Paul Goldberg

Dr. Anil Potti, the Duke University cancer researcher whose resume and research are under scrutiny, is the ideal target for Paul Goldberg, the editor of The Cancer Letter. Goldberg, who has an uncanny sense for hubris, is building a reputation for outing bad apples among cancer researchers, and he has dug up some interesting documents about Potti.

I met Goldberg a year ago at a training course the National Institutes of Health put on for science writers. He was one of the speakers and talked about a lunch cancer researcher whose research was flawed and who failed to disclose the $3.6 million she had received from a cigarette maker.

After I read The Cancer Letter’s special issue about Potti, I called Goldberg and got his permission to link to the documents supporting the stories.

There is:

• A copy of the letter more than two dozen biostatisticians wrote to Dr. Harold Varmus, newly appointed director of the National Cancer Institute, urging for a public inquiry.
• A copy of the American Cancer Society letter that notified Dr. Sandy Williams, vice chancellor for academic affairs at Duke’s Medical Center, that payments were being halted on a $729,000 grant Potti had been awarded.
• Three versions of Potti’s resume. One version that includes his now disputed claim of being a Rhodes scholar, a second version that also includes the claim and a third version that doesn’t. Potti used the two versions that include the claim while he was a research fellow at Duke. At the time of the third version, he was already an assistant professor in Duke’s department of medicine and the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy.
• A copy of Potti’s residency application at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine, which includes his educational history in India, a transcript from his medical college in India and a personal statement.
• A faculty profile of Potti, which was published in 2007 in Genome Life, a newsletter of Duke’s Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy. The profile calls him a Rhodes scholar.

Resume padding to gain academic stature is nothing new.

A few months ago, a former Harvard students was indicted for falsifying the resume that got him into the Ivy League school and several scholarships. Last year, California regulators found out that a new law to regulate air pollution was based on statistical work done by a researcher who hadn’t earned a doctorate in statistics from the University of California at Davis as he had claimed. Three years ago, the dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had to resign when it became clear she had inflated her resume with degrees she never received.

Dr. Anil Potti

But Duke has bigger problems than suspected resume padding by a rising star. The Lancet Oncology, a British medical journal, and the American Cancer Society are investigating potential errors in Potti’s research, because other researchers have been unable to independently replicate breakthrough statistical findings that promised to predict which chemotherapy is best for each cancer patient.

Questions about possible statistical errors in Potti’s research came up last year. Duke halted three clinical trials Potti was involved in and investigated, but didn’t allow outsiders to double-check the data in question, according to Goldberg.

Being able to repeat an experiment and come up with the same results is a basic tenet of research. It’s the litmus test to separate fact from fiction in science.

Duke has had problems with basics before.

• In 2003, Jesica Santillan, a 17-year-old Mexican immigrant, died after receiving a heart-lung transplant at Duke University Hospital. The transplant was from a donor with the wrong blood type.
• In 2005, surgical instruments at two hospitals in the Duke University Health System were washed in used hydraulic fluid instead of detergent. The mixup wasn’t detected for weeks, because administrative staff failed to heed multiple complaints by staff.
• In 2008, research of Homme Hellenga, a Duke professor of biochemistry known for his work with designer enzymes, came under fire and he had to retract two research papers because other researchers who repeat his experiments cannot get the same results. According to a story in the magazine Nature, a student in Hellinga’s lab had raised questions about the experiments before the results were published.

The news was disappointing for the University of North Carolina, Duke University, N.C. State University and RTI International, which make up the Research Triangle Solar Fuels Institute. That was clear when David Myers, RTI’s vice president of engineering and technology, talked to Science in the Triangle the same day the DoE made the announcement.

RTP-area efforts to develop a liquid fuel from sunlight will continue despite the federal funding setback, Myers said. The solar fuels initiative is one of the most active areas of energy research here and a key ingredient in plans to build the Triangle into an energy research hub.

“The area is vastly underrated in the amount of energy research going on,” Myer said.

Watch more of the videotaped Q&A here:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Dr. Anil Potti, a Duke cancer researcher, was suspended last week after his claim to have been a Rhodes scholar could not be confirmed. Duke also halted enrollment in three clinical trials that Potti lead. The trials used gene-based test results of drug sensitivity to predict cancer patients’ responses to chemotherapy drugs.

Potti and colleagues at Duke also did the statistical analysis for a report published in the Lancet Oncology three years ago. The report was based on results from a clinical trial involving breast cancer patients. The published report was titled, “Validation of gene signatures that predict the response of breast cancer to neoadjuvant chemotherapy.”

The report, which had 19 co-authors, was an important step toward personalized medicine.

But the Lancet Oncology today expressed concern over errors that two of the report’s authors detected in the statistical analysis by Potti and his Duke colleagues.

Here it is: S0140673610701856

The Lancet investigation goes way beyond potentially false claims of one Duke researcher being a Rhodes scholar. Questions of research methods and errors reach beyond one possibly rogue researcher and potentially put patients’ lives at risk.

RTI energy lab (Photo courtesy of RTI)

One of the founding members of the Research Triangle Energy Consortium three years ago, RTI has scientists working on projects that include the capture and reuse of carbon dioxide – the most prominent greenhouse gas in the Earth’s atmosphere – production of bio-crude from organic waste and a nanotechnology light bulb that promises to be more energy efficient than a fluorescent light and doesn’t contain harmful mercury.

Stimulus funds the U.S. Department of Energy has awarded in the past year to help the economy recover fueled RTI’s stepped-up energy research. Of the institute’s $750 million in estimated revenue this year, energy research will contribute about $12.5 million, said RTI spokesman Patrick Gibbons.

That’s still a small amount, but as Gibbons pointed out during a tour of the Johnson Building last month, “Energy is growing tremendously.” The Johnson Building, which opened four years ago, is home to most of the environmental and energy research on the sprawling, 50-year-old RTI campus. The tour was organized by SCONC, a Triangle-based group of science writers.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is funneling more than $35 billion into research projects nationwide. North Carolina universities, companies and institutes have been awarded nearly $2 billion – about $1 billion from the National Institutes of Health for medical research and more than $800 million from the DoE for energy research, energy efficiency and renewable energy projects.

Federal research funding has long been a lifeblood of North Carolina’s universities, particularly in medical research. Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Wake Forest University garnered nearly 80 percent of North Carolina’s share of the $10 billion in stimulus funds the NIH awarded last year. RTI received about $35 million.

The state and the RTP area are not as well known for research into alternative energy and green technologies. About half of North Carolina’s share of the DoE’s more than $25 billion in stimulus funding so far has gone to the state’s two big utilities, Duke Energy and Progress Energy. RTI is involved in about a dozen energy research projects. Half of them were awarded in the past year with DoE commitments of  about $7 million.

RTI had applied for more DoE funding, including a $120 million solar fuels center and a $20 million pilot plant to convert wood waste into liquid hydrocarbon with the help of high temperatures, high pressure and catalysts. The pilot plant was to be located at the N.C. Biofuels Center. But neither project was approved.

A bottle of bio-crude (Photo courtesy of RTI)

Much of RTI’s approved stimulus projects are also related to next-generation biofuels made by exposing cellulose-rich biomass, such as corn stover, wood chips and switchgrass, and other waste, such as hog manure, to high temperatures. Also known as pyrolysis, the technique is heavily used in the chemical industry and turns the waste into a gas or an oily liquid.

“Everything we do is high pressure, high temperature,” said David Dayton, director of the chemistry and biomass program at RTI’s Center for Energy Technology.

The gasified waste, also known as syngas, and the bio-crude must then be cleaned of impurities before they can be processed into liquid fuel. At RTI, researchers are testing a multitude of chemicals, or catalysts, that scrub contaminants.

In the next decade or so, Congress want to see domestically produced biofuels reduce U.S. oil imports by about 30 million barrels per year and eliminate more than 15 million tons of CO2 per year.

RTI researchers are also working on technologies to reduce CO2 emissions. Lora Toy, for example, oversees a project aimed at developing polymer membranes that capture up to 90 percent of the CO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants with the goal of increasing electricity costs by less than 20 percent.

On most of these projects, RTI is working with a corporate partner to develop the technology for commercial use.

Sheila Kannapan, a UNC physics and astronomy professor, and a few of her students are using SOAR to measure the mass of large objects and star clusters in the universe. Their work is part of a survey that, for the first time, will allow astrophysicists to determine the mass of the universe and better understand dark matter.

During a visit to the UNC campus Thursday, where scientists access the telescope from a remote control room, David Stark and David Hendel, two of Kannapan’s students, explained some of the survey work they do.

David Hendel, an astrophysics student at UNC, talks about his work with SOAR.

Kannapan’s students use a spectrograph, an instrument that measures the light from an object.

Standing in front of a board that showed a drawing of the spectrograph and a measurement chart, Hendel and Stark said the measurements allow assessments about what the light is made of and how far away an object really is.

On a television screen nearby, I and my fellow science writers could watch telescope operators in Chile working their shift and watching us through a Web cam mounted on the screen.

The computer screen below the TV showed a rendering of the Sombrero Galaxy, which is visible through amateur telescopes. Hendel showed us the bright speck on the lower edge of the galaxy that is a new object UNC astrophysicists are studying.

As part of our visit, which was organized by the Triangle-based group of science writers SCONC, we also listened to a presentation by Gerald Cecil, a UNC physics and astronomy professor who teaches students how to build stargazing instruments.

Gerald Cecil

Cecil, who helped design and build SOAR, hopes to this year finish an instrument made with fiberglass cables that would provide a grid of light measurements rather than just a thin slice.

But now the bad news about SOAR, as laid out by Cecil, a wiry, hands-on teacher who’s frustrated by the difficulty of getting funding. (On the bottom of his Web site, Cecil has a running account of the costs of U.S. oil imports and the Iraq war.)

UNC astrophysics, a small department of about half a dozen professors, can get on SOAR 60 nights of the year. That’s fairly unique access to a telescope like SOAR, which is designed to produce the best quality images of any observatory in its class in the world.

To gain this access for 20 years, UNC paid $8 million up front, which did not include ongoing maintenance costs. That’s another $80,000 to $100,000 every year.

Fund-raising efforts have begun to continue the SOAR project, which is also funded by Michigan State University, the U.S. National Optical Astronomy Observatory and Brazil. But money is tight at public universities like UNC and Michigan and federal stimulus money to boost research and development isn’t available for a telescope on top of a Chilean mountain.

Cecil worries that in 2016, when access to SOAR must be renewed, UNC astrophysicists will lose the 60 nights in the sky that now allow them to complete research in a couple of weeks that otherwise would take a year.

U.S. Rep. Dick Gephardt

He carried a to-do list with him that he plans to take to Congress and the Obama Administration.

Changing the way the Food and Drug Administration regulates the development of new medicines,  making the research and development tax credit for companies permanent and establishing a federal office to spearhead public-private partnerships between universities, the National Institutes of Health and R&D companies were among the suggestions on the list.

“It needs to be the new space program in my view,” Gephardt told about 100 people at the packed Capital City Club in Raleigh. 

Gov. Beverly Perdue, mayors and economic development officials from across the state attended the event, which was meant as a first step to build grassroots support for Gephardt’s to-do list.

At stake is the global leadership position the U.S. built in the past 30 years in discovering new medical treatments, improving quality of life and advancing health care, according to a report the Battelle Technology Partnership Practice released June 10. The Council for American Medical Innovation, or CAMI, an advocacy group Gephardt chairs, commissioned the report.

Experts, investors and bright minds from industry, universities and foundations whose brains the Battelle researchers picked, pinpointed several risk factors that the U.S. is in danger of losing its medical innovation edge.

Among those factors is the declining number of novel medicines that have come to market in the past decade. Between 2005 and 2008, the FDA approved on average 19 per year compared to an average 31 per year during the 1990s. A nearly 29 percent decline in venture capital that set emerging biomedical companies back during the recession was also troublesome. So were the science scores among 12th graders, which declined almost 3 percent from 1996 to 2005.

Health care and research to find new treatments have long been among Gephardt’s interests. What caught his attention was a novel triple cancer therapy that saved his son’s life nearly 40 years ago, he said. Gephardt supported a form of universal health care and helped double the NIH’s budget to support basic research to about $30 billion in 2003.

The unprecedented increase in NIH funding several years ago and a $10 billion boost the NIH received in stimulus funds last year benefited research institutions across the Triangle, including Duke University, RTI International and the University of North Carolina.

But Gephardt’s agenda to spur medical innovation and create more R&D jobs in the U.S. will face a Congress and a White House trying to gain control over a ballooning federal deficit. Gephardt didn’t think the NIH’s budget will be cut, but he acknowledged the belt-tightening mood in Washington by saying that his to-do list isn’t a “big ticket item. Yes,” he added, “this costs money, but the payoff is enormous.”

Dr. Maria Escolar

Dr. Maria Escolar was a 35-year-old pediatrician overseeing a program for doctors in training at Duke University 12 years ago when she saw her first patient with Krabbe disease.

Named after a Danish neurologist who first described it in 1913, Krabbe disease is a rare, genetic disorder that is painful and damages mental and motor skills. Children with the disease show no symptoms at birth, but without treatment they go deaf and blind and usually die by the time they are 3.

“It’s one of the most horrible diseases I’ve ever encountered,” Escolar said.

In 1998, very little was known about Krabbe disease and similar metabolic diseases beyond the fact that they were fatal and no cure existed. Escolar, who now heads the program for neurodevelopmental function in rare disorders at the University of North Carolina Gene Therapy Center, was instrumental in changing that research gap.

In 2005, Escolar co-authored a landmark study on Krabbe disease that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study tracked the development of children with the disease who received transplants of umbilical-cord blood from healthy donors. The treatment was developed at Duke and was based on research Escolar and her colleagues at Duke and UNC did on the symptoms and progression of rare, genetic metabolic diseases.

Today, North Carolina’s Research Triangle area remains one of the few places in the world where children with these diseases are treated and new, experimental treatments are being explored.

During a presentation she made at the May TARDC luncheon at Research Triangle Park headquarters, Escolar outlined how much researchers have learned about the diseases since 1998 and what they still don’t know.

Also known as lysosomal storage disorders, these rare, genetic metabolic diseases are caused by mutations that are either inherited or happen spontaneously. The mutations disable enzymes the body needs to break down fat, protein and sugar molecules and make cell building blocks. Just one faulty enzyme can lead to the accumulation of undigested molecules that damage the brain and destroy the protective myelin sheath around nerves.

Lysosomal storage disorders occur in 1 in 100,000 people. The program Escolar heads at UNC has seen more than 400 affected children, 65 of them with Krabbe disease.

More than 100 of the children received umbilical-cord blood transplants.

Whether the transplants prolonged lives, prevented damage and lessened symptoms depended on the disease.

The transplant prevented cognitive damage in some of the children with Hunter Syndrome, a lysosomal storage disease that affects mostly boys. But others didn’t benefit and researchers are trying to find out why, Escolar said. The results in children with Sanfilippo Syndrome, another lysosomal storage disease, were equally puzzling. None of the children benefited from the transplants, except one boy whose social skills improved.

In children with Krabbe disease, the transplants were most effective when given before symptoms developed. Children who were treated within three months of birth suffered much less brain damage than children who were treated later, but even among the youngest transplant patients some showed delays in the development of motor skills.

“Now we understand that transplantation fixes a lot of problems, but we’re not catching it early enough,” Escolar said. A diagnosis in the first two years of life is crucial, she said. Newborn screening for Krabbe disease, as it was introduced in the state of New York in 2006, would be best, she added.

Researchers are also exploring treatment alternatives. Umbilical-cord blood transplantations have a 15 percent mortality risk, because they require chemotherapy and a year’s worth of immunosuppressive drugs. Some European researchers have tried treating the bone marrow of affected children. At UNC, researchers are looking into versions of gene therapy.

PHOTO BY TODD SUMLIN – tsumlin@charlotteobserver.com: Northwest Cabarrus High student Brendon Schaumburg, left, works on his senior project with technology facilitator Julie LaChance.

Teens across the country are starting to play computer games in school – and their teachers encourage them.

It’s called three-dimensional learning, and it has little in common with the 1980s video arcades parents remember.

In North Carolina, high school students who take an elective called “Computer Applications 2″ get introduced to Second Life or ReactionGrid, 3-D virtual worlds in which each player has an avatar – like a digital sock puppet that the user controls. In at least one school district, middle school students sit down at computers to play 3-D games in math and language arts classes.

3-D learning makes immediate sense to anybody born after 1985, because the advances in computer technology that stripped video games of their less-than-wholesome image also made the Internet an integral part of everyday life. For teens growing up in a world of Twitter and Facebook and game consoles such as PlayStation and Xbox, it’s no stretch to slip into an avatar and learn about prime numbers, creative writing or citizenship.

“Everybody knows about technology; 3-year-olds can navigate a laptop,” said Brendon Schaumburg, a senior at Northwest Cabarrus High School in Concord who has played video games since he can remember.

To test ideas for his senior project – an aquaponic greenhouse in a 40-gallon fish tank – Schaumburg logs on to Second Life, where his avatar, Brendon Bilavio, can tinker on a virtual prototype of the greenhouse.

Simulated environments that are colorful, nuanced and lifelike require powerful and fast computers, but they are a key to 3-D learning. Students who enter these environments find themselves on islands, in castles or underwater. They encounter healers, dragons, magicians or a guy with a mohawk. Playing requires taking on different roles, solving puzzles or going on a quest with other players who sit in front of their computers in the same room or thousands of miles away. Sometimes there’s even money to be made that can be spent in-world or converted into U.S. dollars.

Immersion in the game blurs the line between virtual world and real life, and students become apprentices who gain hands-on experience. Mistakes are teachable moments without leaving behind real-life messes.

“The generation that’s coming up is totally absorbed in (the virtual world),” said Julie LaChance, who is charged with integrating technology into classrooms in Cabarrus County schools. “The kids just pick it up. To them it is common, whereas when I talk to a 40-year-old teacher about having an avatar, they look at me like I’m crazy.”

Crazy maybe, but effective.

3-D learning works up to 63 percent better than lectures and allows students to improve their math, science and language skills, according to a report the Kansas City, Mo.-based Kauffman Foundation published last year. Students using computer-generated games to learn algebra were on average able to raise their test results by one grade.

The military, the government and large corporations such as IBM also have adopted 3-D learning. It has been used successfully with students who are deaf or autistic. This year, the New Media Consortium, which lists hundreds of universities, museums and research institutes among its members, identified computer games as one of a handful of emerging technologies that will affect learning, teaching, research and creative expression over the next three years.

3-D learning also has support in the White House. First lady Michelle Obama recently challenged software developers to design video games that teach children about nutritious foods.

“The immersive Internet is the next wave of the net,” said Tony O’Driscoll, a 3-D learning expert at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business who practices what he preaches.

O’Driscoll co-authored the book “Learning in 3D” (Pfeiffer, 2010) with Karl Kapp, a professor of instructional technology at Bloomsburg University in Bloomsburg, Pa. The authors discussed it at the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education conference in March – a conference that took place on 20 virtual islands in Second Life. More than 2,000 educators from 69 countries attended. Like the other participants, O’Driscoll came in the body of a voice-activated avatar: Wada Tripp looks like O’Driscoll but has no specks of gray in his black hair.

What makes 3-D learning stick is a student’s ability to manipulate dials and interact with others in a computer game, said Phaedra Boinodiris, serious games program manager at IBM in Research Triangle Park. “It’s doing versus passive learning.”

Boinodiris, who’s a longtime gamer herself, is behind Innov8, an IBM computer game used by more than 1,000 business schools and companies nationwide. They include Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC Chapel Hill and Duke’s Fuqua School of Business.

The game teaches teams of students how to overcome hurdles that can cause bottlenecks or other delays at a company. One version requires the team to collect information and solve puzzles based on real-life events, such as the situation a plywood supplier faces when a hurricane approaches. The students have to figure out, for example, how much plywood the supplier should stock to meet customers’ demands and be profitable.

Logan, a female consultant in a call center, is the Innov8 avatar in whose skin each team has to slip to walk around the company, interview employees and collect clues in the game.

Boinodiris’ group has also created a game called CityOne, which doesn’t have an avatar. CityOne, which will be available in the fall, teaches how industries, such as banking and retail, are connected with city utilities and city government. To create the game, Boinodiris said, her team relied on subject matter experts worldwide. “It takes an army to make a game like this,” she said.

Games aimed at high school and middle school students are created to work in a similar fashion, but they pursue different goals.

In Pender County, a school district north of Wilmington, teams of sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders who struggled with state algebra tests played a 3-D game called DimensionM during the 2008-2009 school year. Each team came up with an avatar and researched strange disasters on an island. They needed math to solve the mysteries. This school year, seventh graders played a game called Sims to explore elements of fiction writing. Sims simulates daily activities of one or more characters in a suburban household and results of the Pender County creative writing project are posted on a wiki, a Web site with links to other sites on the Internet.

“The experience is embedded in the story line,” said Lucas Gillispie, the instructional technology coordinator for Pender County schools. “Games are powerful learning tools. A player takes a role in the story, which is a multi-sensory experience. By doing, you hit on a wider variety of learning styles.”

Gillispie also introduced World of Warcraft, with about 10 million players per year the most popular 3-D game worldwide, to Pender County schools. A longtime WoW player himself, he offers the game for two hours after school to struggling, at-risk middle school students. The students must learn online manners, work together in guilds and develop leadership skills to go on the fantastical quests. They must also read game instructions, figure out how much gold they have in the WoW bank and write messages to each other.

The students presented Gillispie’s WoW project at the same VWBPE conference where O’Driscoll and Kapp talked about their 3-D learning book. When the students realized that they were about to take educators from around the world on a virtual tour of WoW, Gillispie wrote in his blog, Edurealms.com, “they very quickly went from silliness to seriousness. In fact, in my 10+ years as an educator, I’ve never seen such an abrupt transformation among students. In their minds, they were beginning to take ownership of the idea and realizing that they, in fact, would be the experts teaching the teachers.”

Schaumburg, the Northwest Cabarrus High School senior, got hooked on Second Life because the virtual world was a place where he could test his idea of ending world hunger by using solar energy and sustainable farming methods. With the help of LaChance, his mentor and the owner of the EDTECH Retreat island in Second Life, he built a virtual four-story greenhouse with the same 1-acre footprint as the Empire State Building in New York.

The Second Life prototype allowed Schaumburg to test his business model for growing organic food in water that is fertilized by fish. He figured that his aquaponic method could produce 18 times as many tomatoes per acre than conventional agriculture.

To finish his project, Schaumburg has only one task left to do. Equipped with data from the Second Life prototype, research he did in botanical gardens and greenhouses in the Charlotte area and expert advice from gardeners, engineers and biologists, he will build a real-world greenhouse in his fish tank.

NCSU's EcoCAR

To reduce greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel consumption, the NCSU team installed a large lithium-ion battery pack behind the front seats of the crossover SUV. Up front is a diesel engine from an Opel Corsa, a European fuel-sipper, to power the wheels on longer-distance drives.

The NCSU team had less than six months to take the vehicle apart to where only a blue shell remained and rebuild it to specifications they had determined the previous school year.

On May 8, a carrier will pick up the car and take it to the General Motors Desert Proving Ground in Yuma, Ariz., where less than two weeks later it will be judged in more than a dozen technical events against entries of 15 other teams from Canadian and U.S. universities.

Ali Seyam, student team leader

“We lost so many nights together,” said Ali Seyam, one of three graduate student leaders on the NCSU team. To get the car ready, team members sacrificed spring break, he said, and worked until 6 a.m. Saturday.

The EcoCAR Challenge is a three-year competition that was established by the U.S. Department of Energy and General Motors. Argonne National Laboratory, a federally funded research and development center for science and engineering near Chicago, manages the competition.

Teams spent the first year designing the technology to build their EcoCAR. The second year was dedicated to rebuilding a GM-donated Saturn View. Following a week of tests in the Arizona desert and three days of presentations in San Diego, Calif., students then optimize and promote their entries during the third year.

The lithium-ion battery pack

At the end of the competition, which is broken down into multiple milestones and deadlines, teams with the best scores in the different categories can win hundreds and even thousands of dollars.

But not just the winners benefit. Participating students interact with mentors in the industry and learn cutting-edge skills. Sponsorships and donations to complete an entry, including the car, parts and software, are worth more than $1 million per team, Terry Gilbert, the faculty advisor for the NCSU EcoCAR team, estimated.

Once the competition is over, the NCSU EcoCAR will become part of the university’s pool of vehicles.

More information about the NCSU EcoCAR team is here and here.

Cryptococcus gattii

In Africa, South America, Southeast Asia and Australia, crytococcus gattii infects eucalyptus trees and bothers people with compromised immune systems, such as HIV/AIDS patients and organ transplant recipients, who inhale its spores. But the strain that was first documented on Vancouver Island, Canada, a decade ago and has now spread to Seattle and Portland causes chest pain, fever, shortness of breath and weight loss in otherwise healthy people and has killed at least six of them.

In February 2007, the first North Carolina case, an otherwise healthy man, was treated at Duke University Medical Center, the Duke researchers reported in PLoS One. In a paper they published a week ago in PLoS Pathogen, the researchers wrote that the cryptococcus gattii strain in the Pacific Northwest was new, much more virulent and favored mammals.

The second Duke paper followed on the heels of a report on human health and climate change that was authored by a group of researchers from several federal agencies. Lead author of the report was Christopher J. Portier, the head of the environmental systems biology group at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle Park.

“The purpose of this paper is to identify research critical for understanding the impact of climate change on human health so that we can both mitigate and adapt to the environmental effects of climate change in the healthiest and most effective way,” the report from the Interagency Working Group on Climate Change and Health read.

Filling research gaps in new diseases and well-known diseases that are coming back because of altered growing seasons, more rain in some areas and droughts in others, more violent storms and rising temperatures has been on researchers’ minds for years.

In the past decades, they have identified 30 new diseases, including hepatitis C, avian flu, HIV/AIDS and severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, according to a 2004 report in Nature Medicine. Environmental changes are among the reasons for the emerging diseases. But researchers have also tracked a resurgence of previously documented diseases in new geographic areas, among them tuberculosis and cholera.

The report from the federal interagency working group zeroed in on the following research areas:

• More mold, dust, pollen and air pollution are likely to increase the prevalence of airway diseases such as asthma and respiratory allergies, which already affect about 50 million Americans.
• More information is needed on how climate change affects exposure to toxins and chemicals that might boost cancers, with about 500,000 deaths per year the second leading cause of death in the U.S.
• Heat waves and rising global temperatures could increase the number of heat-related illness and death. The 2003 heat wave in Europe, for example, caused about 35,000 deaths.
• Some birth defects linked to environmental causes have been steadily increasing.
• Exposure to biotoxins from ever more frequent, harmful algal blooms and chemicals from new batteries and compact fluorescent light bulbs could boost neurological and waterborne diseases.
• By 2050, about 200 million people are expected to be displaced by the effects of climate change. The population relocation and the changes in temperatures could cause a resurgence of diseases caused by insects, such as malaria and yellow fever, which were once rampant in parts of the U.S.