linkstream2 microblog

Nice overview of the programs

http://commonfund.nih.gov/initiativeslist

Pictures from an Institution http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/29/pictures-institution Interesting fact on #Bard College: Leon Botstein became president decades ago at 23

Leon Botstein made Bard College what it is, but can he insure that it
outlasts him?Profiles SEPTEMBER 29, 2014 ISSUE
BY ALICE GREGORY

QT:{{"
Botstein graduated from high school at sixteen and went to the
University of Chicago, where he majored in history and founded the
school’s chamber orchestra. He began Ph.D. studies at Harvard,
focussing on the social history of modernist music in Vienna. In
Cambridge, he met his first wife, with whom he had two daughters. (He
has two more children from his second marriage.) In 1970, having left
Harvard to be a special assistant to the president of the New York
City Board of Education, Botstein took a job as president of Franconia
College, a small, now defunct institution in New Hampshire, run out of
a former resort hotel. At twenty-three, he was the youngest college
president that America had ever had. A 1971 profile that ran in
Playboy described him as “a bespectacled, long-haired youth” and
included a photo of him, in a rumpled shirt and a paisley tie, next to
an office door marked “President” in a curiously Tolkienesque font.

…
December, 2013, after a three-month review, Moody’s Investors Service
downgraded Bard’s bond rating three notches and revised its outlook to
“negative.” The Moody’s report cited Bard’s “exceedingly thin
liquidity with full draw on operating lines of credit,” “weak
documentation and transparency,” “willingness to fund operations and
projects prior to payment on pledges,” and “growing dependence on cash
gifts.” (The report found that in 2012 and 2013 more than forty per
cent of annual operating revenues came from gifts. Among other small
private colleges, about seven per cent is typical.) Six months
earlier, Bard had had monthly liquidity of $7.1 million—equal to just
two weeks’ worth of operating costs. Bard is highly leveraged,
carrying a hundred and sixty million dollars of debt, which is close
to its operating budget of a hundred and eighty-five million. The
undergraduate endowment (eighty million dollars) is a tenth that of
Vassar, a school that is comparable to Bard in both size and age and
is one Amtrak stop to the south.

"}}

http://www.courant.com/health/hc-jackson-laboratory-20141002-story.html

QT:{{”

The facility is funded in part by $291 million from the state through a legislative act passed three years ago, largely along party lines. In general, Democrats backed the plan by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s administration, and Republicans said it was too much money in exchange for 300 jobs over the course of a decade.

…
About 150 people work at the Farmington location, most of them hired in the past 16 to 18 months,said Charles Lee, director of the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine.

…

Last week, as Lee arrived by plane in Seoul, Korea, to check on a collaborative research project there, he was greeted at the airport by media reporting on a recent announcement that Lee is a 2014 Thomson Reuters Citation Laureate, meaning that he is a strong contender this year for a Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. Nobel winners will be announced Oct. 6.

…

The lab is headquartered in Bar Harbor, Maine, and it has another location in Sacramento, Calif. All told, the laboratory has an annual budget of $262.4 million for fiscal year 2014 and employs more than 1,500 people, mostly in Maine.

Much of its revenue — $165.3 million — comes from the JAX Mice & Clinical Research Services through its sale of mice to other researchers. Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor ships more than 3 million mice annually to researchers around the globe, Lee said.

The lab also received $69.6 million in public support, including grants and contracts in fiscal year 2014. The rest of its budget is funded by contributions and other sources.

In 10 years or so, the Farmington facility could become a $70 million-to-$75 million operation, said Mike Hyde, a spokesman for The Jackson Laboratory.

…

Jackson is partnering with various Connecticut hospitals and universities, too. Lee has reached out to researchers at Quinnipiac, Wesleyan and Yale.

“I already have a collaboration that’s funded by the NIH with Mark Gerstein, a full professor at Yale University,” Lee said. “I’m developing ties with Rick Lifton, who is the head of genetics at Yale.”

Perhaps the closest academic relationship, in proximity and in collaboration, is between Jackson and both the UConn Health Center and UConn School of Medicine.

}}

http://bd2k.nih.gov/FY14/COE/COE.html#sthash.0bCFkkg3.dpbs
http://bd2k.nih.gov/FY14/DDICC/DDICC.html#sthash.M2bAtnWw.dpbs

http://www.genomeweb.com/informatics/funding-update-nih-bioinformatics-grants-awarded-sept-2-%E2%80%94-oct-3-2014

https://www.23andme.com/researchportal

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/09/09/342196432/by-the-numbers-search-nih-grant-data-by-institution

The Price of Life http://contentviewer.adobe.com/s/Wired/5857345fd35d4d1f9a1f00273013f68a/WI0814_10_Folio/2000_2208IN_deathvmoney.html Nice #visualization of NIH #funding, showing emphasis on #cancer & diabetes v heart disease

http://commonfund.nih.gov/4DNucleome/overview

http://www.genomeweb.com/nih-common-fund-launches-initiative-study-nucleome-four-dimensions

Doctor’s Quest to Save People by Injecting Them With Scorpion Venom http://www.wired.com/2014/06/scorpion-venom Ethical issues in #funding “tumor paint” research