Woodstock CT Café

Sherri Vogt will announce her support of full state funding for Special Education costs.

How Griswald raises money to expand its athletic fields. See the Norwich Bull.

Pomfretite from an elite Vermont college: “Nearly the entire student body showed up in the Student Center to watch the debate on CNN. A friend of mine couldn’t make it because she had to monitor the video editing room. She screened the debate from msnbc.com. At the end of the debate a msnbc reporter praised Palin for not answering many questions stating that it was evidence of her ability to debate effectively. Regardless of her debate skills, the first thing a reporter should have noted is the lack of substance in anything that Palin said. I realize she did better than everyone expected, but isn’t the point of a debate to illustrate to the public how competent one would be if elected?
Wait, really? There’s a liberal media?”

I could not help but be pleased when I heard this morning that Luke Montagnier won the Nobel Prize for discovering the AIDS virus HIV. I have followed Montagnier closely since citing a paper of his in my first Nature paper back in 1978. In the mid 1980’s Montagnier (Pasteur Institute) shared his candidate AIDS virus with Bob Gallo at NIH. Then Gallo ‘discovered’ his own candidate virus which was proved to be Montagnier’s virus by Malcolm Martin at NIH who sequenced both viruses and found them to be virtually identical. Gallo patented a test for HIV (based on Montagnier’s virus) that competed with Montagnier’s patent filed by my patent attorney Bert Rowland (who also filed the genetic engineering patent of Boyer and Cohen). The mess was settled between the US and French governments where the two countries agreed to share 50:50 the invention of the HIV test that is still used today. Nevertheless, it is poetic justice that Montagnier got the Nobel Prize and Gallo DID NOT.  When I was at NIH (1977-82), I got to know Gallo quite well as I usually attended his lab’s weekly seminars. Before AIDS, Gallo had tried to take partial credit for discovering HTLV (the first human cancer virus discovered; there are only a few) from a Japanese group when he was asked to review their paper. HTLV causes some T-cell leukemias but this virus is not a major cause of leukemia. Back in that period discovery of THE human cancer virus was a politically charged campaign because Nixon, a decade earlier, had funded his 10-year war on cancer (in Kennedyesque fashion). By the late 1970’s Congress was holding hearings to find out why the influx funding in cancer research had not produced results. Funny thing. With the exception of human papillomavirus that causes cervical cancer (the other winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine this year), human cancer is for the most part caused by chemical carcinogens (and in some cases radiation) that introduce mutations in the so-called oncogenes. This realization came about in the early-mid 1980s. John