feedharvard

A new online journal developed by students at Harvard Law School (HLS) aims to shed light on the area of sports and entertainment law.

Students received approval for the Harvard Journal of Sports and Entertainment Law in August and will release the inaugural issue of the annual online publication in the spring of 2010. Within the next couple of years, the journal's founders hope to launch a printed version of the publication that will publish twice yearly.

Through a collection of scholarly essays and articles, the new publication, states its Web site, intends to 'provide the academic community, the sports and entertainment industries, and the broader legal profession with scholarly analysis and research related to the legal aspects of the sports and entertainment communities.'

'There are a lot of legal issues in this field and there aren't many scholarly outlets for the investigation of these issues,' said one of the journal's founders and its editor-in-chief, HLS student Ashwin Krishnan '05, J.D. '10. 'We want to explore this field in depth and treat it in a scholarly and rigorous fashion.'

Krishnan, who worked with the Boston Celtics during the 2008-09 academic year, noted that there is enthusiasm on the part of both students and faculty for the new journal as well as a need for it to fill an important academic hole.

'There was no journal at a school like Harvard, and we felt like we could really come in and be the leader in this field as a top-tier law school in this space.'

The journal represents a growing interest in the field on the HLS campus.

The discipline was the original domain of Paul C. Weiler, Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law Emeritus, whom Krishnan refers to as 'the godfather of sports law.' But since 2007, visiting lecturer on sports law Peter Carfagna, who studied with Weiler while a student at HLS, has taken the mantle, introducing a series of courses for students and clinical placements with professional sports teams and leagues, as well as independent writing projects.

Carfagna serves as the journal's faculty adviser and is ideally suited for the role. He was chief legal officer/general counsel of International Management Group ' one of the nation's top sports management and representation firms ' for more than 10 years, and currently heads his own private practice in sports law.

Carfagna's new courses in the Law School's curriculum include this fall's 'Sports and the Law: Examining the Legal History and Evolution of America’s Three 'Major League' Sports: MLB, NFL, and MBA,' and 'Sports and the Law: Representing the Professional Athlete,' which he will teach in the 2010 winter term.

He noted that the area of sports and entertainment law intersects with a number of other important legal topics.

'There are all sorts of [issues] ... that require serious academic consideration because the courts are going to listen to what publications like this journal have to say about where they should go next in these areas that intersect sports law but really define substantive areas like intellectual property, publicity rights, antitrust, and collective bargaining-related issues.'

Sports and entertainment law 'really needs serious scholarship from a place like Harvard,' added Carfagna. 'I think Harvard can put its indelible stamp on the area.'

Krishnan and his fellow journal founders, Josh Podoll, J.D. '11 and Ryan Gauthier, J.D. '10, are not only developing the first issue of the journal, but also hoping to ensure the longevity of the publication by involving first- and second-year HLS students in the project who can step into management roles when the original team graduates.

'Everything that we do with this journal,' said Krishnan, 'is looking toward the long term as well.'

The journal will accept articles, essays, book reviews, notes, and comments regarding legal and/or public policy issues related to the field. For more information on submissions, visit http://harvardjsel.com/submissions/.

One thing certain about the flu is uncertainty, according to Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health and a prominent authority on the spread of infectious disease.

The rise and rapid spread of H1N1 flu virus, known as swine flu, has kept Lipsitch busy in recent months. An expert in computer modeling of disease dynamics, Lipsitch has been part of a team advising federal officials on swine flu's likely behavior and the government's response to it.

In April, shortly after the flu hit the headlines, Lipsitch was called to Atlanta as an adviser to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For a week, he worked intensively with other advisers and officials there to provide analysis and perspective. He appreciated, he said, how difficult the job of health policymakers is in the early stages of a pandemic, when difficult decisions are being made on the basis of still-sketchy information about how dangerous and contagious a pathogen is.

'Academics have the ability to spend more time thinking about these questions than people who provide valuable services,' Lipsitch said. 'I felt frantic the whole time, but not nearly as frantic as the people who had to [make decisions] each day.'

Lipsitch kept in touch with officials in Atlanta after he returned to Boston through conference calls, at first daily and now weekly.

Last summer, as a member of the 2009 H1N1 Working Group of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, he helped draft an assessment of the federal government's handling of the swine flu outbreak so far. He gave it high marks, particularly for its flexibility.

Flexibility is key in handling an outbreak's beginning, he said. Because officials didn't know how dangerous H1N1 was, the initial response included fairly dramatic steps, such as closing schools if a case were diagnosed there. Those responses were dialed back as officials began to understand that, while contagious, H1N1 wasn't as deadly as past pandemic flus have been ' at least so far.

'People took it seriously and then scaled back as the nature of it was shown,' Lipsitch said. 'The response was well-tailored to cover the range of possibilities at any one time.'

Lipsitch was recently named the head of a new center at the Harvard School of Public Health designed to provide better information about disease outbreaks to public health officials and policymakers. The Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, which received a $10 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, will focus on mathematical modeling of seasonal infectious diseases such as the flu, on drug resistance, and on the best ways to allocate resources in interventions.

Lipsitch said that more people with such public health expertise are needed in the United States, so part of the center's mission will also be to educate a new generation of students in the discipline.

Lipsitch, who received his doctorate from Oxford University in 1995, has considerable experience to lend to the effort. Much of his study has focused on the pathogen that causes pneumonia, childhood ear infections, and meningitis, Streptococcus pneumoniae. He has evaluated how it spreads, how it is affected by interventions, and what the patterns of drug resistance are. He also worked on the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, and has worked to better understand the 1918 Spanish flu that killed millions around the world.

With the Northern Hemisphere flu season looming with the pending of winter, Lipsitch said uncertainty remains about the nature of the flu's coming second round. Though H1N1 is so far not as severe as past flu epidemics, it is clear that some will die from the ailment, Lipsitch said. Vaccines, which are being rushed through development and distribution, will be available in October, but it takes time to administer the dose and more time for the body to develop immunity.

Jack Szostak, a genetics professor at Harvard Medical School and Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), has won the 2009 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for pioneering work in the discovery of telomerase, an enzyme that protects chromosomes from degrading.

The work not only revealed a key cellular function, it also illuminated processes involved in disease and aging.

Szostak called the prize 'the highest scientific honor' and thanked his co-winners and collaborators, Elizabeth H. Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco, and Carol W. Greider of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

'It started off as work on a very basic question that has turned out, to our delight and surprise, to have much broader implications,' Szostak said.

The three won the prize for work conducted during the 1980s to discover and understand the operation of telomerase, an enzyme that forms protective caps called telomeres on the ends of chromosomes.

Subsequent research has shown that telomerase and telomeres hold key roles in cell aging and death and also play a part in the aging of the entire organism. Research has also shown that cancer cells have increased telomerase activity, protecting them from death.

Harvard President Drew Faust congratulated Szostak, saying his achievement highlights the importance of basic scientific research, which may not have an apparent practical application when it is conducted.

'I congratulate Jack Szostak and his colleagues on this singular honor,' Faust said. 'Their work has not only shed light on the central scientific issues of aging and disease, it also clearly illustrated the importance of unfettered basic research.”

Harvard Medical School Dean Jeffrey Flier said the work highlights not just the importance of basic research, but also that of the ongoing collaboration between the University and its hospitals ' in this case, Harvard Medical School's Department of Genetics and MGH's Department of Molecular Biology, where Szostak holds appointments.

'These two units have worked together in tremendous and beautiful synergy, scientifically, for so many years, and have been a breeding ground for so many scientific breakthroughs, including those being recognized today,' Flier said. 'The things [Szostak] did to understand how yeast cells work are now leading to what we think are going to be important breakthroughs in therapies for cancer, approaches to aging, and [important in] many other human diseases.'

MGH President Peter Slavin said the hospital was 'thrilled and honored' to learn of Szostak's award and thanked him for his contributions to biomedical research and for advancing the understanding of human biology and disease.

Robert Kingston, chief of MGH's Department of Molecular Biology, called Szostak 'a scientist's scientist' with an 'absolutely remarkable record of scientific achievement.'

'Jack is among a handful of the most respected scientists in the field,' Kingston said. 'He's immensely, immensely deserving of this recognition.'

In addition to being a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, Szostak is the Alex Rich Distinguished Investigator in the MGH Department of Molecular Biology, a member of MGH's Center for Computational and Integrative Biology, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

Szostak's day began at 4:45 a.m. with a phone call from the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, which awards the prize. By midday, he said, his phone still hadn't stopped ringing.

Later Monday, Szostak missed the introductory biochemistry class he was scheduled to teach and appeared instead at a news conference at Massachusetts General Hospital's Simches Research Center. He entered the room, beaming, to a standing ovation by colleagues from the hospital.

Matthew Powner, a postdoctoral fellow in Szostak's laboratory on the building's seventh floor, said he and the rest of the lab were excited for Szostak. The lab was decorated with congratulatory notes, ribbons, and gold balloons.

'I think it's fantastic news,' Powner said.

Telomeres' existence was hypothesized in the 1930s after scientists observed that, though the ends of normal chromosomes never fuse with each other, the ends of chromosome fragments do. In 1980, Szostak began collaborating with Blackburn. Together they showed that repeated nucleotide sequences found in telomeres of a single-celled protozoan also worked to protect chromosomes in yeast cells, illustrating they had discovered something very basic that worked in a wide range of creatures.

Blackburn and Greider went on to isolate telomerase, while Szostak identified a protein essential for maintaining telomeres in yeast, which turned out to be a key component of the enzyme. His work showed that the inability to add nucleotide repeats to chromosomes led to telomere shortening and eventually cell death. This was the first link between the molecular biology of telomeres and cellular senescence, the aging and death of cells.

Although this work was not known to be relevant to human disease when carried out in the 1980s, subsequent studies of telomeres and telomerase in human cells have shown that the enzyme plays crucial roles in both cancer and aging.

Since his work on telomeres and telomerase, Szostak has shifted focus. Today he is exploring the very beginnings of life, focusing on how the first cells were created. He is co-director of Harvard's Origins of Life Initiative.

With Szostak's award, 44 current and former Harvard faculty members have been recipients of Nobel Prizes for wide-ranging work, including the tissue culture breakthrough that led to the creation of the polio vaccine, negotiations that led to an armistice in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the first description of the structure of DNA, pioneering procedures for organ transplants, and the development of Gross National Product as a measure of national economic change.

The most recent Harvard faculty member to win a Nobel Prize was in 2005, when physicist Roy Glauber received the physics Nobel for work on the nature and behavior of light and Thomas Schelling won in economics for work on conflict and cooperation in game theory. Previous winners this decade include Linda Buck, in physiology or medicine in 2004, Richard Giacconi, in physics in 2002, and A. Michael Spence, in economics in 2001.

The Institute of Politics (IOP) remembers Senator Edward M. Kennedy, an active member of the Institute's Senior Advisory Committee since the IOP's creation in 1966 as a living memorial to his brother, President John F. Kennedy. The IOP's mission is to unite and engage students, particularly undergraduates, with academics, politicians, activists, and policymakers on a non-partisan basis and to stimulate and nurture their interest in public service and leadership.

"Ted Kennedy has for decades been a paragon of public service and an impassioned champion of education and opportunity for all. His profound commitment to making the American dream real for people from all walks of life, and his special devotion to higher education, will endure and inspire us long beyond his passing. We have been privileged and proud to have him as a member of the Harvard family, and I am one of the many, many people who will deeply miss his leadership, his courage, and his friendship." Harvard President Drew Faust

Katherine N. Lapp, executive vice president for business operations for the University of California, will become Harvard University’s executive vice president, President Drew Faust announced today (Aug. 20). Lapp will assume her duties in early October.

As executive vice president, Lapp will be the chief administrative officer within the University’s central administration and a member of the president’s senior management team. She will oversee the financial, administrative, human resources, and capital planning functions of the central administration, as well as administrative aspects of information technology. She will also work with colleagues across the University to identify areas in which greater coordination or collaboration can improve the quality or cost-effectiveness of operations, services, or administrative support. In addition, Lapp will serve as an ex officio member of the board of the Harvard Management Company, which manages Harvard’s endowment.

Lapp has served as the chief business officer for the University of California (UC) since May of 2007, overseeing a system consisting of the Office of the President, 10 separate campuses, five medical centers, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, with a system-wide budget that exceeded $18 billion this past fiscal year. Before moving to California, Lapp had a distinguished career in leadership roles in city and state government in New York, including serving as executive director and chief executive officer of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, North America’s largest regional transportation network.

“Katie Lapp brings extraordinary management experience and an impressive breadth of accomplishment to this role,” said Faust. “She has extensive expertise in budget and finance, exceptionally strong credentials as a leader and reformer of systems and operations, and demonstrated success in the higher education environment.

“Katie has a reputation for effectiveness, honesty, and integrity in whatever she undertakes, and she has shown that she has the capacity to work with multiple constituencies to accomplish common goals,” Faust continued. “I very much look forward to working with Katie, and I know that she will be a superb addition to the Harvard community.”

“I am very excited about this opportunity to return to the East Coast while continuing to work in higher education,” said Lapp. “I was brought to California to strengthen the administrative effectiveness of the President’s Office and system-wide operations, and I have loved supporting the academic mission of this great public university system. I look forward now to the opportunity to immerse myself in the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for Harvard.”

The search was guided by an advisory group co-chaired by Vice Presidents Clayton Spencer and Robert Iuliano, and also including David Ellwood, dean of the Kennedy School, Daniel Ennis, executive dean of the Medical School, Christine Heenan, vice president for Government, Community and Public Affairs, Jay Light, dean of the Business School, Kathleen McCartney, dean of the Graduate School of Education, Peter Tufano, Sylvan C. Coleman Professor of Financial Management and senior associate dean of the Business School, and Thomas Vautin, acting vice president for administration.

In addition to serving as the chief budget officer for the University of California, Lapp has provided administrative oversight of finances, human resources, real estate and facilities management, and information resources. She has overseen the university’s financial management, including the issuance of bonds and debt service strategies for all university locations, and the implementation of campus-based capital projects and the development of capital plans to ensure compliance with system-wide budget and finance approvals. Over the past two years, Lapp has overseen a complete restructuring of the Office of the President, including reducing the budget in excess of $60 million. More recently, for the current fiscal year, she has directed the effort to reduce the system-wide budget by $800 million to meet state budget requirements.

Prior to her time at UC, Lapp spent her entire career in New York. Following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, then-Gov. George Pataki appointed her executive director and chief executive officer of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). In this role, Lapp oversaw the operations, finances, and long-term business strategies of a transportation network with more than 2 billion riders and consisting of New York City Transit, Metro-North Railroad, Long Island Rail Road, Long Island Bus, MTA Bridges and Tunnels, and the MTA Bus and MTA Capital Construction companies. As CEO, Lapp, along with the MTA’s board, was responsible for 65,000 employees, an annual budget of more than $7 billion, and a $21 billion five-year capital program for system maintenance and expansion.

Before moving to the MTA in 2002, she served in a variety of positions in the criminal justice system of the State and City of New York, culminating in her role as the state’s director of criminal justice and commissioner of the Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS) from 1997 to 2001.

Lapp received her B.A. in 1978 from Fairfield University and her J.D. in 1981 from Hofstra University.

Lapp succeeds Edward C. Forst, who served as Harvard’s first executive vice president.

Adam Cohen and Ben Rapoport needed materials to conduct a science experiment, but supplies were hard to come by.

Cohen, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology and of physics in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Rapoport, an M.D./Ph.D. student at Harvard Medical School and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, were in the West African nation of Liberia, devastated by two civil wars that ended in 2003. Its classrooms had been stripped during the wars, leaving Liberian teachers and students with few resources beyond the desire to learn.

So Cohen and Rapoport went shopping for limes.

A short time later, their trip to the open-air market was done and they had what they needed: limes, metal nails, and copper wire. Soon they were demonstrating how to make a simple battery to Liberian science teachers, daring them to feel the admittedly small electrical current on their tongues, and offering a hands-on illustration of scientific principles that across the war-devastated nation are taught mainly through lecture and memorization.

“That’s what we want to do, teach relevant science and make it self-sustaining,” Rapoport said.

Liberia presents fertile ground for Cohen and Rapoport’s efforts. The nation, founded in 1847 by freed American slaves, was torn by two civil wars that began in 1989 and ended in 2003. The wars killed hundreds of thousands, generated tales of beheadings, torture, and other atrocities, and devastated the nation’s infrastructure.

Though the fighting has been over for several years, its effects are still apparent.

During their two weeks in Liberia in June, the two scholars were struck by the bare classrooms and stripped labs — even metal drawers were taken for sale as scrap. The years of war had seen schools abandoned, leaving nearly a generation of adults with little education. During the war, soldiers took what they needed, removing metal from buildings not damaged or destroyed in the fighting, killing livestock, and burning rubber trees for charcoal. On the palm oil plantation of the family that hosted Cohen and Rapoport, machines with key parts missing lay rusting in the underbrush while the oil harvesting — crushing and extracting the liquid from oil palm fruits — was done entirely by hand.

“Education is the one thing you can’t steal from people,” Cohen said. “People are very open to new ideas there and there’s a tremendous amount to do.”

During the course of their trip, Cohen and Rapoport visited the University of Liberia at Monrovia, the Liberian Ministry of Education, several civic groups, and 10 schools, doing some classroom teaching but mainly focusing their efforts on providing science training for the teachers.

The two strove to make their presentations as hands-on and relevant as possible, demonstrating several simple experiments that could be done with local ingredients. For example, they showed faculty and students how to extract DNA from local produce using kitchen utensils as laboratory equipment and easily obtained chemicals, such as soap, salt, and rubbing alcohol, as reagents.

They also added a module on nutrition after seeing the distended bellies of children across the countryside, a sign of kwashiorkor, or a deficiency of protein and micronutrients. Protein-rich foods are available, though they’re not typically given to children, whose diet, they observed, is almost exclusively made up of high-starch foods such as rice and cassava, often cooked with palm oil. Meat, for example, is considered a food for men, Rapoport said, but nuts, beans, and eggs are all available locally and would add protein to a child’s diet.

Most schools had little by way of laboratory equipment. What was there was often locked away unused or broken in a way that might be easily fixable, if parts were available. At one school though, the pair came upon a laboratory complete with equipment such as scales, beakers, and microscopes, some of it still bound in packing material. The room, however, had been padlocked and unused. When the two asked to get inside, the headmaster had to send for a key to open the heavy metal doors.

The layer of dust on the equipment spoke of their lack of use. The teachers, Rapoport said, didn’t know how to use the equipment, so he and Cohen conducted an impromptu lesson on basic laboratory skills, weighing a cell phone and different liquids to spark a discussion of density. It wasn’t long before a few students entered, then more, and the lesson eventually drew 30 students into the unused room.

“There was this beautiful lab, all laid out, but it had never been used,” Rapoport said.

Wherever they went, the complaints from science teachers were the same: no equipment, teaching that was theoretical and by rote, and a lack of job prospects in scientific fields — the medical school has only 50 slots — that keeps student interest low. The two stressed that science learning isn’t only important if one wants to be a doctor or scientist. Understanding the scientific method and how to gather and analyze information is important in a host of fields.

“For me, part of science education was memorizing facts, but a big part of it was fostering inventiveness,” Cohen said.

Though this year’s trip was exploratory in nature, Cohen and Rapoport are already thinking about what to do next. They’ve begun constructing an online journal, The Liberian Scientist, in an effort they hope will not only provide a showcase for what science is being conducted in the nation, but also help build the scientific community there.

Though computer equipment does exist, much of it is broken or heavily virus-infected, Cohen said. He’s thinking of purchasing USB flash drives, loading them with antivirus software, open source software such as Open Office and Wikipedia, and perhaps electronic versions of key texts, such as medical books, and sending them over. Though he and Rapoport are still assessing the results of this year’s trip, they’re also talking about returning next summer, spending less time running around the country and more time in focused workshops aimed at teachers.

Repaying a debt to Liberia

Cohen and Rapoport became interested in Liberia back when the two were in high school together at Hunter College High School in New York City. While there, they met Asumana Randolph, a science teacher originally from Liberia who worked as a technician in the science labs and adviser to the science club and to students’ independent research projects. The two said they learned a lot from Randolph, who stayed connected to his large family in Liberia, often shipping home needed materials. (Once he collected thousands of shoes and shipped them off.) Randolph eventually created a nonprofit organization, the I-Help Liberia Project, to help in the effort and got the school involved, bringing some high school students back to Liberia with him.

Randolph said it was very gratifying to see two former students take up the cause to help Liberia, particularly since he had always preached that, as a scientist, one should not live in a world bounded by a laboratory, but reach out and help people as well.

“It is all about, ‘ I’m going to leave this world.’ You ask yourself what do you leave behind?” Randolph said.

In this case, Randolph said, Cohen and Rapoport are tackling a task critical to Liberia’s future because science underlies all development.

“If you talk about transportation, you’re talking about science. If you talk about public health, you’re talking about science,” Randolph said. “If you want to look at Liberia for the next 10 years to come, you have to look at the science curriculum and teach students how to think for themselves. Development in Liberia cannot happen without a strong science background.”

Cohen said he had always meant to visit Liberia and this summer finally put the trip together. He and Rapoport remain in touch with Randolph, who helped organize the visit. Randolph scheduled trips to various schools and put Cohen and Rapoport in touch with family members who hosted them. The two said that though people typically think that aid always flows from the United States to other countries, in this case it was Liberia that exported an important mentor to the United States.

Cohen said the trip has already borne some fruit. The first day after he returned, he hosted a group of seventh-graders from New York City. He showed them the lab and then showed them some photos from Liberia and told the students the story of students there. He heard recently that the class has decided to sponsor a class of Liberian seventh-graders, helping them stay in school. He said he is also working with the Harvard Islamic Society to raise funds to rebuild a local mosque that was damaged during the fighting.

Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have substantially improved the odds of successfully reprogramming differentiated cells into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) by blocking the activity of the gene that instructs the cells to stop dividing.

Konrad Hochedlinger and colleagues at the MGH Center for Regenerative Medicine also found that reprogramming efforts are more likely to be successful if they target immature cells rather than their more mature counterparts for reprogramming.

Induced pluripotent cells are adult cells that have been reprogrammed back to an embryo-like state in which they have regained the potential to turn into any of the 220 cell types in the body, such as liver cells, skin cells, or heart cells. “This has been a main question and main interest in the field for a long time,” says Hochedlinger. “When you work with mature cells, for some reason only a few of them actually reprogram into an iPS cell: Why is the reprogramming process so inefficient?”

The team has devised two solutions for the problem of inefficiency, one of which involves selecting only certain cell types for reprogramming. The work is being published in two separate reports, one in the journal Nature, and the other in Nature Genetics.

Researchers know how to reprogram fully developed cells into iPS cells, yet the efficiency of the process remains very low – only about one in every 1,000 mature cells is successfully reprogrammed. Hochedlinger explained that because it’s been difficult to reprogram mature differentiated cells, he and his colleagues focused their effort on a population of relatively rare progenitor cells, cells heading down a particular developmental pathway, but not yet turned into the eventual cell type.

“By attempting to reprogram a population of progenitor cells, you have a way to increase efficiency,” says Hochedlinger. “This may be relevant when you think about upscaling iPS technology in a human setting. If you want to make iPS disease-specific cells from a limited amount of tissue material, you may want to specifically isolate these rare progenitor cells because you know the chance is much higher that they will give rise to an iPS cell compared with the mature cells which actually make the bulk of the tissue.”

Progenitor cells can give rise to a number of mature cell types within a given tissue type. For instance, blood progenitor cells give rise to all types of blood cells. Cardiac progenitors give rise to a number of different types of cardiac cells. But cardiac progenitors do not develop into blood cells, and vice versa.

“The second solution we came up with was identifying molecules whose manipulation enhances the cell division cycle, the proliferation of the cells, and thereby also enhances the efficiency of the reprogramming,” Hochedlinger continues.

Normally adult cells have a limited number of cell division they can go through before they stop dividing. “Certain molecules turn on to tell the cell ‘stop dividing now,’” he says. “We find that if we inactivate the molecule, it makes the cell continue dividing. And we can increase the efficiency of reprogramming by making the cell grow indefinitely.”

The work is an important step in “fine-tuning” the science of creating iPS cells. It both takes advantage of progenitor cells’ability to be reprogrammed, and also allows researchers to begin the process with a mature cell, where specific molecules are manipulated to obtain cell division and enhance the efficiency.

Producing iPS cells en masse will provide researchers with a way to study diseases in the laboratory, as well as provide targets for drug development, and, if the iPS cells prove to be biologically identical to human embryonic stem cells, they may provide material for cell transplants in diseases such as diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, and heart disease.

Political and philosophical differences aside, it’s the economic crisis that’s driving the current national health care reform debate.

“Every day the president gets an envelope [that] says, ‘Whoa! Bigger [deficit] this day than yesterday,’” noted Robert J. Blendon, professor of health policy and management, speaking at the Harvard School of Public Health on Tuesday.

Couple the worst economy since the 1930s, with the reality that President Obama “does not have the statutory power to enact health care reform,” and the reform effort is headed for major reformation, contends Blendon.

The structural and economic realities simply cannot be ignored, he said, pointing out that the structure of the U.S. government requires House, Senate, and the president to negotiate major issues as though they were “coalition partners.” But in the case of health care reform, they aren’t doing that, he added.

Blendon, who is also a professor of political analysis at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, said that what is being debated now is not a real restructuring of the American health care system, but a “[proposed] law that says ‘everybody who works at Dunkin’ Donuts has to have insurance.’

“It turns out millions of people work full time, but they get no [health] benefits. Cost and the [state] of the economy are the problems,” Blendon said. People across the country can be heard crying, ‘I can’t afford to pay. Do whatever you want – just don’t ask me to pay.’”

The tax issue presents a perfect example of why it’s not really up to the president to decide what health care reform will look like. In fact, Blendon said, “the discussions about Obama’s health plan are actually, politically fictitious” because Congress controls the power to tax and “in a deep recession you have people saying ‘I can’t pay more taxes. I can’t even pay for my kids to go to college,’” Blendon said.

“So this is no small issue at any level,” he continued. “A lot of people are saying, ‘Of course I want reform. I want coverage, but somebody else has to pay for this,’” he said. “… And every time that happens, Obama turns to [his director of the National Economic Council] Larry Summers and says, ‘Take it out of Medicare.’ Summers gets it out of Medicare, and then Mom and Dad start firing off e-mails [to the White House] about it” and the fight starts all over again.

It may be that everyone has agreed that providing universal health care coverage is the socially right thing to do, but then comes the reality of the proposed law, said Blendon. And a number of realities trump principle, he added.

Blendon explained that when most people think of health care reform, a national health insurance plan of some sort, they envision everyone having something like a national insurance card, “mostly paid for by tax payers ahead of time. But the U.S. model is not going to work that way,” Blendon said. “People are going to be asked to pay thousands of dollars for a subsidized policy unless their income is very low. And a lot of young people who are healthy,” and don’t think they need insurance, and the “‘I hate the government’ types are not going to buy it.”

Despite the endless discussion on talk radio and in the blogosphere, none of the major players in the current health care debate is pushing for an all-government, “socialized medicine” form of health care, Blendon told his audience. In reality, all the proposals are solidly anchored “in the existing system, which is an employer-based insurance for people who work, a public insurance plan, like Medicare, for the retiree, and some kind of insurance for the unemployed or those working only part time.” There is a new government portion to Obama’s plan, which proposes to mandate employer coverage, creating a public insurance option that will compete with private insurance companies, a government body to regulate cost, and a guarantee of insurance for all Americans, Blendon said.

Here, defining the role of government becomes significant. “The public wants much more involvement with the government in decisions about insurance companies through hospitals, and doctors … in quality and in cost. They want to share it. But when you push them, [people] all say the same thing: ‘I don’t want the government running the system,’” Blendon said. “The issue in the American debate right now is: ‘I want Obama to do more, but I don’t want him to end up running it.’”

In fact, Blendon said, special interest groups – such as the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, and the American Medical Association — are playing to people’s fears of a government take-over of the health care system, and are themselves in a position to shape the plan that ultimately emerges.

The reason the special interests are so powerful is obvious, Blendon said: “If I have to run every two years (for a seat in the House) there are two things in the United States political system that I need, and that’s voters and money to run,” and the special interests provide some of the former and a lot of the latter.

However rough — and complex — the debate is, Blendon is convinced that a very significant, yet not as broad piece of legislation, will get produced by the first of the year. “It possibly won’t solve as many problems as people expected when they started the debate. But we’ll have a reform that will be a compromise bill.”

This bill, when enacted in its final form, will probably be a compromise. In Blendon’s opinion, it will move the discussion forward with a lot of improvements, but rather than say “health care solved” it will raise a lot of issues that will continue to be very important for both experts at Harvard and people across the country.

When Ron Brummitt emerged from the Harvard Square subway stop on a recent summer morning he was met by some of the area’s sadly familiar fixtures: homeless adolescents looking for a handout.

Though he was on his way to the Harvard Business School (HBS) across the river, Brummitt took time to stop and talk with the group of three teens. Refusing to give them money, he escorted them instead to a nearby convenience store, where he bought them something to eat.

Before leaving, the fit-looking 54-year-old asked one of them why they were there. “What is it to you, sir?” the teen replied. Brummitt’s response was brief.

“I was on the streets,” he told him; “You don’t have to be on the streets.”

As a boy growing up in Florida, Brummitt’s abusive, “out of control” parents shattered his childhood. Later, drugs and alcohol led him to a life of addiction and crime.

“Drugs will take you farther than you ever want to go,” he said, “and will keep you there longer than you ever thought was possible.”

Eventually homeless, he landed at the doorstep of the Miami Rescue Mission one night in 1990, seeking refuge from a drug supplier he couldn’t pay.

The decision changed his life. Brummitt stayed at the homeless shelter, entered a detoxification program, went straight, and ultimately straight to the top of the organization. He has been the Miami Rescue Mission’s president and CEO since 2007.

Brummitt, who has a degree in psychology and is an ordained minister, was at Harvard in July to take part in Strategic Perspectives in Nonprofit Management, a weeklong, HBS seminar that aids senior executives from the nonprofit sector in developing leadership strategies.

Participants review cases – specific examples of conflicts or problems taken from the real nonprofit world – with an HBS instructor and explore possible solutions. In addition to class discussions, they meet frequently in small group sessions with their peers to talk about the particular challenges they encounter in their line of work.

This year the program, which was developed in 1994, had its biggest enrollment to date with 156 executives from 20 different countries.

“In my view, this sector has the hardest problems, the least resources, and the least structural help in achieving high performance,” said Herman B. “Dutch” Leonard, Eliot I. Snider and Family Professor of Business Administration at HBS and George F. Baker Jr. Professor of Public Management in the Kennedy School of Government. “The vision and excellence in this sector has to come from its organizations’ leaders.”

Throughout the week, participants discuss a wide range of topics, said Leonard, including ways to develop and implement strategic visions, navigate the struggling economy and work with increasingly limited resources, and engage with their employees about the challenges they face. Participants also leave the campus with a robust network of peers in the nonprofit sector.

“We hope we are arming them for a wider engagement within their organization … but it’s a dance they are involved in, not a battle, and we are trying to prepare them for that larger dance,” said Leonard, chair of the program for the last five years, who praised the groups’ commitment and dedication.

“It’s an inspiration for us to have a chance to work with them.”

Brummitt said he plans to use his Harvard experience in part to develop better training for his staff, re-examine ways to reach specific goals established by his board of directors, and explore other areas of growth for his organization.

“You can read books about nonprofit management, but to come [to Harvard] … and then to be able to take back maybe two or three things I can do right away, implement right away [is invaluable]. … This has been a different, unique type of learning experience.”

Brummitt also praised the talent and devotion of his peers in the program.

“There’s a lot of people in the world,” he said, “who want to do a lot of good.”