August 7, 2001
Vol. LIII, No. 16

NCI's OCCAM Thrives with New Projects, Expansion

NIH Launches Native American Recruitment, Awareness Initiative

NIH Museum Survey Indicates Support,
But Also Ignorance

Brain's Painkiller System Seen in Action

Partnership Launches Osteoarthritis Initiative

Genome of Gum Disease Bacterium Sequenced

Tramont Named Director
of AIDS Division

Nelson Lauded for
Listening to Patients

Yen Wins Mentoring Award

By Carla Garnett

Dr. James Hildreth tells Howard University students that he was inspired to pursue medical research following his father's illness.

Dr. James Hildreth was 11 years old when his father developed renal cancer. Poor and black in rural Arkansas, the elder Hildreth had few healthcare options.

"All that we could do was watch him wither away and die," said the now-adult James, a graduate of Harvard who earned an M.D. and a Ph.D., is a professor of pharmacology at Johns Hopkins, and who, until recently, was a researcher at the National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities. "I was angry then, and I'm still angry now, because in my mind, it was a health disparity that caused my father's death. So my life's goal at 11 years old was to get into Harvard, so I could get into medical school. I was going to become a doctor. I was going to go to medical school even though there was no one else who looked like me practicing medicine where I grew up."
M O R E . . .

After a Crohn's Gene, Then What?

By Anna Gillis

Shortly after the press announced the discovery of the first gene linked to Crohn's disease, Dr. Judy H. Cho started getting calls. Since May "there's been a small flurry of people wanting to get tested," says Cho, a researcher at the University of Chicago Hospitals.
M O R E . . .