Student Research at Duke

The 2007 Research Fellows have been matched with faculty in eleven different departments. Joining with the faculty mentors are multiple postdoctoral fellows and advanced graduate students who demonstrate to the Fellows how to do the minipreps and Northern blots and PCR and all the other techniques that the students mention in their blogs. Techniques are important, but there is more to come as students see the result of their experiments. But I digress. The true point of this post is to recognize the faculty mentors and to thank their colleagues who are helping our students discover science at the bench rather than at the textbook. Namely:

Student * Faculty Mentor * Department

Priyanka Amin * Fan Wang * Cell Biology
Tessa Carducci * John Simon * Chemistry
Jason Chen * Sri Raghavachari * Neurobiology
Yishan Cheng * Tannishtha Reya * Pharmacology/Cancer Biology
Monica Hamilton * Anne West * Neurobiology
Catherine Hartman * Robin Wharton * Neurobiology
Vanessa Kennedy * Jennifer Groh * Neurobiolog
Priya Khatri * Nina Sherwood * Biology and IGSP
Kristin Knouse * Xiao-Fan Wang * Pharmacology/Cancer Biology
Sidney Kuo * Fred Dietrich * Mol Genetics & Microbiology
Sara Leiman * Mehta Keune * Biochemistry
Fei Lian * Pei Zhou * Biochemistry
Wendy Liu * H.F. Nijhout * Biology
Rebecca Liu * Sharon Endow * Cell Biology
Andrew Lyu * Fan Wang * Cell Biology
Upom Malik * Homme Hellinga * Biochemistry
Sarah Nam * Chris Raetz * Biochemistry
Yongho Park * Thomas McIntosh * Cell Biology
Samantha Pearlman * Anne Yoder * Biology
Matthew Pease * William Wetsel * Psychiatry/Behav Sci
Jose Pena * John York * Pharmacology/Cancer Biology
Alaina Pleatman * Mark Dewhirst * BME
Lulit Price * Tom Ortell * Pathology
Racquel Quarless * George Truskey * BME
Kalen Riley * Ryohei Yasuda * Neurobiology
Trisha Saha * Margaret Kirby * Cell Biology
Jessica Shuen * Nicole Calakos * Neurobiology
Jacquelyn Sink * Sally York * Pharmacology/Cancer Biology
Julie Sogani * Gerald Blobe * Cell Biology
Sarah Steele * Alejandro Abbalay * Mol Genetics & Microbiology
Julie Stevenson * Victoria Seewaldt * Medicine

One component of our summer programming is a set of activities addressing Responsible Conduct in Research (RCR).  Thanks to Suzanne for organizing the movie, And the Band Played On, as part of RCR.  That movie was released in 1993 with updated material from a mid-1980’s “medical chronicle” of Randy Shilts, an investigative reporter.  There are, of course, criticisms of the movie’s representation of the events, and there are probably blogs on that topic.  But since the statistics at the end of the movie are nearly 15 years out of date, Suzanne has provided us with this update.
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I just wanted to follow up from the movie last night, And the Band Played On, with the latest statistics, available from 2006.

Who knows what the world would be like today if our government, related health organizations, and scientists took quicker action in trying to prevent the spread of this mysterious disease early on? The  numbers today are staggering. I hope you got from the movie a sense of the factors that unite and divide scientific inquiry with human affairs in general. In addition the arguments that kept people from taking action and making progress spanned from intra-populational communities to the international level. The stigma of having HIV/AIDS continues today in many places and in many ways, often preventing effective treatment of the disease and prevention of its spread. Even a small but vocal group maintains that HIV is not the cause of AIDS.
All of the following information has come from the World Health Organization’s web-page, as well as their fact sheet:

http://www.who.int/hiv/mediacentre/news62/en/index.html

* an estimated 39.5 million people are living with HIV

* in 2006, 2.9 million people died of AIDS-related illnesses

* in North America there are 1.4 million people living with HIV

* there were 4.3 million new infections in 2006 with 2.8  million (65%) of these occurring in sub-Saharan Africa and important increases in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, where there are some indications that infection rates have risen by more than 50% since 2004

* In 2005, a total of US$ 8.3 billion was estimated to be available for AIDS funding; this figure is estimated to rise to US$ 8.9 billion in 2006 and US$ 10 billion in 2007. But it falls short of what is needed––US$ 14.9 billion in 2006, US$ 18.1 billion in 2007 and US$ 22.1 billion in 2008.

Suzanne

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute provides important financial support for the Research Fellows Program, but the program would not be possible without the generosity of the 30 faculty scientists and others in their research groups who are mentoring our undergraduates this summer. Over the 17 years of our program, more than 150 faculty have been mentors; every science and biomedical department at Duke has hosted multiple Research Fellows. Faculty also present their own research to students, are good natured when interviewed by the students and welcome the students into group journal clubs and social functions in the labs. We thank all the associates and colleagues of our faculty mentors for the time and resources they commit to the Research Fellows.