FALL, 2009/  Issue (#28)

Life Sciences News

News and Information for and about students ,staff, and faculty in theLife ScienceDepartment at Santa Monica College

One of Lucy Kluckhohn-Jones' microbiology students (Jesalyn Dunlap)reported that she was selected to participate in the Summer Internship Program at the NIH, where she will be working in the Clinical Center in Bethesda, MD for nine weeks.  She was one of 10 nursing students chosen to work with the Nursing & Patient Care Services dept.  She was placed on the floor conducting research on metabolism & will a poster on her work.  She will also  have the opportunity to shadow Nurse Researchers on the floor and help in the office with research related administrative duties (& paid no less!)
      Ms. Junlap just finished her Junior year at UCI's Program in Nursing Sciences.  She was recently published in the Journal of Professional Nursing for an editorial piece, was given a $1500 scholarship from Johnson & Johnson, and started a student created online newsletter.
     Jesalyn says events & articles produced by the School of Nursing can be viewed on LifeLine:  Nursing Science Journal at:  www.lifeline-nursing.blodspot.com. 0.............
     Many of our 23 biology majors finished their course work at SMC and transferred to the "Big U" after the spring semester.  Here is a partial list:  UCLA = 17 students, CSUN = 3 students, UCSD = two students, UCBerkeley, UCIrvine, UCRiverside, USC, John Hopkins, CSULA, and Inter-American University of Puerto Rica School of Optometry each had one student.  Six others are remaining at SMC to finish course work.
     Jennifer Hranilovich (Bio21-22; Bio23, Fall 06) was accepted into the MD program at Washington University in Saint Luis (class of 2013).
     Carlos Peinado, one of our top Anatomy & Physiology students, was accepted and attended the Weill Cornell/Rockefeller/Sloan-Kelling Gateways to the Laboratory Summer Programs, where he was the only community college participant.  Carlos is planning to transfer to UC Berkeley or UCLA.
     Ryan Garcia (Bio21,22) graduated from UC Davis College of Veterinary Medine in 2008, earning its highest honor:  The School of Veterinary Medicine Medal.  While at Davis, Ryan participated in a number of outreach programs including "Feeling Their Pain:  STAR (Student Training in Advanced Research) Program assessing pain medication in cats, as well as providing care to animals as part of a large outreach to the greater Sacramento community.  Dr. Garcia finished an one year internship rotation at the University of Minnesota, and has returned to UCDavis for a three year small animal medicine residency.
     Giar-Ann Kung who took a number of our courses in the past (Microbiology, Field studies, Field Zoology, and Field Biology) has been working with Dr. Brian Brown, curator of entomology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.  Her most recent publication is entitled Four distinctive new Neotropical species of Coniceromyia Borgmeier (Diptera:  Phoridae) with wing-patterns.  Zootaxa 2273: 49-58.  [see more about this paper in NATURE NOTES]

Students interested in summer research programs can go to the link provided by Aram Kim (Biology 23, Spring 2004) at
http://www.nsf.gov/home/crssprgm/reu/start.htm
http://www.yale.edu/necuse/
http://www.the-aps.org/education/ugsrf/SumResLINKs.html
http://research.berkeley.edu

Book: 

  GLOBAL WARMING!
Online questionnaires to calculate your current energy use.   http://safeclimate.net/calculator.
The carbon equivalency calculator translates units of greenhouse gases saved in easily understandable equivalents:  gallons of gas saved, acres of forest preserved, etc.  The listed site is usctcgateway.net/tool.  Did not work recently though.
 

DONATING BLOOD?

To donate blood, call 1.800.GIVELIFE or 1.800.448.3543.  Call between 8am to 9pm to schedule an appointment.

American Red Cross of Santa Monica, 1450 Eleventh Street at Broadway, Santa Monica.  2nd and 4th Monday of each month, except holidays, 9:30am - 4pm.

American Red Cross of Greater Los Angeles, West District Office, 11355 Ohio Avenue, West Los Angeles (enter from Sawtelle Blvd entrance at V.A. Facility) 12pm to 7pm.  2nd and 4th Saturday of each, except holidays, 7am to 1:30pm.

A REAL DEAL is donating blood at St. John's Health Center, where perks include a free cholesterol test, pair of free AMC theatre movie passes, and entry into a monthly drawing.  Platelet donations, a process which takes about twice as long, earns three movie passes!  Call 310.829.8025 for details and an appointment.  There is also free valet parking for all donors.  (Unconfirmed, but a student indicated that UCLA gives THREE movie tickets!).  Hospitals give out these perks, as it costs the hospital 3-4X as much to purchase the blood from an outside source.

BIOLOGY NEWS
Venkatraman Ramakrishna, Thomas A. Steitz, and Ada E. Yonath shared the 2009 Nobel prize for chemistry for their studies on the structure and function the ribosome.  They used a method called X-ray crystallography to map the structure of the ribosome, the position of every atom that makes up the ribosome.  Ramakrishna was born in India but is now a U.S. citizen heading up the Structural Studies Division at Cambridge University.  Steitz is the Sterling professor of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry at Yale University.  Ms. Yonah is a crystallographer at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science.
     The 2009 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack W. Szostak for their research on chromosomes and its implications for cancer and ageing.  Specifically the studied how chromosomes can be copied during cell division and how they are protected against degradation.  The solution was through the discovery of telomeres at the end of the chromosomes and the enzyme that make them, telomerase.  Blackburn is an Australian-American researcher at the University of California, San Francisco.  Greider is a molecular biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory at John Hopkins University.  Greider is a product of the University of California system.  Szostak is Professor Genetics at Harvard Medical School.

Things to do.....
TUTORS NEEDED:  Students who have successfully completed Life Science Dept courses such as Biology 21-22-23 , Botany, Microbiology, Zoology 5, Anatomy1 and 2, Physiology 3 and are interested in teaching can be tutors.  Contact faculty members in those disciplines for further information.
HABITAT WORKS:  If you are interested in the environment or volunteering for wildlife or habitat conservation projects around Los Angeles or Southern California, check out this great organization.  http://www.habitatwork.org/  One of its leaders is Tom Persons, an alumni of many of our Field Studies courses.

Care-Extender Program at Santa Monica-UCLA Center.  Get experience in Health Care!  CALL 310.319.4398

Ed Tarvyd received a bit of new about Jerry Ward, microbiology professor and long time department chair (eons ago... about 25 years).  Jerry, now 86, and Pauline, now 85, are quietly living in northern California near their children (and grandchildren and great grandchildren) in the town of Fontana(?) in the redwood country.  Jerry walks several miles every day after surviving heart surgery 4 years ago.  Pauline has survived several breast cancer surgeries and had successful eye surgery after being nearly blind for 10+ years.  They are suffering the usual maladies of old age, but are otherwise in great shape.  For the first time in 57 years, Jerry and Pauline did not make the famous trip for the summer to their cabin in the Dakotas.  They have been married 66 years.  (I wonder how many standard deviations that many years is from the California mean!)  They recall their days at Santa Monica College and says hi to everyone.

Norm Hogg, a full-time professor in our department, who passed away in 1997, was a Master Bird Bander.  Back on 27 July 1991, he banded a Black Skimmer chick at a nesting site at the northern end of the Salton Sea.  This bird was resighted on 17 May 2009 by Peter Knapp, a birder.  He read the number using a telescope at the Bolsa Chica Nature Preserve.  This 18 year old bird is the third oldest record for this species.
Dr. Zorica Scuric, an adjunct professor teaching Biology 21 and Biology 3 has also been an Assistant Researcher in the Department of Pathology & Lab Medicine at UCLA.  Recently she was the lead author on the following paper:  Ionizing radiation induces microhomology-mediated end joining in  trans in yeast and mammalian cells.  Scuric, Z., C.Y. Chan, K. Hafer, and R.H. Scheistl. Radiat. Res. 2009 Apr.  171(4):454-463.
     This fall Dr. Scuric has been invited to be a panelist on one of the symposia at the 40th Annual Meeting of Environmental Mutagen Society, which will take place 24-28 October in St. Louis, Missouri.
     In addition, Dr. Scuric just received UCLA Grant funding in the amount of $91,116 for the 2009 Pilot Seed Grant UCLA Center of Biological Radioprotectors (UCLA-CBRP).  The proposed project is entitled "Effect of Radioprotectors on Radiation Induced Microomology Mediated End Joining."
     Walter H. Sakai participated in the 2009 Western Bird Banding Association (WBBA) meetings hosted by the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory in in Milpitas, CA.  He presented a poster entitled "The Roadkill Cafe:  The use of roadkills for demonstration and teaching" and led a workshop on the preparation of bird museum study skins.  He was also nominated to serve another term as the WBBA editor for the journal North American Bird Bander.