Funding Office Research Articles

Identifying non‐vitamin & mineral bioactive (non‐VM) ingredients for inclusion in Dietary Supplement (DS) Composition Databases

DSHEA defined DS and permitted addition of non‐VM ingredients if they meet the Act's requirements. Dietary Supplement Ingredient Database (DSID) is a federally funded database that contains analytically derived information on the composition of DS. DSID contains estimates of adult & child multi‐VM supplements (MVMs). Addition of over‐the‐counter (OTC) prenatal MVMs & omega‐3 fatty acid supplements to the database is in‐progress.ObjectiveDevelop a plan for including non‐VM ingredients in DSID.MethodThe DSID working group identified 41 non‐VM ingredients of interest. The criteria to rank and prioritize the 41 bioactives were existence of studies or safety concerns, public exposure, federal research priorities, and availability of validated analytical methods and analytical reference materials. Public health significance, previously used to rank VM ingredients, was not scored due to lack of data. The top 11 ingredients were: CoQ10, garlic, saw palmetto, ginkgo biloba, glucosamine, ginseng, green tea catechins (EGCG and other catechins), milk thistle, echinacea, flaxseed, and turmeric (curcumin).ConclusionObtaining input from the research community on which of these non‐VM ingredients should be incorporated into DSID and deciding on whether and how to report data for constituent levels not declared on the product label, i.e., proprietary formulas. (Funding Office of Dietary Supplements, NIH)

Emeryci i renciści w polskim systemie ubezpieczeń społecznych lat 1944–1958: sytuacja materialna i strategie przetrwania

Annuitants and Old Age Pensioners in the Polish Social Insurance System 1944–1958. Material Situation and Survival Strategies (Summary) Annuitants and old age pensioners comprised a social group whose numbers steadily increased in post-war Poland (from almost 187,000 people in 1945 to more than 800,000 in 1954), although Polish society was one of the most recent in Europe. The vast majority of people of retirement age consisted of women (ca. 70%). The resurgence of the social insurance system in the post-war period, within its pre-war institutional forms, was gradually deprived of its autonomy, becoming centralised and subjected to the implementation of the Party and the State’s changing objectives. Many types of insurance policies (i.e. health, family) were expanded and became more universal, as did bringing insurance for blue-collar workers into line with that for white-collar workers. The employer was now burdened with paying the obligatory insurance dues. The financial independence of the social insurance system was abolished. 1950 ushered in the dominating concept of social insurance in the Polish social security system, which remained in force until 1968, its point of departure being the Law on the Social Insurance Institution (ZUS) passed on 20 July 1950. The law abolished the separate insurance fund by including the insurance budget within the state budget, with ZUS becoming its executor. Health care was excluded and was now entrusted to the Employees Health Care Fund Board. Social insurance offi ces were also closed down. The Law of 29 December 1951 also included in ZUS the National Pension Fund Office, which made payments predominantly to full-time state functionaries and the professional military. This system created new groups of privileged and the degraded, depending on the availability and quality of the services, and selected according to ideological and political criteria and current economic needs. Although the characteristic features of the benefits system binding in the Stalinist period encompassed an increasingly large number of the PRL’s population, it did not guarantee the majority of old-age pensioners and annuitants funds which were necessary for maintaining at least a minimum subsistence. The high salary and wage increases in 1954 and 1958 were still not high enough to allow the majority of pensioners and annuitants to meet their basic needs. In this situation, the most frequently used survival strategies involved professional work and sharing accommodation with family members, as a rule combined with the performance of various household chores. This difficult material situation was the prevailing reason for the pessimistic vision of reality reflected in the letters and complaints addressed by old-age pensioners to the central Party and state institutions. Bitterness, a feeling of resentment and, at times, outright despair, was accompanied with criticism of the government which was often accused, in harsh terms, of being responsible for the misery of their daily existence.

Josh Goldberg and the physical reality of gravitational waves

In this article, I pay tribute to the contributions made by Josh Goldberg toward our understanding that gravitational waves are genuine physical predictions of general relativity. Josh played a central role in developing our understanding of how a binary star system generates gravitational waves. Another key contribution came through his patronage of the 1957 Chapel Hill Conference, in his role as funding officer for the Air Force’s support of research in gravitation. I examine in detail the discussion at the Chapel Hill Conference, and show how the question of the reality of gravitational waves was resolved by a recognition that one could, in principle, construct a detector for such waves. I trace the implications of this resolution in the work of Joseph Weber, who attended the Chapel Hill Conference, and of Rainer Weiss, who did not attend but who carefully studied the key paper that Felix Pirani presented there. I conclude with a brief discussion of how a few minor remaining puzzles were resolved some years later.

The First Biomagnetic SQUID Measurement: Some Recollections

Event Abstract Back to Event The First Biomagnetic SQUID Measurement: Some Recollections David Cohen1, 2* 1 Mass. General Hospital, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, United States 2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Francis Bitter Magnet Lab, United States I have been asked to say a few words on this 40th anniversary of our paper [1], which introduced the SQUID detector into the area of biomagnetism. In particular, I have been asked to offer some recollections of that work, performed at the Francis Bitter Magnet Lab, at MIT. I find that some of the details seem to be as fresh in my mind today as if they happened yesterday (typical of the aging mind!). A general history of the early biomag work at MIT has already been written [2], but I here concentrate on the first SQUID measurement. I first relate how I happened to arrive at MIT to do this work. Earlier I had been at the University of Illinois at Chicago where I built a modest shielded room to measure the MCG and MEG. I was a young physicist who could gamble on a totally new career, but measuring weak fields of the body was considered really weird by my traditional physics colleagues, and I lacked internal support. Nevertheless, I did complete the measurements that interested me, using the best ac detector then available, which was a room-temperature copper coil, intrinsically very noisy. The next job was to look for a more sympathetic home, and I indeed found it at the MIT Francis Bitter lab, and moved there in 1969. I built a good 5-layer shielded room of roughly spherical shape, but what was needed was a very low-noise detector, to match the low background noise in this new, good room. So, in the fall of 1969, the stage was set for a new detector. I had been hearing about a new superconducting detector, with very low noise. Ed Edelsack, a funding officer who had given me a small grant, told me that he was also funding Jim Zimmerman, who had just co-invented the point-contact SQUID [3]. Ed put me in touch with Jim, and it was arranged that Jim would bring one of his first SQUIDs to MIT, to look for biomagnetic signals in the new room. Jim arrived near the end of December, with his SQUID equipment. After mounting it in the room, we looked at the easiest biomagnetic signal: the human heart. Jim was the subject. The resulting raw MCG signal was almost as clear as a routine ECG and several orders of magnitude better that the raw MCG due to a coil detector. A bit later we wrote our paper [1]. At the time, we had no idea that the use of the SQUID in bio-magnetism would eventually lead to a grand conference in Dubrovnik, 40 years later…

Rheumatoid arthritis: the role of early intervention and self-management

2009 has seen the publication of a number of key documents relating to the care of people with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). The National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence issued guidance on the management of RA in adults while the King's Fund and National Audit Office have reported on the services that are available for people with RA. This paper will provide an overview of these reports and their implications for primary care. The role of early identification, referral and diagnosis will be explained as well as the treatment options available. The role of self-management and how community nurses can facilitate self-management will be discussed.

Funding and project officer How it works

In 2003 Shari Baker became a full−time funding and project officer for 23 schools in Leeds. Four years on, she discusses funding strategies and reveals how successful her role has been for the schools in question.

The year of the UNICORN: a review of the first year's experience with the UNICORN collection management system at the King's Fund Centre

In the Autumn of 1989, King Edward's Hospital Fund for London embarked on an ambitious project to develop a fully integrated information retrieval system for its two libraries and several specialist information exchanges accessible to all staff via the Fund's office automation network. In August 1990, it became the first European organisation to purchase the UNICORN collection management system to which it added the BRS/ SEARCH system for a complete full‐text retrieval and library management package. One year after installation, all modules are operational, a major collection inventory, weeding and barcoding project is nearly complete and the retrospective conversion of the library catalogues is on target with completion due in less than six months. The Fund, now one several of European UNICORN sites, recently hosted the first European UNICORN Users' Group.