Rodney L. Goldstein named Chair of University of Chicago Medical Center Board of Trustees
Medical Center physicians offering services at the new Vascular Institute of Chicago are, left to right: Tina Desai, MD; Giancarlo Piano, MD; Christopher Skelly, MD; Hisham Bassiouny, MD; and Daniel Katz, MD, chief of Vascular Surgery at Weiss Memorial.
A New Vein of Care for Vascular Disease University of Chicago Medical Center physicians now offer their services at the new Vascular Institute of Chicago at Weiss Memorial Hospital, bringing experienced vein and artery care to the city’s North Side. The new institute provides a home for all vascular services, using Medical Center physicians to help diagnose patients and create tailored treatment plans based on the patient’s condition, medical history and lifestyle. For patients familiar with the University of Chicago Medical Center, Weiss offers the same technology and expertise as those on the main campus, said Hisham Bassiouny, MD, medical director of the new
Vascular Institute and chief of the Section of Vascular Surgery and Endovascular Therapy at the Medical Center. The new institute offers state-of-theart diagnostics and minimally invasive, innovative treatments. Bassiouny is the only Chicago-area surgeon who is FDAapproved to use the da Vinci® Surgical System for lower extremity vascular reconstruction. “This unique capability exemplifies our commitment for continually evaluating emerging technologies which can best improve outcomes for our patients,” Bassiouny said. “Our enterprise thrives on successfully managing the most complex of cases, and we are thrilled to offer
the Chicago North Side our leading edge services for vascular disease management.” The Medical Center has an established relationship with Weiss in regard to vascular care. In 2008, the two hospitals collaborated on establishing the Vein Clinic at Weiss, which has successfully treated varicose and spider veins, deep vein thrombosis and other conditions for many years. As a part of the Vein Clinic, the Non-Invasive Vascular Laboratory excels in using ultrasound and doctors’ expertise to safely and accurately diagnose vascular conditions. This laboratory is nationally accredited and unparalleled among Chicago’s community hospitals.
In Praise of Genetic Diversity It was an intriguing find for evolutionary biology: two genes involved in the size of the developing human brain were subject to selection in recent human history, and may still be evolving today. But when Bruce Lahn, PhD, a University of Chicago professor of human genetics, published this discovery in 2005, he knew that it might create controversy alongside excitement. A variant of one of the genes, microcephalin, occurred less often in sub-Saharan Africa than other regions of the world, while the other gene, ASPM, had a variant seen commonly in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia but less often in East Asia, Native Americans and Sub-Saharan Africa. Lahn suspected extremists would distort his evidence of these genetic differences to inappropriately justify racist beliefs. What he didn’t expect was that credible scientists would also distort his findings, and that some would actually question whether his research should have even been performed in the first place.
After that experience, Lahn decided that both the scientific community and society in general needed a new moral framework to deal with rapidly growing information about how genes differ between individuals and groups. In an
An illustration of a marked chromosome.
opinion piece published in the journal Nature last October, Lahn and co-author Lanny Ebenstein, PhD, of the Department of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, argued that researchers must embrace and even celebrate the idea of genetic diversity.
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“Instead of trying to suppress the science, we should try to build a moral consensus that is constructive to the overall well-being of the species,” Lahn said. Lahn argues that the idea that there are no significant differences between ethnic groups is in fact more dangerous than the potential misuse of human genetics research. Scientists may be pushed away from important research questions instead of adding to growing evidence that the grouping of individuals can be medically useful in the growing fields of personalized medicine. (See the mapping genes article on page 12.) The solution, Lahn and Ebenstein argue, is to convince people to accept genetic diversity as much as they have grown to appreciate cultural diversity in recent decades. “Genetic diversity is a strength, not a weakness, of humanity,” Lahn and Ebenstein wrote. “On the whole, humanity has been and will be stronger, not despite our differences, but because of them.”
Rodney L. Goldstein, an accomplished Chicago business executive and longtime leader in the university community, has been appointed as chair of the University of Chicago Medical Center Board of Trustees. Goldstein succeeds James S. Crown, who served as interim chair of the Medical Center Board. “Rod’s background in planning for the success of varied enterprises will be
invaluable as the Medical Center enters a critical period of growth and new opportunities,” said Everett E. Vokes, MD, interim dean of the Biological Sciences Division and the Pritzker School of Medicine, and interim CEO of the Medical Center. Goldstein joined the Medical Center Board in 1992. He has been a Trustee of the University since 2006.
University Research Stimulated by Federal Recovery Act Funds When Barack Obama promised in his inaugural address that his administration would “restore science to its rightful place,” researchers across the United States hoped it was more than mere rhetoric. After years of flat budgets from scientific funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), many laboratories were in dire need of funding to continue projects and launch new experiments. Eight months into his first term, President Obama delivered on his promise to the scientific community with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which included more than $5 billion directed toward science and medical research. At the University of Chicago, more than 150 researchers received Recovery Act money from the NIH, NSF, National Endowment for the Arts and the Department of Education, totaling nearly $72 million campus-wide over two years. An estimated 79 jobs will be created or preserved due to the funding, according to a university calculation. The majority of that money was awarded to researchers at the Medical Center and in the Biological Sciences Division, with more than $43 million from NIH grants for fiscal year 2009 and an additional $1.3 million from the NSF. An additional $17 million will be awarded by the NIH in the second year of the grants. Some grants as small as $10,000 will help laboratories with day-to-day supply and personnel costs, while several multimillion dollar grants will launch new nationwide clinical
trials administered from the University of Chicago. The largest grant, at $5.6 million, was designated to fund the EVE project — the “mother of all asthma studies,” according to Carole Ober, PhD, professor of human genetics and obstetrics and gynecology. Ober and Dan Nicolae, PhD, associate professor of genetic medicine, statistics and human genetics, are primary investigators on the project, which will coordinate researchers at 10 institutions to perform genome-wide association studies on more than 30,000 subjects. The researchers hope to find novel gene variants associated with asthma that will lead to new treatments. “We’re excited to receive the funds to launch a project that may open promising new avenues for asthma research,” Ober said. Another multicenter clinical research effort will be directed from the Medical Center by Jerry Krishnan, MD, PhD, associate professor of pulmonary medicine. CONCERT, a collaboration among six health care institutions, was given nearly $4 million to begin studies comparing treatments for chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, which is expected to be the third most common cause of U.S. deaths by 2020. Basic science research also received several large grants from the Recovery Act funds. Kevin White, PhD, professor of human genetics and ecology and evolution, received two $900,000 grants to help the NIH ENCODE project create an encyclopedia of DNA elements. A new technique created in White’s laboratory will be applied to the genomes of humans and Drosophila, the fruit fly that has historically been an important scientific model for genetic function. Summaries of all university projects that received Recovery grants can be found at http://arrafunding.uchicago.edu Esra Tasali, MD, received $1 million to research the relationship between sleep apnea and the onset of Type 2 diabetes. Photo by Lloyd DeGrane
NOTEWORTHY Don’t do it on your own. Gilda’s Club, a nationwide support group for cancer patients and their families, meets every Wednesday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the fourth floor atrium in Duchossois Center for Advanced Medicine, and 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. in room TC-614. For more information, call Kathleen Boss at 312-464-9900 or visit www. GildasClubChicago.org. The University of Chicago’s neurosurgery service risk-adjusted mortality rate was ranked second among 105 academic medical centers in the University HealthSystem Consortium’s (UHC) Clinical Outcomes Report for July 2008 through June 2009. The Medical Center inaugurated a new pharmacy residency program in 2009, attracting pharmacists from around the nation seeking to enhance their clinical and academic knowledge. The program houses six post-doctorate pharmacists and will double that amount next year as well as expand its duration to two years to provide specialty training for pediatrics and clinical care.
BRIEFLY Tiny dinosaur, big discovery The smallest dinosaur ever discovered in North America was recently identified from bones that have been housed at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Originally discovered in Colorado in the 1970s, the bones have been in storage ever since.
Fruitadens haagarorum stood only four inches tall, weighed two pounds and was 28 inches long. The agile, fast-running omnivore lived 150 million years ago during the Late Jurassic Period, which makes it one of the earliest dinosaurs. The new species was identified from parts of skulls, vertebrae and limbs of four specimens. Fruitadens belonged to the heterodontosaurids, an important group of dinosaurs previously unknown in North America. The species was identified by Richard Butler, PhD, of the Bavarian State Collection for Paleontology in Munich, and his team. The team, along with Laura Porro, PhD, postdoctoral research associate in Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago, discovered the species.
Bones of fruitadens haagarorum
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