National Institutes

Many Americans would be surprised to learn that chimpanzees are still being used in biomedical research and that millions of other animals are utilized in consumer product and toxicity testing. Others may find a sense of security in knowing that this practice continues to provide information on which chemicals and products are deemed safe. The fact is that it doesn't have to be this way, and there are a number of public health, economic and animal welfare reasons to change our ways. The evolving process by which the U.S. regulates chemicals is important to every American household.

The pharmaceutical industry and the National Institutes of Health spend billions of dollars annually on medical research techniques that have been rendered obsolete by technological advances. Adult stem cell research is key to our status as the world's leader in medical research. The continued use of animals to test the effectiveness of medications and health interventions for humans is akin to using smoke signals instead of e-mail as a method of communication. Animal testing has never really worked.

Dr. Frederick L. Brancati, an internationally known expert on the epidemiology and prevention of type 2 diabetes who was director of the Division of General Internal Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, died Tuesday of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, at his Lutherville home. He was 53. "He was a delightful human being — smart, witty and fun to be around," said Dr. Michael J. Klag, dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, whom Dr. Brancati succeeded as division chief.

North County High School freshman Jack Andraka stood on the auditorium stage, speaking about the invention that earned him the $75,000 grand prize at the recent Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. Behind him stood Dr. Anirban Maitra, a professor in the Johns Hopkins University's department of pathology who gave Jack use of his lab to craft his invention, a cheap and effective "dipstick-sensor" method of testing blood or urine to identify early-stage pancreatic cancer and other diseases.

WASHINGTON -- Frank Robinson might not have concrete plans for the next baseball season, at which point he will be closing in on his 71st birthday. But that's only because he doesn't know who will own - and thus determine the future of - the franchise he manages. So, there's only one answer Robinson can give to the question of whether he'll be in Baltimore, tipping his cap to the fans who worship him still, for the first interleague visit by the Washington Nationals next summer. "If I'm still here," Robinson said last week, face split in the familiar grin and a just-as-familiar laugh escaping him. There aren't many rational reasons why Robinson wouldn't still be managing the Nationals a year from now, certainly not if his demeanor so far this year is any indication.

On a littered street corner in Park Heights, community leaders and representatives of a national institute plotted yesterday to take on the liquor industry that they believe is targeting Baltimore's young and poor.Members of the Marin Institute for the Prevention of Alcohol and Other Drug Problems and Baltimore's City Wide Liquor Coalition for Better Laws and Regulations toured two blighted areas and talked about revitalizing them by reducing the number of liquor stores and billboards for alcoholic beverages.

Singer Art Garfunkel, a real estate magnate and an investor are putting $2 million in gold bullion on the line to inspire researchers to cure blindness by 2020, establishing through Johns Hopkins Medicine one of the world's largest prizes for a scientific advancement. The men, one-time roommates at Columbia University, intend for the prize to trigger research into the variety of diseases that cause blindness — 80 percent of which are preventable — in 39 million people around the world.

African-American women in Baltimore and five other U.S. cities are becoming infected with HIV at a rate five times the national average for black women, and closer to the rates of some African countries, according to a new study. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University and around the country who made the findings suspected the rates were higher in these "hot spots" that have battled the epidemic for decades, but the numbers still came as a surprise in a field that tends to focus more on black and gay men. "This is why it's important to remind people that this is going on right here in our hometown," said Dr. Charles Flexner, the principal investigator for the Baltimore part of the study and a clinical pharmacologist and infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins.

Catholic schools are hooked on phonics.Over the decades -- as fads in reading instruction have come and gone -- Baltimore-area Catholic schools, like many other parochial schools across the nation, have held to teaching children to read by first focusing on the sounds that make up words and sound-letter relationships.In stark contrast to most public schools, which in the 1980s tended to forsake teaching sounds for an early focus on reading stories, virtually all of the 70 elementary schools in the Archdiocese of Baltimore teach phonics as a separate subject in the early grades.

Mission: To provide instruction in the visual and performing arts, including dance, voice, piano, theater, and arts and crafts; to provide space for local and traveling exhibits that are of interest to the community; to serve as the home of the Eubie Blake Museum - a repository of memorabilia of the ragtime and musical theater composer and other jazz greats born in Baltimore, including Billie Holiday, Cab Calloway, Chick Webb and Avon Long; and to preserve...