Obama taps Ala. doctor for top job
Tuscaloosa News – July 14
A few years ago LaTasha Seliby was told to search for Dr. Regina Benjamin on the Internet. ‘Once I saw who she was, I immediately knew I wanted to work with her,’ said Seliby, a medical student at the University of Alabama. Seliby recently finished an eight-week preceptorship with Benjamin at her clinic in Bayou La Batre, completing her work there less than three weeks before President Barack Obama tapped Benjamin to be surgeon general. ‘I’m excited for her, and this country,’ said Seliby, 28, of Biloxi, Miss. ‘Dr. Regina Benjamin is a real gem.’ Benjamin is known along Alabama’s impoverished Gulf Coast as a country doctor who makes house calls and doesn’t turn away patients who can’t pay – even as she’s had to find the money to rebuild a clinic repeatedly destroyed by hurricanes and once even fire…A native of Daphne, Benjamin graduated from UA at Birmingham School of Medicine in 1984…Benjamin serves as a clinical affiliate on the faculty at the School of Medicine, and has taken several students from the Tuscaloosa campus for the eight-week preceptorships. ‘We’re excited for her, and we are excited they chose a primary care physician from a rural area because that’s one of the hardest hit areas,’ said John Higginbotham, an associate dean at UA’s College of Community Health Sciences. Seliby spent a lot of time with Benjamin, sometimes making house calls with her, she said. ‘She told me, ‘These people need doctors, and if I have to go to their homes, I’ll go to their homes,” Seliby said… Seliby is glad Obama chose Benjamin to be Surgeon General, a position that requires Senate confirmation. ‘She’s in the trenches, and a lot of times the decision makers aren’t,’ she said.
Surgeon General Nominee Has Ties to UA; One UA Medical Student Talks about Dr. Regina Benjamin
ABC 33/40 (Birmingham) – July 13
President Obama’s nominee for surgeon general has several Alabama ties. One includes mentoring a University of Alabama medical student. Today, the president announced his choice of Dr. Regina Benjamin. LaTasha Seliby says she trained under Benjamin for two months this year in her Bayou La Batre clinic.
WVUA (Tuscaloosa) – July 13
CBS 42 (Birmingham) – July 13
FOX 6 (Birmingham) – July 13
Actors from Cuba, Tuscaloosa team up to present ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ in Spanish
Tuscaloosa News – July 14
After a harrowing day of traveling that kept them on the move for more than 24 hours, 10 Cuban actors…finally sat down in Tuscaloosa at about 3 p.m. yesterday, visibly tired but also enthused about the upcoming three weeks. Joining an equal number of local actors, with a local director and crew, they’ll be performing Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ or ‘Un Sueno De Una Noche De Verano,’ Aug. 6-8 on the University of Alabama campus. After that, the show moves to Havana, where the American cast will be replaced with more Cuban actors…The UA theater professor directed ‘The Merchant of Venice’ in Havana last year, working with many of the same Cuban professionals. Most of the American cast are students of his; Panitch’s familiarity with them showed as he joked, cautioned and cajoled about the hard days ahead. ‘This is the first group of Cuban and American actors to work together in this country, to our knowledge,’ Panitch said…Other UA theater faculty are assisting in the production, including costumer Donna Meester and set designer Rick Miller. John Virciglio of the UA dance faculty is filming a behind-the-scenes documentary, and Tom Wolfe, associate dean from the College of Arts and Sciences, is writing and performing the original, 1960s rock-influenced score.
UA team may have found new Parkinson’s treatment
Tuscaloosa News – July 14
Three University of Alabama researchers are part of a team of scientists who found a possible new treatment for Parkinson’s disease. The UA researchers, led by doctoral student Shusei Hamamichi, took a chemical process developed at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology and confirmed it in a microscopic worm. They found the process that saved yeast from toxic levels also protected the worm from Parkinson-like problems…Likely the most important part of the researcher’s conclusion, published in this week’s issue of the academic journal Nature Chemical Biology, is a new approach to testing therapies for Parkinson’s and other neuro-degenerative diseases. ‘We’re expanding the capacity of a genetic system to create chemical variation with the hope of finding new ways of encoding and modifying drugs,’ said Guy Caldwell, a biology professor who along with his wife, Kim, worked with Hamamichi. ‘One of the more unique aspects of this is the chemistry being applied towards the disease. It’s a fairly innovative approach in that what we are going to see come out of this is chemical structures not normally tested.’
Novel Drug Discovery Tool Could Identify Promising New Therapies for Parkinson’s Disease
Insciences.org – July 13
Researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health have turned simple baker’s yeast into a virtual army of medicinal chemists capable of rapidly searching for drugs to treat Parkinson’s disease. In a study published online today in Nature Chemical Biology, the researchers showed that they can rescue yeast cells from toxic levels of a protein implicated in Parkinson’s disease by stimulating the cells to make very small proteins called cyclic peptides. Two of the cyclic peptides had a protective effect on the yeast cells and on neurons in an animal model of Parkinson’s disease…Dr. Lindquist’s team collaborated with other researchers to test these two cyclic peptides in C. elegans, a millimeter-long worm with a small number of dopamine-producing neurons that are easy to examine and count…Guy Caldwell, Ph.D., and Kim Caldwell, Ph.D., professors of biology at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa developed this C. elegans model, and performed the testing.
redOrbit – July 13