed in Cairo's Tahrir Square, which served as the epicenter of the Jan. 25 uprising that pushed Mubarak from power, are demanding either the military rulers immediately hand over power to a civilian administration or set a fixed date for a transition to civilian rule.
The days of unrest have proven deadly, with at least 29 killed across the country ? most in Cairo ? and the violence and continuing demonstrations prompted the civilian Cabinet to offer its resignation late Monday. But the move failed to appease the activists who see the civilian government as little more than subservient to the military rulers.
Firmly entrenched in Tahrir, the activists issued a call for a million-man demonstration, a move that had hundreds of people streaming into downtown Cairo and raising the scepter of further clashes and violence even as officials called for restraint from all sides.
But the promise of continued trouble only builds on already building political uncertainty that has battered the country's economy.
Naga said the stock market has lost about 180 billion pounds ($30.25 billion) since the start of the year ? with most of that linked to the unrest in the country versus the overall global financial concerns linked to the Euro-zone debt crisis and broader fears of recession.
"Yesterday, the losses were about seven billion (pounds) and today, I'm expecting the same if not more," he said.
ST. PAUL, Minn. ? GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann lashed out Wednesday at NBC for not apologizing or taking immediate disciplinary action for an off-color song played during her appearance on Jimmy Fallon's "Late Night."
In her first comments on the flap, Bachmann said on the Fox News Channel that the Fallon show band displayed sexism and bias by playing a snippet of a 1985 Fishbone song as she walked onstage for Tuesday's show. The title of the song is "Lyin' Ass B----."
"This is clearly a form of bias on the part of the Hollywood entertainment elite," Bachmann said. She added, "This wouldn't be tolerated if this was Michelle Obama. It shouldn't be tolerated if it's a conservative woman either."
Fallon has tweeted an apology to Bachmann, saying he was "so sorry about the intro mess." Bachmann said she hoped to speak with Fallon later Wednesday and wouldn't mind going on his show again.
But Bachmann expressed surprise that she's heard nothing from the TV network. She suggested that discipline for the show's Roots band was in order.
One of Bachmann's congressional colleagues, New York Democrat Nita Lowey, had called on NBC to apologize for its "insulting and inappropriate" treatment of its guest.
An NBC spokeswoman didn't immediately return a phone message from The Associated Press.
The Roots' bandleader, Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, has said the song was a "tongue-in-cheek and spur-of-the-moment decision."
Bachmann, who is lagging in presidential polls, has spent the week promoting her new autobiography in national television interviews.
___
AP Television Writer David Bauder contributed to this report.
A team of University of Missouri researchers have found that targeting a synthetic molecule to a specific gene could help the severity of the disease Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) ? the leading genetic cause of infantile death in the world.
"When we introduced synthetic RNA into mice that carry the genes responsible for SMA, the disease's severity was significantly lowered," said Chris Lorson, researcher at the Bond Life Sciences Center and professor in the Department of Veterinary Pathobiology and the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology. "The mice that receive synthetic RNA gain more weight, live longer, and had improvements in motor skills. These results are very exciting."
SMA is a rare genetic disease that is inherited by one in 6,000 children, who often die young because there is no cure. Children who inherit SMA are missing a gene that produces a protein which directs nerves in the spine to give commands to muscles. Lorson's lab focuses on targeting a partially functioning back-up copy of the missing gene, known as SMN-2, into producing the needed protein.
While the results are promising, Lorson notes additional research is needed before synthetic RNA could be used on humans for SMA. Clinical trials for similar synthetic RNAs are currently being performed in other neurodegenerative disease such as Lou Gehrig's or ALS. In SMA, there are clinical trials taking place in many labs across the country that are investigating drug compounds to increase SMN-2 protein production.
"It's been remarkable to watch how quickly SMN-2 knowledge has transformed from basic molecular biology to being modified targets for novel therapeutics," Lorson said. "SMN-2 is like a light that's been dimmed, and we're trying anything to get it brighter. Even turning it up a little bit would help dramatically."
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University of Missouri-Columbia: http://www.missouri.edu
Thanks to University of Missouri-Columbia for this article.
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New strategy could lead to dose reduction in X-ray imagingPublic release date: 21-Nov-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: B.C. Wang wang@bcl1.bmb.uga.edu 706-542-1747 University of Georgia
Athens, Ga. For more than a century, the use of X-rays has been a prime diagnostic tool when it comes to human health. As it turns out, X-rays also are a crucial component for studying and understanding molecules, and a new approach -- just published by researchers at the University of Georgia -- may dramatically improve what researchers can learn using the technique.
One of the primary ways scientists can understand molecules is to bombard their crystalline forms with X-ray beams. This allows a crystallographer to discover many things about the molecule, from the arrangement of atoms to the position of chemical bonds. Thus, the techniques of X-ray crystallography have been central to numerous important scientific discoveries in many fields.
Now, a team led by B.C. Wang, Ramsey-Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Structural Biology at UGA, has shown for the first time that by using multiple data sets, each under-exposed simultaneously, one can produce a composite data set that may give three to five times better signal levels than standard techniques for structural analysis. This new technique is particularly better than standard procedures when it comes to studying large molecules, many of which are important in drug development and other important processes.
"When compared to crystals of small molecules, macromolecular crystals diffract X-rays poorly and usually tend to have a much shorter lifetime in the X-ray beam," said Wang. "So a macromolecular crystal can only withstand a certain amount of X-ray dose before it is destroyed as a result of radiation damage. Obtaining accurate and complete diffraction data sets of these crystals is very important."
Strikingly, the new procedure used by the Wang team could be adapted for use with X-ray techniques in studying human health. This could eventually mean that doctors utilizing it could get more information on a patient while using a lower X-ray dose. That, however, is still in the future.
The research, just published in the online edition of the journal Foundations of Crystallography, could lead to a much more rapid acquisition of knowledge about molecules, Wang said. Authors of the paper, in addition to Wang, include from the Wang lab Lirong Chen, Hua Zhang, Weihong Zhou and Zheng-Qing Fu. Collaborators from the Institute of Biophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing include Zhi-Jie Liu, Dong Wu and Wei Ding. Wang is a member of the department of biochemistry and molecular biology in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at UGA.
X-ray diffraction data on crystals have been steadily improving over the past few decades, but the study of large molecules has continued to present sometimes-intractable problems. One always present issue is that while X-rays can reveal much about molecule, the technique also destroys the molecules, just as too much radiation can be lethal in humans. So the question has persisted: How can we get the same quality of data using a lower amount of total X-ray radiation than what we use now to study molecules?
Wang and his team had the idea of taking what might be called "slices" of radiation dosage to produce multiple scans. The total information from these combined multiple "weaker" scans might then actually surpass what could be found with normal X-ray crystallography with a single stronger scan. In order to see if this actually worked, Wang and his collaborators came up with a theoretical prediction for the strategy and then tested it using six bovine insulin crystals.
"The calculations from the diffraction data of these six insulin crystals collected using two different data-collection systems showed that the data is much better with the MDS strategy than with the regular single-path strategy," said Wang.
While the new technique could one day be important in breakthroughs in medicine and human health, the immediate impact is that it will allow researchers to study large molecules with greater depth and understanding by avoiding the use of too much X-ray radiation that would destroy the sample.
###
The work was supported by grants from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Ministry of Science and Technology of China, the Georgia Research Alliance and the University of Georgia Research Foundation. The study was carried out at the Southeast Regional Collaborative Access Team beamline at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
New strategy could lead to dose reduction in X-ray imagingPublic release date: 21-Nov-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: B.C. Wang wang@bcl1.bmb.uga.edu 706-542-1747 University of Georgia
Athens, Ga. For more than a century, the use of X-rays has been a prime diagnostic tool when it comes to human health. As it turns out, X-rays also are a crucial component for studying and understanding molecules, and a new approach -- just published by researchers at the University of Georgia -- may dramatically improve what researchers can learn using the technique.
One of the primary ways scientists can understand molecules is to bombard their crystalline forms with X-ray beams. This allows a crystallographer to discover many things about the molecule, from the arrangement of atoms to the position of chemical bonds. Thus, the techniques of X-ray crystallography have been central to numerous important scientific discoveries in many fields.
Now, a team led by B.C. Wang, Ramsey-Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Structural Biology at UGA, has shown for the first time that by using multiple data sets, each under-exposed simultaneously, one can produce a composite data set that may give three to five times better signal levels than standard techniques for structural analysis. This new technique is particularly better than standard procedures when it comes to studying large molecules, many of which are important in drug development and other important processes.
"When compared to crystals of small molecules, macromolecular crystals diffract X-rays poorly and usually tend to have a much shorter lifetime in the X-ray beam," said Wang. "So a macromolecular crystal can only withstand a certain amount of X-ray dose before it is destroyed as a result of radiation damage. Obtaining accurate and complete diffraction data sets of these crystals is very important."
Strikingly, the new procedure used by the Wang team could be adapted for use with X-ray techniques in studying human health. This could eventually mean that doctors utilizing it could get more information on a patient while using a lower X-ray dose. That, however, is still in the future.
The research, just published in the online edition of the journal Foundations of Crystallography, could lead to a much more rapid acquisition of knowledge about molecules, Wang said. Authors of the paper, in addition to Wang, include from the Wang lab Lirong Chen, Hua Zhang, Weihong Zhou and Zheng-Qing Fu. Collaborators from the Institute of Biophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing include Zhi-Jie Liu, Dong Wu and Wei Ding. Wang is a member of the department of biochemistry and molecular biology in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at UGA.
X-ray diffraction data on crystals have been steadily improving over the past few decades, but the study of large molecules has continued to present sometimes-intractable problems. One always present issue is that while X-rays can reveal much about molecule, the technique also destroys the molecules, just as too much radiation can be lethal in humans. So the question has persisted: How can we get the same quality of data using a lower amount of total X-ray radiation than what we use now to study molecules?
Wang and his team had the idea of taking what might be called "slices" of radiation dosage to produce multiple scans. The total information from these combined multiple "weaker" scans might then actually surpass what could be found with normal X-ray crystallography with a single stronger scan. In order to see if this actually worked, Wang and his collaborators came up with a theoretical prediction for the strategy and then tested it using six bovine insulin crystals.
"The calculations from the diffraction data of these six insulin crystals collected using two different data-collection systems showed that the data is much better with the MDS strategy than with the regular single-path strategy," said Wang.
While the new technique could one day be important in breakthroughs in medicine and human health, the immediate impact is that it will allow researchers to study large molecules with greater depth and understanding by avoiding the use of too much X-ray radiation that would destroy the sample.
###
The work was supported by grants from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Ministry of Science and Technology of China, the Georgia Research Alliance and the University of Georgia Research Foundation. The study was carried out at the Southeast Regional Collaborative Access Team beamline at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
CAIRO (Reuters) ? Protesters demanding an end to army rule and angered by rough police tactics battled with police on Sunday, presenting Egypt's ruling generals with their biggest security challenge yet, a week before parliamentary elections.
Two people were killed and hundreds wounded in clashes on Saturday night reminiscent of some of the worst violence during the 18-day uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak in February.
Youths in Cairo chanted "The people want to topple the regime" as they rushed at police, who fired rubber bullets and teargas. Protesters clashed with police in two other cities.
Egypt holds its first parliamentary election since Mubarak's overthrow in a staggered vote that starts on November 28. Many Egyptians are worried that police will not be able to secure the polls, although the army insists that it can.
Presidential powers remain with the army after the vote. A row has erupted between political groups and the army-picked cabinet over ground rules for drafting the constitution that could leave the military free of civilian control. Parliament is to pick the assembly to draw up the constitution.
There was sporadic violence on Sunday after the worst overnight clashes subsided. More than 5,000 protesters were still gathered in Tahrir on Sunday afternoon, many saying they would not to leave until their demands were met.
Demonstrators wore masks to protect against teargas and showed off spent gas canisters and bullet casings. Metal barricades had been set up on approach roads to Tahrir Square, where Egyptians gathered to bring down Mubarak.
Many Egyptians are angry that nine-months after ousting Mubarak, the army remains in charge and police are still using the same heavy-handed tactics against demonstrators.
"DO NOT LEAVE THE SQUARE"
"We are on the brink of danger. Those asking for the government to fall are asking for the state to fall," Egyptian army General Mohsen Fangary told a television channel.
He said the election would go ahead on time and the army and Interior Ministry would maintain security. He also said the army, in line with a timetable previously announced, aimed to return to barracks by the end of 2012. Presidential elections could be held by then.
The army-backed cabinet had outraged many Egyptians by presenting proposals for the new constitution that would have shielded the army's budget from civilian oversight and given it a broad national security remit.
It had amended the proposals to give civilian powers more say but not enough to prevent Friday's protest.
After a cabinet meeting on Sunday, Deputy Prime Minister Ali al-Silmi said: "We will not back down from the last proposed amendments to the constitutional document."
As police fired round after round of teargas at protesters near the Interior Ministry, closer to Tahrir the demonstrators laid sheets of metal to block roads into the square.
"I tell you, do not leave the square. This square will lead the way from now on," presidential candidate Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, a hardline Islamist, told a group of protesters early on Sunday. "Tomorrow the whole of Egypt will follow your lead."
During Saturday's clashes, protesters broke chunks of cement from pavements and hurled them at police.
"We don't expect anything from the military council, they will ignore us like what used to happen during Mubarak's days," said Abdallah Belal, a 21-year-old student in Tahrir.
The state news agency quoted the Health Ministry as saying 942 people had been wounded and two people were killed. It said a man, 23, was killed in Cairo by a gunshot to the chest and a man in the second city Alexandria had a gunshot to the head.
A security official said police had not used live rounds and had used lawful methods to deal with "troublemakers." The army stayed away from fighting.
The army won popular backing during Mubarak's overthrow for maintaining order and pledging to hand power to an elected government, but support has ebbed over its use of military trials for civilians and suspicion that it wants to continue to wield the levers of power after a new government is sworn in.
PROTEST AT POLICE
About 5,000 protesters had converged on Tahrir on Saturday afternoon when police tried to evict the remnants of a 50,000-strong demonstration a day earlier, mostly by Islamists demanding the departure of the military.
Police beat the protesters, most of them not Islamists, with batons and fired teargas to regain control of the square, only to retreat after night fell.
Protests erupted in other cities. About 800 people gathered in front of the security directorate in Alexandria, chanting: "Interior Ministry officials are thugs."
About 1,000 gathered outside a police station in the eastern city of Suez, site of some of the worst violence in the uprising. They threw stones at it and tried to force their way in. Police fired teargas and shot in the air.
Liberal groups are dismayed by the military trials of thousands of civilians and the army's failure to scrap a hated emergency law. Islamists eyeing a strong showing in the next parliament suspect the army wants to curtail their influence.
Analysts say Islamists could win 40 percent of parliamentary seats, with a big portion going to the Muslim Brotherhood.
"We are not political parties and we hate the Brotherhood who gave up on the revolution and the people," Medhat Fawzy said. "We are Egyptian youth," he said, flashing a victory sign.
The liberal April 6 Youth movement said the interior minister should quit for ordering the use of force against a peaceful protest.
Friday's rally appeared to be the biggest Islamist challenge to military rule since the largely secular uprising that toppled Mubarak. The demonstrators were mainly Brotherhood members and their harder-line Salafi rivals.
(Additional reporting by Omar Fahmy, Patrick Werr, Marwa Awad, Abdel Rahman Youssef, Dina Zayed, Tom Pfeiffer and Yousri Mohamed; Writing by Edmund Blair and Patrick Werr)
Hospital officials are insisting that Smith stop using marijuana for at least six months, undergo random drug testing, and participate in weekly substance-abuse counseling before they will consider putting him back on the list.
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Public release date: 21-Nov-2011
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