Community Briefs

UCLA chancellor celebrates big day

Chancellor Albert Carnesale celebrated his 65th birthday
Monday.

His more modest beginnings originate in Bronx, New York where he
grew up in a tenement.

“I went to pubic schools in New York, K-12,”
Carnesale once said. “I wasn’t a serious student,
nonetheless, I got a pretty good education.”

Carnesale enjoys opera and classical music, Bruin athletics and
reading.

But his commitments have not always rested solely with UCLA. The
East Coast engineer has been an adviser on nuclear weapons policy
to six U.S. presidents and is a former Harvard chancellor.

Though he says he still has trouble telling which side of Los
Angeles the ocean is on, the weather and atmosphere at UCLA have
kept him here.

He also said once that students seem to be intrigued by his
“relative absence of a clear career path” but
summarizes it in his tingle theory.

“I describe my tingle theory of career planning, which is,
“˜Do whatever makes you tingle,'” he said.

Scientists limit gene copying

Before each division, cells duplicate hundreds ““ often
thousands ““ of DNA snippets from each chromosome. But if any
snippet gets copied twice, the daughter cells will get faulty
instructions and may start a buildup of errors that can cause
cancer generations hence.

Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco have
deciphered the long-puzzling process by which every cell regularly
averts these dangers by shutting down the gene copying process as
soon as one complete copy is made.

The discovery, published in the journal Nature, involves a
fail-safe system of overlapping controls requiring that three
separate chemical processes be reversed before the genes can be
re-copied ““ a highly unlikely series of events, and therefore
a near-perfect protection.

The finding was made by studying the cell cycle in common
brewer’s yeast. While some details may differ in humans, the
basic pattern of overlapping controls and the strategies used to
carry them out are expected to be similar, researchers say.

“We eventually demonstrated that not one or two, but at
least three distinct controls have to be turned off simultaneously
for cells to start replicating again. This is unlikely to happen by
accident, so this multi-layered protection is virtually
fail-safe,” said Joachim Li, UCSF assistant professor of
microbiology and immunology and senior author on the paper.

While multiple overlapping pathways are not thought to be an
uncommon safeguard, few such systems have been clearly described,
Li said.

UC project aims to reduce wildfires

The University of California Cooperative Extension is looking
for owners of small forested parcels in the northern Sierra Nevada
to help reduce wildfire-caused home loss.

“Wildland fires are becoming increasingly common as more
people move to rural areas,” said Michael De Lasaux, UC
Cooperative Extension natural resources adviser for Plumas and
Sierra counties. “One of the most important things we can do
to alleviate the wildfire risk is to reduce excessive fuel
accumulations in what is known as the wildland-urban
interface.”

In cooperation with the U.S. Forest Service, UC Cooperative
Extension is launching a seven-county demonstration project that
will show how to mechanically thin stands of small trees with
small-scale logging equipment.

Eligible demonstration sites of three acres or less must be
fairly flat and located in Butte, Nevada, Placer, Plumas, Shasta,
Sierra or Yuba counties. Landowners and loggers will be shown how
dense groves of small trees can be thinned using small tractors
with specialized attachments for cutting and moving the trees. The
small trees that are removed may also be milled for lumber or
posts.

“To my knowledge equipment such as this is not currently
being used in this manner in Northern California,” De Lasaux
said. In addition to demonstrating the potential of this small
equipment, the project will examine economic and environmental
considerations.

Doctors close holes, reduce strokes

Heart disease, hypertension, high cholesterol and cigarette
smoking are well-known risk factors associated with stroke ““
a potentially fatal condition in which blood flow to the brain is
disrupted. But sometimes strokes strike people without warning.

These strokes of mysterious origin, known as cryptogenic
strokes, can occur in people with a small hole between the upper
chambers of the heart. In such cases, a blood clot passes through
the hole ““ called a patent foramen ovale ““ then makes
its way to the brain and causes a stroke.

To prevent this from occurring, physicians at UCLA Medical
Center recently began performing a procedure to permanently close
PFOs, which are present in about 10 percent of adults. Because many
people with such holes don’t have strokes, this procedure is
only performed on those with a PFO who have experience one or more
cryptogenic strokes.

Interventional cardiologists close PFOs without surgery by using
a small wire-and-fabric implant known as a CardioSEAL. The one-hour
procedure involves placing the implant inside a special catheter
and using medical imaging equipment to help guide the device from
an artery in the groin area up to the heart. Typically patients are
observed overnight and discharged the following day.

Reports from Daily Bruin staff and wire services.