Stories from students with low income and/or minority backgrounds

Jennifer Morton, currently professor at City College of New York and research fellow at Princeton, is working on a book project about the challenges faced by students from low-income and/or minority backgrounds. Please help her with this by sharing stories of these challenges with her, or encouraging others to share their stories. She and many of her CCNY students fit this profile, but she would like to hear from more people.

You can find more information about her project at her website. http://jennifermmorton.com/stories/

Twelfth woman to win Nobel Prize for Meds

3 researchers have won this year’s Nobel Prize for medicine. Youyou Tu, a Chinese woman who began her work during the cultural revolution, developed Artemisinin, which has had a highly significant impact in limiting cases of maleria.

The other two researchers, “William C. Campbell and Satoshi Omura won for developing a new drug, Avermectin. A derivative of that drug, Ivermectin, has nearly eradicated river blindness and radically reduced the incidence of filariasis, which causes the disfiguring swelling of the lymph system in the legs and lower body known as elephantiasis.”

The report of the prize in the NY Times is well worth reading. It contains details of research, such as searching through ancient texts from Chinese herbalists to recover lost knowledge about herbal properties, or testing thousands of soil samples.