General
A research team led by investigators from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) has discovered that amyloid-beta (A-beta), the protein that forms plaques in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease, can also be detected in the lens of the human eye. The investigators were able to identify A-beta in lens samples from elderly individuals with and without the disorder; however, an unusual pattern of amyloid deposits was found only on the lenses of Alzheimer's patients.
"Where is Saddam?" Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld asked today during an appearance on Fox News Sunday. Rumsfeld and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Air Force Gen. Richard Myers said during appearances on various news programs that there has not been a verifiable appearance by the Iraqi dictator or his sons since the war began. In that time, Rumsfeld and Myers said, coalition forces have been pushing on many fronts to liberate Iraq. Forces have control of western Iraq, and coalition conventional forces are massing in northern Iraq as special operations forces lead local forces there in much the same way they did in Afghanistan.
U.S. Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona, M.D., sees dentists as equal partners in war on terrorism, he told dental leaders March 27 at a conference on "Dentistry's Role in Responding to Bioterrorism and Other Catastrophic Events." The conference was co-sponsored by the American Dental Association and the U.S. Public Health Service. Dr. Carmona, a high school dropout and Army enlistee who later retrieved his education, is the 17th Surgeon General of the USPHS, sworn into office last Aug. 5. He opened the two-day conference with an overview of current threat that invited dentist participation in war on terror.
An ongoing national shortage of a vaccine that prevents meningitis and pneumonia in children has left doctors scrambling to provide even the minimum number of shots, and has exposed gaps in the nation's "patchwork" vaccine system, the first-ever in-depth study of the problem finds.
A minimally invasive, experimental treatment is proving successful in removing small kidney tumors from appropriate patients, report researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). In a study in the February 2003 issue of Radiology, the MGH team describes how a technique called radiofrequency ablation (RFA) destroyed all renal cell carcinoma (RCC) tumors less than 3 cm in size and some larger tumors, depending on their location. The most common form of kidney cancer, RCC will be diagnosed in almost 32,000 Americans this year and is most frequently treated with surgical removal through either an open or laparoscopic procedure.
Researchers have determined the structure of a protein with a surprising feature in it: a knot. This is the first time a knot has been found in a protein from the most ancient type of single-celled organism, an archaebacterium, and one of only a few times a knot has been seen in any protein structure. This very unusual protein shape finding is a result from the NIGMS Protein Structure Initiative, a 10-year effort to determine 10,000 unique protein structures using fast, highly automated methods.
