Daily News

January 2, 2003

McMaster professor of medicine Deborah Cook, and other Canadian researchers, have shown a costly diagnostic and treatment tool, assumed to raise survival rates in many hospital settings, provided no benefit to patients facing major non-cardiac surgery. Dean Sandham of the University of Calgary's medical school, led the team that showed using pulmonary-artery catheters in older patients about to undergo such surgery does not raise their likelihood of surviving and, in fact, raises their risk of a life-threatening blood clot in the lungs. "We can't afford to use our health-care resources on things that aren't helpful," he said. The findings of their 10-year study, published in today's New England Journal of Medicine, contradict what, for some time, was considered a given: that high-risk surgery patients were less likely to die if a pulmonary-artery catheter was inserted before they went under the knife. "This will have a very large impact on patient care," said Cook, chair of the Canadian critical care clinical trials group. "This is truly a landmark study. It shows clearly that, in the population tested ..., there's no evidence of any benefit of having the pulmonary-artery catheter." Click here for the story in The Toronto Star.

January 2, 2003

Promising young doctors studying at McMaster University will get a helping hand via a $1 million gift from Charles and Margaret Juravinski. The donation is part of a $16-million gift to benefit six health-care centres in Hamilton, including another $1 million toward building a new centre for health research at McMaster; $2 million to Hamilton General Hospital; $2 million to St. Joseph's hospital and $5 million each to Regional Cancer Centre and long-term care centre and St. Joseph's Villa. Click here to read the story in today's Hamilton Spectator.

December 24, 2002

Happy holidays from the Daily News. The University will be closed from Wednesday, Dec. 25 to Wednesday, Jan. 1, reopening on Thursday, Jan. 2. Classes resume Monday, Jan. 6. Most campus services are closed for the holiday period. For a listing of dining facility operating hours visit Hospitality Services. Click McMaster Libraries for library hours of operation. Security will be on duty throughout the holiday period, providing services 24 hours a day. Officers will be patrolling campus, answering alarms and monitoring security systems. For assistance, call security at ext. 24281. The Daily News returns Thursday, Jan. 2.

December 23, 2002

Highlights from the Dec. 12 Board of Governors meeting Centre for Environmental Genomics A Centre for Environmental Genomics and Biotechnology will be established at McMaster. . . .

December 23, 2002

When you recognize a new acquaintance across the room at a holiday party this year, know that the reason you can do so is because of work your brain and eyes did when you were a baby. McMaster University vision scientists have discovered that the ability to recognize someone from different points of view - when they look down at a tray of food or turn their head to the side as a friend arrives - is dependent upon seeing things during the first few weeks of life. Their study's findings were published in the November issue of the journal Developmental Science. "The visual experience you have as a baby is training the brain for the future," said Daphne Maurer, a psychology professor and vision scientist at McMaster, who oversaw the research conducted by graduate student Sybil Geldart. The other researchers involved in the study included McMaster research associate Catherine Mondloch, Scania de Schonen of the Laboratory of Cognition and Development at CNRS-Paris 5 and Dr. Henry Brent of the Hospital for Sick Children.

December 22, 2002

In her laboratory within the Faculty of Health Sciences, McMaster neuroscientist Margaret Fahnestock is studying proteins essential for nervous system development and function. Her research focus is on the regulation and biosynthesis of neurotrophic factors and their role in Alzheimer's disease and epilepsy. Fahnestock and her colleagues are specifically looking at nerve growth factor (NGF) and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) which are necessary for peripheral and central nervous system development, maintenance and response to injury. They are attempting to dissect the mechanisms that regulate NGF and BDNF expression and to determine how these mechanisms go awry in Alzheimer's disease. At a special luncheon held recently, Fahnestock accepted a cheque for $35,000 from Frank Fordham, Hamilton Valley representative, of the Scottish Rite Charitable Foundation of Canada. This was the third instalment of a three-year grant that is helping in the fight against Alzheimer's disease. The foundation also presented Diego Garzon, a graduate student in Fahnestock's laboratory, with a grant for $6,750, the second in two years, which will help with his graduate studies. "Diego and I are grateful to the Scottish Rite Charitable Foundation of Canada for its generous support of our research," said Fahnestock. "We are studying molecules that may protect the brain against neuronal loss in Alzheimer's disease, and we hope our studies will lead to new therapies for this devastating disease. The funds from the Scottish Rite Charitable Foundation of Canada have allowed us to pursue an exciting new lead which has changed our ideas of how NGF and BDNF are synthesized and used by brain cells. The graduate student research grant will allow Diego to continue his graduate studies on why BDNF levels are reduced in Alzheimer's disease." From its incorporation, the foundation has concentrated its efforts in support of research into the causes of and the possible cure of intellectual impairment, especially as it affects children and older adults. Through donations from members and other interested individuals, fundraising programs, bequests and memorials, the Scottish Rite Charitable Foundation of Canada has increased its capital to more than $10 million dollars. This year, income of more than $550,000 was used to fund major research grants and graduate student research grants across Canada.

December 20, 2002

The International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE) Local 772 and McMaster University have ratified a three-year renewal collective agreement. The engineers' previous collective agreement expired . . .

December 19, 2002

Undergraduate students dropping and adding courses can avoid lining up by just a click of a mouse. SOLAR (Student Online Academic Registration), a new Web portal offered through McMaster University General Student Information (MUGSI), allows students to add, drop or cancel courses for the September 2002 to April 2003 academic session. "SOLAR drop and add gives students ownership of their course drop and adds, and the convenience of being able to do course changes at the click of a button," says Sue Pennington, project manager of the Student Self-Registration Project. "Students will be taking responsibility for making course selections that meet their program requirements. They are being advised to get academic counselling if they need it, and to check their personal Degree Audit Report after making changes." MUGSI is available off McMaster's home page at http://www.mcmaster.ca. A seven-digit McMaster Student Number and four-digit PIN must be entered in order to use the site. Eligible students can access MUGSI's SOLAR system from any home or on-campus residence PC, from available PC labs on campus, or from anywhere you surf the Web. For security reasons, the SOLAR system is not accessible from campus MUGSI kiosks'.

December 19, 2002

Nursing students helped perform an important operation this week. In fact, approximately 200 homeless are going to benefit from it. The second annual Operation Shoebox Christmas, an initiative led by M.A.C. Door and Mac SOC, delivered Christmas in a shoebox to Hamilton's homeless community. Nearly 100 volunteers from the School of Nursing, staff, faculty and the community filled nearly 200 shoeboxes with gloves, hats, socks and Christmas candy, which they distributed this week. "Some participants gathered their friends to make a shoebox donation," says Dyanne Semogas, assistant professor and clinical director of M.A.C. Door. "Others made the shoebox drive into a family activity enlisting the imagination of their children. Still others in the spirit of Saint Nicholas gathered their church group to fill once empty shoeboxes with donations of socks, mittens, scarves, gift certificates, bus tickets, toiletries, fruit, toys and chocolates."

December 18, 2002

McMaster University President Peter George welcomed Tuesday's announcement by the Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities that there will be another round of projects to receive funding from the SuperBuild program. For McMaster, and other post secondary institutions like McMaster that face dramatic demographic pressures due to geographic location, the commitment to capital funding for 13,000 new student spaces targeted at high growth areas of the province is a step in the right direction. "At McMaster, we have increased our enrolment targets by a significant 20 per cent from 2001, in response to the increased demand in our catchment area that extends across the GTA and southwestern Ontario. We are acting now to ensure we are ready and able to accommodate those extra students through a comprehensive plan designed to create new student spaces in response to unprecedented enrolment increases.

December 17, 2002

Scratching your left knee with your right hand appears to be an effortless act. Not so for your brain. An international research team including David Shore, an assistant professor of psychology at McMaster University and Donna Lloyd, Charles Spence and Gemma Calvert of the University of Oxford used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to understand how the brain represents a limb placed across the body midline. The results showed profound changes in the way our brains process tactile stimulation to the right hand when it lies to the left of the body and that this is different when we can see the hand versus when we can't. The new study shows the complex process the brain works through to ensure you can perform a movement that appears effortless. "There is a complexity involved that we take for granted," said Shore, whose research specialty is multisensory temporal processing. "This is the first examination of the fMRI-related cortical consequences of placing a limb across the body midline in humans."

December 17, 2002

One of McMaster University's key academic and administrative leaders is moving on to Canada's capital university. Alan Harrison, dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, has been appointed vice-president academic and provost at Carleton University in Ottawa. Focusing on improving the student experience and developing Carleton's research profile attracted Harrison to the position. "Putting students first is something that is personally close to my heart and something I have consistently tried to do at McMaster in my time as dean," Harrison says. "It is something that I will continue to focus on at Carleton." Being situated in Ottawa was another reason he was drawn to the new post. "Carleton has the opportunity to exploit its capital advantage," he says, "and the University clearly recognizes the strategic value of this."

December 16, 2002

Senior management invites the McMaster community to drop by the third annual holiday open house at the downtown centre Dec. 18 and on campus Dec. 19. The first open house will take place Wednesday from 8:30 to 10 a.m. at the Downtown Centre, 2nd Floor, Room 216. On Thursday, an open house will take place from 8 to 11 a.m. in Convocation Hall, on the McMaster campus. Please bring a non-perishable food item for the food drive for a chance to win a door prize.

December 16, 2002

Commonwealth Games Canada has chosen Hamilton to pursue a Canadian bid for the 2010 Commonwealth Games. Hamilton will now proceed to the international round of competition against New Delhi. The winner will be announced next fall. "There is tremendous excitement that Hamilton has been chosen to represent Canada in the international round of the competition," says McMaster President Peter George, who was in Ottawa today for the announcement. "This successful bid will bring tremendous international attention and benefits to Hamilton and to McMaster. This is an exciting chance not only to work closely with the City to bring the very best to Hamilton, but also to create a legacy for McMaster." Halifax was also in the race for the Canadian bid.

December 13, 2002

A second temporary classroom will be constructed at McMaster to meet demands for increased student enrolment. The facility, to be located west of the first temporary classroom and facing Mitchell Crescent, will house two 200-seat classrooms. Construction of the facility will begin in April and it is anticipated the building will be completed in July and ready for classes in September 2003, says Tony Cupido, director of Physical Plant. The pre-engineered steel stucture will be similar to the existing temporary classroom, he says. "The facilities will look virtually the same. It will be the same width only a little longer." Construction of the building was approved by the Board of Governors Thursday. Use of the structure after the new classrooms are available in the expanded Health Sciences facility must be approved by the Planning and Building Committee and the Board of Governors. "We're trying to be proactive with the double cohort situation," said Donald Green, chair of the Board's planning and building committee. "We will be short of classroom space and in order to solve that problem we will need to add another building." The cost of the facility will be at least $500,000.

December 13, 2002

The City of Hamilton's Commonwealth Games Bid Committee invites the community to the McMaster campus tomorrow (Saturday, Dec. 14) as it makes its pitch to host the 2010 games. The media conference will take place in the McMaster University Student Centre atrium at 2 p.m. The Commonwealth Games selection committee was in Halifax earlier this week and in Hamilton today and Saturday to review the two cities' bids to host the games. The committee will be on campus to hear Hamilton's presentation. A decision will be announced Monday, Dec. 16 at 11 a.m. live on CBC Newsworld. Photo caption: McMaster's 'Mactron', the University message/score board, welcomes the Commonwealth Games selection committee to the McMaster campus.

December 12, 2002

A report from McMaster's Senate Committee on Academic Dishonesty indicates there were 173 cases of academic dishonesty in the 2001-02 academic year  approximately one per cent of the University's student population. Offences ranged from plagiarism from the internet to copying of assignments. "The Senate Committee has some unease with the fact that so many of the cases are plagiarism with the internet," said committee chair John Drake to University Senate Wednesday. "It is something I think Senate should take a look at." Four faculties with large enrolments experienced an increase of cases disproportionate to enrolment increases in 2001-02.

December 11, 2002

Bikramjit Nahal, a first-year science student at McMaster University, received the 2002 Lincoln M. Alexander Award at a Queen's Park ceremony Tuesday for his leadership in promoting racial harmony and eliminating discrimination. Nahal was a member of the Anti-Racism Committee at Parkside and played a large role in implementing programs teaching students to learn about racism. He also created student interest in the annual Walk Against Male Violence Rally and began a Necessities Drive, collecting donated hygiene products and giving them to teens and adults sheltered at Wesley Urban Ministries. He organized a book drive to raise awareness about educational poverty, collecting more than 900 books for children in Poland, Russia, Africa, Lithuania and India. Nahal was recognized by the prime minister for excellence in leadership, academics and community, and has won several awards, including the YMCA Peace Medal a few months ago. Created in 1993 to honour the former Lieutenant Governor's commitment to support young people and promote racial harmony, the annual Lincoln M. Alexander Awards are presented to two Ontario youth who have worked hard to improve racial understanding, one in their school and the other in their community. Two young people, between the ages of 16 and 25, receive an award of $2,500 each and a framed scroll. The other 2002 recipient was Tamara McDonald, a student at Sir Winston Churchill High School in Thunder Bay. Click "Students prove making a difference a matter of choice" to read the story in The Hamilton Spectator.

December 10, 2002

The billowing smoke from steel mills may not only make it hard to breathe, but may also cause genetic damage, according to new research by McMaster biology researchers. Scientists have long suspected that industrial pollution poses a significant risk to the health of human and animal populations, although much of the evidence is anecdotal or confounded by factors other than air pollutants. McMaster associate professor James Quinn and colleagues previously found a high rate of heritable mutations in herring gull populations nesting near steel mills. However, it was unclear whether the observed effect was due to emissions in the air or contaminants in the water. To isolate and examine the effect of air pollution, Quinn, PhD student Chris Somers and colleagues from Health Canada housed laboratory mice in ambient air one kilometre downwind from two integrated steel mills near Lake Ontario and a rural location 30 kilometres away.

December 10, 2002

The author of Canada's current number one children's book, Hana's Suitcase, will speak at the book launch for the fifth volume of Main Street: The Anthology of the McMaster Certificate in Writing Program tonight (Tuesday, Dec. 10). Author and CBC producer Karen Levine will give a 30-minute presentation on her remarkable true story, which documents a Japanese woman's effort to find out what happened to a young Jewish girl, Hana Brady, in the Second World War. The evening will also feature Faculty of Humanities writer-in-residence Shyam Selvadurai, reading from his award-winning novel, Funny Boy. Main Street, the award-winning anthology series published by the Centre for Continuing Education, features selected short Canadian fiction and poetry from 34 students in the writing program. Several Hamilton and area authors will also receive awards handed out during the evening's festivities. Levine is a prize-winning producer with CBC Radio. She was formerly executive producer of As It Happens and currently works at This Morning as producer of the First Person Singular series. Karen has won the prestigious Peabody Award for her documentary Children of the Holocaust, and her production of Hana's Suitcase was nominated for a Governor General's Literary Award, the Ontario Library Association's Silver Birch Award, and their new adult literacy award, The Golden Oak. Selvadurai, McMaster's writer-in-residence, was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He came to Canada with his family at the age of 19. He has studied creative writing and theatre and has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from York University. Funny Boy, his first novel, was published to acclaim in 1994 and won the Canadian W.H. Smith/Books First Novel Award, and in the U.S., the Lambda Literary Award. The novel was also named a Notable Book by the American Library Association. His second novel Cinammon Gardens has been published in Canada, the U.K., the U.S. and translated into six languages - Italian, French, German, Danish, Spanish and Hebrew. It was shortlisted for Canada's Trillium Award, as well as the Aloa Literary Award in Denmark and the Permio Internazionale Riccardo Bacchelli in Italy. The Main Street book launch takes place Tuesday, Dec. 10 in the University Club from 7 to 9 p.m.