Artemisinin: From Chinese Herbal Medicine to Modern Chemotherapy

Malaria is a disease that has blighted humankind since early times. The first antimalarial treatment available to Europeans was the dried bark of the cinchona tree from Peru. The main problem in its use was adulteration by other material. The ‘active principle’ was first extracted in 1820 and named quinine. It was found to be a more powerful and reliable drug than cinchona bark. Once its chemical structure had been determined, it was possible to synthesize substances chemically related to quinine that were equally powerful but could be manufactured industrially. Mepacrine (atabrine) was amongst the most successful, but had adverse side effects. To avoid these side effects, further chemical modification gave chloroquine, a highly successful drug. This sequence is a common way of converting an herbal remedy into a modern-style chemical drug. It parallels, to some extent, the process of potentiation common in traditional herbal medicine. By the 1970s, drug resistance had developed with chloroquine. To find and develop a new antimalarial drug that worked on an entirely different pharmacological principle, Chinese scientists turned to their herbal compendia (ben cao) and found that Artemisia annua (qing hao) was frequently mentioned as a treatment for intermittent fever. Whether, in view of the distinctive doctrines of Chinese medicine, it should be possible to extract an active principle as described above is discussed. After a very careful reading of the procedure given for the use of qing hao, an active substance, artemisinin, was extracted. Artemisinin has a truly remarkable chemical structure, and chemical modification produced artesunate, the drug of choice. To prevent the development of resistance, artesunate is used in combination with other antimalarial drugs. Modern pharmacology has largely ignored that other substances in artemisia and the cinchona bark may contribute to their therapeutic effect. This matter is also discussed

The Third Way: Prevention and Compensation of Work Injury in Victoria, Australia

This study originated because the leadership of the VWA and the responsible Minister wanted an assessment of the performance of the Victorian scheme within a larger perspective. They commissioned the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, an endowed, not-forprofit research foundation in the United States, to assemble an appropriate team of workers' compensation experts to conduct such a study. The assignment was to carry out a thorough, independent review of the Victorian system of prevention and compensation for work injuries and to provide a set of informed judgments about the system and its performance

LABOR LAW- Seniority Rules- An Otherwise Bona Fide Seniority System that Perpetuates Effects of Pre-Title VII Discrimination Is Not Unlawful

Article summarizes International Brotherhood of Teamsters v United States and says that the Supreme Court has carved out an exception to the mandate of the Civil Rights Act that the courts remedy the effects of past employment discrimination that has produced a result that is contrary to the framework and intent of the Act

Recent Decisions

Many inverse problems can be described by a PDE model with unknown parameters that need to be calibrated based on measurements related to its solution. This can be seen as a constrained minimization problem where one wishes to minimize the mismatch between the observed data and the model predictions, including an extra regularization term, and use the PDE as a constraint. Often, a suitable regularization parameter is determined by solving the problem for a whole range of parameters -- e.g. using the L-curve -- which is computationally very expensive. In this paper we derive two methods that simultaneously solve the inverse problem and determine a suitable value for the regularization parameter. The first one is a direct generalization of the Generalized Arnoldi Tikhonov method for linear inverse problems. The second method is a novel method based on similar ideas, but with a number of advantages for nonlinear problems