Newsmakers

(Every week faculty and staff from across campus are featured or cited in newspapers, magazines, broadcasts and other media from around the country. The listings that follow represent a small selection of the many stories that spotlight UW–Madison and its people. More newsmaker listings)

Fat: Could it be contagious?
A team of researchers at UW–Madison has published a paper suggesting that human obesity may be linked to a virus, a finding that has health reporters and researchers buzzing. Researchers found that chickens and mice infected with a human virus gained up to 2.5 times more weight than noninfected animals on the same diet. “The idea that a human virus causes obesity in both chickens and mice obviously leads to the possibility that it could happen in people,” Medical School professor Richard Atkinson says in U.S. News and World Report (Aug. 7). Human research is needed before it can safely be concluded that fatness can be contagious.

Libraries: Public or profit?
Promising access to hundreds of thousands of books online, companies such as Evrary.com and Questia Media are setting up operations on the Internet, where they hope to find niches as next-generation libraries. These companies would operate somewhere between libraries and bookstores, offering the convenience of full-text searches and electronic browsing at a cost to the user. Kenneth Frazier, director of UW–Madison’s library system and president of the Association of Research Libraries, tells the New York Times (June 15) that he wonders how these profit-motivated services will affect the role of the public library. Will online libraries only offer access, he asks, to “the stuff that gets the highest return economically?”

Poverty line: Out of line
Most Americans believe that a salary of $35,000 a year is needed to support a family of four – more than twice what the U.S. government defines as the poverty level, a recent survey shows. Critics say the government measure, which was first set in 1963, fails to account for changing needs in child care, education, housing, transportation and medical care. “We need to change the poverty measure to get close to real poverty,” Barbara Wolfe, Institute for Research on Poverty director, tells Dallas Morning News (May 28).

Country, not city, folks
The growth in the suburbs is generally attributed to droves of people moving from the city to the relative comforts of the outskirts. But the Washington Post (May 28) tells how a new book co-authored by sociology professor Joel Rogers finds a different source of suburban population growth: people moving away from rural areas. Over the past four decades, suburban populations have grown by about 19 percent. But over that same time, cities have only lost about 2 percent of their residents, while rural areas have lost 17 percent. The shift is helping bring about political changes in suburbia, as generally conservative county folk move in.

Cloning: Still far from reality
The Associated Press (Aug. 12) reports that cloning remains an imperfect technique, yielding a healthy cloned offspring only about 10 percent of the time in cows and only once out of 277 attempts in sheep. Attempts to clone a human might be impossibly expensive, but cloned embryos might be used as a source of stem cells that could be grown into organs for transplant. But even that possibility is far from reality, says James Thomson, the professor who successfully cultivated stem cells in his laboratory in 1998. It may be possible to create a simple organ such as a bladder, but “lung, kidney and heart are not going to be on the horizon any time soon,” he says.