REGENERATION
BY JANETTE WILLIAMS
Grant helps PCC grow its stem-cell program When grants are handed out for training students in cutting-edge stem-cell research, a two-year college might not seem to stack up against more conventional academic powerhouses. But Pasadena City College was the pick for a three-year, $1.7-million grant announced in March from the California Institutes for Regenerative Medicine, and the first 10 interns were ready to start work when school opened this fall. It was recognition that the biotechnology program launched at PCC in 1999 had made the grade, says Professor Wendie Johnston, director of the biological technologies program. “It’s the first time this group was per-
suaded — we leaned on them,” says Johnston, adding that PCC was the only two-year institution funded by a CIRM grant. When the grant was announced, Michael Yaffe, a CIRM scientific officer, says PCC’s grant application was particularly strong since its program has been going for a decade, and it has established research partnerships with other institutions, including Caltech. Support from the PCC Foundation and industry partners also have contributed to the program’s growth and success, Johnston says. The new program’s interns — most of them in their late 20s and with bachelor’s degrees — will work with experts in sev-
Internet in space is not science fiction, and Scott Burleigh is one reason why BY EVELYN BARGE
HOW LONG WOULD IT TAKE YOU TO RECEIVE E-MAIL FROM MARS? RIGHT NOW, FOREVER; THAT’S BECAUSE THE MAIN COMMUNICATION PROTOCOL THAT IS USED TO ROUTE TRAFFIC AND DATA OVER EARTHLY Internet doesn’t work over very long distances — say, about 20 million miles from Earth. But engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion LaboON THE WEB ratory in La Cañada Flintridge are working on a See a NASA illustration of NASA-wide project to have a deep-space network how the interplanetary — effectively, an interplanetary Internet — up and network might operate insidesocal.com/rose running by 2011. JPL computer programmer Scott Burleigh is one of the senior software engineers, and he’s among the original developers of what has come to be the network’s fundamental technology — Delay Tolerant Networking protocols, designed to withstand long delays, disruptions and disconnections in space. Transmission glitches can happen, for example, when a spacecraft moves behind a celestial body, or when solar storms kick up and long communication delays occur. 22 | ROSEFALL09
PHOTO BY WALT MANCINI
eral fields, from basic stem-cell science to research in regenerative medicine. Johnston says they will receive stipends as they prepare for the next phase of their professional lives in the growing field. The PCC students are experienced in working with mouse stem cells, but that’s likely to change now that the ban on human embryonic stem-cell research has been lifted, Johnston says. “It hasn’t been controversial for us,” she says of the college’s stem-cell program. “Although I did get a call from a woman who says she knew we were cloning sheep and wanted to know where we were keeping them.” R