         
|
|
|
1st appeared 28 April 1999 Two UCSF Scientists Elected to NAS
Xeroderma pigmentosum is a rare disease that is more common in Japan and North Africa. Its symptoms include intense blistering, burning, abnormal pigmentation, with skin cancers occurring with high frequency within the first decade of life. Cleaver's continuing research in this area includes DNA damage from ultraviolet light, mechanisms of DNA repair and the genes involved in this process. His is currently identifying mutations in patients, cloning one of the remaining genes, and analyzing a protein involved in the repair.
The realization that nerve connections in the sensory and motor regions of the brain are more adaptable than previously thought has led neuroscientists to become more optimistic about the prospects for improving recovery from stroke and other nervous system injuries, and helps in understanding the success of implants for the deaf that can restore speech. Merzenich and his UCSF colleagues have demonstrated that experience and training on sensory and motor skills improves these skills and produces fundamental reorganizations within the brain. More recently, Merzenich and colleagues found that such training produces dramatic changes in the way information contained in sound stimuli is organized into representations within the brain, the researchers found. Based on these findings, Merzenich's research team developed an effective treatments for language-learning disabilities that affect as many as 7 million children in the United States and cost society in excess of $7.5 billion annually. The computer-game-based training program developed by Merzenich and colleagues strengthens children's ability to perceive rapidly changing speech sounds, as well as sequences of these speech sounds and other sounds. The inability to correctly identify these sounds is considered a hallmark of language-learning impairment. The National Academy of Sciences is a private
organization of scientists and engineers dedicated to the furtherance of science and its
use for the general welfare. Those elected Tuesday bring the total number of active
members to 1,825. The Academy was established in 1863 by a congressional act of
incorporation, signed by Abraham Lincoln, that calls on the Academy to act as an official
adviser to the federal government, upon request, in any matter of science or technology. |
||
DAYBREAK | ARCHIVES | CALENDAR
| CAMPUS NOTES Copyright ©1999 Regents of the University
of California. All rights reserved. |
||
James E. Cleaver, PhD,
renowned for his research of a rare hereditary disease that can cause sun-induced skin
cancer, and Michael Merzenich, PhD, who has studied the ability of the brain to learn and
form networks of nerve connections, were elected yesterday to the prestigious National
Academy of Sciences.
Merzenich, the Francis A.
Sooy Professor of otolaryngology and a research scientist with the W.M. Keck Center for
Integrative Neuroscience at UCSF, has for two decades studied the ability of the brain to
learn and in so doing to form new networks of nerve connections. Merzenich pioneered the
new idea, now well accepted, that adults as well as growing children exhibit these brain
changes. In his research into this phenomenon, termed "brain plasticity,"
Merzenich has concentrated on refining maps of the brain regions that represent sensory
and motor stimuli.