Professor Bhugra is Professor of Mental Health and Cultural Diversity at the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London, and Honorary Consultant at the South London and Maudsley Trust. He has been Dean of the Royal College of Psychiatrists since 2003.

His research interests include professionalism in psychiatry, decision-making by psychiatrists, depression, schizophrenia, pathways into psychiatric care, deliberate self-harm, primary care, cross-cultural psychiatry, spirituality, psychosexual medicine and diversity.

Professor Bhugra has published widely, including books on cultural psychiatry, management, and religion and psychiatry. In 2006, after receiving a Wellcome Trust grant, he wrote a book entitled ‘Mad Tales from Bollywood: Portrayal of Mental Illness in Conventional Hindi Cinema’.

Professor Bhugra has been active in the College since 1985, and has chaired the Collegiate Trainees Committee (1987); the Overseas Doctors Training Committee (1996-present); and the Faculty of General and Community Psychiatry (1997-2001).

“It is an honour and a privilege to be elected to the Presidency of the Royal College of Psychiatrists,” said Prof. Bhugra. “I am particularly pleased to have received such overwhelming support from the members and fellows of the College.

“From my arrival in Cork nearly three decades ago, my journey through clinical and academic services in Leicester, Eastbourne, Guy’s and the Institute of Psychiatry at the Maudsley in London has been thoroughly enjoyable.

“My medical training was at the Armed Forces Medical College in Pune in India, and my psychiatric training here in the UK. After gaining clinical experience, I have devoted much time to training. As a result, the links between service development, standards of healthcare delivery and research have been my passion.

“I believe that the profession of psychiatry must be at the core of all medical care, ensuring that psychiatrists meet the mental health needs of all patients. The medical profession is at a crossroads, with serious threats to professionalism.

“The role and identity of psychiatrists must be strengthened, and the College must take a lead in defining professionalism for the 21st century. Most importantly, maintaining good standards for delivery of psychiatric services, and aspiring to top quality services that psychiatrists themselves will be willing to use, is the paramount challenge for the profession.

“I will work with key stakeholders to achieve this, including patients, carers, mental health professionals, the voluntary sector, and primary care.”

Professor Bhugra’s priorities are to:

1. review psychiatry’s contract with society through a re-evaluation of professionalism;

2. ensure that the College is relevant to its members by rewarding excellence, consultation and participation, and raising standards for practice and services;

3. support and represent the membership and trainees through changing times;

4. build stronger links with stakeholders;

5. build on existing links with the international community.

Royal College Of Psychiatrists

It’s called anoxic depolarization and it primarily results from the brain getting insufficient blood and oxygen after a stroke, says Dr. Sergei Kirov, neuroscientist in the Medical College of Georgia Schools of Medicine and Graduate Studies.

The brain uses about 20 percent of the body’s total energy and about half of that is needed to run the pump that maintains healthy levels of sodium and potassium in and around brain cells. A stroke takes away the pump’s fuel, called ATP, so neurons and supportive astroglial cells quickly become bloated and dysfunctional. Cells die if the pumps don’t start working soon, Dr. Kirov says.

Resulting waves are responsible for much of the immediate brain cell death in the core of a stroke. Milder waves may continue to pound contiguous areas for hours or days, potentially increasing stroke size and damage. In this area called the penumbra, cells get a little more oxygen so there is the potential for recovery if the waves can be silenced, he says.

Dr. Kirov has been examining whether several drugs can stop the pounding of the penumbra in an animal model and has completed a small pilot study in human tissue. The scientist, who directs MCG’s Human Brain Laboratory, recently received a second grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke to focus on the drugs’ potential in human tissue. “We only have one approved drug therapy for stroke and new approaches are needed to improve treatment for the third leading cause of death in western countries,” he says. He and others believe a focus on human tissue will better identify therapies that have real clinical merit.

A special report in the Nov. 29, 2007 issue of Stroke noted the failure in humans of numerous stroke therapies that looked promising in animal studies and outlined a new road map that includes better proof of efficacy in animal models as well as studies in human brain tissue focusing on the penumbra.

Dr. Kirov agrees. “Human brain slices as a model system can provide a missing link between animal models and patients and offer a unique chance to identify and study potentially useful therapeutics.”

He is getting live images of glowing human neurons or astroglial cells to look first at the simulated stroke and then at what protection different drugs provide. The tissue is removed primarily during epilepsy surgery at MCGHealth Medical Center and Children’s Medical Center. He replicates a stroke in the tissue by withholding oxygen and glucose then measures whether drugs can block anoxic depolarization.

There is plenty of living proof that cells can recover if the waves are short term: that’s essentially what happens in migraines. “Some people describe these moving through their visual field: a wave silencing, but not killing, the neurons,” Dr. Kirov says. Precisely what starts the wave remains an unanswered question. But he thinks he may be able to help delay or prevent the destructive electrical activity they bring without depressing usual central nervous system action.

He’s testing dibucaine, a local anesthetic known to impact ion channels, which regulate the flow of negatively and positively charged molecules in and out of cells. Positively charged potassium, for example, normally leaks out through ion channels. With anoxic depolarization, there’s too much sodium and too little potassium inside cells. He’s also studying two sigma receptor ligands, dextromethorphan and carbetapentane. Sigma receptors are ubiquitous in the body, but little is known about their role and what naturally activates them. Recent research suggests sigma receptors help protect cells from stress by ensuring an adequate level of the properly folded proteins they need for normal function. MCG Retinal Biologist Sylvia Smith and others have shown that sigma receptors are located within the endoplasmic reticulum of cells, which controls protein synthesis and regulates calcium levels. When needed, the receptors appear to chaperone these proteins to the cell powerhouse, or mitochondria. In his studies, Dr. Kirov is testing to see whether these sigma receptor ligands inhibit anoxic depolarization in humans to forecast translational success.

###

Source: Toni Baker

Medical College of Georgia

The research led by pathologists based at the University of Liverpool measured the levels of a protein called heat shock protein-27 (Hsp-27) in prostate tissue samples taken from 553 men at the time they were diagnosed with prostate cancer. During a 15-year follow-up, the research showed that those men who tested positive for Hsp-27 at diagnosis were almost twice as likely to die from prostate cancer, than men who did not have the protein.

These findings suggest that Hsp-27 could be used as a potential test to distinguish men with the aggressive forms of the cancer that need immediate treatment from men with slow-growing forms of prostate cancer, and with which they can live with for many years. At the moment, there are no reliable tests to make this distinction.

Lead author, Professor Chris Foster, a Cancer Research UK-funded scientist at the University of Liverpool’s School of Cancer Studies, said: “We have identified a link between the presence of Hsp-27 at diagnosis and a lower survival rate for prostate cancer. Our study shows that this protein marker – currently found in tissue samples – can give us a reliable and accurate indication of whether individual cancers will become aggressive. Currently, we are working on developing this finding into a blood test to monitor men with prostate cancer in order to determine when their individual disease needs treatment.”

Hsp-27 is a key component of signalling pathways that control the movement of cells around the body. The study also suggests that new drugs could be developed to block these signals and halt the spread of prostate cancer cells.

Professor Foster added: “If further research shows that blocking these cell message systems is successful, it could provide a new treatment for aggressive forms of prostate cancer.”

Dr Lesley Walker, director of cancer information at Cancer Research UK, said: “These results are an important step towards tackling the long-standing question of how to treat men with prostate cancer once it has been diagnosed. The need for treatment varies greatly between patients – men with non-aggressive cancer can live with it for many years without needing therapy, while aggressive cancers require prompt treatment with combinations of surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy. But it is very difficult to distinguish who has which type of cancer.

“A marker molecule which identifies aggressive prostate cancer would help us target active treatment to patients who need it – avoiding unnecessary therapy, which can have side effects, to those who don’t.” She added: “The next stage would be to test this protein in large clinical trials to decide if how useful it could be for diagnosis or treatment.”

Notes

*Hsp-27 expression at diagnosis predicts poor clinical outcome in prostate cancer independent of ETS-gene rearrangement. British Journal of Cancer. CS Foster et al.

Prostate Cancer

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men in the UK, with around 34,000 new cases diagnosed every year. Around 10,000 men die from the disease each year in the UK.

There are several tests that are used to diagnose prostate cancer including the PSA blood test – PSA is a protein produced by both normal and cancerous prostate cells. A high level of PSA can be a sign of cancer but there is no one PSA reading that is considered ‘normal’ and average levels rise with age. PSA alone is not recommended for screening in the UK, as the evidence of its reliability is still very unclear.

Source
Cancer Research UK

Staff at the Royal Darwin Hospital – who treated many of the casualties – also received vital personal support from mental health nurses, especially as they waited anxiously for the first victims to arrive.

“The 2002 bombings were Australia’s first large-scale introduction to terrorist activity in the immediate geographical area and they initiated a new phase of trauma response for public health services in the country” says Anthony Guscott of Top End Mental Health Services, which provides in-patient and consultation liaison nursing services at the Royal Darwin Hospital.

“A national mental health response to mass trauma was established and this proved particularly useful to the Royal Darwin Hospital, which handled a large number of casualties from both bombings.”

The national group driving the national mental health guidance were also able to draw on their experiences of other traumatic events, including the Eyre Peninsula bushfires that killed nine people and injured 110 in South Australia in January 2005.

This national guidance was then used to shape more effective local front line mental health services to cover both day-to-day needs and cope with major incidents. For example, the Royal Darwin Hospital now has a round-the-clock mental health presence in the emergency department and other departments can call on out-of-hours’ support as needed.

Many of the bomb victims suffered profound mental health problems immediately after the bombings. In 2002 the mental health response was poorly planned, but the lessons learnt from the first incident meant that in 2005 patients’ physical and mental health needs were better co-ordinated by staff who had already recognised and established a stronger link between trauma and psychiatric support.

Just over 200 people were killed by the 2002 bombs, including 88 Australians, and hundreds more suffered burns and other injuries. Many of the victims injured in the suicide bombings at Paddy’s Bar and the Sari Club in Kuta were taken to the Royal Darwin Hospital to be stabilised before being moved to other hospitals. A high proportion had suffered chemical burns.

A senior psychiatrist and the director of mental health nursing were available to provide advice, but no psychiatric reviews were requested by staff who treated the victims or prepared them for transfer to hospitals in their home states.

The experience in 2005 was very different.

Twenty people were killed and 129 wounded in the bombings in October 2005 – four Australians died and 19 were injured. On this occasion the majority of deaths and injuries were caused by shrapnel rather than burns.

Top End Mental Health Services’ staff were involved in the trauma planning sessions as soon as word of the bombings reached the hospital.

The experienced mental health nurses who had previously worked with people affected by the Eyre Peninsula bushfires provided a high profile presence in the emergency department, for patients and staff alike, from the moment casualties were admitted. And all patients underwent a mental health review before being moved to hospitals in their home states.

“Staff saw victims who had severe shrapnel wounds and were physically and emotionally affected by the bombings” says Guscott.

“They experienced depersonalisation, disassociation, disbelief and anger. Many described greater physical pain than their injuries would be expected to cause, together with a physical ache over their losses, thoughts of what could have been and the futility of the situation.

“All spoke in their own ways of how they felt their safety and personal space had been violated.”

And because the 2005 bombs were detonated at dinner time, some victims found it difficult to eat and became anxious at mealtimes.

The early intervention by mental health nurses proved invaluable for many of the patients.

In a short period many changed from providing limited verbal responses to starting to communicate more confidently.

The mental health nurses also provided vital, confidential support for other hospital healthcare staff while they were waiting for the victims to arrive and ongoing support while they treated them.

“Some staff described the eeriness of the ward waiting to receive incoming patients and other were anxious about what to expect having been involved in caring for bomb victims three years earlier” says Guscott. “And a number of general nurses and support staff also experienced disturbing phenomena such as the smell of burning flesh – a throwback to the chemical burn victims treated by the hospital in 2002.”

Following the 2005 incident hospital staff also took part in feedback sessions run by mental health staff so that their comments could be used to make any further improvements to the major incident plan and identify any ongoing staff support that was needed.

Guscott doubts whether the Royal Darwin would have handled the second bombing as effectively without the lessons learnt from the first.

“The fact that mental health nurses had become a recognised part of the hospital establishment between the two incidents meant that staff worked together in a much more co-ordinated way to help the victims of the second bombing” he says. “They also recognised that the mental health nurses could provide them with the support they needed to handle the trauma.”

###

* The Bali bombings and the evolving mental health response to disaster in Australia: lessons from Darwin. Guscott et al. Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing. 14, 239-242. May 2007.

* Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing is an international forum for the advancement of psychiatric and mental health nursing practice. It publishes peer reviewed papers which reflect developments in knowledge, attitudes and skills and integration of these into practice. blackwellpublishing/jpm

* Blackwell Publishing is the world’s leading society publisher, partnering with 665 medical, academic, and professional societies. Blackwell publishes over 800 journals and has over 6,000 books in print. The company employs over 1,000 staff members in offices in the US, UK, Australia, China, Singapore, Denmark, Germany and Japan and officially merged with John Wiley & Sons, Inc’s Scientific, Technical and Medical business in February 2007. Blackwell’s mission as an expert publisher is to create long-term partnerships with our clients that enhance learning, disseminate research, and improve the quality of professional practice. For more information on Blackwell Publishing, please visit blackwellpublishing/ or blackwell-synergy/.

Contact: Annette Whibley
Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

“Sitting results in dramatic drops in lipoprotein lipase, which captures fat from blood and uses it as fuel,” said Kravitz. “This leads to soaring levels of triglicerides, elevated risk of cardiovascular disease and lower levels of good cholesterol.”

Even a little weight loss – three to five percent of body weight – can be good for your health. Benefits include improved cholesterol levels, better glucose metabolism and lower risk for cardiovascular disease.

Though diet is crucial, it’s also important to focus on physical activity. Those who succeed in losing weight and keeping it off average three to seven hours of moderate-to-vigorous exercise per week. “Consistent physical activity is the best predictor of sustained weight loss,” said Kravitz.

Fortunately, there are many simple ways to increase physical activity. Kravitz suggested a few ideas:

Staying Active at Work

– Stand up and walk around the office every 30 minutes.

– Use the farthest bathroom from your desk.

– Make every coffee break a walking break.

– Take stairs rather than short elevator rides.

– See co-workers at their desks rather than emailing or calling.

Staying Active at Home

– When watching TV, get up and move during every commercial break.

– Take a family walk after dinner.

– Cut the grass with a push mower.

– Replace the Sunday drive with a Sunday walk.

– Park in the far corners of parking lots.

– Pace the sidelines during your kids’ games.

Also, contrary to what your teachers may have said, don’t stop fidgeting. This little activity can burn up to 350 calories per day, leading to weight loss of 35 pounds per year.

Source:

American College of Sports Medicine

This international Conference focuses on the drug discovery from natural products and traditional medicines. This five day event features presentations, posters, and panel discussions to highlight the progress being made in field and lessons learnt along the way. The conference aims to provide scientists and executives from academia, and pharmaceutical companies, with the detail information on drug development from natural products and traditional medicines. The interactive sessions, discussions and workshops will provide ample opportunity for further networking and brainstorming. For details please,
visit the website, www.niper-ddnptm

Topics to be covered include:

- Methods and techniques
- Discovery of new biological pathways
- New/novel chemical entities as lead scaffolds
- Phytopharmaceuticals
- Nutraceuticals and functional foods
- Infectious diseases
- Life-style and metabolic disorders
- Oncology
- Inflammation and immunological disorders
- Marine natural products
- Synthesis of bioactive molecules
- Traditional medicines
- In-silico approaches

The following Speakers of international repute have confirmed to participate in the event:

Prof. Sukh Dev, India
Prof. D. Kingston, USA.
Dr. Sheo Singh, Merck USA

Prof. S. Linder, Sweden
Prof. W H Gerwick, USA
Prof. H. Wagner, Germany
Prof. Luisella Verotta, Italy
Prof. Ikuro Abe, Japan
Prof. Bharat Aggarwal, USA

Prof. Ramesh Gupta, USA
Prof. Bhushan Patwardhan, India
Dr. Rakesh Mourya, India
Dr. James M. Balkovec, Merck USA
Dr. Duane L. Pierson, USA
Dr. Satish K. Mehta, USA
Dr. Sudarshan Arora, India
Dr. J. S. Yadav, India

Scientists keen to share their knowledge and expertise at this conference are cordially invited to deliver a short lecture or present a poster.

For other information please, contact

Conference Secretariat
Department of Natural Products
NIPER, Sector-67,
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Punjab INDIA.
E-mail: ddnptmniper.ac.in
Web: niper.in

REGISTER HERE

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The results, based on following 15 sufferers of the disease over an eight-year span, appear in the current issue of the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease.

“Compared to what we expected based on a prior longitudinal study of BDD, there was a surprisingly high recovery rate and a low recurrence rate in the present study,” said Andri Bjornsson, first author of the paper and a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. He works in the BDD program at Rhode Island Hospital, run by co-author Katharine Phillips, professor of psychiatry and human behavior.

After statistical adjustments, the recovery rate for sufferers in the study over eight years was 76 percent and the recurrence rate was 14 percent. While a few sufferers recovered within two years, only about half had recovered after five years.

The subjects were a small group diagnosed with the disorder out of hundreds of people participating in the Harvard/Brown Anxiety Research Project (HARP). Study co-author Martin Keller, professor of psychiatry and human behavior and principal investigator of the HARP research program which has been ongoing for more than 20 years, said that because the BDD sufferers were identified through this broader anxiety study, rather than being recruited specifically because they had been diagnosed with BDD, they generally had more subtle cases of the disorder than people in other BDD studies. In comparing the HARP study with the prior longitudinal study of BDD, it is possible that the high recovery rate in the HARP study is due to participants having less severe BDD on average.

In fact, despite the sometimes-debilitating nature of the disorder, a third of those in this study were working full-time.

Acknowledging that many doctors are unfamiliar with BDD or may even be skeptical about the disorder, Keller said doctors should consider the light that these findings shed on the clinical progress of the illness.

“We want to make people aware of BDD – aware that it exists and that it’s a real mental illness,” said Keller. “These people should be assessed very carefully and steered toward treatment very quickly.”

In addition to Bjornsson, Phillips and Keller, other authors include Ingrid Dyck, Ethan Moitra, Robert L. Stout, and Risa B. Weisberg.

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Source:
David Orenstein
Brown University

In the article, Power and Perspectives Not Taken, Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University, Joe Magee of the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at NYU, and colleagues at Stanford University found that possessing power itself serves as an impediment to understanding the perspectives of others. Through several studies, the researchers assessed the effect of power on perspective taking, adjusting to another’s perspective, and interpreting the emotions of others. To study the link between power and perspective taking, Galinsky and colleagues used a unique method in which the participants were told to draw the letter E on their forehead. If the subject wrote the E in a self-oriented direction, backwards to others, this indicated a lack of perspective taking. On the other hand, when the E was written legible to others, this indicated that the person had thought about how others might perceive the letter. The results showed that those who had previously been randomly assigned to a high power group were almost three times more likely to draw a self-oriented E than those who were assigned to the low power condition. Galinsky and colleagues also found that power leads individuals to anchor too heavily on their own vantage point, thus leaving them unable to adjust to another person’s perspective and decreases one’s ability to correctly interpret emotion.

Galinsky says that this research has “wide-ranging implications, from business to politics.” For example, “Presidents who preside over a divided government (and thus have reduced power) might be psychologically predisposed to consider alternative viewpoints more readily than those that preside over unified governments.” Galinsky also adds that a key is to somehow make perspective-taking part and parcel of power, “The springboard of power combined with perspective-taking may be a particularly constructive force.”

###

Contact: Adam Galinsky

Association for Psychological Science

To whittle a recording of your favorite song down to a manageable pile of megabytes, computers take advantage of reliable qualities of sounds to reduce the amount of information needed. Collections of neurons have their own ways to efficiently encode sound properties that are predictable.

“In perception, whether visual or auditory, sensory input has a lot of structure to it,” said Keith Kluender, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Your brain takes advantage of the fact that the world is predictable, and pays less attention to parts it can predict.”

Along with graduate student Christian Stilp and assistant professor Timothy Rogers, Kluender co-authored a study published in this week’s (Nov. 22) early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing listeners can become effectively deaf to sounds that do not conform to their brains’ expectations.

The researchers crafted an orderly set of novel sounds that combined elements of a tenor saxophone and a French horn. The sounds also varied systematically in onset from abrupt, like the pluck of a violin string, to gradual, like a bowed string. These sounds were played in the background while test subjects played with Etch-a-Sketches.

After a little more than seven minutes, listeners completed trials where they were asked to identify one sound in a set of three that was unlike the other two.

Distinguishing sounds that varied in instrument and onset in the same way they had just heard was a simple matter. But sounds that didn’t fit with, say, more pluck and not enough saxophone were completely lost to the listeners. They could not correctly identify one of the non-conforming sounds as the odd one among three examples.

“They’re so good at perceiving the correlations between the orderly sounds, that’s all they hear,” says Kluender, whose work is funded by the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. “Perceptually, they’ve discarded the physical attributes of the sounds.”

The results jibe well with theoretical descriptions of an efficient brain, and the researchers were able to accurately predict listener performance using a computational model simulating brain connections.

“The world around us isn’t random,” Stilp says. “If you have an efficient system, you should take advantage of that in the way you perceive the world around you. That’s never been demonstrated this clearly with people.”

To avoid having to carefully take in and remember every last bit of visual or audible stimulus it encounters, the mind quickly acquaints itself with the world’s predictability and redundancy.

“That’s part of why people can understand speech even in really terrible conditions,” Kluender says. “You can press your ear to the wall in a cheap apartment and make out a conversation going on next door even though the wall removes two-thirds of the acoustic information. From just small pieces of sounds, your brain can predict the rest.”

Source: University of Wisconsin-Madison

The results of a three-year study of inner-city middle school students by Weill Cornell Medical College researchers appears online in the journal Addictive Behaviors (April print edition). Previous research has shown the connection between advertising and adolescent alcohol, use as well as the influence of peers in promoting adolescent alcohol use.

“There are many pressures on teens to drink. One very powerful influence is advertising — from television to billboards, it’s everywhere. Our study found their ability to be critically aware of advertising as well as their ability to resist peer pressure are both key skills for avoiding alcohol,” says Dr. Jennifer A. Epstein, lead author and assistant professor of public health in the Division of Prevention and Health Behavior at Weill Cornell Medical College.

Results were taken from surveys of over 2,000 predominantly African American adolescents from 13 inner-city junior high schools in New York City over three years. The study found that seventh graders better able to be critically aware of advertising — something the study terms “media resistance skills” — were significantly less likely to drink alcohol as ninth graders.

These same seventh graders were more likely to have developed better skills for resisting peer pressure by the eighth grade, further reducing their likelihood of drinking. Armed with media resistance and peer refusal skills (saying “no”), these students were less likely to succumb to advertising and peer pressure to drink alcohol subsequently in the ninth grade.

Alcohol is the number one drug of choice in this country and among our nation’s youth. A recent report by the Surgeon General found that despite laws against it, underage drinking is deeply embedded in American culture, viewed as a rite of passage and facilitated by adults.

“Our findings point to the need for prevention programs that teach adolescents media resistance skills and peer refusal skills to reduce the likelihood that they will succumb to the powerful dual influences of alcohol advertising and peer pressure,” says Dr. Gilbert J. Botvin, the senior author; professor of psychology in public health and professor of psychology in psychiatry; and chief of the Public Health Department’s Division of Prevention and Health Behavior.

Dr. Botvin, who developed the award-winning Life Skills Training (LST) substance-abuse prevention program for junior high and middle school students more than 25 years ago, continuously works with his colleagues to refine and disseminate the program through research and teaching. (Dr. Botvin has a financial interest in LST, and his consulting company provides training and technical assistance for the program.)

This study was supported by a grant to Dr. Epstein from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) and to a grant to Dr. Botvin from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).

Weill Cornell Medical College

Weill Cornell Medical College, Cornell University’s medical school located in New York City, is committed to excellence in research, teaching, patient care and the advancement of the art and science of medicine, locally, nationally and globally. Weill Cornell, which is a principal academic affiliate of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, offers an innovative curriculum that integrates the teaching of basic and clinical sciences, problem-based learning, office-based preceptorships, and primary care and doctoring courses. Physicians and scientists of Weill Cornell Medical College are engaged in cutting-edge research in areas such as stem cells, genetics and gene therapy, geriatrics, neuroscience, structural biology, cardiovascular medicine, infectious disease, obesity, cancer, psychiatry and public health — and continue to delve ever deeper into the molecular basis of disease in an effort to unlock the mysteries of the human body in health and sickness. In its commitment to global health and education, the Medical College has a strong presence in places such as Qatar, Tanzania, Haiti, Brazil, Austria and Turkey. Through the historic Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar, the Medical College is the first in the U.S. to offer its M.D. degree overseas. Weill Cornell is the birthplace of many medical advances — including the development of the Pap test for cervical cancer, the synthesis of penicillin, the first successful embryo-biopsy pregnancy and birth in the U.S., the first clinical trial of gene therapy for Parkinson’s disease, the first indication of bone marrow’s critical role in tumor growth, and most recently, the world’s first successful use of deep brain stimulation to treat a minimally-conscious brain-injured patient. For more information, visit medrnell.edu.

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