The Forum: Spring 2008

Spring 2008 journal of the Honors Program at the University of North Dakota. The issue includes stories, poems, essays and art by undergraduate students.https://commons.und.edu/und-books/1061/thumbnail.jp

A study of practitioner–service user relationships in social work

This paper reports on findings from a qualitative study of practitioner–service user relationships in social work. The research aimed to identify social workers’ personal constructs of their relationships with service users and explore how these constructs differed across roles and settings. A qualitative methodology employing a variation on role repertory grid techniques was used to carry out semi-structured interviews with social workers. Twenty-five social workers from seven different practice settings were interviewed and altogether identified over 200 personal constructs. The research team undertook a thematic analysis of these constructs along with their explanation and discussion in interview transcripts. The results identified twenty-five superordinate constructs within ten core themes, which reflected practitioners’ experience of relationships, their systemic context, along with dynamics of power and collaboration. The constructs were often found to contrast a positive or preferred attribute of relationships with a more negative or challenging attribute, although the reality of relationships was often found to be complex and ambiguous. Some implications are explored for current theories of relationship-based practice in social work

Research on the Premotor Symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease: Clinical and Etiological Implications

Background: The etiology and natural history of Parkinson’s disease (PD) are not well understood. Some non-motor symptoms such as hyposmia, rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder, and constipation may develop during the prodromal stage of PD and precede PD diagnosis by years. Objectives: We examined the promise and pitfalls of research on premotor symptoms of PD and developed priorities and strategies to understand their clinical and etiological implications. Methods: This review was based on a workshop, Parkinson’s Disease Premotor Symptom Symposium, held 7–8 June 2012 at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Discussion: Research on premotor symptoms of PD may offer an excellent opportunity to characterize high-risk populations and to better understand PD etiology. Such research may lead to evaluation of novel etiological hypotheses such as the possibility that environmental toxicants or viruses may initiate PD pathogenesis in the gastrointestinal tract or olfactory bulb. At present, our understanding of premotor symptoms of PD is in its infancy and faces many obstacles. These symptoms are often not specific to PD and have low positive predictive value for early PD diagnosis. Further, the pathological bases and biological mechanisms of these premotor symptoms and their relevance to PD pathogenesis are poorly understood. Conclusion: This is an emerging research area with important data gaps to be filled. Future research is needed to understand the prevalence of multiple premotor symptoms and their etiological relevance to PD. Animal experiments and mechanistic studies will further understanding of the biology of these premotor symptoms and test novel etiological hypothesis. Citation: Chen H, Burton EA, Ross GW, Huang X, Savica R, Abbott RD, Ascherio A, Caviness JN, Gao X, Gray KA, Hong JS, Kamel F, Jennings D, Kirshner A, Lawler C, Liu R, Miller GW, Nussbaum R, Peddada SD, Comstock Rick A, Ritz B, Siderowf AD, Tanner CM, Tröster AI, Zhang J. 2013. Research on the premotor symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease: clinical and etiological implications. Environ Health Perspect 121:1245–1252; http://dx.doi.org/10.1289/ehp.130696

Somatic mutations affect key pathways in lung adenocarcinoma

Determining the genetic basis of cancer requires comprehensive analyses of large collections of histopathologically well- classified primary tumours. Here we report the results of a collaborative study to discover somatic mutations in 188 human lung adenocarcinomas. DNA sequencing of 623 genes with known or potential relationships to cancer revealed more than 1,000 somatic mutations across the samples. Our analysis identified 26 genes that are mutated at significantly high frequencies and thus are probably involved in carcinogenesis. The frequently mutated genes include tyrosine kinases, among them the EGFR homologue ERBB4; multiple ephrin receptor genes, notably EPHA3; vascular endothelial growth factor receptor KDR; and NTRK genes. These data provide evidence of somatic mutations in primary lung adenocarcinoma for several tumour suppressor genes involved in other cancers - including NF1, APC, RB1 and ATM - and for sequence changes in PTPRD as well as the frequently deleted gene LRP1B. The observed mutational profiles correlate with clinical features, smoking status and DNA repair defects. These results are reinforced by data integration including single nucleotide polymorphism array and gene expression array. Our findings shed further light on several important signalling pathways involved in lung adenocarcinoma, and suggest new molecular targets for treatment.National Human Genome Research InstituteWe thank A. Lash, M.F. Zakowski, M.G. Kris and V. Rusch for intellectual contributions, and many members of the Baylor Human Genome Sequencing Center, the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, and the Genome Center at Washington University for support. This work was funded by grants from the National Human Genome Research Institute to E.S.L., R.A.G. and R.K.W.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/62885/1/nature07423.pd

Search for Leptoquarks in Electron-Photon Scattering at sqrt(s_ee) up to 209 GeV at LEP

Searches for first generation scalar and vector leptoquarks, and for squarks in R-parity violating SUSY models with the direct decay of the squark into Standard Model particles, have been performed using e+e- collisions collected with the OPAL detector at LEP at e+e- centre-of-mass energies between 189 and 209 GeV. No excess of events is found over the expectation from Standard Model background processes. Limits are computed on the leptoquark couplings for different values of the branching ratio to electron-quark final states.Comment: 23 pages, 5 figures, Submitted to Phys. Lett.

Search for Associated Production of Massive States Decaying into Two Photonsin e+e- Annihilations at sqrt(s) = 88-209 GeV

A search is performed for production of short-lived particles in e+e- -> XY, with X -> gamma gamma and Y -> ffbar, for scalar X and scalar or vector Y. Model-independent limits in the range of 25-60 femtobarns are presented on sigma (e+e- -> XY) x B(X -> ffbar) for centre-of-mass energies in the range 205-207 GeV. The data from all LEP centre-of-mass energies 88-209 GeV are also interpreted in the context of fermiophobic Higgs boson models, for which a lower mass limit of 105.5 GeV is obtained for a "benchmark" fermiophobic Higgs boson.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figure

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure