Category: Uncategorized

2004—A Year For Witches

By George F. Will

Newsweek



In 2004 an IBM supercomputer set a world record with 36.01 trillion calculations per second. The U.S. electorate may have made its calculation the instant John Kerry, who is not a supercomputer, explained why Toy’s restaurant in Canonsburg, Pa., “is my kind of place”:

“You don’t have to—you know, when they give you the menu, I’m always struggling: ah, what do you want?

He just gives you what he’s got, right?… whatever he’s cooked up that day. And I think that’s the way it ought to work, for confused people like me who can’t make up our minds.”

This year some paleoanthropologists reported that our cousins the Neanderthals, who disappeared 30,000 years ago, had better minds than has been thought: on a plain in Spain there is a mass grave containing evidence of funeral ritual, which means that Neanderthals had a capacity for symbolism. This year Democrats stressed their superior brains. (Bumper stickers: SOME VILLAGE IN TEXAS IS MISSING THEIR [SIC] IDIOT; JOHN KERRY—BRINGING COMPLETE SENTENCES BACK TO THE WHITE HOUSE.) A campaign flier in Tennessee pictured George W. Bush’s face superimposed over that of a runner in the Special Olympics, and proclaimed this message: “Voting for Bush is like running in the Special Olympics. Even if you win, you’re still retarded.”

From an Indonesian island came evidence that as recently as 18,000 years ago—only yesterday, as paleoanthropologists reckon—there was a race of Hobbit-size (about three feet tall) semi-people. Their small brains probably were incapable of idealism of James Kilgore’s sort. In 2004 Kilgore, 56, was sentenced to six years in prison for his part in the murder of a mother of four during a 1975 California bank robbery that was supposed to help finance the Symbionese Liberation Army. Martha Stewart was sentenced to prison for lying about a crime she was not charged with. Scott Peterson was convicted of double murder—killing his wife, and killing his unborn child, a problematic idea given the current understanding of abortion rights. Before death tardily overtook another dispenser of death, Yasir Arafat, he received a letter from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals—well, of animals other than people—asking him to stop using donkeys in suicide bombings. It was said that the death of this winner of the Nobel Peace Prize might make peace possible. [more…]

By David Brinn

December 12, 2004

A revolutionary Israeli treatment for leukemia using a stem cell-derived product has achieved remarkable Phase I and II trial results. Ten American patients with late-stage leukemia underwent the StemEx leukemia treatment developed by start-up Gamida-Cell and 50% confounded expectations by living past the first 100 days.

It appears to be the first successful human clinical test of a commercial product derived from stem cells.

Each year, nearly 27,000 adults and more than 2,000 children in the United States learn that they have leukemia, a malignancy of the blood-forming cells in the bone marrow.

Current treatments are based mostly on bone marrow transplants. When these transplants encounter the patients’ immune systems, severe side effects result. StemEx uses progenitor and stem cells taken from the patients themselves. The population of these cells is expanded, and they are then returned to the patient’s body. The results of trials on the ten terminal patients upheld Gamida-Cell’s expectation that the severe side effects of current treatments would be greatly reduced.

The trial was conducted at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, one of the world’s most prestigious institutes.

Gamida-Cell CEO Ehud Marom said that the trial had taken 100 days, during which the treatment on patients had been monitored. Anderson Center principal investigator Dr. Elizabeth Shpall presented the trial results last week at the 2004 annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology (ASH).

“Anderson is the best center for cancer in the U.S. and we wanted to work with the best center and the best principal investigator,” Marom told ISRAEL21c.

According to Marom, until now using conventional treatment, only 10% of patients managed to get through 100 days. With the StemEx treatment, 50% of the patients whose cases were extreme – and for which no other treatment were available -survived 100 days.

“The patients included in the trial were in the advanced stages of leukemia. However, in the future, the treatment can be used instead of bone marrow for any stage patient,” Marom said.

“Ten leukemia patients, many of whom had failed standard chemotherapy and other therapies, underwent StemEx transplants,” explained principal investigator Shpall. “StemEx combines ex vivo expanded cord blood stem/progenitor cells with non-expanded cells from the same unit. The net results of the Phase I/II study indicate that StemEx is safe, and no serious adverse effects were reported in connection with the StemEx transplant. We are very excited about the data from this study. It is very important research that we believe will contribute greatly to patient care in the future.”

According to Shpall, four standard parameters within the time frame of 100 days were evaluated. These included graft failure rate, transplant-related mortality, GvHD and time to engraftment. In all cases, StemEx scored well.

“The bodies of only 20% of the patients we treated rejected the transplant, compared with an average of 60% of current transplants. In addition, the time that patients required to rebuild their immune systems was shorter than for current treatments, which meant that they were less exposed to infections,” Marom told Globes.

“The results of the Phase I and Phase II trials mean that our product is safe, and apparently effective. The company must now prepare for a more extensive Phase III trial,” he added.

Marom told ISRAEL21c that Anderson would be used once again as a site for the trials, as well as a center in San Antonio, Texas, and other centers across the U.S. and possibly in Canada. He estimated that the next trials would begin in the first quarter of 2005, following the approval of the FDA to commence this part of the trial. “We are hoping for an FDA approval by 2007/2008,” he said.

Gamida-Cell develops products based on stem cells for treating cancer and autoimmune diseases, and for cardiac and pancreatic repair. The company was founded in 1998 based on technology for stem cell expansion licensed from Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem. The StemEx is their first product which has moved past Phase II trials.

“In the development of biotechnology companies, Gamida-Cell is now a company with a product headed for Phase III trials. If these trials are successful, the drug can be registered with the FDA and marketed,” said Marom.

Gamida-Cell has raised $22 million to date from Elscint (Europe-Israel), Biomedical Investments, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (Nasdaq: TEVA; TASE: TEVA), Denali Ventures, Auriga Ventures, Pamot, and Comverse Technology (Nasdaq: CMVT). The company has also signed a conditional strategic agreement with Teva.

“The results of the trials have created great interest in the company on the part of large and medium-sized pharma companies, and also in the investment community. Our goal now is to bring StemEx to market as quickly as possible,” said Marom. He told ISRAEL21c that news of the StemEx success was received very positively at the ASH conference, “both from the clinical as well as the big pharma perspective.”

The combined market potential of Gamida-Cell’s stem cell expansion products is estimated at $40 billion worldwide. This includes umbilical cord blood stem cells as well as stem cells from the placenta, bone marrow, peripheral blood and adult organs like the liver and heart in addition to skin, neural and pancreatic tissue.

Israel is among a small group of countries that have developed their own stem-cell regulations that permit most types of work in the field. Israel’s carefully regulated but open atmosphere for research has helped catapult it into the front ranks of a field that many consider the next frontier of science.

Besides Gamida-Cell, other Israeli biotech companies on the cutting edge of stem cell products include Pluristem (PLRS.OB), which multiplies stem cells found in umbilical cord blood., Tissera (OTCBB:TSSR), which is developing cell therapy to treat harmed fetuses; and ProNeuron which has developed ProCord, a treatment for complete spinal cord injury.

“What Israel has done in the laboratory and in their oversight mechanisms is a model for other nations to emulate,” Georgetown University’s LeRoy Walters, an expert in the global dimensions of stem-cell research, told The Forward.

The work by Gamida-Cell was carried out with adult stem cells, not embryonic stem cells which is at the heart of the controversy in the United States. That debate resulted in President Bush’s 2001 decision to cut off federal funding for research on stem cells harvested from human embryos.

The lighting of the White House menorah and an a capella concert by Kol Zimra at the White House. Click here for the video.

DAVID CRUMM: Spiritual quest starts in metro Detroit

BY DAVID CRUMM

FREE PRESS COLUMNIST



December 10, 2004

For years, I’ve heard Jewish parents talk about the Christmas envy their kids can feel at this time of year, but I’d never heard of Hanukkah envy until recently.

My son Benjamin, 15, and I were untangling strands of Christmas lights in front of our house when he asked, “Dad, why couldn’t we have been Jewish? Their holidays are so cool! They get to eat special meals, read things, light candles, do things together.”

“We’re doing this together,” I said, hefting a snarl of lights.

“Uh, right, Dad,” he said with a shrug. “Maybe it’s crazy, but it feels like we should do something more with the holidays.”

I knew that his question was far from crazy. He was slicing through our holiday hoopla with the laser vision of youth. And that’s how a spiritual quest unfolded this week that wound up connecting with the plight of refugees in Africa, a mountain of winter coats in Detroit and an unusual Christmas party tonight in Royal Oak.

My first stop involved calls to two of the country’s top religious authors, Christian Bible scholar Marcus Borg and Jewish cultural expert Scott-Martin Kosofsky. They told me that my son’s query is the same question that countless Americans are asking right now.

Kosofsky’s newest effort is “The Book of Customs: A Complete Handbook for the Jewish Year.” When I asked him about the meaning of Hanukkah, he said, “Most of us grew up knowing full well that this is considered a minor holiday, and that a lot of what we see in Hanukkah today is a case of Christmas envy that developed in Jewish families to give us a version of the Christmas gift-giving season. But there’s really much more to Hanukkah than that.”

The festival, which ends with the lighting of an eighth candle in Jewish homes on Tuesday evening, marks an ancient triumph of religious freedom. A Jewish group called the Maccabees fought successfully to reclaim their temple in Jerusalem from a ruler who was trying to replace Judaism with Greek culture. Jews light candles to recall the light rekindled in the temple by the Maccabees. “And, if you focus on that, then this is a powerful story of liberation,” Kosofsky said. “Especially with the founding of the state of Israel, the Maccabean period is a time people harken back to and say: We did it then; we can do it again.”

What amazed me was that Borg pointed to similar themes in Christmas. Borg’s “The Heart of Christianity” is a plea for feuding Christians to agree on some basic truths.

“And in Christmas, we’ve got several basic themes,” Borg said. “One is the theme of light coming into the darkness. That’s an ancient symbol of enlightenment and deliverance.

“But another theme is both theological and political. It’s the theme of Jesus as the son of God, which was a title claimed by the Roman emperor. So, it’s very powerful: a story of light in our darkness and of one who comes to challenge the kingdoms of this world.”

It’s a disservice to obscure the two faiths’ many differences, but I wanted to test the assumption that there is a middle ground in holiday themes. And, looking around metro Detroit, I found that this idea makes a lot of sense.



At the West Bloomfield congregation Beth Ahm at 9:30 a.m. Saturday, Rabbi Jason Miller is inviting the public to join in a nationwide Sabbath of Conscience on Darfur. (Beth Ahm is at 5075 W. Maple Road.)

On Saturday, Miller will talk about practical ways people can contribute to efforts to help end the displacement and massacre of thousands of families in Darfur.

Or, consider this: At 7 p.m. today in Royal Oak, there’s a Christmas party for people with AIDS, their families and friends. Over the years, as I’ve brought up this popular annual event to someone who’s never heard of it, there’s often a reflexive wince. Apparently, it’s jarring to hear the words Christmas and AIDS in the same breath.

But there’s hardly another religious service in the course of a year that’s as richly uplifting as this celebration. The host is St. John’s Episcopal Church at Woodward and 11 Mile.

And that brings me to the mountain of coats in northwest Detroit. My last stop was a visit with Capt. K. Kendall Mathews, Detroit commander of the Salvation Army. I found the uniformed clergyman at the Army’s Brightmoor Community Center, surrounded by a vast, fluffy rainbow of winter coats.

“We’ve already distributed 10,000 coats this winter around Detroit, but these are about 300 more we’ve just received,” he said Thursday as volunteers sorted the garments.

Suddenly, the challenge of untangling heaps of coats seemed a lot more important to me than untangling Christmas lights. I should bring my son down here one day and help, I thought.

“But you know what?” Mathews told me. “The holidays are great because they inspire people to kick it up a notch and give more. But, if people truly understood what God was doing for us, I think they’d see that we should be doing this as a year-round thing.”

Copyright © 2004 Detroit Free Press Inc.

Kolel Moshe Lifelong Learning Institute: Meets at Congregation B’nai Moshe, 6800 Drake, West Bloomfield. Nancy Kaplan: 248-737-1931. “The Joseph Story: Setting the Stage for Development of the Jewish People,” 11 a.m. Dec. 12. Brunch and Learn program with Rabbi Jason A. Miller of the Hillel Foundation at the University of Michigan. Cosponsored with Congregation Chaye Olam. $10. Drop-in.

This past week Elissa and I attended a wonderful speech by Starbucks’ Founder and Chairman Howard Schultz. He was the featured speaker at the Main Event — Jewish Federation of Washtenaw County’s (Ann Arbor) annual fundraiser.

Schultz spoke of his beginnings, growing up poor in the Brooklyn projects with a blue-collar father who was unemployed for much of his childhood. He talked about the growth of the company and its expansion throughout the world into several distinct cultures (Japan, France, and the Middle East). He explained his vision to be an ethical corporate executive and how the Jewish values instilled in him as a young man have helped him to achieve this. He is extremely generous with his fortune, paying for all of his employees’ health care (part-time employees as well) and subsidizing their education. He did not accept any money for this speaking engagement and funded his own travel expenses as well as his staff who accompanied him to Ann Arbor.

Please consider Howard Schultz’ generosity and ethical acts before criticizing him or the Starbucks company.

In case you haven’t seen this one yet… Click here.

Answer: Princess Diana’s death.

Question: How come?

Answer: An English princess with an Egyptian boyfriend crashes in a French tunnel, driving a German car with a Dutch engine, driven by a Belgian who was drunk on Scottish whisky, (check the bottle before you change the spelling) followed closely by Italian Paparazzi, on Japanese motorcycles; treated by an American doctor, using Brazilian medicines.

This is sent to you by a Canadian, using Bill Gates’s technology, and you are probably reading this on your computer, that uses Taiwanese chips, and a Korean monitor, assembled by Bangladeshi workers in a Singapore plant, transported by Indian lorry-drivers, hijacked by Indonesians, unloaded by Sicilian longshoremen, and trucked to you by Mexican illegals…..

That, my friends, is Globalization.

From the Wall Street Journal (11-19-04)

By SHARON BEGLEY

When scientists theorize about why racism is pervasive — so much so that some have suggested it is hard-wired into us — they come up with something like this: Back when humans were venturing out of the species’ birthplace in east Africa, each little band mostly kept to itself.

But occasionally someone, searching for food or territory or maybe adventure, came upon someone unfamiliar, from a different band.

He could wait for the thoughtful, cognitive part of his brain to assess the stranger. Or he could follow the instincts of the primitive, vigilance and wariness-inducing part of his brain, instantly identifying the guy as an outsider and then either running like heck or assaulting him. With this reaction, he was more likely to live and reproduce. We, the descendants of such people, inherited their genetically based brain modules, which reflexively classify people as “like me” or “unlike me.” And thus was racism wired into humankind.

Leave aside that this fable is impossible to test and rests on a questionable assumption (at the dawn of human history, people looked pretty much alike even if they belonged to different bands). It has nevertheless exerted a powerful hold on the imaginations of those who regard racism as a fundamental and therefore inevitable human attribute. More evidence: Although many white Americans consider themselves unbiased, when unconscious stereotypes are measured, some 90% implicitly link blacks with negative traits (evil, failure).

But recent studies challenge the conclusion that racism is natural and unavoidable.

Evidence that we are wired for racism comes from studies in which whites were shown pictures of black faces. That typically produced a spike in activity in the part of the brain, called the amygdala, that is the source of wariness and vigilance, responding automatically and emotionally to possible threats. The greater the whites’ negative attitude toward blacks, as measured on the unconscious-stereotyping test, the greater the activity in the amygdala when they saw black faces, compared with the activity when they saw white ones. (Data from studies in which blacks saw white faces are less clear-cut.)

But that primitive response is not inevitable. In a new study, researchers found that it indeed occurred when the faces were flashed for 30 milliseconds, so quickly that they could be seen only subconsciously. There was no such difference in amygdala activity, however, when the white volunteers saw faces for 525 milliseconds, scientists led by William Cunningham of the University of Toronto will report next month in the journal Psychological Science.

Instead, there was greater activity in the prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate. Both regions are associated with higher thought and with inhibition and control of reflexive responses. This suggests that the thoughtful, rational part of the brain snuffed out the prejudicial response that would have otherwise popped up from the amygdala. In fact, people who showed the most unconscious bias on the test of unconscious stereotyping, and thus had the most to control, also showed the greatest activation of higher brain functions when they saw black faces.

“If people have a chance, they can modify or override the emotional response with the cognitive regions of their brain,” says Prof. Cunningham.

Although you might think that racism is fundamental and inevitable because it emanates from a primitive part of the brain, even if we can override it with a higher region, Prof. Cunningham demurs: “It’s silly to say that these automatic reactions are the true you,” or that they are any more “you” than thoughtful reactions that reflect consciousness and beliefs.

Consider what happened when white volunteers looked at yearbook photos of black or white faces for two seconds to determine any of three things: if they were over 21, if there was a dot on the face, or if the person depicted looked as if he or she liked a particular vegetable.

There was no extra activity in the amygdala when the whites looked for a dot on a black face, found psychologist Susan Fiske of Princeton University. They were probably seeing the faces not as faces but as mere background for a dot, so no racist feelings surfaced. But there was a spike in amygdala activity when the whites scrutinized the black faces to assess age. Categorizing someone for one purpose (age) seemed to activate stereotypes of another category (race).

But then the volunteers looked at black faces to assess their affinity for asparagus (or celery, or carrots). There was no amygdala spike. Why? This task forced the volunteers to see black faces as those of unique individuals. That inhibited what Prof. Fiske calls “category-based emotional responses” generated by the amygdala.

“Prejudice is not inevitable,” she concludes in a paper to be published in January. To the contrary. With a conscious goal to see someone as unique, the default response — race-based and stereotyped — “can evaporate. We have some control over how we look at people. You’re not responsible for what goes into your head — and people are fooling themselves if they think they can be colorblind — but we are responsible for what we do with that information.”